Chapter 3: Tiny wife tries something
The fair came with the cold, three weeks later, riding in on a blue October morning that made the hay smell sharp and the coffee steam.
Vivi had been talking about it for days. The county fair was the one thing the whole valley agreed on, ranchers and town folk alike, and Johnny had cleared the afternoon the moment she mentioned it. She'd been to fairs as a girl, in the city, but this was different. This was her fair now. Her county, her neighbors, her banner snapping overhead above the homemaker's row of stalls.
She'd entered a jar of pickles and a loaf of bread and, on Dolores's bad advice, a pie.
"You put jalapeños in that crust on purpose," Dolores said, falling into step beside her on the fairgrounds path. The old woman wore her turquoise bolo tie under an unzipped canvas jacket, silver hair flattened by a wind-blown cap, and she carried a paper sack of kettle corn like a weapon she intended to finish by dark.
"On purpose and it was delicious."
"It was an ambush." Dolores popped a fistful of corn in her mouth. "Where'd the boys go?"
"Johnny got pulled into a talk about the water district. Casey saw the demolition derby sign and left without saying goodbye."
"So it's just us women." Dolores looked her over. "You look half froze. Here." She dug in her pocket and produced a knitted scarf, mustard yellow, obviously homemade, and wound it around Vivi's neck without asking. "Made it last winter. Keep it."
It smelled faintly of Dolores's woodstove and horse. Vivi pulled it up to her chin and did not argue.
The stalls went on and on. Quilts and honey and a 4-H table of immaculate rabbits. Somebody's daughter was selling cider slushies out of a cooler. The fairground smelled like sugar and sawdust and manure, all of it mixed into something Vivi was starting to recognize as home.
They stopped at the pie table, where a stout woman in a fair volunteer sash was writing ribbons, and Vivi got a third place rosette for the jalapeño pie and an unprompted critique from the volunteer that lasted four minutes. Dolores leaned on the table and listened with open enjoyment.
"Well, look who it is."
Vivi turned and found two women approaching, and she knew their faces from church and from the feed store and from Johnny's dinner table stories. Marisol Vega, whose family ran the dairy south of the river, broad and brown and fifty-something, with a laugh that carried across a field. And beside her, small and quick, RuthAnn Hollis, the postmaster's wife, seventy if she was a day, with reading glasses pushed up into white curls and a candy dish of gossip in her purse.
"Mrs. Vega. Mrs. Hollis." Vivi had learned to use everyone's last names here. It was safer.
"Third place, huh." Marisol inspected the rosette. "First fair and you place. My first fair I got nothing and cried in the truck."
"You did not," RuthAnn said.
"I cried in the truck," Marisol confirmed. "Congratulations, honey. Your man's been telling everyone at the co-op that his wife bakes. Won't shut up about it."
"He does not," Vivi said.
"Reyes. Johnny Reyes. That man used to stand at the co-op counter silent as a fence post for thirty years." Marisol spread her hands. "Now it's 'Vivi made stew, Vivi's got a rose coming up, Vivi, Vivi, Vivi.' We had to start a rule about it."
RuthAnn laughed, high and dry. "That man was so far gone the day she walked in. I was behind the counter at the post office and I watched him come in to buy stamps he did not need, three separate times that first week. Bought a sheet of stamps every time. I bet he's got a drawer full of stamps."
Vivi's ears went hot. Again. Three weeks of progress.
They drifted together down the row of stalls, the way women at this fair had always drifted, and Dolores fell in on Vivi's other side, and Vivi realized too late that she was now boxed in by the exact configuration of ladies that always led to trouble.
It started innocently. Whose husband had fixed what fence. Who was cheating at the rodeo queen raffle. RuthAnn's hip, the weather coming into it. And then, in the lee of the quilt stall, out of the wind, Marisol lowered her voice the way women do when the subject has teeth.
"So. Speaking of husbands." She nodded at the kettle corn, at the scarf, at Vivi in general. "RuthAnn was just telling me about her anniversary. Forty-eighth."
"Forty-ninth," RuthAnn corrected, pleasuring herself with the correction. "And I told her the secret and she didn't believe me."
"What secret?" Dolores asked, though Vivi suspected from her face that Dolores knew exactly what was coming and was walking them all into it like a sheepdog herding lambs toward a pond.
"The mouth secret," RuthAnn said, and sipped her cider slushie like a woman delivering a verdict.
Vivi's brain stopped. "The what?"
RuthAnn leaned in, glasses sliding down her nose, conspiratorial as a card cheat. "Forty-nine years, honey, and I'll tell you what keeps a man home at night. You got to be good to him. And I don't mean casserole."
"Oh, here we go," Marisol said, delighted.
"I'm saying," RuthAnn went on, entirely unbothered, "that a woman who knows how to use her mouth keeps a man devoted. That's scripture, practically. My Earline, rest her, told me that on my wedding day and I thought she was vulgar. Forty-nine years later I'm telling everybody she was right."
The scarf Vivi was wearing became suddenly the warmest scarf in the history of textiles. She was aware of her own face going through several colors. "That's. Very. Um."
"You don't do it?" RuthAnn asked, and there was no mercy anywhere in her voice, just genuine curiosity, bright and unblinking. "Not even for your man?"
"RuthAnn," Dolores said, flagging her off with one hand, grinning like Sunday.
"No, I'm asking! She's a married woman, it's a fair question. Every wife does it. It's just part of it, like doing his laundry."
"Well, not every wife," Marisol said, and shrugged her enormous shrug. "I do, but my cousin Concepción says her pastor calls it a sin, so she's never once, and hers is sixty and they're still hollering at each other, so I don't know what to tell you."
"Her pastor doesn't have a husband," RuthAnn said.
Vivi stood there holding her rosette and her cider she hadn't sipped, and listened to two women in their fifties and seventies discuss it in the same tone they'd use for canning tomatoes. Like it was easy. Like it was dishes. RuthAnn demonstrated, briefly, with a gesture, and Marisol said "that's more teeth than I'd risk" and RuthAnn said "Earline's method, don't blame me," and Dolores laughed so hard she had to put her hand on the quilt rack.
Because that was the part they all kept skating over. The size. Nobody at this table had married a man built like a barn. Nobody here was five foot one with a mouth Vivi could fit, generously, two of her own fingers across. Nobody had to think about the geometry of it the way she was suddenly, helplessly, thinking about it.
"You've gone quiet, girl," Dolores observed, sly as anything.
"I'm eating my cider," Vivi said.
"You're doing math," Dolores said. "I can see it. Same face Casey makes counting heifers."
"I am doing no such thing."
"Mm." Dolores ate her kettle corn and said nothing else, which was worse than teasing.
Marisol, mercifully, pivoted to the quilt auction, and RuthAnn went with her still arguing about Earline's method, and the three of them followed, and Vivi walked the rest of the row in a haze of kettle corn smell and SCARLET LETTER-level blush, while the wind snapped the banners overhead and somewhere across the grounds the demolition derby announcer bellowed through a blown speaker.
They found the men at dusk, more or less. Johnny first, coming out of the extension office meeting with a rolled-up paper under one arm, looking like a man who'd been talked at for two hours and had endured it the way he endured everything, stone-faced and patient. He saw her and his whole face changed, that specific change, the roof sliding off a house, and he crossed the trampled grass and bent and pressed his lips to her hair.
"Third place," he said, taking the rosette from her hand and holding it up to the last of the light. "Bet it was the jalapeños."
"The judge said my crimp was inconsistent."
"The judge is wrong." He put the rosette in his shirt pocket, right over the heart, like a decoration he'd earned, and Vivi had to look at the ferris wheel for a while.
Casey found them at the funnel cake stand, dusted in powdered sugar to the elbow, with a story about the demolition derby that featured himself as an uncredited tactical advisor to the winning driver. He ate two funnel cakes. He told Johnny about the water district and Johnny told Casey about the water district and both agreed the water district was a racket, and Vivi stood between them under the string lights and felt the evening settle over her like the scarf.
It was on the drive home, in the dark truck cab, heater ticking, that the thought fully assembled itself. Johnny drove with one wrist on the wheel, country station murmuring, and she watched his hands on the wheel, the span of them, the knuckles, and did arithmetic she could not stop doing.
Because here was the thing. It had never once felt like a problem in the dark. Johnny was careful the way he was careful with everything, and he asked, and he waited, and whatever she managed had always made him come apart so completely, so gratefully, that she'd never once thought of herself as falling short. But RuthAnn had said it like a chore on a list. Every wife does it. And now some stubborn little coal in Vivi, the same coal that had made her look Casey in the eye over pancakes, had caught light.
She wanted to do it. Not because RuthAnn said. Because Johnny had spent a year making her feel like the biggest thing in the county, and she wanted to give him one thing that took effort. One thing where the whole point was that he was enormous and she was not, and she did it anyway.
She turned it over the whole drive. She was still turning it over while she washed her face and took her hair down and put on the flannel nightshirt that was really his, sleeves rolled four times, and he was already in bed with the lamp on and the auction paper folded on his nightstand, and he looked up at her from the pillow, grey at the temples, glasses off, and patted his own chest once in invitation, which was where she slept, half on top of him, the way they both liked.
She did not get in the bed. Not yet.
She stood at the side of the bed in the lamplight, heart going, and pulled her hair back and re-tied it, which he knew by now meant things, and his eyebrows lifted, and he set the auction paper aside.
"Little one."
"I want to try something," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "You have to lie still. And you can't help me. And you can't laugh."
"I would never laugh," Johnny said, and then, because he was honest to the bone, "much."
She climbed onto the bed on her knees beside him and worked his waistband open, and he lifted his hips to help and then put his hands flat on the mattress, both of them, out of the way, obeying, and the sight of this enormous patient man making himself into a stillness for her did half the work before she'd even started.
It was going so well right up until it was not.
The trouble was not courage. The trouble was physics. RuthAnn had not mentioned physics. Vivi got her lips around him, as much as she could manage, which was not nothing, she'd done this before in modest proportion and he had made noises about it that lived in her memory, but tonight she was greedy, tonight she had a point to prove, and she pushed too ambitious too fast, and her jaw said no. Plainly. The way a door says no. She adjusted. Tried the angle RuthAnn had demonstrated with the slushie straw. Discovered that RuthAnn had evidently married a man of ordinary, civilian dimensions. Got halfway and stalled, eyes watering, and heard Johnny's breath catch above her and felt his hand come off the mattress, hovering over her hair, not landing, just hovering, and that hovering undid her more than anything.
She came up off him, gasping, jaw aching, hair escaped from the ribbon, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and glared at him as if this were his fault, which in a cosmic sense it was.
Johnny was looking down at her from the pillow with an expression she had never seen on him before. Awe, mostly. But threaded through it, unmistakably, the struggle of a fifty-three-year-old man losing a fight with his own face.
"You said you wouldn't laugh," she said.
"I'm not laughing." His voice had dropped an octave and frayed at the edges. "Vivi. You're glaring at me like I'm a stubborn bolt."
"Like a bolt I can't get loose." She sat back on her heels, rubbing her jaw, ears blazing. "How is this supposed to work. Physically. You're the size of a door."
"I never asked it to work," he said. "I have never in my life thought about it as something you owed."
"You didn't ask. RuthAnn asked." She pushed her hair out of her face. "Whole conversation at the fair. It's easy, apparently. Like laundry."
"RuthAnn Hollis is not married to me." He sat up, slow, the mattress dipping, and gathered her in, one huge hand spreading across her whole back, and pulled her up his chest until they were face to face, her knees on either side of his ribs, so small against him that the comparison itself was a kind of joke. His eyes were dark and warm and very slightly wet at the corners from the fight he'd lost with his face. "You just about broke me in half with what you managed. You know that."
"You're supposed to say that."
"I don't say things I don't mean. Ask Casey."
"Casey can never know about this."
"Casey will know nothing," Johnny agreed solemnly, "except that we came home from the fair and you had an argument with my body and won." His thumb traced her jaw where it ached, feather-light. "You bit off more than you could chew. Literally."
"Do not make jokes right now."
"Sorry." He was smiling. He was entirely, ruinously smiling. "It's just that you planned this. At the fair. That's the face you were making at the quilt stall, isn't it. You were taking measurements in your head."
She buried her face in his neck. "I hate this family of gossips you married me into."
"No, you don't." His hand came up and cradled the whole back of her skull, and she felt the laugh go through his chest before she heard it. "Come here, stubborn girl. Let me return the favor, since you've injured yourself in service."
"You don't have to," she said into his throat, already dissolving.
"Vivi." His mouth found her ear. "What do you want?"
And there it was, the same question, the feed store question, the question he'd never once stopped asking, and she laughed, small and helpless, and answered him, and the lamp stayed on a long time.
The lamp stayed on so long that when it finally clicked off, the house was dead quiet, the cold pressing on the windows, and Vivi lay in her usual spot, half on his chest, jaw pleasantly sore in a way she was going to have to keep private from four separate women, listening to his heart slow down under her ear.
Johnny's hand moved absently up and down her spine. Then he said, into the dark, "Third place pie. I'm entering next year."
"You can't enter next year. It's the homemaker's division."
"I'll register as Vivian Reyes."
"You can't do that either."
"Watch me." The hand paused at her shoulder blade. "Vivi?"
"Mm."
"What RuthAnn said. The way she said it, like it's a duty." She felt him choose his words, slow as setting fence posts. "Don't ever carry that one. Anything you ever want to do to me or for me, do it because you want it. If I ever let you think you owe me something, that's the day I've failed at the one job I've got."
She lifted her head. In the dark she couldn't see his face, only the shape of it against the window light, and she found his jaw with her hand and followed it up and kissed the corner of his mouth.
"I wanted to," she said. "That's the part they all missed. It was never about the chore."
"What was it about?"
"About you being enormous," she said, "and me doing it anyway." She laid her head back down. "You should've seen your face."
"You'll be planning it again by Christmas," he said. "Bigger ambition. Longer ribbon in your hair."
"Go to sleep, Johnny."
"I'm asleep." A pause, the length of a man failing to keep a straight face in the dark. "Your jaw okay?"
She pinched him, somewhere in the dark, as hard as she could, which was about as hard as a moth landing, and he laughed, deep and low and all through the bed, until she gave up and laughed with him.