with grilled steaks and corn on the cob, homemade rolls and fresh-fruit pies. People were dressed in their Chief Joseph Days finery, including Diana in her rhinestone boots and her coronation Stetson with its rhinestone tiara.
Diana was visiting with someone, an old lady, when her father came striding over to her, grabbed her hat, and held it just out of reach while she tried desperately to reclaim it.
“Couldn’t you find something better than this to wear?” he sneered down at her, shaking the hat but still holding it well beyond her fingertips. “Did you have to come to your mother’s funeral all tarted out in your hussy clothes?”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m not a hussy. I’m the queen. I get to wear these clothes. You can’t stop me.”
“You’re not the queen,” he leered back at her. “Not really. You cheated. You cheated. You cheated.”
Diana woke up drenched in sweat with the hateful words still ringing in her ears. Her father had shouted those words at her in real life and left them echoing forever in her memory, but not then, not at her mother’s funeral. When was it? When had it been?
“It would sure as hell be nice if I had a little help with the chores around here of a Saturday morning,” Max Cooper had grumbled. “I’m sick and goddamned tired of you getting all tarted up and taking off every goddamned weekend.”
“Dad,” she said, “I’m the queen, remember. I have to go. I signed an agreement saying that I’d represent Joseph in all the rodeo parades around here.”
“I’m the queen,” he mocked, imitating her. “My aching ass you’re the queen! Like hell you are! You’re no more the queen than I am. You cheated.”
“Max,” Iona cautioned.
“Don’t you ‘Max’ me. How long are you going to go on letting her believe she’s Little Miss Highness, God’s gift to everyone? How long?”
“Max.”
He turned on her then. Diana knew he wouldn’t hit her. Not anymore. He’d only really come after her once after George Deeson-that “goddamned coffee-drinking Jack Mormon,” as Max called him-appeared on the scene. It happened early on in the course of Waldo and Diana’s training. George was just coming up the outside steps that led to the kitchen to collect his morning coffee and biscuits when all hell broke loose.
Diana never remembered what that particular fight was about and it didn’t matter really. She said something to her father, and Max hit her hard across the mouth with the back of his hand, sending her spinning into the corner of the kitchen. She waited, head down, expecting the next blow, which never came. When she finally dared look, George Deeson had a choke hold around her father’s collar, holding him at arm’s length with a knot of fist twisted into her father’s protruding Adam’s apple.
“Don’t you ever do that again, Max Cooper, or so help me God, I’ll kill you!” George was old enough to be Max’s father, and he didn’t raise his voice when he said it, but Max went stomping out of the house like a whipped dog, while George calmly sat down to butter his biscuits and drink his coffee.
Evidently, Max Cooper took George at his word. He never struck Diana again, not once. Not ever, although he tried the night she came home with her clothes torn to pieces.
Later, much later, in the hospital in La Grande when her mother was dying, Diana had asked Iona about it. Why had her father called her a cheater?
“Because of George,” Iona said.
“George? What did he do?”
“He bought two hundred dollars’ worth of rodeo tickets the last day of the contest,” Iona said. “He gave them away to a bunch of poor kids here in La Grande who couldn’t have gone otherwise.”
“He didn’t buy them from me,” Diana said. She had sold tickets until she was blue in the face, but she didn’t remember selling more than one to George Deeson.
“I gave him the tickets and took the money, but they were from your ticket allocation. Even though you didn’t sell them yourself, that batch of tickets put you over the top. Remember, there was only a quarter of a point difference between you and Charlene Davis.”
“So Dad was right,” Diana said, feeling her one moment of triumph, her rodeo-queen victory, slip through her fingers in retrospect. “I did cheat after all.”
“No, Diana,” Iona had said firmly, squeezing her daughter’s hand despite the pain it caused her. “You’ve earned every damn thing you’ve ever gotten.”
It was the only time Diana ever remembered hearing her mother use the word
Lying in bed at her home in Gates Pass, Diana’s eyes misted over. What would have happened to her if George Deeson hadn’t driven into her life, bringing Waldo with him? Where would she be now? Married to some drunken logger in Joseph like Charlene was, or else still living in the house by the garbage dump. Would her life have been worse or better? There was no way to tell.
Her grief for George Deeson, dead now these four years, spilled over into grief for Waldo, who had broken a leg during her first semester in Eugene and had to be put down. While she was at it, she shed a tear for her mother, and finally a few for herself as well. What if Brandon Walker was right? What if she didn’t have guts enough to pull the trigger? What if Andrew Carlisle killed her? What kind of legacy would she leave for her child?
Still wide awake, she thought of all those boxes sitting in the root cellar, waiting for someone to sort through them-her mother’s boxes and, more than that, her husband’s. Whose job was that? Who was the person whose responsibility it was to go through them, to sort the wheat from the chaff so Davy or someone else wouldn’t have to do it later? There were things in those boxes that should be kept and saved for him and others that should be thrown away and never again see the light of day.
It was weeks before she could face returning to Gary’s office, weeks before she could approach the desk again with its stilled typewriter and haunting stack of blank paper.
She started with the bottom drawer, thinking that would be the least painful, but of course, she was wrong. Had Gary been smart enough, he would have got rid of it, would have destroyed it, but she found the damning envelope with its University of Arizona return address almost immediately. Curious, she pulled out the sheaf of loose papers and scanned through them, recognizing at once the clumsy effort of one of her own early short stories, the one she had submitted as part of her application to the Creative Writing program.
At first she noticed only the stilted phrases, the graceless prose that flows at tedious length from the minds and hearts of beginning writers, but then her eyes were drawn to the handwritten comment at the end. “Gary,” it said. “Your work here is, naturally, a beginning effort, but it shows a good deal of promise. We’ll discuss the possibilities for this manuscript in greater detail once you’re enrolled in the program and fully underway.” It was signed, “A. Carlisle.”
For a full minute, she stared down at the paper, trying to make sense of it all. Then the full weight of Gary’s betrayal thundered over her, burying her in a landslide of emotion.
Gary had gained admission to Andrew Carlisle’s program using her story, not his own. Not that she would have wanted to be in it after all, she thought bitterly, but the rejection had caused her to doubt her own ability, to retreat into teaching, to settle for second best rather than following her own aspirations.
Up to that very moment, in spite of everything else, Diana Ladd had grieved for her dead husband. Now she exploded in a raging fit of anger.
“Damn you!” she screamed in fury at Gary Ladd’s unconcerned Smith-Corona. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”
Having once allowed herself to succumb to anger, it never once left her. It functioned as a whip and a prod, goading her to succeed at writing no matter what obstacles might fall in her path.
Diana dropped the papers, scattering them like leaves across the desk and floor. She fled Gary’s office and never returned. Only as she left for the hospital to have Davy, with the arrival of the movers barely minutes away, did she give Rita permission to go into Gary’s abandoned office and pack up whatever she found there.
With the exception of appropriating the typewriter for her own, in the intervening years, Diana had never
