Lindy couldn't take her eyes off the child who was being introduced to a picture book in the bookstore front of her two-bedroom shotgun house in tiny Wallace, Kansas. Wallace was in "nowhere land" twenty-five flat and nearly tree-less miles east of the Colorado state line just off Interstate 40. She had no idea how old the little girl was. Lindy, twenty-four, hadn't paid any attention to children until recently. She hadn't thought about them at all until her husband, Arthur Brand, now fifty-six and considering his mortality after a brush with liver cancer, had revealed how much he ached for them to have a child. Now she felt so guilty that she was fully aware of every young child she saw and increasingly was pining for motherhood herself. Luckily, the population of Wallace, Kansas, was only sixty-three, and the child delighting over a picture book in Lindy's small bookstore was one of only three under the age of four living In Wallace at this moment.
The reason Lindy felt guilty was that they'd been married for five yearsâhappily so, she thoughtâand she'd been taking precautions all this time. She liked sex; she'd been a little afraid of children and not at all interested in the process of birthing one. She and Arthur never discussed having children, but Arthur was more than twice her age. How did she know that he was so naĂŻve about such things? It was true that he nominally was a Catholic, but out here in nowhere Kansas there wasn't a Catholic church anywhere close. They didn't go to church or talk religion. Lindy hadn't been brought up going to a church.
It had been having liver cancer and facing his own mortality at fifty-five that had started Arthur talking about having a family and about Catholics' attitude toward procreation. He didn't contemplate why they hadn't started one alreadyâat least in the open. And there was no natural reason before he started treatments for the cancer that they didn't. They did itâa lotâup to that time, and he didn't wear protection. Before the cancer Arthur had liked to fuck. Lindy liked to be fucked. Despite the age difference, Arthur was very good at it. It hadn't come up that she was taking precautionsâthat they hadn't discussed having a family and she thought he was too old, marrying her at fifty, to be raising children. She'd just cut off that possibility in life when they married.
And now that Lindy knew that Arthur wanted to keep his line alive, it really was getting too late. They hadn't had sex for a year. That wasn't because they weren't sexually attracted to each otherâLindy knew she was still a looker and Arthur was a hunk of a man for his age, or she wouldn't have married him in the first place. It was because of what Arthur had gone through in the past year. The chemo and medicines and all had pretty much destroyed his libido. She didn't know if he even could get it up anymore. The few times he'd tried after the doctor said it was safe to start up again, he hadn't been able to get hard. He'd satisfied Lindy in other ways, but he hadn't gotten there for himself.
He hadn't had trouble getting it up at the start and she'd been flattered that the handsome and so intelligent English teacher at the Community College of Aurora, a section of Denver, Colorado, to the east of the central downtown area, had been interested in a student in her first year at the junior college. Lindy's interest had been English as well, and in addition to teaching the subject, Arthur was a novelist in his own right, albeit on a modest scale. Even that scale was urbane and fascinating to Lindy. He paid attention to her in class, commenting more than once how good her writing wasâand her poems. They exchanged poems, which had become increasingly intimate as the semester progressed. And, ultimately, because of the incident, they hookup up and the romance became serious.
The romance became scandalous at the community college too, and, although they married, they thought it best to leave Denver. Arthur was from this small village, not really a town, in western Kansas, notable only as the location of an old fort museum, Fort Wallace, out south of town a quarter of a mile, on I-40. The value of the museum was more convenience than history. It was a place where those hurrying through Kansas as fast as they could either from or to Colorado made a pit stop and lingered for a couple of minutes for a brief history lesson. Where they'd set up a small bookstore on the large, glass-enclosed front porch of Arthur's dad's house on Clark Street in Wallace was where they lived. From the front door, when the hall door was open, you could look straight back down the length of the house. Beyond the bookstore room you entered the living room on the right, with the dining room on the left, with the kitchen behind it, and then you went straight back down a hall, with a bath on the left, a laundry room-storage room on the right and then bedrooms, one on the right and one on the left, and, at the end of the hall, the door into the backyard.
Arthur had inherited the house from his dad, without a mortgage, which was one reason they could live comfortably on just Arthur's partial pension from college teaching. His dad had owned a garage and gas pumps in Sharon Springs, a town on I-40 ten miles from Wallace and another fifteen miles to the Colorado boarder. That too had come to Arthur and he still owned it and realized supplemental income off it with others fully running the business. Arthur's mother had owned a bigger house in Sharon Springs, population 750, which Arthur also owned and where they had a larger bookstore that Arthur worked. Arthur's father and mother had never married, but both had done what they could for the son they shared. Lindy and Arthur had continued sharing a love for English and books and so they had the two small bookstores in two hamlets that really weren't large enough to support bookstores but that they could provide because income was coming in from elsewhere and living was cheap here in "nowhere" Kansas.
And everything had been just hunky-dory here until Arthur had gone through cancer and was now regretting that he and his pretty wife less than half his age hadn't started a family. Lindy hadn't even thought about having children until Arthur said something. Now, though, as she watched Ellen crouching down and showing her little daughter the pictures in a book they probably wouldn't buy and Lindy didn't really care whether they would or not as long as they were reading books, Lindy could feel her internal clock ticking.
And Arthur had been good to herâreal goodâshe sure did wish she could give him a child to live on with his family name and who could inherit the family property.
* * *
The "incident" that had led Lindy and Arthur to the life they now shared in "nowhere" Kansas had occurred in a darkened and otherwise deserted classroom at the Community College of Aurora five and a half years earlier, shortly after Lindy turned nineteen, when another, a year older, student, Steve Sales, fucked her in the missionary position on the teacher's desk. It wasn't an assault. Lindy was quite willing in the coupling. She hadn't come to the community college virginal. Like many girls living in the Denver suburbs, she lost her virginity on high school senior prom night. That almost was the expected way to celebrate high school graduation. And like many, it wasn't taken from her by anyone who would be central to her subsequent life.
While Kyle Kendricks, king of the high school homecoming court to her queen, was fucking her awkwardly, in equally awkward positions, in the backseat of his father's 2012 Chrysler 300, Lindy's mind had been on the dark and handsome high school basketball star, Steve Sales, who had graduated the year before and who was the heartthrob of Lindy and so many of the other girls across classes while Steve was still in school. All the time that Kyle was inside herâpainfully not only because it was her first time with anything other than a guy's tongue and fingers being there but also because there had been insufficient preparation for what they were doing and Kyle hardly knew what he was doingâLindy's mind was on Steve Sales being on top of her and inside her.
She, like some of the other girls in her high school, had gotten looks of Steve in the altogetherâand Kyle too for that matterâin the boy's locker room, thanks to a coach who was willing to give her a surreptitious view of the locker room while standing close behind her and feeling her upâtoo scared to go further with her and content to having his hands on her while she was in heat. Steve's body was divine. Kyles's was all right, but it was Steve, naked and on top of her, who Lindy had been thinking of on prom night. This was while a not-totally-naked Kyle was crushing her on the backseat of his father's Chrysler and doing grunting and groaning pushups on her, the skirt of her prom dress hiked up to her waist and her low-cut bodice pulled down to there as well. He kept slipping out of her and Lindy continually had to guide him back in. He was in when he released and only then did either of them realize that although Kyle had brought condoms, he hadn't used one. Luckily, nothing came of that.