The Garden of Happy Endings (29 page)

“You, too, Elsa.”

She turned to head toward the rectory, and he called her back. She looked at him.

“Would you like to join us, me and Calvin and Mario, for supper tomorrow night?”

“Not Tiberius?”

“He’s got plenty of male relatives. He doesn’t need a Big Brother.”

For a moment, she hesitated, aware that there was more and more building here, and that she had other choices to make, other things to work out.

“Careful now,” he added. “It’s not just any old supper. We’re going to the Passkey.”

Elsa feigned a swoon. “Ah, the best grinder in the world. I haven’t had one in twenty years, I bet. I’ll be there. What time?”

“Six-thirty. I’d pick you up, but between boys and dog, there isn’t a seat left.”

She laughed. “I can drive myself.”

“That’s fine.”

E
lsa watched through the rectory windows as clouds moved over the sky. They were fat clouds, dark with rain. Lightning arrowed out of them, cracking and thundering. Charlie stuck close to her, lying on her foot if he could get away with it, moving when she moved, his body quivering every so often. “Weird to have lightning so early in the day,” she commented, eyeing the sky from the table, where she sat with a mug of coffee clasped between her palms.

Joaquin stood at the old gas stove. A cast-iron griddle, a Christmas gift from Elsa a few years back, drew heat from two
burners. He brushed the surface generously with melted butter, and glanced at the sky as he turned to pick up a plate of sliced peaches, lightly spiced with mace and cinnamon and nutmeg. “It looks like Kansas during tornado season.” He’d lived there for a short stint as an undergrad. “Forecast is for serious rain.”

As if to underscore the words, the first heavy drops splatted against the windows, as big as saucers. “I’m glad we don’t get tornados here.”

“Yeah. Not my favorite weather.” He placed three slices of peaches in a circle, sprinkled them with brown sugar, and covered them with buckwheat pancake batter, a recipe he’d developed just for Elsa, who loved buckwheat as much as anything on the planet.

She smiled at his concentration, the comma of his body arched over the grill, his precision in placing the peaches and pouring the exact circle of the batter that surrounded each one. His face was nearly perfect in profile—the high brow and angled cheekbones, his aggressive Mayan nose and full lips. So very handsome.

And still too thin, she realized. His hands looked too big at the end of bony forearms, and his rear end had practically disappeared. “You’re still not eating enough, are you? How much are you running, my friend?”

He finished the final pancake. “What? Running?” He put the bowl down and picked up a spatula. “I don’t know. Eight or nine miles.”

“Every day?”

With care, he used a kitchen towel to wipe away a spot of batter. “Yeah.”

“That’s a lot.”

He shrugged. “I have a lot on my mind.”

“Do you want to talk it out?”

He straightened and looked over his shoulder at her. “Not this morning, but thank you.”

“You’re not eating enough to compensate for all those miles. Maybe you need to have dinner with me and Tamsin more often. How about Monday evening?”

“Are you feeding all the unmarried men of the parish now?”

She raised her eyebrows at the tone in his voice. Outside, the rain splatted and spit, and in the distance were the first waves of thunder. Charlie edged closer to her leg, and she shifted to put one foot on either side of him. “It’s all right, baby.” To Joaquin, she said, “I am a nice person that way. I will cook your favorites, too. What do you want? I’ll even cook paella.”

He glanced at her, ever so slightly coy. “Really?”

She let a smile edge onto her face. “Really. Because I love you, and you are important to me.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.” She drew an × across her heart. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

His grin was true this time, and she fell back against the chair, glad to have jollied him away from … whatever it was that kept cropping up between them lately. “You need to eat more, Joaquin,” she said firmly. “Or run less. Or both. I want you to gain ten pounds,
sabe
?”

“Sí.”
He flipped the pancakes. “I promise.”

As he reached into the oven for the plates warming there, a wild blade of lightning blazed over the sky, and before it had even stopped, a violent crack of thunder blasted the air.

Elsa jumped, giving an involuntary cry. Joaquin dropped the plates and they shattered on the linoleum floor. Charlie leapt up and barked frenetically, his whole body shivering.

As if the lightning had broken the sky, rain came pouring out of it, unbelievably loud, pounding so hard on the roof and windows it seemed like everything would fall apart.

“Wow!” Elsa cried, and fell to one knee to put her arms around Charlie. He wiggled and whimpered against her, inconsolable. To Joaquin, she called, “I need a blanket!”

He nodded, dashed into the adjoining living room, and tossed her an afghan. She wrapped it around her shoulders and sat on the floor, pulling Charlie into a tent made of her body and the afghan. He crawled, close to the floor, into her lap, and tucked his nose under her arm. She pulled the blanket down around him, humming a lullaby and rocking slightly.

Joaquin swept up the broken plates and threw them in the trash, then knelt beside Elsa. “What else can I do?” He put his hand on Charlie’s hindquarters.

She shook her head. “Now we just wait it out.”

“I’m going to take the pancakes off so they don’t burn.”

Overhead, the rain poured and poured and poured. Elsa rocked gently back and forth, singing softly “Alleluia,” one of her favorite hymns. Joaquin turned off the stove and sat down beside them, joining in to sing the old words with her. His voice was deep and hers was an alto, and they had sung many many many songs together, but not for a long time.

Maybe because she had spoken to Deacon about it or maybe because the smell of rain and earth triggered her visceral memory, she was transported to another day, a day on the Camino, the week before they arrived in Santiago. The day that changed everything.

Everything.

S
he and Joaquin were nearing the end of their pilgrimage on the Camino. It had been raining for a couple of days. While they were not exactly used to walking in the rain, because it was never pleasant, they were also resigned to it. They’d been on the road for nearly two months, and rain was part of the game. They wore their ponchos and kept moving, drying out
their shoes as well as they could at night, putting on fresh socks as often as possible. Twice, they’d taken a break for a day to dry out a little.

But at the end of the
camino
, with Santiago only six days away, they were exhausted in every possible expression of the word. In body, in mind, in spirit. It seemed to Elsa nearly impossible that they could keep walking for even two more days; conversely, impossible that they could ever
not
be walking. It was one of the reasons people undertook a pilgrimage—to reach that point of no return, to understand that life is only fleeting.

On that day, the rain came down hard, sudden and blinding. Lightning finally drove them to take shelter in a grim concrete shed, a gray little nothing thing—until you went inside.

A crude altar took up the entire back wall, and it was piled high with hundreds of offerings. There were pieces of paper with prayers written in a dozen languages, photos, and all kinds of other offerings—a barrette and a shoe, stones and feathers, even a branch from a tree, withered and old now. People had also written all over the walls and the altar itself.

As she ducked into the space, Elsa was shivering from the rain, but she shivered even more in the cold room, hearing all those whispers and pleas, a sibilant chorus giving texture to the quiet. Joaquin came in behind her, shaking himself off. His hair was long then, pulled back into a ponytail, and he barely had any beard at all; only wisps grew along his chin.

“This is amazing.”

Elsa nodded, still shivering. She took a sip of water, and removed her poncho, shaking it out and then smoothing it on the ground so she could sit on it. She shrugged out of her backpack, which had been whittled down to practically nothing over the long miles. They had both begun with too much. Now they carried only the barest of necessities—three pairs of underwear and six pairs of socks, two sweaters, two T-shirts each, and the ponchos.
One pair of shorts and one pair of long pants each. A hairbrush, two hats, lip balm, sunscreen, Band-Aids and moleskin and antiseptic and a small bottle of shampoo they alternated carrying. Joaquin carried a bar of soap and water bottles and any food they bought for the day—his shoulders were stronger, to start, and had grown powerful over the walk.

She dug her second sweater out of the pack and pulled it on over the first, hugging herself to keep warm. Last night had not been a good sleep—there had been young pilgrims partying all over the town, and the noises had gone on into the wee hours of the night. Elsa was usually too tired to worry about interruptions, but she had her period and couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning and hurting. Maybe, she’d thought, they should take a rest day. But they were both anxious to get to Santiago, and a rest day would make it seven days instead of six, so they’d packed their gear, and Elsa had stocked up on supplies, making sure she had enough tampons to last between towns.

The skies were gloomy when they’d set out with a breakfast of rolls and meat and hot chocolate in their bellies. Elsa had popped a bunch of aspirin and they’d started walking in the dark day, donning ponchos just in case.

After a couple of hours, it started to rain. Harder and harder, until they were driven inside this cold shelter. Elsa huddled in her sweaters, leaning against the wall, her lower abdomen pulsing with low-grade pain. Joaquin moved around the room, looking carefully at everything, murmuring over one thing and another.

It had all started as such a lark, but both of them had been changed by their pilgrimage. The knowledge settled between them, unspoken as of yet, a quiet void of conversation they jumped over and around and sat on top of.

For Elsa, it was the people who had changed her, the pilgrims carrying their stories down the road to Santiago, the people manning the bars and restaurants and hostels along the way. She
wanted to facilitate the journey of pilgrims, ordinary pilgrims in everyday life. Help the weary, comfort the bereaved, ease the furious.

She could not do that in the Catholic Church, not in the way she envisioned, so she would have to explore other options. She didn’t relish telling Joaquin, who had been devout before they began their pilgrimage, and had grown more deeply so as they walked. His faith had always been one of the most appealing things about him. Now it glowed in him like a beacon, peaceful and encompassing. It drew people to him. As she watched him, sleepily, it seemed as if he was praying, his hand hovering over one of the lines written on the wall, and then another, sometimes adding his voice to the petitions that filled the room. Closing her eyes, she smiled softly, warming up now. A good man, her Joaquin. She dozed.

When she awakened, the rain had stopped, and she had fallen sideways, her head resting on a backpack. Joaquin was kneeling in prayer, but he didn’t have his head bent. He was, instead, in an attitude of listening, his face turned upward to the altar. Blinking sleep away, Elsa thought she saw a woman sort of floating or sitting on the altar, a greenish light around her, and then she was gone.

A
nother violent crack of lightning, then thunder, shook the rectory kitchen, bringing Elsa back to this time. This room, with Joaquin again.

“Do you ever think of the
camino
?” she asked.

“I have been lately.”

“Me, too.” Overhead came a much louder racket. Hail began to clack against the windows. “Oh, this is bad, Joaquin. It’s going to demolish the garden!” She wanted to jump up and look out, but Charlie quivered and whimpered under her arms. “What do we do?”

“Let’s pray.”

“Yeah,” she said, snapping. “That always seems to work.”

To her surprise, he laughed. “Cranky, cranky.”

“What is so funny?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his shoulders still shaking. He bent his head, and laughter spilled out of him. “You. This. The dog. Prayers. All of it.”

“Whatever. I’m not getting it, but you seem to be having a good time.”

And he was. Still laughing, he fell sideways and then backward on the floor, his hands on his belly. He was laughing so hard that Charlie stuck his nose out of the afghan for a minute and stopped his quivering. Curious, he came out and licked Joaquin’s face, which only made him laugh harder. And even though Elsa could see no earthly reason for the hilarity, she found herself laughing a little herself, just because he was, like yawning when someone else yawns.

Finally, he slowed and sat up, wiping tears off his face, then resting his long arms on his knees, hands dangling down. “Ah. Better now.”

“What in the world set you off?”

He waved a hand. “It wouldn’t make any sense to you.” For a moment, he faced her, calm and easy in a way he hadn’t been with her in a long time. Then he scooted forward, and with the dog between them, he took her hands. “Let’s pray. It can’t hurt, right?”

She shook her head. And closed her eyes and let him pray for the protection and survival of the garden, for the health of the people, and for hope.

“And finally, God, I ask a particular blessing on your daughter Elsa here, who has lost her way. Show her the path back to you so that she can continue her work.”

Elsa raised her head and found him looking at her as himself, her friend Joaquin, instead of Jack the priest, and she accepted it in the spirit he offered it. “Amen,” she said.

They sat on the floor, rubbing their hands over Charlie to keep him soothed. The hail slowed to a mild clatter, then stopped. The lightning ceased. Charlie fell on the floor and sighed, closing his eyes for a nap.

“Let’s have breakfast and then we can go check the damage,” Joaquin said.