Flora had been a half-grown kid when Clark brought her home from a farm where he’d gone to bargain for some horse tackle. He had heard that a goat was able to put horses at ease and he wanted to try it. At first she had been Clark’s pet entirely, following him everywhere, dancing for his attention. She was as quick and graceful and provocative as a kitten, and her resemblance to a guileless girl in love had made them both laugh. But as she grew older she seemed to attach herself to Carla, and in this attachment she was suddenly much wiser, less skittish—she seemed capable, instead, of a subdued and ironic sort of humor. Carla’s behavior with the horses was tender and strict and rather maternal, but the comradeship with Flora was quite different. Flora allowed her no sense of superiority.
“Still no sign of Flora?” she said as she pulled off her barn boots. Clark had posted a “lost goat” notice on the Web.
“Not so far,” he said, in a preoccupied but not unfriendly voice. He suggested, not for the first time, that Flora might have just gone off to find herself a billy.
No word about Mrs. Jamieson.
Carla put the kettle on. Clark was humming to himself as he often did when he sat in front of the computer. Sometimes he talked back to it. “Bullshit,” he might say, replying to some challenge. He laughed occasionally, but rarely remembered what the joke was when she asked him afterward.
Carla called, “Do you want tea?” And to her surprise he got up and came into the kitchen.
“So,” he said. “So, Carla.”
“What?”
“So she phoned.”
“Who?”
“Her majesty. Queen Sylvia. She just got back.”
“I didn’t hear the car.”
“I didn’t ask you if you did.”
“So what did she phone for?”
“She wants you to go and help her straighten up the house. That’s what she said. Tomorrow.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her sure. But you’d better phone up and confirm.”
Carla said, “Why do I have to, if you told her?” She poured their mugs of tea. “I cleaned up her house before she left. I don’t see what there could be to do so soon.”“Maybe some coons got in and made a mess of it while she was gone. You never know.”
“I don’t have to phone her right this minute. I want to drink my tea and I want to take a shower.”
“The sooner the better.”
Carla took her tea into the bathroom.
“We have to go to the laundromat. When the towels dry out, they still smell moldy.”
“We’re not changing the subject, Carla.”
Even after she’d got in the shower, he stood outside the door and called to her.
“I am not going to let you off the hook, Carla.”
She thought he might still be standing there when she came out, but he was back at the computer. She dressed as if she were going to town—she hoped that if they could get out of there, go to the laundromat, get a takeout at the cappuccino place, they might be able to talk in a different way, some release might be possible. She went into the living room with a brisk step and put her arms around him from behind. But as soon as she did that a wave of grief swallowed her up—it must have been the heat of the shower, loosening her tears—and she bent over him, crumbling and crying.
He took his hands off the keyboard but sat still.
“Just don’t be mad at me,” she said.
“I’m not mad. I hate when you’re like this, that’s all.”“I’m like this because you’re mad.”
“Don’t tell me what I am. You’re choking me. Go and get control of yourself. Start supper.”
That was what she did. It was obvious by now that the five-o’clock person wasn’t coming. She got out the potatoes and started to peel them, but her tears would not stop. She wiped her face with a paper towel and tore off a fresh one to take with her and went out into the rain. She didn’t go into the barn because it was too miserable in there without Flora. She walked along the lane back to the woods. The horses were in the other field. They came over to the fence to watch her, but all except Lizzie, who capered and snorted a bit, had the sense to understand that her attention was elsewhere.
It had started when they read the obituary, Mr. Jamieson’s obituary, in the city paper. Until the year before, they had known the Jamieson’s only as neighbors who kept to themselves. She taught botany at the college forty miles away, so she had to spend a good deal of her time on the road. He was a poet. But for a poet, and for an old man—perhaps twenty years older than Mrs. Jamieson—he was rugged and active. He improved the drainage system on his place, cleaning out the culvert and lining it with rocks. He dug and planted and fenced a vegetable garden, cut paths through the woods, looked after repairs on the house—not just the sort of repairs that almost any house owner could manage after a while but those that involved plumbing, wiring, roofing, too.
When they read the obituary, Carla and Clark learned for the first time that Leon Jamieson had been the recipient of a large prize five years before his death. A prize for poetry.
Shortly afterward, Clark said, “We could’ve made him pay.”
Carla knew at once what he was talking about, but she took it as a joke.
“Too late now,” she said. “You can’t pay once you’re dead.”
“He can’t. She could.”
“She’s gone to Greece.”
“She’s not going to stay in Greece.”
“She didn’t know,” Carla said more soberly. “She didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I didn’t say she did.”
“She doesn’t have a clue about it.”
“We could fix that.”
Carla said, “No. No.”
Clark went on as if she hadn’t spoken.
“We could say we’re going to sue. People get money for stuff like that all the time.”
“How could you do that? You can’t sue a dead person.”
“Threaten to go to the papers. Big-time poet. The papers would eat it up. All we have to do is threaten and she’d cave in. How much are we going to ask for?”
“You’re just fantasizing,” Carla said. “You’re joking.”
“No. Actually, I’m not.”