Wife Wanted in Dry Creek. Janet Tronstad

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СКАЧАТЬ she still there?” the older man asked a little unnecessarily in Conrad’s opinion. His uncle was looking out the window of the hardware store across the street. There was no way a person could leave Conrad’s gas station without being in full sight of anyone looking out that window.

      “Yeah, she’s still here,” he answered anyway. “Did you happen to get a good look at her?”

      “Elmer said she has really long black hair and is pretty.”

      A whole group of older men sat inside the hardware store and kept their eyes on the comings and goings of Dry Creek. Elmer had underestimated her beauty, Conrad thought. Pretty was too tame a word to describe her. She was leggy and walked toward the beat-up old car with her long hair swinging with every step she took. She had warm brown eyes and creamy skin. Even wearing jeans and a black leather jacket, she was too exotic for this place. He hadn’t given much thought to her apart from that until he saw the tears in her eyes. That’s when all of the pieces fell into place and he recognized her.

      Conrad remembered his uncle was waiting. “Yeah, she is that.”

      “Is she acting peculiar?”

      “In what way?”

      “Well, nervous. Is she anxious to get away from here?”

      “She might be a little impatient, but lots of people are.” He didn’t know how to go about this, but he knew a man needed to lance a boil if he wanted it to heal. “The thing is she looks like someone in a picture I have and—”

      “Aha,” his uncle interrupted in triumph. “Elmer told me she’s probably on one of those wanted posters you keep on that bulletin board of yours. The sheriff called and asked us to be on the lookout for an old gray car with a dent in the right fender. Somebody stole it down by Pryor. On the Crow Indian reservation. Even I could see her car is gray. And banged up, too.”

      Conrad closed his eyes. No one would steal that old car she was driving. Not unless they were drunk or too blind to see it clearly. “I don’t think she’s wanted for anything. That’s not where I saw her.” He drew a deep breath. “I know it’s not her, but she looks like the woman on the calendar.”

      “What calendar?”

      “You know the one I showed you.”

      There was a moment of absolute silence.

      “You mean the woman you’re going to marry?” Uncle Charley finally asked in a hushed tone. “That calendar?”

      Conrad didn’t know why he hadn’t seen the pitfalls last week when he’d used a page in his calendar to make a point with his uncle. “No, she’s not the woman I’m going to marry. I’m just saying—oh, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

      The fact that he had not wanted to have a serious discussion with his uncle about his love life was the reason he was in trouble now. Last Wednesday the older man had come over to show Conrad what he’d put in the church prayer bulletin—“Wife wanted for my nephew.”

      A prayer didn’t get more public than that. Or more embarrassing.

      Conrad knew he should have sat down right there and assured his uncle that he would get married eventually, in his own time. But he was in the middle of rebuilding a tractor engine for the Redferns and they needed it soon if they were going to plow the ground they were leasing in time to get a crop planted. So he’d tried to stop his uncle’s crusade the quick way, by pointing at the calendar on the wall and announcing that he had already picked out his future wife. It had been a joke, of course. Just a way to avoid the awkwardness of a conversation he didn’t want to have.

      “She’s really here? Your wife?” His uncle sputtered, his voice rising.

      “Don’t get excited. It’s not good for your blood pressure.”

      “Well, I can hardly believe it.”

      “That’s because there’s nothing to believe. It’s just that someone who looks like the calendar woman is here.”

      When he said it out loud, it didn’t sound so bad. The problem was Conrad wasn’t sure this woman looked like anyone else. He’d never seen anyone like her in town before, not even when folks from the Miles City rodeo spilled over into the Dry Creek café. He took another look at her. For one thing, those strappy black high heels she wore would jump-start a dead man’s heart. Women around here didn’t wear shoes like that.

      “Still, maybe it’s a sign,” Uncle Charley said hopefully.

      “She just needs to get a new muffler on her car.”

      If he had to pick some woman to make his point, Conrad wondered why he hadn’t chosen an ordinary woman who really existed in his world. Maybe someone like Tracy Stelling, who cut his hair once a month at the Quick Clips in Miles City. She’d grown up on one of the ranches near here and, although she’d left for a dozen or so years, she’d returned, looking subdued and grateful to be home. He’d have a chance with someone like that. He’d even been thinking of asking her out to dinner so he wouldn’t be lying if he said he was considering Tracy for a wife.

      “Every relationship needs to start someplace,” his uncle said.

      “That’s the whole point. There is no relationship. She’s just passing through. And she’s not even the real woman. I mean the woman I thought she was.”

      He looked over at the calendar again. The woman was wearing a deep red dress with a white apron and holding open the door of a rundown farmhouse. The woman stood defiantly as if she was trying to fight off some crushing despair. He hadn’t noticed until she was standing at his window, looking out and blinking back her tears, that her profile was the same as the calendar woman.

      “Conrad? You still there?” his uncle asked.

      He swallowed, but he couldn’t talk. The calendar woman had reminded him of the feeling he’d had when he’d been five and his mother had died from pneumonia. Just the way she stood there holding that door, he’d known she’d shared the same feeling as him at some time in her life. They’d both screamed at the wind, even when no sound was coming out of their mouths.

      “I’m just thinking—what if she did steal that car?” his uncle continued. “A thief could be dangerous. Knives. Guns. That kind of thing. Not that the sheriff said anything about the suspect being armed, but you never know. You need to be careful.”

      “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine,” Conrad said, hoping it was true.

      “I could call the sheriff and have him check the woman out,” his uncle persisted. “We should at least get a license plate number.”

      If it would make his uncle stop asking questions about the woman, he’d give him the numbers to Fort Knox if he had them. He looked down at the work order he’d just filled out. “The plate number is SAQ718.”

      He’d had to go back into the service bay to write down the number because the woman didn’t know it. Of course, lots of people didn’t know their license plate numbers. That didn’t mean they were driving stolen cars.

      “Say it again so I can write it down.”

      “SAQ718. СКАЧАТЬ