Berns says ‘hi.’”
The mention of Mrs. Berns’ name should have set my danger danger radar off, but it, too, was enthralled by the magnificence that was Johnny. I’d met Mrs. Berns shortly after arriving in Battle Lake. She’d marched up to me and informed me that she was my new assistant librarian. After witnessing my second corpse in sixty days, I wasn’t in a state of mind to argue the finer points of experience or pay, or the fact that I didn’t need an assistant. She’d shouldered her way into the Battle Lake Library just like she’d shouldered her way into my life, infuriating me, saving my life, and making me look forward to my eighties. Oh yeah. Mrs. Berns turned eighty-seven last week. “Really? How’s she doing?”
He ran his hands through his hair. “The usual, mostly. She said she’s hardly seen you since the State Fair, either.”
I grimaced at the emphasis on “either.” Johnny I’d been avoiding on purpose, but Mrs. Berns was my best friend. I had been self-involved the past couple weeks, fall-cleaning my garden, prepping the house for winter by installing clear plastic over the windows and caulking drafty cracks, and catching up on my reading. Since Mrs. Berns, whose library schedule was whimsical during the best of times, hadn’t seen fit to show up for work since the summer crowds had fled town, our paths hadn’t crossed. “I’ll have to stop by.”
“You should.” He rocked a little on his feet. “She’s taking a class at Alex Tech. Oh, and she mentioned something about her son being in town.”
“The one who put her in the home?” I became aware that Johnny was feeling awkward, his body not fitting him quite right. Usually I was the artless one in this pairing. Was it something I’d said? I quickly ran through our five- minute interaction. Nah. I was good.
“I think so. She didn’t want to talk about it much.”
“Sounds like her. Now I
He nodded, suddenly tongue-tied, looking embarrassed for no reason I could fathom. I wondered if he was wrestling with some internal body function. I knew how that could take its conversational toll. Clueless as to how to handle being the suaver of the two of us, I angled away and pretended to organize the pile of returned books I’d gathered from the return bin. I felt like a dumb monkey shuffling and then reshuffling eleven books, but I wanted to give Johnny a chance to compose himself without me looking at him.
I stuck with it, waiting for Johnny to retake the reins, but next thing I knew, the front door chimed and he was gone, no more words spoken. I was alone in the library with the books, my accumulated baggage, and a crisp ivory envelope Johnny had left on the counter top, “Mira James” scrawled on the front in a masculine stroke.
3
You can probably guess what being the daughter of a manslaughterer does to an already awkward teenaged girl, especially in Smalltown, Minnesota. I beat cheeks to Minneapolis as soon as I graduated and spent the next ten or so years sitting in on enough English classes to earn a bachelor’s degree and drinking too many vodka and diet Cokes. It was a fear of ending up like my father that had driven me to housesit for Sunny, which was ironic because it turned out that in this west-central Minnesota oasis, alcohol was as necessary to a night out as shoes.
But before that, in high school I felt lucky to have a few girlfriends, forget dating a boy. By the time I escaped the constricting environment of Paynesville and made it into the Big World, my virginity had grown heavy, a white purse that you loved until you found out everyone else thought it was dumb. Probably I should have hung onto my purse-fashion is cyclical-rather than open it for Ben, my first official boyfriend.
He was a regular at Perfume River, the Vietnamese restaurant where I waited tables, a black-haired loner who asked me out via a note on the back of his bill for imperial beef with fried rice. Turned out he was in a band, which in Minneapolis at that time was like saying he had two hands. We hung out together in various bars for a few weeks, me with a fake ID and him monologuing about the raw originality of his music, until The Night. I hope I’m not breaking the virgin’s covenant by revealing that the pleasure of the first time fell somewhere between a swimsuit wedgie and an off-trail bike ride, lasting approximately as long as the former.
Ben would never know what a gift he’d received. We broke up the next morning without ever really talking about it and proceeded in true Midwest fashion: we forgot we knew each other. I felt a little bad that he had to find a new restaurant to hang out in, but such is the price of a doomed relationship. I’d been with a handful of men since then, and though I was far from pro, I thought I’d seen enough to know when a guy asking me on a date really wanted to get to know me versus wanted to stick a toy surprise in my cereal box. That’s why I was so puzzled by Johnny’s letter.
Inside the envelope was a handwritten invitation requesting my presence at the Big Chief Motor Lodge this evening at nine p.m. in room 20. The Big Chief was the newest business in the growing town, opening its doors to the community last week. It sat on a key location one hundred feet from the shore of West Battle Lake, within eyeshot of Chief Wenonga, the glorious fiberglass statue that graced the perimeter of the town as well as my dreams. The statue was the gold standard of political incorrectness, but whenever I looked at it, I got all swoony and my heart skipped a beat. The statue was fashioned after the actual Chief Wenonga, an Ojibwe warrior. A hundred and some years ago he’d led the charge against the Dakota, another proud tribe who’d put down roots in this area.
History remembered Chief Wenonga as a gifted leader and fighter. Battle Lake, however, erected him as a stereotypical Old West Indian with full feather headdress snaking down his back, inky eyes and proud nose on a face slashed with war paint, adorned with leather pants and moccasins, an erect tomahawk in the left hand suggesting glorious things. My mind may never have gone there if the Chief statue wasn’t also shirtless, the star Chippendale Dancer of the fiberglass world. Plus, he was emotionally distant, which up until Johnny, had been the kind of guy I was attracted to.
Ah, Johnny. Open and kind, he liked to garden, had a degree in biology from the University of Minnesota, and he was taking care of his sick mother during the day and rocking out as the lead singer of a popular band at night. He was perfect, and therefore all wrong for me. So why was he making this low-class move of asking me to meet in a hotel, and why put it on a written invitation suggesting I “dress casually?” That sounded completely unlike him. But, I had a pretty good idea who it
The Senior Sunset is maple-lined walks with commemorative benches on the outside, institutional rooms with locked doors and paintings of pastel pastiche on the inside. From what I gathered, before Mrs. Berns had arrived, most of the clients at the Sunset spent their time watching TV or moaning for someone to brush their hair. Now, they giggled in corners as they passed black market copies of
According to local gossip, she’d arrived in the area in the 1920s filling the typical Minnesota farmwife role, raising seven kids during the Depression, taking in extra sewing to make ends meet, hardworking and responsible
