Montana Noir by James Grady

Author:James Grady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2015-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

3 Wins, 3 Losses

Alyce Lewis had withdrawn from the world from time to time even before she got sick. Carla suspected it was because her mother enjoyed the drama her absences created. There were small-town rumors: Alyce had gone to New York City, worked in off-Broadway musicals under a stage name, and flamed out before coming home to Glendive in shame. She’d suffered a bad bout of plastic surgery in Mexico and now went to bed wearing her makeup. She’d had an affair, which was why her husband blew his brains out during harvest. As Carla walked into the parlor, she smelled dead flowers in vases filled with fetid water. She saw the spent oxygen bottles and listened for the grandfather clock, which had stopped working. She was reminded that nothing is as simple as gossip.

The truth was that Carla’s father had killed himself after learning the pipeline he’d built on their land had leaked benzene into the groundwater. Nearby homes and ranches were contaminated. Three newborn babies died. Arnold settled with the families, buying their silence. But when Alyce got sick, her heartbroken father took matters into his own hands. Arnold cleaned up the mess, literally and figuratively.

The affairs came later. Many of them.

“Hello, dear,” her mother rasped, staring out the front window into the dark clouds that had put out the sun. “People kept calling all week, telling me you were back in town. If I had known dying would have brought you home so quickly, I would have got on with this business years ago.”

Carla thought her mother looked like an aging movie star in repose. She was wearing silk slippers and a long ivory negligee whose plunging back showed her jutting shoulder blades, revealing how much weight she’d lost during her eight-year battle with leukemia. Alyce took a long drag on her cigarette, heedless of the wheeled oxygen tank at her side. The hose curled up beneath the nape of her neck, disappeared into the long blond tresses of her wig, and then reappeared just below her nose. Curlicues of smoke drifted up and caressed a ceiling the color of coffee-stained teeth.

“I think you died when you married Arnold,” Carla said. “I’m looking at a ghost who’s made some very bad financial decisions.”

“So you’ve heard.” Her mother fought a cough, then smiled through cracked lips. “Yes, everything that rightfully belongs to you, my dear. Everything your grandparents fought for during the Dirty Thirties when the weaker fled, everything your father endured those long winters for, so he could make this place what it is—I’m leaving it all to your stepfather.”

“If you’re doing this to hurt me—”

“I’m doing this to save you. Oh, I knew what he did to you, darling.” She paused to let that sink in, flicking her cigarette into a cracked ashtray. “And I know how that must make you feel. But if I’d left him, if we divorced, he would have ended up with half of everything and I just couldn’t allow that. So I waited and put it all in his name.

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