The Lives of Edie Pritchard by Larry Watson

Author:Larry Watson [Watson, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781643750576
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

She tears this sheet off, then she tears it into tiny pieces and drops them in the wastebasket. She leaves room 106—but with the door still left open a few inches—and walks across the parking lot and down the sidewalk. “Here, Mickey, here, Mickey, here Mickey,” she whispers over and over in a voice so faint a cat’s ears would be necessary to hear her call.

CARLA DRIVES LIKE Roy, with one wrist draped over the steering wheel. She asks Edie, “Anyone else you planning to look up in Gladstone? Relatives? Old friends?”

“No. No one.”

“Let me ask you this,” says Carla. “Are you going back to him?”

“Him?”

“The Husband?” She points at Edie’s right wrist. “Who tried to make you stay?”

“Oh. I don’t know. I can’t see myself back there. But I can’t see myself anywhere else either.”

“So,” Carla says, “definitely not lovelier? As in, the second time around?”

Edie lets this question pass. “Your first husband,” she says, “was he from Gladstone? A name I’d know?”

“Billings,” says Carla. “I was living there, working in my uncle’s carpet store. One day this big-shot developer came in wanting a deal for a new apartment complex. He made some kind of filthy joke about laying carpet, and when I didn’t blush I guess he thought I was the girl for him. We were okay until his business went bust. Then we did too. I came back to Gladstone with the boys because my mother had ovarian cancer. I thought I’d take care of her, but the way we fought I probably cut her life shorter. Roy and I just . . . He was here. I was here. No introductions needed.” Carla shrugs. “How about you and your mister?”

“Not so different from your story,” Edie says. “After I left Gladstone I landed in a kind of roundabout way in Granite Valley. I’d made friends with an older woman, Gladys Frost. Or it was more like she adopted me. She gave me a place to live and a job working the counter at her bakery, which I thought was funny because the apartment Dean and I had, you might remember, was over Flieder’s Bakery. This cheerful nice-looking guy started coming in every morning for a glazed doughnut. That was Gary. We started going out, Dean’s and my divorce came through, and pretty soon I was Mrs. Gary Dunn. It seems like the story should be more complicated, but that’s pretty much it. One bakery to another, one marriage to another.”

“Well, how’s this for symmetry: After Roy and I got together, my ex-husband moved to Gladstone. To be closer to the boys, he said. Now he and I are real estate competitors.”

“I think you and Roy make a great couple.”

“Well, I could tell you some stories. But you go ahead and think that.”

Carla abruptly pulls the car to the curb in front of a two-story white Colonial with an American flag flying from its wide front porch. “God damn it,” says Carla.

Carla climbs out of the car,

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