Mothers and Other Liars (3 page)

The first of the summer peaches rest like crescents of sunset in the pie dish. Ruby dots them with biscuit mix, dusts them with sugar, pops the cobbler into the oven.

“So how was camp?” She dumps steaming macaroni into a two-legged colander.

In her bright green Girls Inc. T-shirt, hair a ponytail of white cotton candy, Lark doodles in a notebook at the kitchen table. “Actually, kinda cool.” “Actually” is her new favorite word.

Ruby slices the hot dogs into nickels, tosses them into the cheese sauce like coins in a well, stirs in a spoonful of horse radish. After calling the salon to cancel her appointments, she herself spent the day at the library, searching computer databases, chewing on every morsel of the scant information beyond what was contained in the article.

“Mo-om.”

Ruby jumps at Lark’s bleat. Her hand knocks into the drain board; a coffee cup shatters in the sink. She turns to see Lark pointing at the kitchen counter, at the groceries Ruby has yet to put away. “What, what?”

“The environment? Phosphates? Our rivers?
That’s
not the good detergent.”

Nestled in a cloud of white—paper towels, a four-pack of toilet paper, a jug of bleach—the bright orange Tide box is conspicuous. For a moment, Ruby is miles, and years, away. “Oh, uh, someone must have put it in my cart by mistake.” She knows that she is the “someone,” grabbing the laundry soap she hasn’t used in ages.

The shards of pottery are Anasazi bronze gashes against the creamy porcelain of the sink. She unwinds a wad of paper towels, scoops up the mess, tosses it into the garbage can.
Pull yourself together
, she tells herself as she finishes preparing the meal.

The blue willow plates are a riot of color, macaroni and cheese, green beans, a smile of cantaloupe with raspberry and blueberry teeth. A regular June Cleaver Ruby is, without the heels and pearls. She sets Lark’s plate in front of her, takes the catty-corner seat.

Lark looks down at the plate, over at Ruby. “Thanks, Mom. But what happened to pizza night?”

Lately, Ruby has been so tired by Friday evening that calling in a pizza order is the pinnacle of her culinary ambitions. “I was just in the mood…. So what did you draw for your shirt?”

Lark eats a forkful of macaroni and gives Ruby a cheese-streaked grin. “You’ll see.”

Ruby pushes food around her plate. Playing June Cleaver is one thing; swallowing food is quite another under these circumstances. While Lark eats, Ruby flips through the spiral notebook, pages crammed with self-conscious schoolgirl cursive and guileless doodles.

As usual, Ruby is astounded at the complexity of this child’s thoughts. She writes poems full of love and loss and longing, when the biggest heartbreak she has suffered—so far anyway—is seeing a deer dying at the side of a road. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”

Lark kisses a raspberry with an exaggerated smack, pushes it through her cherub lips. “I don’t know.”

What will these poems look like when her heart breaks for real? Ruby turns her body away from Lark as a single fat tear smacks the page, spattering lilac ink like a bug on a windshield. She remembers reading somewhere that an African language has two different words for rain, the plump round female drops and the sharp needles of males. This tear, she thinks, is definitely a mother tear, a pendulous, pregnant mother of a tear.

Ruby busies herself with Lark’s backpack, empties the bottom-of-the-bag detritus onto her lap. A few colored pencils, a crumpled granola bar wrapper, a Baggie of uneaten carrots. She assumes the carefully folded piece of white paper is one of those pop-up Ouija games the kids make, providing sage answers to all the questions of the universe, like will Tom kiss Jane on the playground.
If only,
Ruby thinks. Then she hears the tinkle of metal inside.

“What’s this?”

“Nothing.” Lark’s cheeks flush pink. “Just a present. From the new girl. Olivia. They were her mom’s. She gave some to Numi, too.”

When Ruby unfolds the notebook paper, a pair of earrings drops into her palm. Dangly earrings, silver and amethyst and pearl. Pierced earrings. She looks at Lark, waits.

“You said I can pierce them.”

“When you’re eleven.”

Lark takes a swig of milk. “But…”

Ruby sets her plate on the floor, where Clyde promptly inhales her supper. The plate clinks against the tile as his enthusiastic tongue pushes it across the floor. “You’re nine. And these are very grown-up earrings.”

She carries the rest of the dishes to the sink and stacks them with the pans and the star-holed colander, then turns back to look at Lark. “Do you really want someone to bribe you to be her friend?”

Lark shrugs her shoulders while Ruby grabs an oven mitt off the counter, pulls the dessert out of the oven. The smell, of golden sugar and syrupy nectar, transports her across miles and years to her grandparents’ kitchen. For a moment, she aches down to her viscera to be there, safe amid the speckled white Formica and harvest gold appliances.

A headshake brings her back to Santa Fe. “And are you sure Olivia’s mother gave her the earrings? What if she just took them? You know the difference between right and wrong. If she is giving you something that doesn’t belong to her…”

Ruby’s words echo in her own head.

Later, Ruby takes pajamas from the dresser drawer—boy jammies like Ruby’s. Neither of them likes to be tangled in a nightgown.

“I’m sorry, Mama.” Lark sits on her bed, looking like Clyde after he’s been scolded. “Don’t be mad. I’ll give them back.”

Ruby hugs Lark against her chest. “No, baby. I mean, yes, I know you’ll do the right thing and give them back. But I’m not mad at you. I’m…it’s…”

She feels Lark’s hand patting her back, like she did as an infant when Ruby held Lark against her shoulder, and Ruby strains with every cell of her body to keep from wailing as if she were the infant. She forces her face into a semblance of composure, turns down Lark’s bed and fluffs the pillow, straightens the stack of books on the nightstand. Lark devours library books like some kids do candy bars. “You can read for a while.”

“Mama?” Lark asks for the daffy song, a ritual she abandoned as too babyish a year or so ago.

As she sings the familiar verses, Ruby tucks the purple sheets along one side of Lark’s bony frame. Clyde nestles against the other. Maybe Lark needs the comfort of their old routine because of the earring incident, or because her antennae are twitching at the signal of Ruby’s distress. Probably a combination of both.

At Lark’s doorway, Ruby pauses. “When you’re eleven, we’ll pierce those ears. And buy you your own special earrings.” And as her mouth says the words, her heart prays that she isn’t telling her daughter yet another lie.

The Santa Fe sky is O’Keeffe blue above the Saturday flea market. The light that attracts all those artists to this corner of the world really is different, and the God-skies, billowy clouds backlit and pierced by sunbeams, are amazing. The flea market, though, reminds Ruby of a refugee camp in some drought-ravaged corner of the world. Rows of canvas and plastic awnings tethered to rusted-out campers, rickety card tables piled with the dregs of attics and garages, broken blenders and eight-track tapes and chipped tchotchkes.

One person’s junk is another person’s, well, junk. Yet if that person sifts patiently enough through the yard-sale rejects, a real treasure can be found, a hundred-year-old reliquary or an ancient African fertility stick. And then, interspersed among the clutter, are the booths of true artisans, the wares of potters and weavers and sculptors and painters worthy of the upscale galleries in town.

Ruby and Jay’s booth is down the second dusty aisle, between a rug dealer with heaps of Indian rugs, their reds and oranges flapping on clotheslines in the always present breeze, and a jeweler with three slender glass cases, chunky turquoise displayed on black velvet lining. Across the aisle is Benny, who sells local honey and all sorts of gadgets and tools. In the past, Ruby has marveled at the number of people who can’t resist owning a scary-looking dental hygienist’s tartar scraper of their own. Today, though, she can barely focus on her own work.

Near the front of the booth, Lark’s head shimmers in the sunlight as she lures passersby under the blue canvas awning. Clyde wiggles at her side, greeting each dog like a long-lost sibling. Assorted tables, bureaus large and small, and patio chairs intermingle with displays of Jay’s pewter vases and bowls and serving utensils, Arthur Court knockoffs that he brings back from regular runs to Mexico. Ruby’s reborn furniture gleams as proudly as the platters in the Saturday sun, and their booth, as usual, is crowded.

This furniture business just sort of
happened
. She made a changing table for Lark from a garage-sale desk, then some patio chairs for the Ms’s anniversary and a lamp table for Rosa, a stylist at the salon, from the pieces of an old armoire. Then requests started coming in from friends of friends of friends. Her most popular deck chairs are a simple assemblage of the scraps of wood left over from other projects.

On a regular day, working the flea market makes Ruby’s head spin. Today it is in danger of flying off into the stratosphere. Thoughts are fireflies flitting around inside her skull, tiny explosions bursting here and there and there, like the ones she caught as a child and put in a mason jar next to her tall, narrow bed, watching them in the dark until her eyelids were leaden. She deals with customers on autopilot—yes, she makes them herself; yes, they are reclaimed wood; that one there she made from a dining room set she found in an estate sale down in Lincoln; yes, she takes custom orders—while she bashes a useless net around the inside of her head, trying to capture the panic of fireflies.

What should she do? How can she live with herself if she doesn’t come forward; how can she live without Lark if she does? She spots Beer Barrel Pete ambling past her booth. Pete, with a face of desert wood and a waterfall of silver hair down to his waist, is a flea-market fixture and purveyor of all kinds of goods, mostly illegal.
Passports
, she thinks. Pete helped Ruby out before; she’s sure he would do it again. Maybe Mexico is the answer. Jay has friends and connections down there. Maybe she and Lark could just disappear, start over.

Could she make a new life for them on the run, always looking over her shoulder? Would that life be better for Lark than the alternative? What will happen to Ruby? Lark, Ruby, Lark, Ruby. How will either of them survive? What will they each look like when—if—they reach the other side of this long, dark tunnel?

Ruby understands the marrow-deep determination of that other mother, who never gave up hope. She has that same mother-tiger determination to protect Lark. All morning, she has kept one eye on her daughter, an ear listening for a frantic bark from Clyde. Watching for a suit-clad arm trying to grab Lark from the booth.

When the tide of people ebbs in the afternoon, Ruby and Lark take a break. Ruby spreads an old quilt on the ground behind Jay’s trailer, and they have a picnic in the dust. After Chaz left last night, Ruby fried chicken in the cast-iron skillet. She made potato salad, giving herself a mini-facial in the steam over the stove. The brownies got an extra squeeze of chocolate syrup. And this morning before she woke Lark, she tucked their lunch into the neoprene cooler that staves off botulism so much better than the old wicker basket.

Every moment, every gesture, of these days cries for ceremony, not knowing how long they will last. Toasters come with guarantees, not life. A person never knows when a building is going to crumble to the ground around his ankles or a bus careen around a corner to flatten him like a cartoon character. A person never knows when her daughter is going to be snatched away, shattering her life as surely as bricks and tires.

Lark tears off a piece of chicken, tosses it toward Clyde. He nabs it out of the air, jaws snapping shut like one of those fly-catching plants. The food hits his stomach without touching his mouth; now you see it, now you don’t.

“Mmm,” Lark says through a mouthful of chicken. “Almost as good as Nana’s.”

Ruby swats at her leg. “And just how would you know, seeing as how you never tasted Nana’s chicken?”

“That’s what you always say.” Lark shrugs. “Like you’re trying to steal her ribbon from the county fair.”

Ruby just shakes her head at her wise-beyond-years daughter—and the truth of the statement. All these years and it is still Nana’s pan and Nana’s recipe. “It’s not a competition, baby bird. I’m just trying to do her proud.”

Lark unloads a heaping forkful of potato salad into her mouth. “Mmm…” She giggles, but her potato-salad smile doesn’t fill her big brown eyes, doesn’t even reach them. She’s definitely putting on a show.

Leaning back on her elbows, Ruby decides just to soak up the moment with her daughter. Maybe Lark’s memory will hold on to a crumpled edge of this picnic. Maybe even if she doesn’t remember this particular day, a warm, sepia-tinged feeling will wash over her when she picnics with her own daughter someday.

God only knows what is going to happen to her and Lark, but just for now Ruby wants to be selfish and proud that her wonderful sprite is the product of moments like this, moments spent with Ruby.

“Aunt Wonnie!”

Lark’s cry yanks Ruby from her ruminations.

“Hey, Larklette. What’s the deal, pickle?” When Antoinette plops down on the quilt, Clyde jumps up to greet her. Ruby and Lark both manage to grab their lemonade cups; only the potato salad container and a couple of brownies are trampled in the excitement. “Fried chicken. Fancy.”

“Yeah,” Lark says. “Mom’s trying to bribe me. She just hasn’t told me why.”

Ruby busies herself, brushing brownie crumbs and clumps of potato salad into her napkin. She averts her eyes from both her daughter and her best friend.

“See what I mean, jelly bean?”

“I see nothin’,” Antoinette says. “I know nothin’.”

“Then you, Aunt Wonnie, are as blind as my pet bat.” Lark’s nickname for Antoinette comes from her thinking that when Antoinette first introduced herself, like so many other grown-ups, she was telling Lark to call her “Auntie” something. Their banter comes from years of the three of them taking road trips around the state in search of wood for Ruby’s furniture.

“Speaking of blind,” Ruby says. “How was your date last night?”

Lark whistles. “Must’ve been real good for you to come out to the flea market to dish about it.”

Antoinette laughs. “You, Miss Sassy Pants, are getting entirely too sassy for your pants.”

“But you hate the flea market,” Lark says.

“Well?” Ruby asks.

Antoinette shoots Ruby a look. “If only I was blind.”

“Beauty’s only skin deep, Aunt Wonnie. Skin deep.”

Ruby knows Antoinette is not referring to her date. She digs a newspaper sleeve from her tote bag, holds it out to Lark. “Take Clyde on poop patrol.”

Lark stomps to her feet. “You always make me miss the good stuff.”

Ruby points her thumb over her shoulder. “Go. Then it’s back to work for the both of you.”

As she and Clyde step around the trailer, Lark calls out over her shoulder, “Tyrant. They have child labor laws, you know.”