In the Land of Second Chances

by George Shaffner

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Meet Wilma Porter, the plucky and kindhearted owner of the only bed and breakfast in Ebb, Nebraska. Wilma knows everybody in town and everybody is in a bit of trouble. No one more so than Calvin Millet, though. His wife has up and left him and their ailing daughter. His department store is close to bankruptcy. His house has been destroyed by a tornado. The folks of Ebb, including Wilma and her indomitable gang of friends, watch Calvin's fortunes wane with great dismay, for in Ebb, everyone's fate is connected to his.

When a handsome stranger named Vernon L. Moore comes to town selling games of chance, more than a few eyebrows are raised. A consummate salesman, he befriends the troubled townspeople one by one. He listens to their stories and asks them intriguing questions that make them see their situations differently. The father of a dying child, the reclusive widow who's taken permanent board at the B & B, the banker with ulterior motives, and the outspoken Wilma Porter are all changed by their encounters with this mysterious man who seems not of this world. After all, no one has seen a traveling salesman in Ebb for more than thirty years. But wherever he's from and whoever he is, he leaves behind a town where second chances are not only possible, they can—and do—happen.

Release date: October 15, 2004

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

MY NAME IS Wilma Porter. I own the Come Again Bed and Breakfast, which is the only B & B in Ebb, Nebraska, and the only one in Rutherford B. Hayes County that is recommended by two Internet directories. I bought the place from Clement Tucker, our very own Warren Buffett, who contracted an acute case of Midlife Crisis about five years ago and decided to build himself a modern house with all the latest conveniences.

The Come Again is a single-turreted, three-story Victorian mansion that was built by Silas Tucker the Second shortly after the Civil War. There’s a single, grand oak tree in the front that antedates the house and a black asphalt driveway leading up to a formal porte-cochere and a little parking area for my guests. Last year, I had the house painted bone white except for the roof, which is black. I think the contrast is meaningful.

Clara Tucker Booth Yune, Clem Tucker’s older sister and Ebb’s most prominent recluse, occupies the entire third floor of the Come Again on a permanent basis. There are six bedrooms on the second floor. I live in the one that faces the back garden; the other five are for rent. Each bedroom has its own bathroom; the Cornhusker Suite even has a Jacuzzi. Downstairs, there’s a living room the size of a tennis court, a parlor for the TV, a den, which I keep for myself as a rule, and a giant-sized dining room that will seat sixteen. Except for my kitchen, which is commercial grade, the entire house is decorated in beautiful old antiques that Clem Tucker left behind or I bought cheap at estate auctions and refinished myself in the basement.

Like most folks who live in Ebb, I was born right here, but about an hour after I got my high school diploma I jumped on a bus to North Platte. I came back with my two daughters after the divorce fifteen years later. Both girls are grown up and gone now. One is up in Omaha and the other is over in Council Bluffs, across the river.

By most measures, Ebb is a small town. It is the county seat, but only two thousand people live inside the city limits. There’s not a lot to do here most of the time, and that’s the way we like it. If we need some excitement, we can drive up to Lincoln. For twenty years, every politician in this area has been elected on the “No Wal-Mart, no how” platform. We take a similarly dim view of fast-food franchises, slow-food franchises, convenience-store franchises, and all other franchises with big, backlit signs in primary colors. The only exception is the new Starbucks on Main Street, but Ebb is so small that we only have the one.

All the rest of the stores on Main are unique and most of them have been in operation for more than fifty years. The biggest and most famous is Millet’s, the last remaining department store in the tri-county region. Millet’s, which is pronounced like “mill-it” and not like “mill-ay,” sits right at the corner of Bean Street and Main, where it’s been ever since Joshua Millet opened it up back in 1920. It has survived the Great Depression, rural flight, three bank bankruptcies, World War II, a flood, and God knows how many droughts and tornadoes. Now it is owned and managed by Calvin Millet, June and Joshua III’s only child. Calvin is a smart, hardworking young man, and everybody in Hayes County shops at his store as if it was a patriotic duty, but we’re all afraid that Millet’s will not survive his run of terrible bad luck.

Calvin was a homely baby, bald and sort of wedge-headed, but he grew up to be tall and handsome in a gangly, fair-haired sort of way, kind of like Gary Cooper. He was too skinny to play high school football, a form of religion in these parts, but he studied hard and got good grades even though he worked in his father’s store. After graduation, he went up to Lincoln and got himself a four-year degree in accounting, and then he joined the Air Force to see the world. They sent him to Bossier City, Louisiana.

Calvin had hardly been gone for any time at all when his parents were killed in a train accident. I could tell at the funeral that he had already started to lose his hearing. He’s fine now; he wears tiny little hearing aids in both ears, but the Air Force had to give him a medical discharge so he came back home to run the family store. A year or so later, he married Mary Beth Tucker, Clem’s only child and a bit of an airhead, but a real beauty and the catch of the county from a financial point of view. Six months after that, Lucy was born. I know what you’re thinking, but the human gestation period in rural America is only six months for the first baby. After that, it’s nine months.

When Lucy Millet was eight years old, she contracted some sort of neurological disorder. I hear it’s similar to Lou Gehrig’s disease, but more aggressive and unnaturally painful. Anyway, a real sick daughter was more than her momma could handle, so she pulled up and left for L.A. Just disappeared in the middle of the night. Took the Jeep and the dog and the George Foreman cooker and left Calvin a note saying she was real sorry.

Mary Beth’s departure caused quite a buzz at the Quilting Circle. Most of us are divorcées ourselves, so we aren’t inclined to be critical of any woman who leaves a man. In fact, we have a support system in place so that a woman can do it right: counselors, lawyers, day care, even police protection. But Mary Beth didn’t use the system, and her husband and sick daughter suffered for it. She hasn’t been welcome in these parts since.

Apparently, being a waitress to the stars was not keeping her in the manner to which she was accustomed, so Mary Beth came home anyway but just long enough to sue Calvin for divorce. Since she had only abandoned her husband and sick child in the dead of night, and taken the dog and the Jeep to boot, the court was sympathetic to her predicament. Calvin now pays her alimony. In case you were wondering, the judge is married to a Tucker, once removed.

Little Lucy Millet is the sweetest little blonde-haired girl you have ever seen and she is smart as a whip, but she isn’t getting any better. For the last three years, Calvin has flown her all over the country looking for a doctor who can cure her, but all they’ve done is slow the disease down and, according to rumor, empty the Millet bank account. Calvin has health insurance through the farmer’s co-op, just like everybody else in these parts, but most of Lucy’s treatments have been experimental, and that means that the HMO won’t pay for them. Unless somebody gets those insurance companies under control, I figure that two aspirin and a glass of water will count as a medical experiment before I’m dead.

The tornado hit last month while Calvin and Lucy were away at the Mayo Clinic. That was too early for tornadoes as a rule, but the weather has been unseasonably warm all year. Luckily, it was a tiny thing as twisters go. It missed the town and everything else in Rutherford B. Hayes County except for Rufus Bowe’s grain silo and Calvin Millet’s place. Actually, it tore the roof off of Rufus’s silo and dropped it on Calvin’s house—dead center. I drove out to see what happened with my best friend, Loretta Parsons, who is Ebb’s sole resident black person and the owner of the Bold Cut Beauty Salon. Calvin’s home was a sight to see. It looked like a pile of rubble with a great big aluminum teacup sitting in the middle of it. You wouldn’t think that anybody’s aim could be that good, not even God’s.

After the tornado, Calvin and Lucy stayed with me at the Come Again for a few days until he found them a cracker-box of a house to rent in Carson, about fifteen minutes down the road toward the Kansas line. Calvin hasn’t talked to Buzz Busby about rebuilding yet, even though that place is so small and so far away from town. I would know for sure if he had.

We’re all sad for Calvin Millet and worried sick about poor Lucy—any caring person would be—but I have to tell you the honest truth: we’re just as scared of rural America’s variety of the domino theory. If Calvin’s finances fall apart, then Millet’s Department Store will fail. If Millet’s goes under, then the county’s political resolve will collapse and we’ll get a Wal-Mart store one week later—in a ravine ten miles from nowhere because the land will be dirt cheap. The next thing you know, everybody in the county will be shopping for bargains in the ravine, so Loretta will have to shut her doors, and so will the Starbucks and every other place on Main except for the Corn Palace and the Yune Library. Then the girls won’t bring their kids back after they get divorced and that will be the end of Ebb as we know it.

You may think that I’m exaggerating, but this town is perched on the sad edge of a slippery slope. I went to church and wished to God I could help in some way, but He sent us a salesman. That’s right, a salesman. At least that’s my theory. You be the judge.

I WAS SITTING outside of Starbucks on the first day of spring, sharing some pound cake and swapping some tasty rumors with Loretta, when I got a call on my cell phone from a man who wanted to reserve a room at the Come Again. As usual, there was plenty of static, so the reception wasn’t real good. It is my belief that our customer-centric telephone company bought exactly one cell for all of Hayes County and then they put it in the back of a pickup truck, so whenever it goes behind a hill or a big barn you can’t hear a darned thing other than crackling air. Still, I could hear enough to determine that this man wanted a room that very evening, so I made my apologies to Loretta and went straight home to fix one up.

I was a bit unprepared because it was too early for visitors to Ebb. Excluding Clara, I get most of my guests two times a year: at high school graduation and in the fall, right around harvest time and the county fair. Otherwise, I have visitors for funerals and holidays, but nobody had died recently, thank God, which meant I wasn’t expecting.

The man said he would arrive around four o’clock, so I made a nice Darjeeling tea after I finished his room and then waited in the parlor where I have a panoramic view of my drive. My new boarder arrived shortly after that. He was driving an expensive, cranberry-colored station wagon, probably German, and that was fine with me. The men I don’t like drive those poser pickup trucks, the great big, noisy ones with blown engines, huge wheels, and lots of decals. What in the world are they thinking? I know they’re compensating, but I wish they would do it somewhere else, like Bolivia.

This man was special; you could see it right away. He was ruddy in complexion, probably in his mid- to late-forties, and trim but not skinny, with a head of dove-white, wind-mussed hair and a matching mustache that was well trimmed. He was wearing a snappy, double-breasted gray suit with a white-collared blue shirt and a colorful tie that I would ask him about later. His shoes were shined, too, which is always a good sign. Even pulling a great big roller suitcase in each hand, he stood ramrod straight and walked with a confident gait.

Before he could knock, I opened the door, smiled my best “welcome y’all” smile, and said, “Good evening, sir. My name is Wilma Porter and this is the Come Again Bed and Breakfast. Are you the man who called me earlier in the day?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “My name is Vernon Moore.” His eyes were crystalline light blue, like a spring Nebraska sky, and they looked right into mine as he shook my hand with a strong grip. He smiled, too. I could see that he had excellent teeth. A country girl always checks the teeth.

“Please come in,” I said. “May I help you with your luggage?”

“No thank you, Ms. Porter. I’m used to carrying it myself.” He stepped inside the door and put his bags down on my carpet, a beautiful Persian thing that Clem Tucker didn’t want when he left. I noticed that Mr. Moore wasn’t wearing a wedding band, which a single girl checks whether she’s from the country or not, even though she can never be certain that the data is reliable.

Mr. Moore stood in the foyer for a good half minute, just looking around at my antique furniture, my leaded-glass lamps, and all the pictures and mirrors on my flock-papered walls. Then he said, “This is a lovely house, ma’am. I appreciate your taking me in on such short notice.”

“You’re more than welcome,” I answered. “If you’ll be kind enough to sign the guest register, then I can show you to your room.” About thirty minutes later, he came down the back stairs into the kitchen where I was slicing bacon for the next day. He was wearing creased jeans, white cross trainers, and a white, long-sleeved cotton shirt with a buttoned-down collar, as if he was a forty-year-old teenager straight out of the fifties.

I couldn’t think of a thing to say that didn’t sound too familiar, so I offered my new boarder a hot cup of tea. He asked politely for iced water instead and made himself comfortable at the kitchen table at my invitation.

After I had fixed him his drink, I embarked on standard B & B conversational protocol. It is right there in the owner’s manual. You ask them if they like their room; they say yes. You ask them what they like for breakfast; they tell you. Men usually prefer eggs and bacon, but Mr. Moore asked for a waffle. You ask them if there is anything else they need; they practically always say no, but Mr. Moore asked for an ironing board and a radio. I resisted a teensy temptation to ask him if he ironed his clothes with a radio and agreed to bring them up to his room. Then I smiled sweetly and said, “That was a lovely tie you were wearing when you arrived.”

He brightened up just like a man always does when a woman says something nice about his clothes. “Thank you, Ms. Porter,” he responded. “It’s a genuine Jerry Garcia.”

“You mean the Jerry Garcia, as of the Grateful Dead?”

“The very same. Apparently, he designed some ties before he passed on.”

I responded, “The pattern is unusual. I wonder what his body chemistry was like when he thought it up.”

“I’m sure I don’t know, Ms. Porter. The tie does have a fanciful design, but I like the colors and it goes with several of my outfits.”

That sounded like a lead-in to me, and he seemed as if he was softened up enough, so I steered the conversation toward the Big Question. “Not many folks wear suits around here anymore. Around this time of year, most of the businessmen in town start to dress in PGA Rural, which is pastel sweaters, clashing polo shirts, plaid pants, white socks, and tasseled loafers. There ought to be a law. If I may ask, what brings a man of your sartorial refinement to Ebb?”

Mr. Moore smiled right back at me. He had a warm, lovely smile with just a pinch of danger in it, like he was warning you that there might be hijinks ahead. He said, “I’m a traveling salesman, Ms. Porter. I sell games of chance. I have come to Ebb to sell games of chance.”

I have to say that I was so startled by his answer that I had no idea what to say, but Mr. Moore just sipped his water and waited. I finally replied, “My, that is unusual. I don’t remember seeing a traveling salesman in Ebb since I was a young girl. What kind of games do you sell, Mr. Moore?”

He answered, “I sell cards, dice, backgammon, traditional board games, any game that involves a fair measure of uncertainty. I specialize in cards. I carry decks from all over the world and in every conceivable price range.”

He smiled again. It was that warning smile. “Do you like card games, Ms. Porter? Would you like to see a Siamese double deck in a mahogany box with inlaid mother-of-pearl?”

Well, there it was. One minute I was in complete control and asking the Big Question, and the very next minute I was on the pointy end of a sales pitch. After a few moments, I said, “You know, Mr. Moore, I do play some pinochle over at the Corn Palace on Thursday nights. But that’s only during the winter, and I don’t know that they’ll be needing many playing cards right now. Maybe they will.”

Mr. Moore smiled again, sweetly this time if I may say so, and replied, “I’ll stop by, but only to make a social call. I came to Ebb to visit Millet’s. I understand that it’s the biggest department store in the county …”

“It’s the only department store in three counties,” I said with pride, as if I had anything to do with it myself other than my regular custom.

“Well, that’s just perfect,” Mr. Moore replied. “If I’m a lucky man, then the proprietor will be interested in purchasing some of my games.”

I turned back toward the counter for a minute, but not because I am impolite or because I had to slice more bacon. I just wanted to think a bit. Mr. Moore seemed like such an optimistic man, and I was sure he had driven a long way, but I doubted that Calvin Millet would be buying many old-fashioned games. On the other hand, I could not quite bring myself to believe that any man who dressed so well and drove such an expensive car was really a traveling salesman either.

Well, when was the last time you saw one?

I offered, “It’s not my place to say, but I don’t know how interested Calvin Millet will be in buying much right now. Things have not been going his way lately, to say the least.”

Mr. Moore stirred the ice in his water with his finger and then he said, “Is that a fact, Ms. Porter? By inference, I assume that he is the owner of Millet’s Department Store. I don’t mean to pry, but I’d appreciate it if you could tell me about the man.”

I sat down at the table with my tea and told him the entire sad tale. Mr. Moore listened quietly, as if he was taking notes in his head. He should give lessons to those commentators on TV; he didn’t interrupt me one time. When I was done, he said, “It would be an understatement to say that Calvin Millet has been on a losing streak. What about his daughter, Lucy? How is she now?”

“We are all so worried about that sweet little girl,” I replied. “Calvin brought her back from the Mayo Clinic right after the tornado—they even stayed with me for a while—but she hasn’t returned to school, and a nurse has moved in with them down in Carson. If she’s from hospice, and we all suspect she is, then he has finally given up.”

Then Mr. Moore made a curious remark. He said, “That’s not a very American thing to do, is it, Ms. Porter? Give up I mean.”

I wanted to say, “Of course not,” but I bit my tongue. He said it with such finality. It didn’t seem proper to carry the matter further, so I went back to my chores.

Eventually, Mr. Moore said, “Would you be kind enough to introduce me to Mr. Millet tomorrow morning?”

Naturally, I agreed and then I left Mr. Moore to finish his iced water alone. He seemed to want it that way. He went on a walk right before sunset and didn’t return until nine, which is when I lock the doors.

Yes, we lock the doors at night now. Even in Ebb.

I CAME DOWN to fix breakfast at 6:30 A.M. and Mr. Moore was already sitting in the kitchen sipping some iced water and reading the local paper. He actually stood up when I came into the room—I can’t remember the last time that happened—and then he offered me some hot tea. I was appreciative to be sure, but that was a bit more role reversal than I could stand with the lights on and I was afraid that he would want to cook the waffles next.

Since he was already there, I served breakfast in the kitchen. This is not consistent with best B & B business practice. . .