Ellen rubbed her face with her both hands.
It hadn’t been him at all. It hadn’t been her cowboy who looked so right in his jeans and boots. She made it all up.
“You weren’t thinking about you two getting back together, were you?” Joan McBain asked, a worried note in her voice.
Ellen shrugged.
“You know what your problem is, honey?”
“You tell me,” Ellen said, her voice suddenly cold. “You’re afraid of success. Oh yes, you are,” Joan McBain said to Ellen’s grimace.
“You’re damn good. I used to watch you. You were the best thing going in this town. You’d be good anywhere.”
Ellen stared up at the ceiling.
“Instead, you spend your time going from one rinky-dink town to another and now you’re thinking of coming back here? Honey, you should be going to a big city, not back here. Nothin’ here for you. Nothin’.” She paused for a pull on her cigarette.
“You plan to see Ronnie while you’re here?” she asked with a smoky exhale.
“I don’t know.”
“He’d love to see you, Ellen. I know that. He’s down at the store. You could catch him there.”
What was she supposed to do, walk into the store and wait until neither of them had anything left to say or until it was time for him to leave to be with this new woman, the nice girl, the one he was going to marry? That wasn’t the way she pictured it on the long drive up.
She had pictured how she would walk into Joan McBain’s kitchen and he would be there and she would smile at him. He would lift her up the way he used to and say, “Hell, what do you weigh, girl?”
He’d put her down and pick her up again by the loops of her jeans.
“You don’t weigh as much as a sack of feed,” he’d say.
That is the way she wanted it to be by the time she reached Gallup, the way she knew it would be by the time she passed Grants.
“I really care for him, you know,” she said softly.
“I know, honey. He is easy to love. Hey, look at that little sweetie.” Ellen followed her gaze.
“She’s my prize, my little princess.”
Outside in the pasture the spindle-legged foal bounced after the mare.
“Cute baby, isn’t she? She’s going to be somethin’ great.”
Before she got into her car, Ellen stopped and took a deep breath. There was a biting chill in the air. There might be snow tonight. She looked up at the clear, cloud-free sky. No, not tonight, but maybe tomorrow.
It would be a day to sit and read and watch the snow and the Sandias as they turned black-green with a dusting of white. Or, if she got lucky, the mountains would disappear in thick gray clouds that would billow close to the ground like sails.
“How are you, Elena?” Juan Moya moved to her side.
“Lo mismo, the same,” she said. “You think it will snow tonight?”
“I think tomorrow,” he said.
“Be nice to see snow.”
“It don’t snow down there where you are, does it?”
“It’s already hot,” she laughed. “You like it?”
“Not much.”
“I was there once. It is a big city, no? And it was hot. I remember that.” He shook his head sadly.
“It hasn’t changed.”
“You like it better here?” he asked.
“I think I do.”
“You come back, Elena?” he asked with a shy smile.
She could go by the store. She could see him, say hello. She could call him tomorrow and tell him she was in town. He would know. Joan McBain would tell him and he would know she was at Dale’s. If he wanted to see her, to talk to her, he would know where to find her.
Ellen knew how this night would go. She would wait for the sound of his truck. She would wait through the wine and Dale’s stories and the station gossip. She would wait and jump if the phone rang, which it would, but not for her. She knew that too.
“You should come back,” Juan Moya said strongly. “I never liked that city. Too hot.”
There was that wooly wet smell in the air, that catch of breath in her throat, the moving sense of a hard change coming. Yes, it might snow tonight.
“We’ll see,” she said.
She got into her car without glancing back to see if Joan McBain watched. She didn’t want to know.
47
Nancy Patterson faced another weekend without news and she didn’t care. Between sick photographers, bored and surly reporters, out-of-commission vans, interviews who canceled or never showed up, she didn’t care. She would use what she had. That was the job of a weekend producer, to use what you had or could find. She had two newscasts today. She’d be out of the station, home free, really home free, in about ten hours.
She counted her possibilities. Two crews were out. That meant three stories, four if she was lucky. She could pull a few stories from the network feed. She had wire copy to rewrite and a package she could pull of the hold sheet. Add sports and weather and she had her newscasts. She opened the morning paper. She only needed two minutes of state news, tops.
As she read, the scanners clicked and chattered away. If something out of the ordinary came across she would hear it whether she was reading, writing or answering a phone. She could be in the bathroom and hear something that would make her run, if no one was looking, or walk quickly if someone was.
They all did that, reporters, photographers, producers. They heard the fire call, the shooting report, over the chaos of a working newsroom five screaming minutes before a newscast. They were tuned in that way, waiting for the big story.
Like Ellen would tell non-news people, “On slow days we sit there and pray for a plane crash.”
Nancy wasn’t praying for any tragedy today, not when she was alone
