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Stories
by Maile Meloy
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“I was sorry you stopped teaching the class,” he said. “I
looked forward to it, those nights.”
“It wasn’t because—” she said. “I meant to tell you on
Tuesday. I’d already asked for a replacement, because of the
drive. They found one yesterday.”
“Okay,” he said. “That drive is pretty bad.”
“You see?”
A man in a dark suit got out of a silver car and looked
over at them, sizing Chet up. Beth Travis waved and smiled.
The man nodded, looked at Chet again, and went into the
building; the door closed. Chet suddenly wished that she had
quit teaching the class because of him, that he’d had any effect
on her at all. He shifted his weight. She pushed her hair
back and he thought he could step forward and touch her
hand, touch the back of her neck where the hair grew darker.
Instead he shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. She
seemed to scan the parking lot before looking at him again.
“I don’t mean any harm,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I have to go feed now,” he said. “I just knew that if I
didn’t start driving, I wasn’t going to see you again, and I
didn’t want that. That’s all.”
She nodded. He stood there waiting, thinking she might
say something, meet him halfway. He wanted to hear her
voice again. He wanted to touch her, any part of her, just her
arms maybe, just her waist. She stood out of reach, waiting
for him to go.
Finally he climbed up into the truck and started the engine.
She was still watching him from the parking lot as he
drove away, and he got on the freeway and left town. For the
first half hour he gripped the steering wheel so hard his
knuckles turned white, and glared at the road as the truck
swallowed it up. Then he was too tired to be angry, and his
eyes started to close and jerk open. He nearly drove off
the road. In Butte he bought a cup of black coffee, and drank
it standing next to the truck. He wished he hadn’t seen her
right away, in the parking lot. He wished he’d had a minute
to prepare. He crushed the paper coffee cup and threw it
away.
As he drove past Logan, he thought about stopping, but
he didn’t need to. He knew what his parents would say. His
mother would worry about his health, driving all night, her
sickly son, risking his life. “You don’t even know this white
girl,” she’d say. His father would say, “Jesus, Chet, you left the
horses without water all day?”
Back at the Hayden place, he fed and watered the horses,
and they seemed all right. None of them had kicked through
their stalls. He rigged them up in the harness, and loaded the
sled with hay, and they dragged it out of the barn. He cut the
orange twine on each bale with a knife and pitched the hay
off the sled for the cows. The horses trudged uncomplainingly,
and he thought about the skittery two-year-olds who’d
kicked him every where there was to kick, when he was
fourteen. The ache in his stomach felt like that. But he hadn’t
been treated unfairly by Beth Travis; he didn’t know what he
had expected. If she had asked him to stay, he would have
had to leave anyway. It was the finality of the conversation,
and the protective look the man in the dark suit had given
her, that left him feeling sore and bruised.
In the barn, he talked to the horses, and kept close to
their hind legs when he moved behind them. They were
sensible horses, immune to surprise, but he had left them
without water all day. He gave them each another coffee
canful of grain, which slid yellow over itself into their
buckets.
He walked back outside, into the dark, and looked out
over the flat stretch of land beyond the fences. The moon
was up, and the fields were shadowy blue, dotted with cows.
His hip was stiff and sore. He had to pee, and he walked away
from the barn and watched the small steaming crater form
in the snow. He wondered if maybe he had planted a seed,
with Beth Travis, by demonstrating his seriousness to her.
She wouldn’t come back—it was impossible to imagine her
doing that drive again, for any reason. But she knew where
he was. She was a lawyer. She could find him if she wanted.
Excerpted from Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy Copyright © 2009 by Maile Meloy. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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