Commonwealth(42)

He took the canvas bag off her shoulder, the one she’d used to carry her schoolbooks in back in her school days. It had always been so heavy. Now there was just a nightgown and toothbrush, a change of clothes for tomorrow, the volume of Alice Munro stories she’d been reading on the bus.

“It doesn’t seem like you’re planning to stay,” he said.

“Just the night.”

“Well then, I should show you a little bit of Iowa before it gets any darker.”

“I saw an awful lot of it on the bus coming in. It looks like Illinois, the parts that aren’t Chicago.” The ride had taken five and a half hours. In between the Munro stories, she’d watched all of those endless snowy fields poked through with a hundred thousand broken stalks of corn, and the long shadows those stubbled cornstalks threw across the snow in the late-afternoon light. She’d leaned her head against the window. Field after field after field, and not an inch of space wasted on something as decorative and meaningless as a tree.

“You’ve already figured it out then,” he said, and pointed to the big double doors that led out to the parking lot. “I’ll take you to dinner instead.” Together they stepped into frozen air, a soft sweep of snow just beginning to cover the recently shoveled walks.

Old snow was layered over the ground, the parked cars that hadn’t been disturbed, the tough little shrubs that would bear the snow’s impossible weight until spring. She could feel her own brittleness as the frozen air did battle with her coat. It was no worse than Chicago, it might even have been two degrees warmer, and still it was like walking into a wall of broken glass. She pictured those early settlers in their covered wagons crossing the prairies in search of a better life. Why did they stop here? Were the horses lame? Was it springtime? Were they so hungry that they brought their wagons to a halt and said, This is far enough?

“Tell me again why this is better than Los Angeles?” Franny asked. She wished she could put her arm through his arm and lean into him. He was tall enough to block the wind.

“I’m not married to anyone in Iowa.”

“Let’s hope that’s true for most of the states.”

“That’s what I like about you. You have a positive take.” He put his hand flat on her back and steered her into an Italian restaurant which looked like it might have recently been a diner. “I’m overestimating,” Leo said, looking at his watch. “There probably isn’t time for dinner. There’s probably only time for a drink. Can you manage with just a drink for now? There’ll be plenty of food later on.”

Franny was just glad to step out of the weather. The wind blew in the door behind them, making an arctic puff across the tables and causing the other diners to look up. The restaurant, unlike the bus station, had a zealous heater. “I’ll manage fine.” She started to zip herself out of her coat and unwrap her scarf, pull off her hat. She wore boots with rubber soles and rubber covering over the toes. They were lined with the pelts of cast-off teddy bears. There was no vanity in winter.

The bartender was a woman who could have been on either side of sixty, with a swept-up pile of blond curls nested on the top of her head and a black vest which nearly failed at its job of containing her bust. The name Rae was stitched across the left breast in looping cursive.

“There he is!” Rae said. “Ducking in before you have to go to work?”

“I thought I should,” Leo said.

“I tried to get off,” she said to Franny, her eyes bright inside their spiky cages of dried mascara. “but I couldn’t do it. What are you going to have, darling?”

“The same,” Franny said, tilting her head to Leo. “And maybe some breadsticks and a glass of water.”

“That’s good thinking,” the woman said, taking a bottle of scotch from the shelf behind her. “That soaks it up. Are you going to introduce him?”

“Have you not met?” Franny asked, confused. It seemed the barmaid had mistaken her for someone else. She held out her hand to the man beside her. “Do you know Leo Posen?”

This pleased them both to no end, Leo and the bartender, and they both gave a nice big laugh that brightened up their end of the bar in this dismal little restaurant. “Rae,” she said, and held her hand out to Leo, who took it in both of his hands for a shake, hail fellow well met.

“She makes me ice,” he said.

“I keep it in a Ziploc bag.” Rae reached into the freezer beneath the bar and pulled out the bag on which she had written No Touch with a heavy black marker. “He thinks that Iowa is trying to poison him with bad ice.”

“He told me,” Franny said, nodding.

“I told you that?” Leo asked, taking off his scarf and helping himself out of his coat. He was wearing a suit again, this one dark blue, and a regimental tie.

“Who am I supposed to introduce you to?”

“You introduce him to the audience at the reading tonight,” Rae said, and used a highball glass to scoop up two servings of the ice. “Big-deal famous writers hardly mean anything in this town but I like to go when I’ve got a free night. I’ve been going for years. That way I get to see all my customers while they work. And you know what all of them tell me? They say, Rae, you should be the one writing books.”

Leo nodded his head in sincere agreement. “You should.”