Free Going to Bend by Diane Hammond Page B

hopeful. In places the house’s metal siding was dented, as though someone had butted it with a car. But there were curtains at the windows and the yard was very tidy, with several whiskey barrels holding the remains of last summer’s annuals. On the lowest limb of a fir tree hung a wooden cutout of a bonneted little girl on a swing. Her skirt was made of real fabric trimmed in lace. For yard art, this was upper end. On the house next door, Gordon could see gargantuan pink wooden butterflies with three-foot wingspans nailed to the siding. Two doors down from Gordon’s own apartment building in Sawyer, there was a polka-dot-painted cutout of a woman’s backside bending over in the garden. Beside it was a cutout of a man’s blue-jeaned backside, his hand out to steal a feel.
    Rose must have been watching for him; she opened the door before he’d even knocked. She wore dressier clothes than normal: a thin, full denim skirt, matching western-style shirt, fake tooled leather belt with fake silver medallions and turquoise, western boots. Could it all havecome from Wal-Mart? And yet he thought she looked very beautiful, ample in a way that you never saw in L.A.’s muscle-bound gym dolls. It disconcerted him to see her in clothes that were so different from her usual jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts. People always led more complicated lives than he imagined or was prepared for.
    He followed her into the living room, a shabby brown-paneled space furnished with mismatched furniture over which had been thrown bright crocheted afghans and scraps of lace, all of it clean and orderly. He fastened with appalled reverence on a single bookcase of pressboard and veneer occupying a place of honor along one wall. On the top two shelves were what looked like complete sets of works by Danielle Steel and Sidney Sheldon. Below them, neatly displayed, was a series of Happy Meal toys from McDonald’s.
    “Mine.” Rose smiled when she saw where he was looking. “No one gets to touch those, not even Carissa.”
    “Do you collect them all?”
    “Oh, no. Just the ones I really like or think might be worth something later on. Otherwise you’d need a special place to keep them all, you’d have so many. Loose and Ryan, Petie’s boys, have whole shoe boxes full and we don’t even take them that often.”
    Gordon nodded and buried his hands deep in the pockets of his corduroy trousers. It was conceivable that at that exact moment he was the only man in Hubbard wearing cuffs. He marveled that Rose would even speak to him. Sometimes when he passed by the barbershop or went into the post office, the conversation paused until he was out of earshot. It was not just his imagination, he was sure. And he minded; that was his dilemma.
    Rose had walked over to a battered wood desk against one wall and was fussing with some papers, tapping them into order.
    “It’s not going as fast as I thought it would,” she said apologetically. “I guess this probably doesn’t look like much.” She held out a thin sheaf of pages, handwritten on both sides of loose-leaf paper, school stuff. Gordon saw that her handwriting was firm, round and excessively legible. There were little circles instead of dots over the
i
’s, and at the end ofeach recipe she had drawn a happy face. With dread Gordon scanned the pages. Then he went back and began to read.
    You might not feel like bothering to put the navy beans through a food mill, since no one ever uses them anymore and they take time and muscle, too
, he found on one page.
Do it anyway. A food processor will leave you a jillion little pieces of navy bean skin that will stick to your teeth, your spoon and the sides of your bowl. Another thing about this soup: don’t eat it the day before anything really important, as it can be cleansing
.
    On another page, chosen at random,
Don’t use cheap cheesecloth to wrap the herb bundle in—get the good, close-woven kind and double it. Otherwise, halfway through the cooking when