The Annie Year. Stephanie Wilbur Ash

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      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 in width and not girth as he has aged. I used to marvel at how he could eat so much at our lunches, but then I realized they were likely his only meals of the day because I paid for them. Mueller has always known how to butter his bread with other people’s butter, even though he has plenty of butter.

      Suddenly Barb appeared next to Mueller, all one hundred pounds of her. She stared him down. The coffeepot she held was shaking in her hand, her iron forearm strength was wavering. This was something I had never seen before. Mueller just shrugged and stared back, waiting for her to say something. Barb’s saying something would have been highly unusual. I stared deep into my coffee, which was almost as black as I could feel Barb’s heart to be at that moment.

      Then Barb did say something. “This Clive Liestman,” she asked Mueller directly. “Is he all right?’

      Mueller shrugged. He looked into his onion rings, then picked one up and ate it. He said, “Yeah, I guess he’s all right. He shows up for field work. He handles the machinery. He doesn’t stir shit up. He’s a farmhand. That’s the definition of a model employee.”

      Then she turned to me. “What about you, Tandy? What do you know about this Clive?”

      My hands went numb again. My armpits itched. I looked down at the stack of onion rings. The ones Mueller had not eaten were stuck together with batter and oil. I would have to pull them all apart before I could make one mine.

      “Not much,” I said. “Why do you ask?” It wasn’t really a question. If she was unwilling to tell me, I was unwilling to tell her my opinion of him.

      “Don’t pretend like I don’t know all about you,” she said.

      “Don’t pretend that I care,” I said back, though I regret it now as I regret all the awful things I have ever said to her or anyone, including Doc and Huff, who, unlike Barb, do not deserve my clemency.

      “I’d ask you to not be an asshole but I don’t think that’s possible,” she said.

      “I am not in the business of telling people what to think,” I said.

      It was the longest conversation I’d had with Barbie in more than seventeen years that wasn’t about income СКАЧАТЬ