“Well, here comes the winter,” Mary said. “You know, you should probably tell them not to like me too much.”
On the drive south to Twig they decided to stop at Mary’s parents’ house in a suburb northwest of Minneapolis. In the five years since she had left home for college, her parents had prospered-her father sold advertising for a Christian country-and-western radio station that had gone national, while her mother owned a card and gift shop called Thinking of You-and each time she returned home, Mary was met by the sight of some new major purchase: a pool table, wrought-iron patio furniture, a big-screen television. This unlikely bounty in her parents’ lives was painful to Mary; she was glad they finally had the things they wanted, but it was also true that she had borrowed most of the money to pay for college, and was now facing student loan payments the size of a house mortgage.
No one was home, but a new pop-up camper sat in the driveway, and Mary and Curtis used the crank to open the camper’s compartment and fiddled with the miniature appliances before driving on to Mary’s mother’s store. The store, in a downtrodden shopping center surrounded by aging subdivisions, should not have succeeded, but in fact Mary’s mother, Gretchen, did quite nicely. Early on she had latched on to a new line of china figurines called Cu-tee-pies-dewy-eyed children in occasional costumes, some holding puppies or rabbits or other small animals-and had wangled an exclusive from the distributor, gambling on the chance that they would become collector’s items, which was exactly what had happened. In the window of her shop hung a banner that read YOUR CU-TEE-PIE HEADQUARTERS, and behind the register Gretchen kept a locked case of retired Cu-tee-pies, some selling for as much as a hundred dollars. For graduation she had given Mary a figurine wearing a cap and gown with the words Congratulations Princess! engraved in gold letters on its china base. She suggested that Mary might want to put it somewhere safe, such as a deposit box at the bank, in anticipation of the day when it would be worth a great deal of money: “a great deal,” she said knowingly. But Mary had no place like that, and now it sat on her kitchen table, beside the salt and pepper shakers.
It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the small store bustled with holiday shoppers. Mary’s father, Lars, had taken the day off to help and was wrapping Cu-tee-pies in tissue paper at a table set up in the back. Mary and Curtis sat down to help him.
“Mary says you’re a painter,” Lars said to Curtis.
“He’s had a show,” Mary offered.
Lars waved a piece of tape from his fingers. “Is there money in a thing like that?” he asked Curtis.
“There can be,” Curtis said. “But not usually, no.”
Mary’s father shook his head sadly and held up a Cu-tee-pie waiting to be wrapped, a little girl in an elf costume clutching a daisy.
“Guess how much my wife makes on this thing,” Lars said. “Don’t guess, I’ll tell you. Thirty bucks retail, and fifteen of it goes right into the till.”
“Those are excellent margins,” Curtis observed.
“It’s a racket, if you ask me. Listen,” Lars said, and lowered his voice, “I’d like to help out. Let me buy one of your paintings.”
“You really don’t need to do that, Dad,” Mary protested. “You haven’t even seen them. They might not be the sort of thing you like.”
Lars shrugged amiably. “Just pick the one that you think I’d like best.”
“We saw the camper,” Mary said neutrally.
“Oh, that,” Lars said, and cleared his throat. “We got it out of the Pennysaver. Your mother has ideas about going out West. When we’ll have the time I just don’t know.”
Mary’s mother returned with Chinese food from the restaurant next door. Like her husband, Gretchen was very tall, and looked much younger than she actually was. She wore her hair in a long loose ponytail that fell down her back, and this afternoon was dressed in a denim skirt and a sweatshirt embroidered with teddy bears. Mary adored her mother with a hopeless affection, like an unrequited crush. She understood this feeling was common in middle children, as Mary was, but there was also a story. Mary’s mother had spent her first ten years of life in an orphanage in Grand Forks, North Dakota, run by the Sisters of Mercy. Though Gretchen was the first to say that it hadn’t been a bad place at all, the experience of growing up in an institution-of eating, bathing, and sleeping in large groups presided over by kindly old women who meant well but did not always remember her name-had left her with a view of childhood that was sentimental and general. She seemed to draw little distinction between Mary and her older brother and younger sister-often she mistook one for the other, and once had driven Mary to a guitar lesson that was, in fact, her brother Mark’s-and nothing could dissuade her from the opinion that her children, who had clothes to wear, food to eat, and a house to live in, were perfectly contented at all times. As she grew, Mary came to see that her mother was merely replicating the impersonal, well-intentioned affections of the nuns who had raised her. But still she longed for more; she longed to be known.
Gretchen served them noodles in brown sauce on paper plates. “So,” she began cheerfully, “am I to understand you two are no longer roommates?”
“We are roommates,” Mary said.
“A mechanical question,” Gretchen went on. “How do you date someone you live with? I’ve tried to imagine how this works.”
“I just bought one of Curtis’s paintings,” Lars said, changing the subject.
Gretchen looked up, as if the painting were there to see. “Really? Which one?”
“I don’t know yet,” Lars said, and waved his chopsticks around. “It’s a surprise.”
They ate their lunch, then opened their fortune cookies and read them aloud. Mary’s read, simply, “You will come into money,” and in the parking lot, Gretchen gave her a fifty she had taken from the register.
The bill was soft in Mary’s hand. “Doesn’t it confuse the books, just pulling money from the register like that?”
“The books, the books,” Gretchen said wearily. “I am the books.” She hugged Mary close, then Mary and Curtis together. “Be happy together, children.”
By the time they returned to Twig, darkness had fallen, and the sky over the alleyway behind the shoe store was thick with stars. Mary dressed for work in black pants and one of Curtis’s white dress shirts, and put on her heavy coat to walk the three chilly blocks to the Norway. The insides were dim and smoky, and the tables were crowded with students from the college, back from their Thanksgiving holiday and now optimistically drunk. Mary’s favorite customer was a man named Phil, a rail-thin alcoholic with a walrus moustache yellowed from smoking, who got by on small checks from the state. Phil lived in a tiny clapboard house by the grain elevator, and his only companions were his cats, whom he had named after different places in Vietnam: Saigon, Da Nang, Haiphong. Each night, Phil came in and put seven dollars on the bar, and drank till the money was gone: a total of six beers at a dollar a can-Pabst Blue Ribbon, or Grain Belt-and a dollar tip for Mary. This was very little, considering how much time he spent at the bar, but Mary didn’t mind, and if Phil was still sober he sometimes helped her clean up, telling her stories about his cats, or about the war in Southeast Asia, in which he had not fought.
Mary said hello to Phil, took an apron and serving tray from behind the bar, and went to a table of four boys who had just come in.
“Anybody here even close to twenty-one?”
Grumbling, the boys produced a variety of documents. Most had been falsified in one way or another, but the unwritten rule of the Norway was that an honest try got you one drink. Then Mary looked at the last card.
“What’s this?” said Mary. “It’s a library card.”