Monday, Monday: A Novel by Elizabeth Crook

Author:Elizabeth Crook
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

29

NIGHT JOURNEY

In Carlotta’s shop, cross-sectioned slabs of transparent rock as thin as wafers dangled like chimes from the ceiling, peacock feathers arched from vases, smoke curled from sticks of incense. Books and figurines and bins of polished stones crowded the shelves along the adobe walls, rattling with vibration when trains clattered along the tracks.

Carlotta wore cowboy boots, a gauze skirt, and a flannel shirt. Her hair swung down her back from under her cowboy hat as she put her arm around Shelly and walked her through the shop to introduce her to friends and townspeople. Her high school principal and several former teachers were there, as well as Jack’s colleagues from Sul Ross and Delia’s friends from church. The cats that lived in the frame shop next door wandered over and ate scraps of sausage that people fed them.

When the party began to wind down, Carlotta invited several friends to the house, where they stood around in the kitchen, drinking beer and eating chips and queso. Jack and an old-timer went out back by the fishpond, long since dry and abandoned due to raccoons, and talked about real estate. Delia had recently converted the old cabin Carlotta had once used as a playhouse to a small guest house, and Shelly walked down the road to look at it, shining a flashlight in the wheel ruts and out across the bee brush and Spanish daggers and stalks of tall agave. Clumps of johnsongrass sprouted in the humped center of the road, and insects chirped in the tall grass along the edges. Night birds called from mesquite trees. In the distance, Lizard Mountain rose in the darkness; at night it was only a jagged pile of rocks jutting into the blue-black sky.

Rounding a bedraggled row of willows and a screen of bushy junipers she saw the cabin, milky white in the moonlight. She climbed the three small steps to the porch and turned the light on as she entered, illuminating a sparsely furnished room that still smelled of fresh paint. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she felt she shouldn’t have come to Alpine; she should have gone to Madeline’s play. She wished that Dan and Madeline would hurry up and arrive. Being here without them felt wrong. Something in general felt wrong.

By one o’clock in the morning, Shelly was pacing in her room at the house. She went through every plausible thought: Maybe they had run out of gas or the car had broken down. She called home to Austin in case they had turned around, but the phone only rang in the empty house until the machine answered with Madeline’s voice saying to leave a message. Jack called the local police and had them check with the Highway Patrol. They said there had been no accidents between Austin and Alpine. “Could Dan have taken a detour?” Jack asked Shelly.

“If he had, he would have called me by now.”

The minutes dragged on and on. She paced in the hall and back and forth on the porch, unable to stop moving.

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