Can This Be Home?: And Four Other Stories

By Bobbe Palmer

Annie has just suffered an unimaginable loss. While she spirals into the darkness of grief, her rancher husband, Ray, appears to lack emotion. But as a storm approaches their Wyoming ranch, Annie finally sees something in Rays blue eyes that transforms everything.

In a compelling collection of stories, Bobbe Palmer shines a light on five women of different ages and circumstances as each faces unique challenges. After little Ally witnesses a fight between her father and another farmer over water, she soon discovers what happens when a man thinks he can do everything for himself. Janie was once happy with Brad. But that was before he let the drink overtake his life. Now all she worries about is which one of them it will kill first. Odd Ida does not like boys. But when one appears at her door, she invites him into her homeand unwittingly, into her life, where she learns loneliness can be cured. Sandy knows something is visiting her farmhouse at night. Now all she has to do is determine its identity and what it wants.

Can This Be Home? is a compilation of tales that offer powerful descriptions, tormented characters, and heartbreak as five women bravely confront their trials.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491776919

Bobbe Palmer

Bobbe Palmer attended Grinnell College in Iowa and the University of Denver. After teaching school one year in Kansas, she married a Presbyterian minister. She assisted him as he served churches in Wyoming, and then in mission work in Alaska. Now a widow, Bobbe lives in Estes Park, Colorado.

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Copyright © 2016 Bobbe Palmer.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-8911-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-7691-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016904954

iUniverse rev. date: 5/2/2016

Contents

Can This Be Home?

Downer’s Water

Fjords and Fog

Green Tears

Shadows from the Past

Can This Be Home?

Sand stings her cheeks. Her own hair lashes them like little knives in the bitter Wyoming wind. Hunched against the blast, running sideways, Annie dashes to the door of the café and bursts inside with the wind.

Three men at the counter turn to look, nod, and go back to coffee cups and cattle talk. She doesn’t speak to them; she knows they don’t want her to.

Combing her hair straight with her fingers, she walks to the back booth and scoots, wincing, across the cracked seats, catching her jeans on the jagged edges, pulling out more cotton stuffing from the insides.

She can see Ray gassing up the truck, his hat jammed low, held tightly by one hand, the other pumping gas.

Sand spatters the window beside her, trying to get at her face again.

What’ll it be? the woman says. Ice clinks in wet glasses as she sets them down, dripping, with cardboard menus from under one arm, wet from her hands.

Coffee—black. Two. Is it blueberry—the pie?

Uh-huh.

Two then—and a scoop of vanilla.

You want ’em warm?

Yeah, please.

On the tabletop, there are wet circles from her glass. She adds one to overlap them. Three. Some beer has three like that on the label—or maybe not beer. Something. We would have been three, linked like that, she thinks.

Coffee, black as ink, in heavy white mugs, and plates of pie leaking purple streaks into melting ice cream clatter onto the tabletop.

The three circles smear and blur, one broken and disconnected now.

Anything else?

No, that’s all.

Ray finishes at the pump; struggles with the pickup door, almost losing his hat; and moves the truck to the space just beyond her window. He pushes through the gale to the door. The wind howls at losing him to the inside. The counter sitters look again, nodding.

Ray, one says.

How’s it going? says another.

H’lo, Jim, Karl. He slides in opposite her, shrugging his jacket into place. What’s this?

Blueberry.

Um.

The coffee burns and curls her tongue. He drinks half a cup in one gulp. Asbestos throat, she thinks.

Her teeth tingle on the berry acid even through the sweet syrup and cold ice cream. They’d be blue like his now. If she made piecrust like this, he wouldn’t eat it.

Storm’s comin’—snow, smells like. We need to go. Finish up.

She scrapes her fork across blue-streaked melt and licks it. She takes one more swallow of inky brew—it’s still too hot.

Ray’s already paying.

A counter sitter says, Real sorry, Ray.

Yeah, thanks.

She all right?

Yeah, she’ll be okay.

Not looking at the faces turned toward her, she opens the door to let the wind take her. He hurries to open the pickup door for her, lest it get away in the wind. Struggling to shut his own door, he says, You coulda spoke to them.

Not now.

He edges the truck toward the highway, sand blasting the windshield. It’s comin’.

In the north, from behind the steely mountains, gray boils up. Overhead are still the mares’ tails they have had all day.

No cars move on the road that falls away, empty, winding over bare gray, tan, blue, and violet hills and ravines to the horizon. Then one car, far off, inches out of a hidden fold of highway and speeds away, heading south. It drops over the horizon line. It’s gone.

Every line of arroyo, escarpment, gully, and butte has been honed to a razor’s edge by the wind, as far as the rim of the world. A tumbleweed, bouncing crazily up from the ditch and over the road, caroms off the truck’s fender, bounces off the café wall, and disappears beyond.

Their pickup rolls onto the highway, toward distant mountains and the storm. Annie watches out the window; he drives in silence.

The days have been heavy with silence since Ray came to her and stood by the hospital bed, looking awkward, as if in the wrong place, the hat sometimes on his head and sometimes rolled by uncertain fingers. He seemed not to know where to sit, looking somehow septic in worn jeans and heavy boots against the white of everything.

There were no words except her name. He watched her, but she could not read the icy blue of his eyes. He held her hand; he watched her cry. He patted her shoulder; he kissed her forehead. He did not cry.

He listened to the doctors, he asked questions, he signed papers, and he paid bills. He said nothing—nothing real. He was like ice—or stone. He shed no tears. Was he sad? Angry? Disappointed in her? Uncaring?

Unfeeling, she thinks.

Finally, on another rise, they turn onto the gravel road. They drive across the clattering cattle guard and down the rutted track toward the ranch that has been in Ray’s family for decades.

Twice, they stop, and he gets out to pull the post on the gate from its wire loops, drag the gate aside, drive through it, and put it back. She struggles across the gearshift the second time and drives them through.

You didn’t need to. I’d’ve done it, he says, seeing her grimace as she crawls back to her seat.

Faster this way.

He was careful with her, gentle with his rough hands while helping her into her coat, into the wheelchair, and into the truck, touching her as if she might shatter. There was no holding, embracing, or hiding in his arms. No, he was careful. They were apart.

Sagebrush and rabbitbrush bordering the road shudder in the wind.

Sorry, he mutters when painful bumps on the road make Annie wince. He slows and picks ruts carefully, aiming to miss holes and rocks.

Down the hill they jounce, across the wooden bridge slowly, clanking; low water braids itself beneath. Willows, bare of leaves, lash the banks. They follow the creek now, past the fenced meadow. It is shorn close, with the hay neatly stacked in circular bales—ready, waiting. Clumps of cattle huddle together, rumps to the wind, blank white faces staring at them as they pass.

Got ’em all down from the mountain last week. Just in time.

Um.

They turn through the tall gate of peeled logs with Circle R over the top and a cattle guard beneath.

Finally, the house is there, hunkered beneath thrashing, bare-branched cottonwoods.

The dogs come from the porch to where they stop by the kitchen door. Old Dog, stretching, moseys up, his tail thumping his sore hips, and thrusts his white muzzle into her hands. Pup whines, wriggles, wags, jumps up to lick faces, and then races around the truck to jump in the way as they unload things from the back.

I’ll git it, he says. You’re not to carry stuff.

I’ll just take these, she says, referring to two small duffel bags—her clothes and his.

The wind grabs to wrench the screen door from her, but she closes it quickly and turns to the kitchen, which is empty, cold, and darkening with the sky. She moves to set the duffel bags on the table, her sneakers squeaking on the old, heavily waxed linoleum. She starts to take off her coat to hang it on the hooks by the door, but no—not yet. It’s too cold.

She picks up the bags to take them to the bedroom, not wanting to go in there.

But she goes. The room is silent and sterile. It feels empty—except of memory. She recalls all those hot late-summer days spent lying there unmoving, alone in the house except for Old Dog, waiting for Ray to come in from the hay fields to wait with her, to share her fear—minute to minute, anxiety steeping the hours till those final moments of pain, blood, and panic.

None of that here now.

Then there was blood on the sheets, on the floor, and on the little rug by the bed. There is none now. The bed is made up and clean. The little rug was too spoiled to save. The floorboards are shiny and sterile. It’s silent. There should be crying in this room—keening maybe.

How can I stay here? Fear lives here—aching.

She puts the bags on the bed. But no—should she take his to the other room, where he slept through those last weeks so as not to jostle her? Fat lot of good in that.

She picks up his bag to take it. She leaves it. He can choose.

She turns back to the kitchen, passing that other room full of wee things, ready—and empty. It was never supposed to be this way anymore, just the two of them.

Can I leave? Where can I go?

The stove clanks as he builds the fire. The kitchen smells of matches and pitch as warmth begins to touch the room.

I’ll be back soon’s I can. He’s shrugging into his old work coat. Need to let the horses up to the shed and put down more hay—couple of things before it really starts. Snow blowing in already. Got here none too soon.

Too soon—much too soon. Maybe never would be too soon.

She drags the bag of flour over to the bin without lifting it. He can do it later.

The few potatoes thud into their drawer, cans onto the shelves, and frozen peas into the freezer. Their own peas died when she could not get up to water them, the drying vines whispering against the window screen above the patch where they grew—little hard seeds drying up inside instead of growing to full sweetness.

Tiny, hard pellets of cold snow or sleet beat against the window now. It’s come.

There are more boxes to empty. He’ll be wanting supper soon.

She can’t. She sits, lest the bottom drop out again. There’s nothing now to drop, but she still has that feeling of emptying.

The chair legs scrape the floor. She drops her head to the tabletop, which smells of soap and wood. Tears come again; they drip through her fingers onto the table, hurting just too much.

I want to go home—somewhere. I can’t want to be here.

He’s back, stomping on the porch and through the door with the dogs, snow already on his boots and hat. The dogs shake in the kitchen, sending globs of snow to sizzle on the stove.

Whoo! This is really goin’ to be some storm! Annie?

She doesn’t answer. Tears shine on her fingers. His hands brush