Sisterchicks in Sombreros (23 page)

“How many times do I have to warn you not to start something you can’t finish, Joanna Banana?”

She took off down the beach before I could trip her. I ran after her in the firm, moist sand, but she was in much better shape than I. I’d never catch her.

Zigzagging into the shallow water, Joanne tried to get me wet as her bare feet kicked up a spray of salt water. I retaliated with a splash in her direction, and Joanne let out a loud yelp.

“I didn’t even get you wet,” I called.

She screamed, and I knew something was really wrong.

“Are you okay? What happened?”

Joanne hopped on one foot and wailed, “I stepped on something. Owww! I can’t see. Where’s your flashlight?”

I quickly turned the light on her foot. We saw nothing. No gash or blood. Only a slight puncture on the fleshy upper pad.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow!” Joanne cried.

Turning the flashlight on the sand where she had been standing, I searched for the culprit, expecting to find the top of a ballpoint pen or something. No evidence lay in the wet sand.

“It hurts! It hurts! It hurts!”

“Okay, Joanne, let’s get you back to the trailer. Can you lean on my shoulder and hobble along?”

We did a crazy hop-shuffle dance step. I’d never seen Joanne fall apart like she was now.

“It hurts,” she whimpered, breathing hard.

“You don’t have any idea what it was?”

“No!” she screamed. “It hurts!”

“Listen, Jo, I’ll drive you to the clinic I saw in town. Do you remember seeing it by the gas station? No matter. Just stay calm, and I’ll drive as fast as I can.”

With my sister whimpering in the seat beside me, I drove like a crazy woman through town, barely stopping at the “Alto” signs.

“Here’s a bottle of water.” I reached behind me when we rolled to a stop at an intersection, and I heard the bottle rattle. “Pour some water over your foot. Maybe a little piece of shell is stuck in there. Hold on. I’m going to make a turn up here.”

With fierce determination, I clutched the steering wheel and drove my sister to the closest thing to a hospital this town had to offer. She didn’t have two broken legs, but I had jumped into the emergency as fully as if she did.

T
he good thing about taking
a nurse-practitioner to a clinic is that she understands her diagnosis long before you do. And that’s an especially good thing when the diagnosis is mostly in Spanish.

Our helpful doctor was certain that a sea creature, possibly a stingray, had stung Joanne. He made her plunge her foot into a pan of steaming hot water. As soon as the water cooled, more scalding hot water was delivered. When I informed the doctor that our accommodations didn’t include electricity or running water, he insisted we stay at the twenty-four-hour clinic with the ready supply of boiling water until he felt confident a sufficient amount of the poison had been extracted from her foot.

While Joanne soaked, she quietly whimpered. I felt so bad for her. She barely had moaned after she was hoisted up from
Ensenada’s water with the rope. For her to react like this, it must really hurt.

After the first two hours of rotating buckets of hot water, she said she could tell a difference. The sharp, burning pain was decreasing. She could partially wiggle her toes again. The panic was lifting from her eyes.

I bought bottles of Coke from a machine in the lobby, and we sat in metal chairs flipping through Mexican tabloids. Some popular Mexican television star was marrying some other popular Mexican television star, but some other blond woman wasn’t happy about it. We figured out that critical bit of news from the pictures. What we didn’t know was if it was happening in real life or on a soap opera.

Sometime close to midnight the doctor indicated he was going home and another doctor was coming on duty. I have to say that I had been very good the whole time we were at the clinic. My suspicion was that this was the clinic Matthew was associated with, and therefore the same clinic that received the dispatch about Miguel’s broken leg. The thought of asking about Matthew had plagued me for several hours, but I wanted to honor Joanne’s resolute request that I keep my fingers out of the matchmaking bowl.

Still, every twinkling Christmas light inside my brain lit up when the doctor said he was leaving. If God was dreaming up a charming surprise for my sister, how great would it be for Matthew to walk in and to see Joanne sitting there, helpless, with her hair going every which way, unbathed except for her
swollen foot that was stuck in a bucket?

Well, maybe that scene wouldn’t be exceptionally romantic, but it would still work. Instead of the Cinderella slipper, Matthew could slip Joanne’s bare foot into another pan of scalding water, and they could live happily ever after.

That’s how I would have written the story.

Apparently God had a different plot in mind and wasn’t looking for someone with control issues to step in and help Him out. God is deliberate.

To my credit, I didn’t say a word when the new doctor came on duty and turned out to be all of twenty-something, wearing too much aftershave and a red bowling shirt. When we left at two-thirty in the morning, I didn’t sidle up to the doctor and ask if he knew Matthew. I didn’t leave a trail of clues for Matthew to follow if he wanted to find the “Joanne Clayton” who was logged in at 6:55 p.m. on Wednesday, December 3. I was hands-off out of respect for Joanne’s wishes.

And it was killing me.

The beds I’d made up earlier that day inside the trailer were a welcome sight by flashlight. Joanne said she had a screaming headache, and I realized I hadn’t replaced the bottle of aspirin I had given away. I prepared a cold, wet paper towel and stood by Joanne’s side, placing the soothing friend on her forehead.

“Just like when we had chicken pox,” she said.

“It’s not as effective as the aspirin would have been.”

“Ibuprofen,” she corrected me.

“Fine, ibuprofen.” With a smirk I added, “If I had tequila, I’d give it to you.”

“If you had tequila, the way I feel right now, I’d drink it.”

“You must be delirious,” I teased.

“I’m actually doing lots better. You can leave the paper towel. It’s helping.”

“And your foot?”

“It’s better. I would never have known to soak it in hot water. Especially such scalding hot water. It seems to have worked, though. Thanks, Mel, for driving me to the clinic and for taking such good care of me.”

“De nada,” I said, crawling into my little bed. The sheets weren’t exactly freshly cleaned, but they were better than what we had slept on the night before.

“Sleep deep, Joanne.”

“Dream deeper,” she answered me.

I don’t know if I dreamed deeper, but I certainly slept deeper than I had the first few nights of this trip. The trailer stayed cool and dark, which allowed Joanne and me to sleep until after ten-thirty that morning. Usually neither of us slept that long, but after what we had demanded of our minds, emotions, and bodies the previous few days, it was a wonder we didn’t hibernate for the entire day in an effort to rejuvenate.

Joanne’s foot was much better, she said, but I noticed she hobbled around as she tidied up her side of the trailer. I had purchased some boxed oatmeal bars for our breakfast and pulled them out along with a glass bottle of what I took to be
Mexican orange juice that didn’t need refrigeration.

“This is orange pop.” Joanne placed her paper cup on the top of the collapsible kitchen table.

“Sorry about that.”

“I don’t mind. The sweetness surprised me.”

“I think that’s because it’s so warm. Would you like a banana, Joanna Banana?”

“Sure, Melly Jelly Belly. What’s on our schedule for today?”

It took me a moment to think before I answered, “Nothing.” I couldn’t remember a day in my adult life when the complete schedule could be listed with that singular word.

“We don’t need to go back to the bank until tomorrow, right?” Joanne asked.

“Right.”

“And we don’t have to talk to a Realtor about selling the place because we’re in agreement that we both want to keep it. At least for now.”

“Right,” I said again.

As if she needed to convince me further she added, “For the investment possibilities alone it seems too soon to sell.”

“I know. I agree. And I’m sure Ethan will agree, too.”

“I’m definitely coming back. We both will have to come back sometime when we can stay longer.”

“And we’ll bring a flyswatter.” I flapped my hand in the air at a pesky fly that was determined to land on my banana peel.

“Flyswatter and what else? I know you’re dying to make a list of some sort.” Joanne didn’t say it in a rude way. She said it
like she knew me well enough to understand what was enjoyable for me, and she was willing to invest part of her free day in doing something I considered fun. Her gesture warmed me because it had been a long time since anyone, especially another woman, had volunteered to do something simply because she knew it would be a treat for me.

“Why don’t we do that now?” she asked. “Where’s your little notepad?”

“Here.” I pulled out my pad and pen and started slowly, making sure I hadn’t misread her invitation to join me in a little organizing fest. “We could use new silverware.”

“At least we have silverware here,” Joanne said. “I don’t think Rosa Lupe had much silverware. You know, I was thinking about how we need to leave pretty early Saturday to get back to the cruise ship by five o’clock.”

“Right.”

“What if we leave nice and early? We could stop by the Valdeparisos’ to see how Miguel is doing. We could even take a little gift to Rosa Lupe.”

My task-motivated mind began to compose a list of all the things the dear woman could use like silverware and a few cooking items. “Great idea. What if we pulled all the extra items out of here? We could give them to Rosa Lupe, and if and when you or I ever come back, we’ll keep the list so we know what items we need to replace.”

“¡Excellente! Let’s get at it and make your day.”

Joanne was right. It made me happy to inventory and set
aside all the items we felt good about taking to Rosa Lupe. The day before I’d been fairly thorough in throwing out old newspapers and some of Uncle Harlan’s rusted fishing lures. Anything else of his, including a battered pair of fishing boots, I loaded into some of the collapsed cardboard boxes I’d found in the broom closet. Aunt Winnie wanted the big fish, but she might also appreciate these other odd reminders of her husband.

By noon Joanne and I had accomplished the task and had a stack of useful items for Rosa Lupe.

“I hope she won’t take any of this the wrong way,” I said.

“No gift is misunderstood when the heart of the giver comes with the gift,” Joanne said. “I know she’ll see our heart in this. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a hammock waiting with my name on it.”

“It is getting stuffy in here,” I said. “How’s your foot doing?”

“Better. You don’t mind if I take a nap, do you?”

“Not at all, Sleeping Beauty.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I thought I might use some of our water to do a better job cleaning up the silverware and the frying pan.”

“It is siesta time, you know.”

“I’ll try not to disturb you.”

While Joanne turned the shaded hammock into a perfect little nest, I filled a basin with water and went to work on the old flatware. Remembering a trick Jessie used in the Boxcar Children, I padded out to the sand and scooped up a handful, which I carried back and used to rub off some of the ancient fish gut stains.

What do you know! It worked!

Alone in my private bliss, I kept staring out at the serenely beautiful ocean and wishing I had a camera. It struck me that I had seen disposable cameras at the grocery store by the resort. While Joanne slept, I hiked the half mile or so down to the grocery store, bought a camera, a small bottle of ibuprofen, and a cold bottle of iced tea. Life seemed so simple, and it seemed so good.

I only saw one person on my walk and guessed that Joanne was right about this being siesta hour. I also wondered if I was safer because I was in the greater orbit of the new resort. Yesterday I’d barely been able to cross the street in the older part of San Felipe without having a run-in with the law. Here I felt as if I were in “Little America.”

Joanne was still snoozing when I returned to our hideaway. I snapped her picture and then stood back to take a lengthwise picture of the palm tree. The quiet snap of the disposable camera apparently was loud enough to wake Joanne.

“What are you doing?”

“I bought a camera. Smile!”

“No! Not until I wake up.”

“Here.” I handed her the camera. “Take a picture of me by Uncle Harlan’s tree.” I started to pose with my palm resting on the trunk of the grand palm when I had an idea. “Wait!”

“Good grief! I was just about to take it. What are you doing?”

“You’ll see.” I went into the trailer, fished out the black-and-white
photo of Uncle Harlan watering the fledgling palm tree, and my hunch was right. He had used the same basin I’d just used to clean the flatware.