Shallow Graves

somebody’d stolen what you were looking for.”
    “Yep. We got outflanked.”
    Literally.
    They walked for a few minutes then, as if Pellam had asked about her husband, Meg said, “Keith’s changed. When his partner died, it affected him. He got an edge to him.”
    “Really? I didn’t sense anything like that.”
    “I wasn’t sure he’d help you. He doesn’t like things that are out of his own, you know, orbit. I’m glad he did.”
    They were being examined—dozens of heads turned conspicuously away while eyes followed them.
    After five minutes of looking at booths, he said, “Why did you leave Manhattan?”
    “Keith got a job with a drug company up here. I wasn’t getting modeling work and just couldn’t break into acting. I had a baby. I always wanted a house.”
    “And you like Cleary?”
    She gave a nervous laugh and looked away. “It’s tough for me to give you an answer. And it won’t matter if I live here for another twenty-five years. I’llnever know the place well enough to talk about it. These places, towns like this, they’re born into you. The roots go way back. You come any other way, you’re just a houseguest. You may be the life of the party, you may even get yourself elected to the town council, but places like Cleary don’t become part of you. It’s in the genes or it isn’t. It’s not in mine.”
    Applause not far away. A new Miss Apple had been crowned. Pellam saw a couple of kids gravitating toward him and Meg. Word was out that the location scout could shoot out a sponge duck’s eye at fifty feet. The boys kept their distance as Meg and Pellam circled the field. The ripe, rich scent of decomposing grass came to them.
    “Your hair looks nice that way.”
    Her fingers reached toward her ponytail then she stopped the acknowledgment and lowered her hand. Her eyes fled from his and she concentrated on something on the horizon. They walked to the festival’s zoo—a sad collection of cows, goats, geese, ducks and a pony—before she said, “Is that why you and your wife broke up?”
    “Uh, why’s that?”
    “Sorry, I was just thinking about you traveling around.”
    “There were a lot of reasons. Sure, the job had a lot to do with it.”
    “You were away from home six months, eight months—”
    “I didn’t travel as much then.”
    “I’d love to travel,” she said. “Maybe do some acting. Not be a star necessarily. Character acting maybe. I’d even like your job.”
    Even your job.
    Just a location scout.
    “I don’t think you would.”
    She said, “Well, I love my house. I wouldn’t give that up. But seeing all those new places. . . . It’s like going on vacation, but having a purpose. I think that’d be wonderful.”
    Women said that. My house. Never our house. He remembered his wife saying just those words. Of course, in the end, that was how it worked out. Self-fulfilling prophecy, he guessed.
    “. . . I guess what I’d want is Sam to come with me for maybe a week or two at a time.” After a moment, she said, “Keith too of course.” She looked at him but he gave no reaction to the lapse. If a lapse it had been.
    Pellam steered away from the domestic situation. He said, “I can’t really tell you why I like it. The thing about scouting is, it’s not the work itself—finding a spot that’ll work for the film. I mean, that’s fine, that’s what they pay me for. But I like the being on the road. . . .” His voice faded and he wasn’t sure he could explain further.
    He waved to Sam. It seemed his fan club had grown to a half dozen.
    “One March,” he continued, “I’d been sitting home for a month. I got a call from a producer who wanted me to scout for a labor union film. I got in the camper and headed right out to the steel mills in Gary, Indiana. Ugly, cold, gray. Walking through slush. That place was as close to hell as any I’d ever been. But I was so glad to get that call.”
    She wrinkled her nose. “I’d only go to fun places. Rio, San Francisco, Hawaii. . . .”
    He laughed. “You wouldn’t get many jobs.”
    “No, but I’d have a hell of a good time on the ones I got.”
    “They have beer around here?”
    “Probably, but don’t you want some cider? They make it fresh.”
    “No, I want a beer. I hate apples, remember?”
    “Then I guess an apple festival doesn’t have a lot for you.”
    “I wouldn’t say that.”
    Meg ignored the flirt and they steered toward the food concession.
    AS HIS MOTHER and