And You Will Find Love

The man spat again. "No one's seen one around here in years. But it's a nice friendly town. Just be careful of the little green rattlesnakes. And some of the jackrabbits grow a tad bold."

"In town?" she asked.

"They're part of the population. Goin' to stay a while?"

"If I get a job. Where's America West Airport?"

The attendant scratched the back of his head and squinted into the blinding hot sun. Sitting in her parked car with no air moving, Barbara began to feel like it was a bake oven and she was an Idaho potato.

"Oh, that. Reckon you could call it an airport. Used to be one, anyway. 'Bout fifteen minutes up that side road there."

He spat again, pointing to a narrow road that looked to be more dust than dirt, leading out to the mountains.

She had something to do before driving on, but didn't want to risk going into his washroom. "Where's a good hotel in town?"

The old man laughed his sides out. "Hotel?"

She thought a moment. "YWCA?"

He laughed even harder. "Lady, this town's so small, we don't have anything that fancy. If you need a place to stay, the Widow Phelps takes in boarders."

Ma Phelps, as she was more generally called, turned out to be a frail old woman whose bony arms showed in her sleeveless calico granny dress. She wore a cloth cap to keep the sun off her gray head and walked with the help of a wooden cane because of a bad left hip. She, too, chewed tobacco.

Barbara was shown a bedroom she could have "all to yerself." Ma Phelps placed such emphasis on "yerself" that her upper and lower plates clacked together.

It wasn't until later that Barbara learned why her landlady objected to her guests having gentlemen callers. Ten years before, her husband Bruno, the town's general handyman, had had a fatal heart attack. It came on while he was in bed with a young woman who for a short time had been a short-order cook at the Jackrabbit Cafe in town.

Barbara became the only boarder at present at Ma Phelps's, in a room she could walk around in and almost meet herself on the other side. She shared use of a bathroom with tub up the hall.

After unpacking, she drove off in search of America West Airport. The dusty road she followed took her past cactus formations, Joshua trees, and ancient creosote bushes, but mostly just nothing but dust under the blazing afternoon sun.