Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town Read online

  She felt like the holiest person in the world, walking serenely in front of her brother and the priest while the whole town watched.

  The new nanny was told to wash Delia’s hair twice that day because the first time it wasn’t shiny enough to be seen from the very back pews. Her mother was keenly aware that that was where Lavinia Johnson would be sitting all alone, or with her eighty-five-year-old mother, whose eyesight wasn’t very good. Delia had heard the ranch hands talking about Lavinia while they smoked outside the barn and she sat, unnoticed, in the hay with Tom Tom, the mouser.

  “She’s a beaut,” Hank had said, “and now that her husband’s bit it, she comes with a fair-sized wad.”

  The other ranch hands had chortled and nudged Hank, while Delia wondered what it was Lavinia’s husband had bitten. Or maybe she’d misheard and something had bitten him, like a rabid dog? (That really would make you crawl around and drool and act generally wild.) But either way—whether he’d bitten or been bitten—it clearly wasn’t good, unless you were his wife, who was now rich with life insurance money. Delia didn’t know what that was either, but every time her mother was on the phone gossiping with Delia’s aunt—who’d followed the wrong guy (so it was said) and now worked in a twenty-four-hour diner in Colorado, which Delia’s mother really lost sleep over—she lowered her voice a certain way specifically on those words, life insurance money.

  Before Lavinia’s husband died, the Johnsons had lived simply, like everyone else in town, but now Lavinia and her mother had expensive coats and a new car, and they were moving to a bigger place with a lot of acreage, because she’d invested in a new technology called a wind turbine. Town was where people lived if they could only afford to rent. People who lived on ranches or had those funny-looking drills like hammers poking out of the ground that they leased to the oil companies, or now, like Lavinia, invested in wind farms, these were the people who came to Delia’s parents’ dinner parties.

  The poor husband who’d bitten it had never been to one of the parties, because the Johnsons weren’t those kind of people when he was alive.

  On dinner party nights, Delia would sit in her room making her gum chain and notice who was coming and going outside her window. If someone was invited, they were what her mother called “the right kind of person.” One night Delia had seen Lavinia emerge from a brand-new car with her mother. They both wore long evening gowns that also looked brand-new. Hank had been scrubbed up, along with another ranch hand, and they were escorting guests from the cars to the front door. Delia giggled a little, seeing Hank with his hair plastered flat against his skull and no Stetson to hide it, so his head looked naked. He took Lavinia’s mother’s shaky old arm and led her up the steps, but his legs were bowed wide, and he mounted the stairs as if he were straddling an invisible horse.

  “Too bad Lavinia’s husband never got to come to a party,” Delia said to the new sitter, whose name she’d already forgotten. Her mother was tired of teenagers like Michelle not turning up when they were supposed to, so she’d hired someone much older tonight, someone with little hairs on her chin. Delia had learned from her mother how to make small talk and was hoping to impress this hairy lady, who also lived in town but was not fun like Michelle had been.

  “I’m sure her husband didn’t mind never being invited,” the woman said with an audible sniff. Her voice had a peppery sting to it that made Delia go quiet.

  Didn’t mind? she thought. The parties were everything. Her mother had not been raised in Wyoming but in Boston, so she knew a thing or two about how to throw a party. And she was determined to bring civility to her new home in the Rockies, even if it meant forcing her ranch hands into clothes that didn’t smell like wet horses and manure and keeping constant vigilance over the dry red dirt incessantly carried in by boisterous winds and dogs and children.

  Delia’s mother was never more in her element than when she was throwing a party. The catering staff barely knew how to carry a tray of martinis without spilling—but they had better not!—while her mother could twirl holding hers above her head and not lose a single drop. Her hair was piled higher than anyone else’s, her dresses were more sparkly, and her laugh was so high it bounced off the chandelier. Delia loved watching it all from the top of the staircase in her flannel pajamas and fuzzy slippers, with her gum wrappers next to her and her fingers folding and unfolding tiny V’s that she fit together one inside the other, perfectly.

  A lot of the money that swirled around them Delia’s daddy got from breeding cows with his prize bull, Brutus. Delia used to laugh when Brutus would try to walk with his huge bulbous ball sack hanging down and his penis practically hitting the ground like a fifth leg. Her brother used to laugh like crazy when Delia said “penis,” especially at the breakfast table. The first time, he’d spluttered orange juice out his nose and her parents had looked shocked and then everyone laughed and she’d felt like the funniest person in the world. She was six.

  But a year later, when she said that Father Lazaria had unzipped his pants in front of her and showed her his penis, they did not find this funny. (Although Delia had not been trying to make anyone laugh or spurt juice out of their nose anyway.)

  Father Lazaria was a man of God, and a family friend. He often came to the house for dinner, and her parents had always smiled and nodded at her when he wanted her to sit on his lap during dessert. Under the table, where no one else could see, there was a bulge in the priest’s lap that had made sitting there uncomfortable, but her mother scolded her when she tried to get down. Maybe, Delia had thought, priests had to wear robes during Mass because they didn’t want everyone to know about their bulging crotches?

  Delia was leery of getting very close to Father Lazaria once she’d experienced his uncomfortable lap, but she tried to be polite about it.

  It had happened on Easter when she was just finishing her important job of carrying the incense back into the sacristy. She was allowed to go alone to return the censer to where it was stored, in what looked like a gilded birdcage. As she turned the key to open the little door and set the incense inside, she heard a click: the door was being bolted behind her. When she turned around, Father Lazaria had spread his arms wide and was lifting his robes, facing her with outstretched wings, like a huge purple phoenix sucking all the air out of the room.

  Instantly, the smell of incense went from being something Delia loved to being something that made her gag. It caught in the back of her throat, and she thought she might throw up. Then he pulled his penis out of his fly and held it out to her in a way that could have been a joke, but not the kind of joke her father or brother ever played. Her gag reflex kicked in, and before she could stop herself, she really was vomiting. All over her shiny black shoes. He’d tucked himself away and looked disgustedly at her.

  Her parents had given her the same look when she’d tried to tell them. She didn’t know what she had done, but as she stumbled over words to describe what she’d seen, it became clear that no matter which words she chose, none of them were what her parents wanted to hear. Her mother informed her that what she said made no sense. Such things simply did not happen in their world.

  But her parents didn’t make her sit on his lap anymore when he came to dinner, and she wasn’t allowed to carry the incense again. Her “punishment” was that they kept her away from the poor priest so she couldn’t tarnish his shiny image. Nothing else was said, but even her brother was different after that. He didn’t tease her anymore, didn’t try to make her laugh, and especially didn’t make jokes about Brutus.

  It happened so quickly and quietly that it would have been easy to think she was imagining it. She only knew that whatever had caused her family to stop laughing was her fault.

  If everyone was going to treat her like this, she thought, it would have been better to just say nothing.

  Her brother avoided her eyes, especially when he went early to church to dress as an a
ltar boy. She began to wonder if she’d really seen what she thought she’d seen.

  When she was eight, she knelt across from Father Lazaria in the confessional box for the first time, just a thin mesh partition between them. Gratefully, she didn’t have to see his face. But his breath filled the whole space: prunes soaked in spirits, a rancid old-man smell. She turned herself blue trying not to breathe it in, but she still felt covered in it. She had to make her First Confession in order to make her First Communion, and Delia still believed back then that the sacraments were holy. She’d desperately wanted to take Communion, because she thought the body of Christ would fix everything that was slipping out from under her eight-year-old feet. She was afraid that God had forgotten her, and even thinking that way made her feel like a terrible doubty person.

  Father Lazaria had had to coax her to say the required words out loud: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” He had cut a small hole in the wall just above where she knelt and a curtain hung over it—apparently nobody else had noticed?—as soon as he heard her voice, his hand reached through the secret hole and slid itself between her legs. That first time she had screamed and jumped out of the confessional, but the look on her mother’s face, as everyone kneeling and lighting candles had turned to stare, told her that she was again, somehow, the problem.

  Why do you insist on behaving this way? said her mother’s eyes.

  After the not sitting on his lap at dinner, and the throwing up on her own shoes, Delia knew the drill. She decided the only thing to do was to stay one step ahead of him.

  She became a tiny contortionist, fitting herself into all the different-sized boxes of expectations and disappointments that she now realized made up her family. In turn, they furrowed their brows and began to wonder if she was going mad (but only in the back of their minds, never out loud) as her obsession with fitting gum wrappers together grew more and more urgent.

  Every time something happened with Father Monster (his name inside Delia’s head), she made a black mark on her gum chain so that she would know how much time had passed by how many gum wrappers she’d folded. If she folded quickly, she could put more distance between herself and the unspeakable things: Twelve feet. Fourteen feet. Sixteen and a half feet. Her childhood was measured in gum wrappers.

  Delia and her brother drifted from their parents’ orbit the way the earth tilts on its axis and the sun and moon never touch, except for the rare eclipse when they stare at each other face to face and the world goes black.

  The catered dinner parties also grew old. Delia no longer found them entertaining, and she tried to block out her parents laughing uproariously over the sound of the martini shaker—At what? Who could say?—while the only thing she never got tired of was the soothing, meditative folding and fitting together of gum wrappers. The chain had grown to almost twenty feet by the time the dreaded “being a teenager and everything” began to smack her in the face.

  It had been years since her father had told her “There are some things you cannot change, not even with money,” and yet, the gut-punching reality was that he was going to try anyway.

  Delia was used to cold hard cash being shoved in her face, but she got even more if she looked like she was on the verge of asking a question or saying anything about anything. A hundred-dollar bill stuffed into the pocket of her boot-cut jeans was her father’s idea of spending money.

  For this reason, she wasn’t just the nutty girl with a gum chain. She had plenty of so-called friends who were willing to be treated at the soda fountain or who invited her to go shopping in Casper because Delia was generous and could be counted on to make up the difference on a favorite sweater or jeans from Hickson’s Dry Goods. So what if the other girls whispered among themselves that she was “overly quiet and a little strange”? (She could hear, you know.) She honestly didn’t care. Not about the money or whether people wanted to be her friend. She was too busy keeping herself together. It reminded her of having an ingrown toenail, a thing that was constantly pressing into you, silently, painfully, although nobody else even knew it was there.

  Her parents still expected her to go to church and receive Communion from Father Monster’s shriveled, stinky hand. They were firm believers that the host must come straight from the priest in order to be a true sacrament. She dreaded feeling his index finger skim her lip as he placed the white host on her shaky tongue. She tried to snatch her tongue back as quickly as possible, but his hairy knuckle might touch her face if she jerked, and she couldn’t risk throwing up again, right there on the altar, while the line of communicants stretched behind her as long as a serpent’s tail.

  She imagined what they’d say, could hear their thoughts as a collective rattle in her head: How dare she grimace at receiving the body of Christ?

  Delia no longer wanted to be seen at all, let alone sitting in the front pew. Anyone who looked might have thought she was still the chosen, holy child, head bowed, praying the rosary. But she had begun to bring the gum wrappers to church and fold them inside her bag, much to her mother’s chagrin. It was a kind of meditation, and she believed in it more than in any of the prayers of the rosary. Delia would never think of church as a sacred, holy place again.

  Her mother’s hawklike eyes scanned the congregation for any sign that Delia’s cracks might be showing.

  Attention for attention’s sake was never her mother’s intent.

  Delia had decided it wasn’t worth it to argue about going to confession year after year, and by the time she was sixteen, she barely spoke, just came downstairs wearing her thickest snow pants and, underneath them, layers of leggings.

  Now it was June, and nobody seemed to notice anything odd, but by this point Delia had perfected being apart from everyone, even herself. Her eyes were glazed, and if she managed it just right—whoop—she was out of her body, looking down from a place where nobody could touch her.

  Even her brother just stared out the window of the car as they drove to Mass, while she watched herself sitting next to him, folding wrappers, fitting the V’s together, sweating profusely in her Gore-Tex snow pants.

  He was too full of himself now that he was a rodeo star. The only things he noticed were his reputation and his fancy Appaloosa–Quarter Horse mix, Maverick. Their father had bought Maverick with cash, as if he were just another pair of boots.

  At the rodeos, girls lined up for miles to take their picture with Maverick and her brother, but mostly with her brother. Delia knew he was almost too handsome for his own good. He had begun to swagger and walk the way Hank did, as if there were a horse under him at all times.

  He could not seem to lose any rodeo event he entered, and had even appeared in a magazine, Western Horseman, which had restored that proud glint in her mother’s eye for at least a month afterward.

  Who wouldn’t be a rodeo star if they spent every waking hour down at the corral, running patterns, jumping barrels? Delia’s brother was meticulous in his training, and not a penny was spared to ensure that he would be the best. The boy who had once tried to find the most colorful gum wrappers for her—and who’d done anything to keep her from crying—was now sitting next to her in the car, yet Delia couldn’t get him to notice that she was dressed for a blizzard.

  It didn’t matter. The real Delia was floating above them, too far away to care. She was a tiny speck next to the sun as it beat down from the dazzling Wyoming sky. She was higher than the Wind River Range, or the Bighorn Mountains, or even the Grand Tetons. Delia, the other Delia, the one inside the car whose brother refused to notice anymore, just laughed and laughed and laughed, heating up the windows as if they were sitting in a pressure cooker.

  And then one day, Father Monster just up and left. A new priest arrived from India with a thick accent that barely anyone could understand, and nobody mentioned Father Lazaria again except to say he’d been “reassigned.”

  Delia’s first thought wa
s that God had not abandoned her after all. But that was instantly replaced with another thought that was not so easy to shake: Why did He take so long?

  Her old babysitter, Michelle, came to visit out of the blue, with an engagement ring on her finger, saying she’d thought about Delia a lot over the years. Delia was skeptical. She could think of nothing to talk about, so she showed Michelle the gum chain, which when rolled up was the size of a volleyball.

  Michelle couldn’t believe it. “I just got busy with the rest of my life and totally forgot even how to do this. But you might have a world record here.”

  Delia remembered the way Michelle had gotten busy with “being a teenager and everything.” Now it was the rest of her life.

  “I guess you forgot about me too,” Delia said. Her eyes had no light behind them.

  “What happened?” asked Michelle quietly.

  Delia just shook her head.

  “Whatever it is, it’s not your fault,” said Michelle.

  “People always say that,” said Delia, “but they don’t mean it.”

  “Where’s the spunky girl I babysat all those years ago?” asked Michelle gently.

  Delia realized she sounded rude. Michelle obviously sensed that Delia wasn’t that happy to see her.

  “You were my favorite babysitter,” she said, but it was a feeble attempt.

  “I’m sorry I stayed away so long. The little girl I knew would have fought her way out of anything. I do know that. She’s still in there, isn’t she?”

  Michelle leaned forward and lightly tapped Delia’s shirt, just over her heart. Her engagement ring sparkled. Delia tried not to flinch.

  * * *

  —

  A few months later she’d walked into her brother’s room to ask if she could ride Maverick. Not far, just around the corral.