Loving Chloe Read online

  From the barn she took careful steps along the fenceline through the snow toward the squealing horse. Beneath her boots she could feel ice crunching. It would be a mistake to hurry. She could fall; the baby could get hurt. Too many nights she woke perched on the cliff edge of dread that he might have something wrong with him already. The months had passed so quickly; she hadn’t seen the doctor until she was five months gone. She’d never heard of a prenatal vitamin until the tall, dark Indian physician tucked a bottle of them into her hand, insisting she not skip a day until she delivered. But this baby grew and thrived no matter what she fed it. Corn chips or chili, or that one day last week she put away a whole Halloween bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Whoever he was, chowing down inside her, she was growing one tough little pony.

  Low in her throat, she made nickering noises and stretched out a hand to the colt. Inside her palm rested the last handful of grain, mouse-nibbled and meager. Wild-eyed, Thunder sniffed the snowy air, catching the scent. The idea of food began to work its sedative magic. He came her way, inch by inch, placing each hoof down carefully, checking to be certain that the snow would hold him. Chloe waited, her body still, snow falling on her shoulders, sprinkling the afghan’s loose purple weave. If there was one thing Chloe Morgan knew how to do, it was be patient with animals. Waiting was step one in an animal’s coming to trust you. Patience helped one make difficult decisions, too, like having her old horse Absalom put to sleep when her mind knew he was beyond saving yet her heart wasn’t so convinced. She missed that horse as much today as she had the day Gabe Hubbard slipped the needle into his jugular. Thunder was company; Absalom was like standing in the presence of a mute angel. Waiting, she imagined, would eventually convince her if what was in her heart amounted to real love or whether it was just some extended case of midlife lust. For the millionth time since her periods had stopped coming, she wondered: Would she wait to love the baby like that once he was born? Could a motherless woman like herself even hope to learn the art?

  Other women wanted babies in such a direct, certain way. They didn’t have these continuous, nagging doubts. Some spilled over with maternal instinct so thick they ran ads in newspapers. These same ladies didn’t care to sift through older children offered up for adoption and never chosen, like Chloe had been. They didn’t wonder who their real mothers were or where they were; they were grandmothers-in-waiting, links in a common, unbreakable female chain. In the classified section of the paper there were always a few of those please-have-a-baby-for-us ads tucked between people wanting to get rid of satellite dishes and jet skis, high-dollar items that had failed to heal bad marriages. They promised to pay for all the medical expenses, maybe buy you a new car if you gave them your baby. Not a puppy from an oversize litter or a horse you’d outgrown—your own flesh and blood. Christ, what made a woman go through nine months if she wasn’t going to keep it?

  “Here, now, you idiot,” she soothed to the horse, reaching over the fence to stroke his neck while he ate the oats. “It’s only snow. If I can hack it, you can, too.”

  She had turned thirty-four on August 13, standing in this very spot, alongside the fence of this corral Hank had just finished building to hold the horse he’d bought from Asa Carver and arranged to have given to her. The gift meant more to her than any stupid diamond ring. If the truth be known, his faith had driven her past the California/Arizona state line and the opaque, greenish Colorado River. She’d crossed over the state border and stopped wanting to turn back. It was the first time in her life since Fats died that she felt herself moving with purpose toward something.

  But saying that out loud was impossible. She cooked dinner, folded the laundry; in bed she kissed Hank for all she was worth, and lately had thought about adding a muffled “I love you” to her sexual repertoire. But when Hank made love to her, it was as if he was constantly pushing for more. No matter how many places she hid herself, he poked at every one. What he wanted she did not know how to deliver. Nevertheless, every morning it came as a profound surprise that here, three months later, the baby almost ready to be born, she still felt the hesitation. Not that Hank wasn’t worth loving, because if any man was, one who paid your bail, hired a lawyer, and abandoned his old comfortable life for you surely was. It had to do with her history. She had buried Fats Valentine vowing to never again let love infect her soul. Maybe perseverance was another name for love.

  The colt greedily finished the oats and ran his rough pink tongue across Chloe’s palm, making her shiver and grin and feel maybe just a little bit sexy. It’s Hank’s baby you’re having, she reminded herself. Not just your own, his. Iris is full of shit. There might even be a dotted line dividing the baby’s body where his features and genes made up a smart, thriving kid headed for college, while her half with its mysterious history—that shade tree of who-knew-what genetics—scowled and waited to be assigned to permanent detention.

  She turned her head at the familiar sound of the pickup, gears grinding to make it up the gravel driveway. Hank was back home, safe again. He got out of the truck holding two bags of groceries. From the top of the bag clutched in his left arm she spotted the tin of cocoa peeking out, the light glinting off the silver metal. Her throat tightened, and she willed the tears back into her ducts. This was a good life, a real one. She turned away from the horse and walked as fast as was safe to the father of her unborn baby.

  6

  “Goddamn son-of-a-bitch cheap-shit pot holder!” Chloe flung the useless square of terry cloth into the sink, dropping the saucepan in the process. Boiled red potatoes jumped in their skins, rolling across the floor in the scalding water. Hank bent down to pick them up with a dishtowel.

  “Go put your feet up and read a magazine. Let me finish supper like I wanted to in the first place.”

  She ran cold tap water over her hand. It was only a steam burn, but it was aggravated by a solid week of cabin fever. “You’re the one who works all week,” she snapped. “The least I can do is rustle your dinner.”

  Hank turned off the tap and inspected her palm. “Which you do all week and I deeply appreciate. Last time I checked, this was the weekend, which is my turn to cook. Besides, I make better mashed potatoes than you do. Let me get you some ice.”

  “I don’t need ice!” She sat down hard on the couch.

  As if canned stew and bread on weekdays constituted the royal treatment. Chloe hugged a throw pillow while he mashed leftover cloves of baked garlic in with the potatoes, adding a generous dollop of sour cream, as if she were a prize cow he was fattening up for the county fair. He rolled the chicken pieces she was planning to fry in cracker crumbs, then set them under the broiler. He steamed broccoli, then made a sauce of lemon and butter to pour over it in an effort to disguise the fact that like herb tea, it was green and healthy. Her hand throbbed, and her skin felt stretched to the breaking point. There weren’t any magazines in the cabin she hadn’t read three times over. The weather was driving her crazy. Snow fell, then melted away in the bright sun only to sleet and fall again. The climate was so dismal that if they’d had a TV the reception would be for shit. She took deep breaths and tried to calm herself down, scrub away the claustrophobia. She imagined the paint mare underneath her, the two of them moving effortlessly through the woods. When Hank called her to the table, she’d eat the damn vegetables and smile.

  Hank whistled as he set down plates. He’d spent the day splitting wood and courting frostbite. All that work they’d had done on the plumbing, and then the damp spot appeared on the floor. Despite it all, his glass was set permanently at the half-full mark. Iris was right; there were women in the world who deserved such a great guy. Too bad Hank hadn’t knocked up any of them.

  Twenty minutes later, she sat at the table and humbly lifted her fork. “Some feast. Thanks.”

  “There’s enough for seconds, if you want it.”

  Undoubtedly thirds on the broccoli. “Let’s just see how far I get with this.”

  They ate supper with the curt
ains open, watching the snow continue its descent. The radio weather report had sounded ominous. A foot on the ground and two more on the way. Nobody dared say the word blizzard. The snow looked like it was going to stick. Build up into drifts that would last until spring. Hank refilled her mug with cocoa and apologized again for the lack of marshmallows.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. “But next time, buy a giant bag. Those suckers are so full of preservatives they’ll last until the year 2000.”

  “You know, with the baby, you really shouldn’t have preservatives.”

  Her face burned. “Yeah, you’re right. Plain cocoa’s fine.”

  He smiled. “I want you to get used to this. Me making dinner, you just resting.”

  Hank wanted what his mother didn’t, and all she wanted was something to do and a few lousy marshmallows. After they’d finished supper, he cleared the dishes and set them in the basin. When Chloe saw him starting to reach for the dish soap and sponge, she said softly, “Hank?”

  He turned to look at her. The changes in the California professor whose life she’d run her train into only eleven months ago continued to transform him. The day they first met she was elbow-deep in mare’s blood, helping Dr. Gabe Hubbard yank a colt from its dead mother. The pale and slight man who had unwittingly tendered her his shirt was no longer nose-deep in student papers and community college politics; he was a ruddy-skinned, windburned Arizonan. He had calluses and muscles, the emblems of a working man. He wore flannel shirts open three buttons down his chest and Sears catalogue long underwear beneath. The pectoral definition beneath his shirt pockets had the power to make her stomach tighten, her juices flow, to make her yearn to do all the things to him that had led up to the pregnancy that now bound them to each other.

  Chloe stroked Hannah’s head. “Dishes will still be dirty in a half hour.”

  Hank came to the rocking chair where she sat and knelt down. “What’s the matter? Is your back aching again? Do you need a massage?”

  “For God’s sake, Hank. What were you, a servant in a former life?”

  He laughed. “Who knows? One of the unfortunate drawbacks to reincarnation is never being privy to what went on before. All I know for certain is I’m a grateful man in this one.” He lifted her sweatshirt and kissed her hot, round belly, the place he always kissed first.

  She thought about his words as she held him close, felt his lips move in a silent language, his face nestled close to the source of her deeper aching, the longing that never seemed to get satisfied. He wore his desire as openly as a tattoo, and the frankness of it got her all excited. The baby seemed to kick the both of them at once, to say, Enough of that already. Get to the practical issues: Agree on my name. There was time for all that later. She took Hank’s hand and led him down the hall to the bedroom.

  December 3

  Le Butt End of Hell

  Dear Chloe,

  Whereas junior high school bit the occasional weenie, high school sucks decomposing donkey. My classes are as boring as they were in September:

  Algebra I, too dumb to discuss. I am getting a C.

  World History, like if the Crusades isn’t a fancy name for rape and pillage, then what is? I’m getting a B because the teacher likes it when I argue with him. I guess it proves one of us isn’t dead.

  Check this out: For Physical Science my dad had to sign a permission slip so I could learn about doing It, like the walls in our apartment aren’t so thin and him and Lita so mega-horny I can’t hear them every night. Oh, Rich, my wild knight! Enter my kingdom! I’m getting an A in there. I’m a little tired of hearing about zygotes and unwed mother statistics, I’m sure! Don’t they have any unwed father statistics?

  Art, at which I completely, totally without question fail. Kit Wedler, the reason they invented paint-by-numbers!

  English, which is all about stupid stories, verb tenses and semicolons. Way major duh; how did I manage to communicate without them?

  Which brings us to my old favorite, P.E. Well, at least here no one monitors the showers. It’s pass/fail and even the geeks pass.

  You have snow? Real, actual snow? Not trucked in by Century 21 realtors so kids can sled for an hour and destroy the park grass? We had Santa Ana winds all this week. It’s eighty. I’m still wearing shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops and gobs of sunscreen. I wish I could come see you right now. Mr. Gaytan, my English teacher, is reading us “The Lottery,” and no, it isn’t anything to do with this week’s jackpot, it’s some dopey story about stoning a poor lady to death. Probably he wrote it since no one I asked ever heard of it.

  Well, keep your fingers crossed Lita can convince my dad to buy me a plane ticket for Christmas. I can’t wait to see your boobs! Thanks to Science I now know what you do with a condom—roll it over a banana! I can definitely help fruit avoid getting pregnant in the future. This morning Lita looks at me and goes, “Honey, you are growing into a woman,” and gets all misty over her shredded wheat. I mean, really, gag me!

  So why haven’t you and Hank got married? Afraid he’ll make you wear aprons and bake cookies? Hank makes way better cookies than you ever could. You know, if you got married, I could be your bridesmaid. We could wear matching dresses and carry those bitchen blue roses. I’m baby-sitting all the time now, so I could take care of the Joey for you if you want to get a job. I wouldn’t charge you very much if it meant I could leave this god-forsaken pit of a school and all the backpack-toting Doc Marten zombie clones.

  Hey, do you guys have a computer? Lita bought us one and I have E-mail now. My address is [email protected]. It is so cool surfing the Net. I have a friend in Portugal and this one guy in London thinks I am on that show Friends! So E me if you do. I can forward you a list of the coolest websites.

  Time for lovely P.E. We are doing soccer, which you will not be surprised to learn sucks just as much as basketball. If by some miracle the ball comes my way, I plan to kick it straight over the fence.

  Love from your once again redheaded in all areas, including Down There, friend,

  Kit

  P.S. Here’s some cool boys’ names I picked out for you during the interminable (Oh, God, I’m actually using a vocabulary word!) “Lottery” reading: Keanu, Corey, Rory, Ocean, Nathan, Colin, Clark, and Sam. My vote’s for Ocean, but Sam’s a good name, too. Basic and easy to spell. The baby Edmund and Maria are adopting on All My Children’s name is Sam. Edmund is a fox among foxes.

  Chloe refolded Kit’s letter into her jacket pocket and pulled up the flaps of her collar before she made her way back to the truck with their bills and advertising circulars. The Cameron Post Office was about the size of a rich lady’s walk-in closet. Their box was #879, zip code 86020. On the bulletin board above the lick-your-stamps counter hung a pest-control announcement regarding the hantavirus. It sported a line drawing of two innocent-looking deer mice/vectors. Chloe’d heard the news bulletins, but not of any actual person who’d caught the virus. The usual navy recruitment poster offered a way out of poverty if you could believe all that job-training horseshit. The Navajo Tribal Authority Purification Report inferred that “total coliform presence in the water supply was within acceptable limits,” translating to: Find shit in your water supply, it’s your own damn problem. She tried not to look at the missing children posters, but that little girl from New York State was still up there. In her photo, smiling big for the camera, Mona H. was five. Next to that picture there was a computer-generated likeness of her at age ten. Most of the time the notices said “custodial dispute,” which meant that the missing tot was probably safe with one parent when a judge had decreed she was supposed to be with the other, but this little girl was a stranger abduction. Five years was a long time to beat those kinds of odds. Heartache didn’t come close to describing how the mother of that little girl must have endured the years. Chloe pushed open the snow doors and walked back outside.

  The Trading Post stood like a picture postcard of the old West—brown sandstone walls, tiny white Christmas lights illum
inating the frost-rimed store windows, a smoking chimney inviting hardy winter tourists into relative comfort so they could load up on unique, authentic, Native American Christmas gifts. The Laundromat and a small grocery attached to the Trading Post each had a separate entrance. The market was pricey compared with Flagstaff, but sometimes that beat having to drive an hour in the snow to pick up a quart of milk. Behind the gift shop, the restaurant with the pressed-tin ceiling offered ordinary coffee and decent Arizona fare, not to mention authentic fry bread, deep-fried pillows of mouthwatering dough. The massive sandstone fireplace was no doubt blazing, making for the perfect place to sit and chat away a cold afternoon, but not a drop of alcohol would contribute to the ambience in reservation territory.

  In California somebody would have torn the place down, modernized it to contemporary blandness, but one of the reasons the Trading Post stood intact was its historic significance. It had been built in 1916, named after Ralph Cameron, Hank had informed her, Arizona’s last delegate before the territory declared statehood. Hank knew things like that; Chloe could go her entire lifetime unaware.

  There was a newly built, pseudo-adobe two-story motel between the museum gallery and living quarters, usually occupied by the now-absent owner, and a multitiered old rose garden, the bushes pruned back for winter. Hank said they shot commercials for art magazines in the museum, taking advantage of the saguaro-rib ceilings and turn-of-the-century antique Navajo blankets. Across the parking lot from the house/museum stood their tiny post office and the gas pumps. The Honda tended to get stuck in the snow, so they usually took the truck and drove slowly. Given a bad enough winter storm, even emergency vehicles had difficulty getting through. Chloe got in the Chevy truck while Hank filled up the gas tank.