LITMIR.BIZ

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      But still he was mine, at least by marriage. People like you may or may not understand this, but when it has been hammered into you your whole life that very little of that life is actually yours, a small technicality like marriage can sometimes mean something.

      I said, “What if we got a foreign exchange student?”

      He said, “From where?”

      I said, “Benin, in Africa?” and as soon as I said it I heard how ridiculous I sounded. Maybe even suspect. “I don’t know. Anywhere I guess.”

      Gerald didn’t move. Finally he said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

      “Why not?”

      “Well,” he said, “what if this African foreign exchange student walked out to the backyard one night and saw us making love in our hot tub?”

      We didn’t have a hot tub.

      “You tricked me,” I said.

      He laughed at me like I was a kid throwing a tantrum. “Oh, come on, Candy Cane,” he said. He squeezed my breast. He whispered, “It would be easier, with the water, more buoyant.”

      “It’s too expensive,” I said.

      “Maybe you should look for one on eBay,” he said.

      Maybe you should disappear, I thought. But I said nothing.

      Gerald rolled to his back and fell asleep. I got up and went to my own bed and did the same.

       4

      That night, a house blew up. It was on the other end of town from the cottage on the go-around, down by the closed Hardee’s, across from the closed A&W, and on an entire city block of houses owned by a holding company in Mankato. It was that area of town where railroad employees had once lived, but most of the houses had been carved up into apartments for Section 8 housing now, or abandoned entirely. I had little to do with that part of town anymore, as few people living there had property or businesses or even enough income to necessitate a CPA. While I was walking to my office that morning, Cindy from Prairie Lanes passed me on her way to open the bowling alley and told me the occupants of the house had not been living here for more than a few months. She heard they were nephews of Arnie Utzke, a former client of mine who had once worked for the railroad and now worked in Forest City at the Winnebago factory. But she wasn’t entirely sure, and Arnie had moved to Forest City, so no one could ask him. She did say for sure that one of the men who lived there had his face blown off in the explosion. She knew this because Dave Oppegaard, the head volunteer fireman, had told her earlier that morning when she saw him at the Kum & Go. Oppegaard had gone into the burning house and saw him. “His skin was basically melting off his bones,” Cindy said. Then she shrugged and asked, “Methheads—what are you going to do?”

      But it wasn’t really a question.

      I wondered briefly if it was the pock-faced man who had driven the rusty pickup I’d seen only a few days earlier. But just as I stood outside my Main Street office, catching a whiff of the cat pee, egg fart, and turpentine smell that hung in the air, the pock-faced man in his rusty pickup truck drove slowly by again. He was alone—no drunken high school students partied in the bed of his truck this time. I watched him and he watched me. I was skeptical of him, as I am skeptical of all new people. I do not know why he was skeptical of me. I had always been here.

      I unlocked my office door and, for the first time in my entire life, and probably in my father’s life too, I locked the door behind me. Shortly after that, around lunchtime, the Vo-Ag teacher knocked on it.

      I opened it. “You don’t have an appointment,” I said to him from the doorway.

      He laughed like a horse. He showed me his white teeth. They were prominent, like a horse’s. He seemed to have more teeth than the rest of us.

      “Dieter said I can smoke here,” he said. He had a pack of cigarettes wedged between his multicolored belt and his too-tight jeans.

      It is true. It’s one of the special features I offer my clients, and I believed then that it was what kept most of them from driving to Decorah or Dubuque or La Crosse. My biggest client, John Mueller, and I have a joke about it even. I say, “It’s not the accounting?” And Mueller says, “A monkey could do the accounting if he had the right software.”

      “You can smoke in the teachers’ lounge,” I said.

      “Dieter says I can smoke here,” he said.

      “Dieter running my office now?” I asked.

      He laughed again, like this was all some big joke. And then he poked me with his long, bony index finger, right below my belly button.

      The people where you live, do they poke each other like that?

      “That girl, Hope, the one who threw the bottle, she showed up in my class today.”

      What was I supposed to say to that? I said nothing.

      “It was either Vo-Ag or expulsion,” he said. “No other teacher would take her.”

      “I have an appointment,” I said, and closed the door.

      It was a lunch appointment with Mueller, though he would never call it lunch. What he would say is “I am coming to town,” and I would meet him at Country Kitchen and make damn sure there was a double order of onion rings there, even though a doctor in Waterloo told him he’s not supposed to eat onion rings because of some vague evidence discovered during his colonoscopy, a vagueness of which had only strengthened fifty-year-old Mueller’s resolve to eat more onion rings.

      I never wanted to sit at one of Barb’s tables, but Mueller would ask to switch if we didn’t. “She’s the fastest,” he would say. He believed his food would taste better because it would be hotter.

      But his logic was flawed. The hotness of the food is related not to the speed of the waitress but to the length of time it sits in the window after the cook has put it on a plate. I have seen Barb stand outside and smoke two entire cigarettes while someone’s patty melt got soggy in that window.

      But still I sat in one of Barbie’s booths and, without speaking to me or even making eye contact, she brought two cups of coffee and a double order of rings.

      That is excellent customer service, in case you have never seen it.

      Mueller wanted to hear what was happening with Winthrop. He was looking to buy the co-op there. The co-op members didn’t have enough money anymore to make it profitable. Mueller did, but he was worried about the tax implications of buying an entire co-op, which he had never done before.

      “Well, it won’t be a co-op anymore if you own it entirely,” I said.

      “What if other farmers won’t use it because it’s not a co-op?” he asked.

      “Huff went,” I said. Huff, the drunk lawyer who refused to speak to his own daughter—he’s the one who handles people problems in this town. In case you are not aware, that is the definition of irony.

      “It’d be cheaper for me to pay you to go to law school,” Mueller said, shaking his head.

      That wasn’t true. I had run the numbers on this the last time he had said it. It would cost him an additional $120,000 that wouldn’t pay off until after he was dead, even if he managed to live until age seventy-two.

      The cheapest option would be for Mueller to develop people skills himself. Even rudimentary ones would be an improvement. But of course I didn’t say that. I said, “I’m ready when you are,” which made him chuckle, which is always good for business, even if it is ironic.

      And that is all the talking we did about it, about anything really. Mueller is not so much for talking. He is for eating. He never gets fatter, though. He is a relatively trim man, save for beefy farmer hands and a barrel chest that has increased only

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