The Wilder Sisters (15 page)

smart, be moved to tears of gratitude. If the wonder vet was smart that way, it might be him.

“Now you’ve seen forty-year-old tits. Stretch marks and all. Give me back my clothes.”

“I will in a second.” Lily checked the tag on the bra. It was cheap and American. The support argument was pointless if the garment hadn’t been manufactured in Europe, where clothing designers un- derstood lingerie. She handed it back. “How can you wear this ugly old thing?”

“It’s comfortable.”

“Comfort isn’t everything. If I ever stop working out, mine are going to drop like a set of water balloons. You look good, Rose. So whose lucky fingers have fondled your nipples lately? That chiro- practor vet?”

Rose blushed as she reassembled her clothing. “For God’s sake, Lily.”

“It’s been two years. Nobody since Philip?” “I’ve been busy.”

“Nobody is
that
busy. You need to get laid, Rose. Just set your mind to it and it’ll happen. Let’s do a drive-by on this Doctor Donavan. I want to check him out.”

Her sister’s face was somber. “Let everything be, Lily.”

“If I do that, you won’t have sex until the next ice age. Come on, you know you want that vet.”

“It might be for the best, considering he’s still in love with his ex- wife, Leah.”

Immediately Lily thought of Tres Quintero at the hardware store, with that eleventeen-year-old Leah at his side. Could it be the same person? Nah, too long odds. Maybe it was infectious, a plague, the Leah virus attacking the state of New Mexico like that hantavirus scare a couple of years back. “Leah? What kind of loser-chick name is that? A Leah when you could have a Rose? I’m sorry. The hell with him, then. You’re young, and you have a generous heart. You have a really good butt, too, and you can cook fried chicken to make Shep Hallford cry. It’s insane to let all that talent go to waste.” She peeled the bark from a cottonwood twig bearing three yellow leaves. “You know, Rose, I’m going to pester you about Philip until you tell me everything, so you might as well give up and get it out of the way.”

Rose lay back in the shade of the tree. “If there is one subject I do not want to discuss, it’s Philip.”

“I’m your sister.”

Rose sighed. “He’s gone, I’m alone, that’s that.” On the last two words, her voice had risen half an octave.

Lily leaned over her sister, touching her cheek with the yellowest leaf on the twig. Quoting their grandmother, she whispered in a voice that came out spookier than she intended, “From fate and death, no man escapes.”

Anger flashed in her sister’s brown eyes. “Oh, spare me, Lily.

Who’s ever died on you?”

Lily thought of the gallbladder lady, that airway tube jutting from her purpling lips, how she’d never kiss her husband or her children again. The sixty-four-year-old man who’d rescheduled his surgery so he could climb one last mountain with his grandchildren, and died on the table when his heart gave out. The kid with the brain aneurysm, the pyloric stenosis baby with the one-in-a-million allergic reaction to anesthesia. Lily’s job was about saving lives, but behind every miracle lurked the potential for so many things to go wrong. When they did, she was supposed to pack it all up inside her Hart- mann briefcase and fit it into a clinical graph that excused any company failures that coincidentally happened to erase peoples’ lives.

“I don’t know what made me say that. It just came out of my mouth from nowhere, this terrible echo of Grandma. She used to scare the hell out of me when she said things like that.”

“Me too.”

“I always resented her favoring you. That’s such a mean thing to do to sisters. Why do you suppose the old witch was so divisive?” Rose shrugged. “I went to church with her while you went fishing with Grandpop. Rather unladylike to prefer worms and tackle over

a chance to confess your sins and say eternal penance.”

Lily smiled. “All those years she scolded me for every little thing. All I could think of to do was refuse to speak Spanish to her. I knew the language so much better than you did. You totally murdered the grammar.”

“I tried. Would it have killed you to make her happy with a few

Abuelitas
now and then?”

“Well, damn, Rose, at the time I sure thought it would. As a kid,

didn’t you ache to fit in out there in the world, not just in various
nichos
in Floralee? She was always trying to dress me in clothes made from tablecloths! For bedtime stories she told me folktales about mothers drowning their children. Jeez. Sometimes I felt my entire life was supposed to be one long-drawn-out apology for not having more Spanish blood running through my veins. It made me nuts. Watching Mami haul it out like a nail file, use it when she needed it, then tuck it away the rest of the time—was that any better?”

Rose was quiet, dragging a stick across the dirt. “It wasn’t about your Spanish, Lily. Grandma never got over Mami marrying a white man. Whenever she looked at you, she saw her own daughter again, and the feelings of helplessness made her go extra hard on you. It wasn’t fair. Still, I think that’s how it was.”

“Plus you were a goody-two-shoes, and I preferred to run bare- foot,” Lily added.

“Yes,” Rose allowed. “That was some of it.”

Lily lay down in the crook of her sister’s shoulder, pressing her face against her Rose’s arm. She let the leaves and sticks drop from her fingers. “Draw a picture on my back, Rose.”

“That old game?”

“Yes. Please. Come on, I want to guess.”

Rose sat up and brushed the dirt from herself. Lily turned on her side. She felt her sister’s index finger, warm against her bare skin, begin to trace an outline. She closed her eyes and let her mind buzz in that sleepy suspension that accompanies sensual concentration. In two seconds she could tell Rose was drawing a horse, but no way did she want her to stop. “Keep going,” she encouraged her sister. “I don’t get it yet.” She felt her fingers trace the almond-shaped ears pricking forward inquisitively, shape a long, Roman nose, capture the graceful curve of equine neck. Rose added nostrils, mane hair, a shock of forelock. Then, with her fingernail, she drew a crooked star where most horses had a blaze. Lily grinned and opened her eyes. “Sparrow. I miss that old pony something fierce. She went everywhere with us, didn’t she? If there’s a heaven, Sparrow will be at the gate nickering.”

“If you
go
to heaven.”

“Oh, I’ll be there.” Lily sat up and reached for her shirt. “Your all- forgiving God loves sinners and whores best. Bet I get in before you do.”

Rose slapped at a bug bite on her shoulder. “I swear I’m an insect

magnet. Does that look like a mosquito bite to you? Hope it wasn’t a spider.”

Lily touched the raised welt, already swollen to the size of a nickel, the color of window putty. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of nature for one day. Let’s go get you some calamine lotion and me some wine.”

Rose gazed longingly up the trail, and Lily could tell she wanted to press on, even though there wasn’t enough light left in the day to go any farther. “We can do this again tomorrow, Rose. It’s not like this trail’s going to disappear.”

“Days like this don’t come along that often.”

She clucked to Alfred and began making her way down the path. Lily understood what she meant. The delicate balance of anything going well was so easily broken. “There’ll be others.”

The horses were full of energy on the ride home. Within the last half mile of the ranch, they began to hear faint whinnying travel up from the common arena. Their horses answered back, their deep, barrel-rattling neighs causing Lily’s legs to throb and her crotch to feel wonderfully ticklish. Pop’s horses liked nothing more than every member of the herd in his designated place. Rose was quiet, rubbing her bug-bitten arm as she rode ahead of Lily. Lily felt bad that she’d pushed her sister about the subject of Philip, but she had a feeling the rift between them wouldn’t heal until that subject had been laid wide open. At the mere mention of his name Rose shut down. How could she ever tell her the things she knew about that man?

They untacked their horses, and Rose got out the Fiebing’s saddle soap and the sponge. Lily brushed saddle stains from the horses’ backs, checked hooves, and fetched each gelding a bucket of oats while Rose polished bridles. Various dogs milled around their feet, angling for a handout, but Buddy wasn’t among them. Lily turned the horses out into the arena, and after some initial threat displays involving boundaries, they both rolled and got properly dirty, transforming back into ranch horses. As she locked them into the common arena abutting the open barn stalls, Shep rode T.C. into the ring.

Shep’s saddle was padded with a couple of layers of yellowing sheepskin, commonly referred to as “cheaters,” the mark of a
dengue
, or sissy rider who lacked the chops to stay in his seat longer than an hour. Lily wondered why he was using them. Whenever Lily asked

Shep any horse questions, he generally worked things around so she was forced to answer them herself, which was how she’d learned 90 percent of her equitation. As to which horse breed was the best, and which ranch horse was Shep’s favorite, he always shook his head and said,
Honey, all they are is horses
, as if preferring one four- legged beast over another was a waste of his time. For awhile Lily’d taken that as sage advice. But factor in that whenever Shep rode for pleasure he chose T.C., and that the riotous gray gelding splattered all over with black leopard spots was the only Appaloosa to be found at Rancho Costa Plente in all its years of existence, that nobody be- sides Shep ever rode him, and Lily knew the old wrangler had a soft spot for this horse. She leaned against the fence and watched him work the animal through his paces.

T.C. was twenty-five years old this year, ancient by horse world standards. But Shep swore he knew a man down in Tijeras whose Appy mare had lived to the ripe old age of forty-two and spent her last years on his porch. Every morning he cooked up a gallon of oatmeal and hand fed her. Whatever supplements Shep gave the old gelding had worked a kind of Geritol magic. His spotted coat was as shiny and thick as a five-year-old’s. He had more weight on him than Shep did, actually, and Lily wondered again about the prostate surgery.

She sighed with pleasure as her father’s wrangler used his leg to coax T.C. into the side pass, a basic dressage move, where the horse fluidly, leg crossing over leg, walked sideways until Shep cued him to stop. After making a figure eight crossing the ring this way, he moved the horse into a collected canter, lapped the arena twice, and began to execute flying lead changes. The horse’s dark gray forelock lifted and fell against his beautifully shaped head, which was held so exactly that—were this a horse show—any judge worth his salt would award him extra points. The animal was entirely focused, and so far as Lily could tell, hadn’t missed a single cue. As Shep al- ternated asking for the right and left lead, the horse’s hooves cut into the arena sand, throwing up spray just like the wake on a boat. Lily shivered. After five minutes Shep halted the horse, reached down and patted his neck affectionately, as if they were the only two breathing creatures on the planet. Lily saw Shep’s lips moving, speaking to the horse as he walked him, cooling him out before putting him away for the night. She wondered what it was a taciturn old man said so easily to horseflesh that he

found difficult to speak to humans. She would have given her eye- teeth to know.

Lily never grew tired of watching the world of her father’s ranch. Sometimes she wondered why it was she’d left. For sure she had better luck with horses than she did with men. It was dusk now, and she needed to get a sweatshirt or give it up and go indoors. Slowly Shep dismounted, placing a hand against his lower back as if he’d strained it. Picking up fifty-pound sacks of grain will do that to you, Lily guessed. He hated using the wheelbarrow and was al- ways too proud to ask for help. She’d say something to Pop, or for as long as she stayed, make sure to move the grain herself. She waited for Shep to come back outside, sit on the fence, and smoke a cigarette, but he didn’t. Maybe he was in the bunkhouse, lying on a heating pad. After awhile she latched the gate behind her and went up to the house.

Rose had already gone upstairs to her old room, the first one at the top of the stairs. Lily could hear her bumping around, probably tucking her sheets into hospital corners, plumping pillows, changing into some regulation nightgown appropriate for a forty-year-old woman. Lily hadn’t remembered to pack a nightie. She got into one of Pop’s old work shirts, poured a glass of wine, and took it upstairs. Rose sat on her bed, clipping her toenails. “Stop. We’ll get manicures and pedicures tomorrow,” Lily said. “Have a real girls’ day.”

Rose looked up. “You spend money on yourself like that every week?”

“Sure. Where is it written that women need to go through life wearing hair shirts?”

Rose gathered the clippings in her palm and tipped them into a wastebasket. “I guess I let all that go when Philip died.”

“So pick it up again. You’re not a hundred years old, Rose. There’s time for another man in your life if you want one.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She made a face. “I’m forty.”

Lily winked. “And at your sexual peak.” “I’m afraid.”

“You’re supposed to be.”

Rose set the scissors down. “Lily, you’re pretty, you have an educa-

tion and more than a little nerve. What do I have to talk to a man about? My kids? Which coupons I clip?”

Lily pulled a Nancy Drew out of the shelf above the bed and flipped its yellowed pages. “Mami never throws anything away, does she? All you have to do is tell him he looks nice, Rose. Ask him questions about himself. They love to answer. Just be yourself. Everything’ll unfold from there.”

“Maybe I don’t want another man.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and laid her face across them.

Lily’s heart went out to her sister, but Rose also pissed her off. All her life Rose was the “sensitive” one, the one Mami treated delicately. Lily was expected to “shape up.” Did Rose think she was the only woman on earth who’d had her heart broken? “That’s fine, too. Whatever you want. Let Doctor Donavan pine away for his ex-wife until the cows come home,” Lily said. “Like I care. I’m going to bed. Good night.”