Night at the Fiestas: Stories by Kirstin Valdez Quade Page B

hunched. He needed to get used to her absence, Frances reasoned, because soon she’d leave for college, and then what would he do? She’d be kind to him when she got off in Santa Fe. She’d tell him she loved him. Frances put on her cardigan, and then, hot, sat back and opened her book.
    I N W AGON M OUND , three people boarded. A thin red-cheeked woman in a gray dotted sundress sat across the aisle from Frances, and a man swinging a lunch sack took the seat in front of her. He smiled from under a bristly caterpillar of a mustache. Frances, aware of his eyes on her, looked out the window at the road blurring below. She pictured herself: her slow blush, lashes lowered against her cheek.
    “Whew. Hot, isn’t it?” The thin woman lifted off her straw hat, and her hair came with it, loosening from her chignon, then falling around her face in lank, damp strands. She pulled a pencil and a crossword from her purse and set to work.
    All the while, Frances examined the man in her peripheral vision. He was sitting sideways, leaning against the window. He craned to see Frances over the backrest. Brown checked suit, agate bolo tie cinched tight under his collar. He was thirty, maybe. His hair was a little long, parted down the middle.
    “Hey.” He stretched a narrow hand toward her, flicked her book. “Pretty girls should smile.”
    People were always telling Frances to smile; apparently her face in its natural state was pinched and sulky. “Well, you aren’t beautiful,” her mother had said thoughtfully this summer. “But you’re perfectly fine when you smile.” Frances hated the implication that she ought to appear good-natured for someone else’s benefit. Who did this man—some ranch hand in his absurd city best—think he was? Still, he had called her pretty, and that was something. She raised an eyebrow in a way she hoped looked disdainful and queenly. “If I felt like smiling,” she said, “I would.”
    He laughed, not unkindly. The man’s breath was damp and garlicky from, Frances imagined, some massive ranch breakfast eaten in a hot kitchen. Greasy yellow eggs, beans, fat sausages splitting their burned skins. The thought was nauseating, and Frances turned her head.
    “You don’t make yourself sick, reading like that?”
    Frances shook her head. She had absolutely no desire to talk to this man. She would not talk to this man. But her silence hung between them, unmistakable and rude. “No,” she said finally. “I never get carsick.”
    “Lucky. I was in the Navy, and I never did get used to the seasickness.”
    “Well,” said Frances, “it can’t help, sitting backward like that.” Rude , her mother would call her; Frances preferred spirited .
    “What are you reading?”
    What could Thomas Hardy possibly mean to him? Frances displayed the cover, feeling superior.
    “So you’re a smarty-pants,” said the man. “Huh.”
    Frances had begun Tess of the D’Urbervilles that summer with trepidation, and she was proud of herself for making it as far as she had. Even more than the story, Frances enjoyed the image of herself reading this fat book with its forbidding, foreign-sounding title. It was a prop, exactly the book a girl with a powder-blue valise would be reading. And apparently, as a prop it was working.
    The fellow lit a cigarette, exhaled, still watching her. “I’m not much for reading. Myself, I’m a painter.”
    Frances brightened and set the book in her lap. “Really? What do you paint? Figures?” She blushed.
    “Nudes, you mean? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it?”
    Frances’s blush deepened. She didn’t deny it.
    He laughed. “I’d say I’m more of an action painter.” He scratched his mustache with a finger, eyes on her, then took another drag.
    Did that mean what she thought it meant? Was Frances being propositioned? He was thinking of her that way, wasn’t he? Certainly he wasn’t talking to the woman across the aisle. And why was that? Because the woman across