"How Erica Barton Wound Up Spending the Majority of her Life in Buffalo, Wyoming"
Erica didn’t plan on staying in Buffalo, Wyoming. She didn’t plan on staying anywhere, necessarily. She would arrive somewhere, she figured, but when, where, or how she’d find that destination she didn’t know. When she left Southern California, where she’d gone to clean up and sell the remnants of her father’s estate, it’d been in a flurry – the Santa Anas were going to blow in any minute and it always kicked up her allergies.
Driving through, she grabs a coffee at The Branded Buffalo Cafe. The coffee tastes more like the Styrofoam to-go cup it sits in than a cup of joe, but her ass hurts from driving, so she stands outside sipping instead of leaving. Her wrists tingle in the cold, and she thinks about the years of high school softball that ground her joints to dust. She’d been two outs from a perfect game once, but couldn’t finish. She never finished.
Karen Stewart, a middle-aged woman, Wyoming born and raised, uncomfortable in her business suit, cozies up next to Erica, “How’s your coffee?”
Erica nods her head, pretending it’s okay, pretending she isn’t thinking about missing prom because her joints ached so much from the game the night before.
Karen says, “You don’t have to lie, coffee’s terrible.”
Erica laughs.
“I’m Karen.”
“I’m Erica.”
“What brings you to Buffalo, Erica?” Karen asks.
“Just passing through.”
Karen’s made this pitch before – she starts as the inquisitive dummy, “Oh? Where to?”
Erica looks toward the brown, lifeless, Bighorn Mountains, hoping she’ll see the answer somewhere beyond the horizon. No answer comes to mind. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Then why you only passing through?” Karen remembers the Davidson family, with their two brats, their 1987 camper van piled high with suitcases, ‘just passing through’. Mr. Davidson was a round blob of grump, ignoring her gentle compliments like, “I love the floral print on your shirt.” But Mrs. Davidson was transparent as wax paper. Karen won her over mentioning the “intimate atmosphere” of the local school system and the “unrelentin’ beauty of God’s creation, right at the doorstep.” Two hours later they bought a four-bedroom two blocks from downtown. They hated it in Buffalo and left three years later, but that commission got Karen her first used Pontiac.
Erica turns to Karen, “I’m looking to settle so I thought I’d drive around, visit places that meet my budget.” Truth was, Erica didn’t know her budget. She’d never created a budget for herself because she enjoyed the paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle, a motivation and will to live that weren’t present otherwise. Now, after her dad died, she had more money than she knew how to spend (which was actually far less than she imagined).
“Well you ran into the right person,” Karen reaches into her purse and pulls out a business card, “Karen Stewart, Queen of Real Estate in Johnson County.” Erica takes the card, and under KAREN STEWART in Times New Roman, it says, “Queen of Real Estate in Johnson County”.
“Wow,” Erica says, “that’s very literal.”
“What are you doing right now, Erica?”
Erica looks at the brown, lifeless Bighorn Mountains again, hoping for an answer, again. She receives nothing, again. “I was just drinking coffee.”
Karen forces a laugh. “Come on, let’s go on a drive. I’ll show you some houses.”
“Where you from, Erica?”
“Originally?” Erica asks the question, then thinks about how Karen couldn’t possibly mean anything else. “I’m from Minneapolis.”
“Minneapolis. I bet parking is a real pain in the bee-hind in those parts, isn’t it, Erica?”
Erica contemplates parking in Minneapolis. It isn’t too bad, but she prefers being agreeable. “Sure, I guess parking is an issue sometimes, when there’s events and such.”
“Not here!” Karen proclaims, “Here, you can park right in front of your house!” Karen has left Wyoming once: a five-day trip to New York City when she was a toddler. Whenever she meets newcomers from major cities, she brings up parking or traffic because that’s what her parents complained about in New York, and she imagines it’s a problem anywhere there’s too many people - too many people being more than a handful.
Erica isn’t impressed with this revelation, but is impressed by the fact that Karen believes parking in front of your own home is impressive. “Wow, that’s incredible,” she says.
“You bet,” Karen says, “and you know stars?”
Erica recalls years spent in Los Angeles, and the sleepy resort towns actors call home, like Aspen, Jackson Hole, Telluride. “Movie stars or, like, the sun?”
Karen stares. “Stars, in the sky, twinkling and such.”
“Oh,” Erica says, “yeah, I know stars.”
“Well, we got plenty of ‘em here!”
Erica visualizes explaining stars to Karen, telling her how no location on Earth contains more stars than any other, because stars exist far outside our solar system, that they cluster in galaxies and explode into supernovae, that many of them also have planets circling, and that there’s entire programs devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. She wants to describe smog, light pollution, the atmosphere, and how those affect our ability to see stars, but not whether the stars exist – it’s more a mental trick via optics.
Erica says, “I like stars.”
“Everyone likes stars!” Karen lies, because truth be told, she isn’t a fan of stars. When she looks up, it makes her think of head lice sitting in oily, black hair. She always starts to scratch, and finds the closest mirror to check for anything crawling on her scalp. But she knows other people appreciate spending time watching them, so she mentions it.
Karen stops the car in front of a prefabricated two-bedroom, two-bathroom on the outskirts of town. “The market’s saturated, so this beauty’s been available for 120 days. I know the sellers – great folks, came to town with the natural gas – but they’re eager to get on with it now.”
The dirt front yard looks like a softball infield. Erica remembers sliding into second base and breaking her ankle. They lost that game. “How much is it going for?”
“It’s listed for $204,000.”
“Oh, that’s a shame,” Erica feels the relief of waking from a nightmare, “my budget is $180,000.” The number is made up, but gets her off the hook all the same.
Karen whispers, “Erica, I bet I can talk them down to $160,000.”
This sentence makes Erica want to throw up, but she restrains herself. “Great.”
The house has no soul: the fireplace is gas, the kitchen is cramped, the cabinets are cheap, and carpet lines every room. Karen assures her, “You tear up this carpet, put down some linoleum or hardwood, won’t cost you more than a few thousand dollars.”
Erica wants to clarify that all the mahogany or cherry wood in the world couldn’t make the house any more appealing, but she says, “That’s right, I could!”
When they get back to the car, Karen says, “What’d you think?”
Erica looks to the brown, lifeless, Bighorn Mountains one last time, knowing better than to expect anything at all.
Karen points to the empty street, “Don’t forget, Erica: you won’t get parking like this in Minneapolis.”
“I certainly won’t.”
Karen licks her lips. She leans in to whisper again, the moistness of her breath pushing into Erica’s ear, “I talked them down to 165. Imagine it,” she points at the lawn, the same color as the lifeless Bighorn Mountains, “you, your rugged, cowboy husband, kids, playin’ on this front yard. It’ll be amazing, huh?”
“Amazing,” Erica says. Her elbow and ankle both start to hurt, and she decides softball was only worth it if she doesn’t get arthritis, which in all likelihood, she already has. She hopes she can focus on the stars, rather than her soon-to-be front yard.
Karen starts the car and wants to say her favorite line from Casablanca, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” but turns on the radio. She tells herself she can say the quote in front of the mirror, at home, with a glass of wine, after the paperwork has gone through.