The Wilder Sisters (14 page)

“He must,” Lily said. “The Max I remember used to kick the snot out of anything vaguely veterinarian.”

“Max is going on eighteen. His kicking days are long gone. And even if he wasn’t, Doctor Donavan really is that good with animals.” On she went to explain about the rescued border collie he’d taught any

number of tricks. This man wasn’t a veterinarian, he was a magician. Lily could smell the real reason lurking beneath that Swiss cheese logic. Her sister was hot for the vet, downright hormonal. Of course, she would never come right out and admit it. Privacy was all with Rose. Lily’d bet a year’s salary the vet had no clue Rose was even

interested.

“Have you ever let him adjust you?” Lily teased. “He only works on animals.”

“Last time I checked, women were animals. Particularly Wilder women.”

Rose made a sound of disgust. “Lily, if you don’t want to hear about my horses, just say so.”

“Rose Ann, I
love
hearing about your horses. It just occurred to me that perhaps the reason you mentioned Doctor Donavan seven hundred times in the last hour might be that you were interested in more than his chiropractic skills. So?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! I don’t know why I bother. How about let’s just enjoy the scenery?”

“Okay by me.” Lily nudged the old horse up the gradual incline of the trail that wound behind the ranch. It was soft, red dirt all the way, beneath the wind-rustled pines and the clatter of cottonwood leaves, the air cool thanks to yesterday’s rainstorm. They climbed five hundred feet in silence broken only by birdsong and the horses’ occasional grunts and nickering. When they rested the horses, Lily stared down at their father’s property. All 240 acres seemed like a small speck in the larger sea of muted blue-green grasses. The Wilder land stretched north, toward the Colorado border. Every now and then a farmhouse broke up the acreage, the glint of sun arcing across a metal roof, the soft red of barn siding worn down to wood by the elements. If a California developer saw all this, he’d get an immediate erection, picturing how many lots he could cut, how many cheaply constructed houses would fit there, and the size of the pockets he was going to need to stuff all his dollars inside. Lily tried to imagine the ghosts of her mother’s ancestors dancing across this land, the drumbeats of old songs echoing around a campfire where
Diné
wo- men nursed babies. At some point, they had to feel the approach of the Spanish conquerors who’d come on horseback, an army of sol- diers cresting the hills with equal amounts of rape and religion in their arsenals. They were

Mami’s ancestors too. How could a person ever reconcile such op- posing halves? Mami rarely talked about her heritage, but Grandma had made it her life’s work. Once she started in, Lily turned her mind off and dreamed of horses. Rose, ever diligent, listened politely. “It’s amazing,” Rose said, rambling on about the damn horse. “The adjustments work so well I hardly have to Bute him anymore.” Lily let simmer what she wanted to say. “Bute’s decent medicine, though it has its drawbacks where long-term use is concerned. I take

it myself every once in awhile.”

Rose gave her a look. “Why? Are you going lame?”

“Very funny.” Lily looped the reins over her left fist. “For mi- graines. Don’t tell me you’ve never had one. They’re supposed to run in families.”

“Describe it for me.”

The debilitating headaches had on one occasion caused her to write out a will.

Whoever finds this note, please return Buddy Guy to Pop’s ranch. He’s been a good dog, and always made me feel safe. He bites, though, so you’d better tranquilize him first. Maybe with one of those darts they use to knock out mountain lions. I also recommend a muzzle, better get leather; Buddy can rip through those Velcro jobs in nothing flat. Send my good jewelry to my bitchy sister, Rose, even though she’ll never have the nuts to wear it the way it should be worn. My stock portfolio should probably go to my niece and nephew, but for God’s sake, get a lawyer to hold it in trust until they acquire some sense, like say around age forty-five. And bury me in something comfortable but flattering, like my camelhair coat from Bloomingdale’s, and my Calvin Klein jeans with the rip in the ass. No pantyhose, no matter what Mami says! In fact, no underwear at all. Well, that’s that. I can’t say I’m happy to leave, but anything is better than how my damn head feels. Adios, cruel world
.

She’d lain down on her bed, one arm around Buddy, waiting for eternity, only to wake up the next morning with a stiff neck and so much dog hair up her nose that she spent the day sneezing.

“Migraines are the tractor pulls of headaches. Sometimes, at the

start, I see purple and yellow spots about a foot out from my field of vision. If I take the Butalbital, lie down with a cold cloth on my forehead, think of nothing, it usually goes away. I don’t know about horses, but Bute makes me feel absolutely pliable. I do believe I could win a gold medal for sex on Bute.”

Sister Rose looked intrigued by that comment. “Did you ever just take it for—you know—that particular effect?”

“Of course I did. Somehow it doesn’t work unless you have the headache too. Weird recipe, huh? Total waste of a side effect, since moving a limb while in the throes of migraine invites agony. But if, say, I’m in some endless meeting with surgeons, or driving in stop- and-go traffic on the freeway and I can’t get to my pills, well, imagine whoever’s driving the tractor is dragging an eight-hundred-pound spike through my left eye. And the wretched beasts can last for hours! I had one once that went on for two days.”

Rose looked over at her sister. “Except for the feeling sexy part, that pretty much sounds like every single day before Amanda left home.”

“I can’t believe she’s running all over hell and gone with a reggae musician. How could you let her go?”

Her sister reached down to straighten out Alfred’s reins. She scratched the gray gelding’s neck affectionately and shrugged. “Maybe you can tell me how was I supposed to stop her.”

“Didn’t you take her to a shrink?”

“Sure. After Philip died I got us all counseling. Second Chance pointed out the
P
encyclopedia on the psychologist’s desk, and Amanda refused to waste her nights healing our family when she could be spending them with boys. Seemed kind of ridiculous for me to sit there explaining my kids’ behaviors and writing checks, so—” and here Rose forced a smile “—eventually I let her flunk her classes, get tattoos, pierce her belly button, stay out all night, sleep with boys, and learn for herself. Of course I’m still waiting for that last part to happen. She passed through town the other day. Lifted a hundred and ten dollars from my purse.”

“You’re exaggerating!”

“I am not. And it wasn’t the first time.”

Lily yanked Max’s head away from a low-hanging branch just seconds before it would have smacked him between the eyes. “Wow! For a chiropractically adjusted horse, he just zones out sometimes, doesn’t

he? And what about Second Chance? Is he depraved, too? Did I set him on the road to ruin with my hired stripper?”

Rose ran her fingers through her curly hair, lifting it from the back of her neck. This part of the trail was hot and windless. The sun beat down with an intensity that would sunburn her shoulders. “It’s still motorcycles. Lately dirt bikes on the circuit. He wins money occa- sionally, and his picture shows up in the Albuquerque paper. I never know where he is until he calls home.”

Lily thought of the carnage she’d witnessed in emergency surgery due to motorcycle accidents. “Hope to God he wears his helmet. I miss those little monsters.”

“Me, too, but they’re grown up, Lily. Sooner or later I had to let them go. And try like hell not to feel like a failure about how they turned out. If I had my way, they would have said good-bye waving college degrees, with my blessings. Things hardly ever work out the way one plans.”

“Don’t you worry about them?”

Rose’s expression clouded over, and Lily was shocked at the equal portions of beauty and sadness her sister’s face could hold.

“Every single day. I look at their baby pictures. Try to remember the good times. I light candles for them at church every week.”

Lily wanted to scream. A long time back, when they attended mass on Sundays alongside Mami, Lily had lit votives and stared into the twenty-five-cent flames, matching their intensity with her own. She’d lit as many as ten candles at a time, hoping to incinerate her larger sins. Holding up her hands, palms forward, she had felt the heat emanate from the flickering wicks. Was that the holy pres- ence or merely by-products of combustion? Candles in some old church didn’t amount to faith, but there was this thick, collective feeling of
otherness
embedded in the adobe walls. If faith was real, she thought it would inevitably find its way inside her. The Virgin Mami worshipped exuded a powerful kind of female peace, but it was difficult to sustain belief when hardly anything one prayed for ever worked out. How did Rose manage? And it wasn’t like Lily had spent
all
her childhood prayers asking for a leopard Appaloosa. She asked for Grandpop to survive lung cancer, which he hadn’t, Grandma to like her—fat chance—and enough food to fill the belly of every starving baby on the planet. From reservation statistics to those heinous commercials on television, all that

infant hunger haunted Lily and made her doubt God. The biology she’d learned in college turned out to be like one giant eraser scrubbed over all that hokey-smokey seek-and-you-shall-find stuff. She couldn’t exactly call herself an atheist, but at this stage in her life, religion kind of boiled down to the Golden Rule, except in the business world, where all rules had a brass exterior covering a lead interior. Rose had never stopped believing, but Lily felt done with a capital
D
when it came to the Catholic Church. “Prayer,” she said. “Hmm. Usually I just pour myself a drink.”

They stopped at the stream to water the horses. Alfred sucked noisily, taking in long, slow drafts that traveled down his neck in rippling swallows, but all Max wanted to do was splash around, act like an idiot, make a mess. Damn horse was into his second child- hood. The feeling of the cool water dampening her pants legs cheered Lily up. Every wet rock and cottonwood tree seemed worth the blisters she’d feel tomorrow. The stream was clean and cold, and the gently swirling current beneath the horses’ hooves would grow swift enough in winter to carry off a tub of lard like Buddy. Blue sky peeked through the turning leaves, that impossible shade that made New Mexico famous, turning the heads of painters, photo- graphers, and people whose broken hearts felt exactly the same color. Lily wondered if Blaise was dating somebody new by now. Her fussy carpenter was such a charmer she couldn’t imagine him sleeping alone for longer than two days. She wondered if he’d pick a blond this time around. It wasn’t that she wanted him back, because she didn’t, but that didn’t make letting go any easier.
Maybe if I wish him happiness some will boomerang back to me
, she thought.
Nah, that kind of thinking is bullcrap, and besides he really hurt my feelings. I want him to suffer a little while longer, at least long enough for me to feel better than he does
. The chill air in the shade felt bracing. But the best thing about the landscape was that there wasn’t anyone with an M.D. in sight.

Rose began to guide Alfred out of the stream and back onto the trail when Lily reached a hand out to stop her. “Let’s dismount. I need to lie down after all that food.”

“Okay.” Rose slid out of her saddle and loosened Alfred’s girth. She ran her irons up the stirrup leathers, just as they’d been taught to do. Lily did the same. A little ways from the water, they ground- tied the horses and let them graze on the small amount of grass. Rose kicked away rocks under a cottonwood until she’d cleared a smooth patch of

dirt wide enough for both of them to sit. Lily pulled off her shirt and hung it on a branch. She sat down, naked from the waist up, sweat cooling on her body, smelling like the earth.

Rose clucked, sounding exactly like Mami.

“What? We’re in the middle of Egypt, and you’re going to lecture me about partial nudity?”

“I can’t believe you don’t wear a bra.” “Give me one good reason why I should.”

“You’re thirty-five years old. How about support?”

Lily flexed her pectorals and her petite breasts lifted. “See that? Weights. Sixty reps in the morning and the same at night. I have muscles to hold my tits up, I don’t need to be tortured every day of my life by ridiculous underwires.”

Rose pursed her lips. “When you go braless, it makes you look…I don’t know, cheap.”

Lily howled with laughter. “Cheap is one thing I
know
I am not. If anything, I am expensive. Besides, I always wear one to work, and—” she leaned over and yelled in her sister’s ear “—I’m on vaca- tion!”

Rose grabbed a handful of sticks and cottonwood flotsam. She pelted her sister until the downy white fuzz was floating everywhere. Laughing, Lily pulled the fuzz from her hair, flinging it back at her sister. They graduated to tickling, at which Lily, the wirier of the two, was unparalleled. She wrestled Rose to the dirt and grabbed the hem of her T-shirt. “So show me your great supported tits,” she taunted her sister.

Through her laughter, Rose gasped for breath. “No, stop it!” “Come on. I want to see what wearing a bra every second of the

day has done for the great Rose Wilder Flynn.”

Lily pulled the shirt up, and just as quickly Rose yanked it back down.

“No fair. I didn’t see anything except that ugly white bra.”

Rose pulled the shirt over her head and unsnapped her bra. Lily quickly grabbed her clothes. Rose’s breasts spilled forth, larger than Lily’s, nowhere near as toned, but still nicely shaped. “Happy?”

Lily studied the pale striations marbling the sides of her sister’s breasts. They weren’t unattractive, exactly. She looked like a woman who’d used her body for its designated purpose. Sure, they rode a little lower than Lily’s, but Rose’s bosom still looked like a place some man could rest his head, find comfort and passion, and maybe if he was