Mary and O'Neil Page 0,49

his hands on his apron. “‘The old baker died.’”

Twig was famous for very little, but in 1874, in the dead of winter, the Jesse James gang had held up the town bank. Unlike his well-known defeat at the town of Northfield in the summer of 1876, the James gang had strolled into Twig Savings and Loan and made off with the money easily, plunging the town into a financial abyss that had nearly erased it from the map of time. It was an odd event to celebrate, but every year on the anniversary of the robbery the Lions Club staged a reenactment on Main Street, and in the evening there were fireworks over the baseball diamond.

That night Mary and Russell went to the fireworks together, and when the last ashes had scattered over the snowy baseball field, Mary left him to begin her shift at the Norway. She finished at midnight and sat down with Phil, who was wearing a lopsided cowboy hat, as he always did for “Jesse Fest.” It was one of Phil’s greatest disappointments that the Lions Club had never asked him to play the role of the great bandit himself. On the bartop in front of him was a single bullet, and he picked it up and pointed it at Mary, who raised her arms in mock alarm.

“Don’t shoot, Jesse,” Mary said.

Phil returned the bullet to the bartop and thoughtfully smoothed out his moustache with thumb and forefinger. “It’s the wrong caliber, anyway. Have a look at this.” He searched his shirt pockets and produced a photocopied wanted poster of Jesse James, which he held beside his face.

“Now, what am I seeing?”

“I got it at the library,” Phil explained. “When I saw it, I, too, was surprised at the degree of likeness.”

Mary studied the picture another moment. “There’s always next year,” she said.

“Not the way I hear it.” Phil dejectedly folded the poster back up. “You think they haven’t seen this already? I am persona non grata in this town.”

Mary got Phil his last beer and got one for herself.

“You shouldn’t drink,” Phil said to her.

Mary poured her beer down the sink and got a Coke instead. “God. Who told you?”

“You shouldn’t, you know. Or smoke.” Phil lit one himself and crumpled the empty pack.

Mary sat down beside him again and waved the thick air away. “It’s the same, just being in here. I’m serious. Did you talk to Russell?”

Phil frowned. “Who’s Russell?”

“So you didn’t talk to him.”

“I always wanted a son.” Phil sighed, his eyes pooling with tears. “Now it’s too late.”

Mary pointed at his beer. “I’ve lost track. How many is that?”

“It’s all right,” Phil said, and rose stiffly to go. “I’m done for tonight.”

She helped him with his coat, a denim jacket so filthy it seemed weighed down by dirt. He had the cowboy hat but no scarf, and she took her own and wrapped it around his lanky neck, tucking the ends into the jacket. “Straight home, all right? It’s cold. Call when you get there.”

Mary left the bar and returned under a full moon to the apartment over the shoe store. Curtis was working at his easel in her old bedroom, and Russell was asleep. She couldn’t explain how Phil had known—although, in hindsight, she recognized that this might not have been so; his words were ambiguous. Mary made cocoa for herself and Curtis and told him her news.

Curtis sat beside her on the sofa and put his arms around her. “A baby,” he said happily; and yet he did not look at her as he said this. “How did it happen?”

“I think in the usual way,” Mary said.

“We were careful, were we not?”

“There’s careful and there’s careful,” Mary said.

They agreed that they would wait a week to see how they felt. That night, in bed with Curtis, Mary thought about Phil. He hadn’t called, but she had not really expected him to. She saw him walking home through moonlight to the run-down house he shared with his cats, across a field of snow as blue as radioactive milk. She saw him lying down in the snow, and then the wind began to push snow over his body, until only the tips of his shoes were showing, but they were her mother’s shoes, and it was her mother under the snow. Then she woke up and realized she had dreamt this.

Curtis said that he wanted to marry. His desire did not seem completely sincere, but under the circumstances Mary wondered how