The Wilder Sisters (16 page)
“Do you think I’m feeling sorry for myself?” Rose asked stridently. “I’m not. I’m just being practical.”
“The hell you are. You’re chicken. Pleasant dreams.” “Lily?”
“What now?”
Rose looked near tears. “I had a good time today. I’m glad we made up.”
“Me too. See you in the morning.” She let Rose hug her good night. Out on the porch swing, Lily rocked and thought about Tres Quintero. On guys like Paul Newman or Richard Farnsworth, every wrinkle looked rugged, every silver hair glinted with sexual health. Tres Quintero seemed to be aging like that. His handsome face at thirty-six was different from how it had looked at eighteen, but it was still compelling to look at, however briefly she had done so. Lily touched her upper lip where her own fine wrinkles made the skin feel loose, dusty. The dry air of Floralee required slathering on the moisturizer. She understood where Rose was coming from. Going back out there time after time wasn’t just scary, it made a woman world-weary. But if a person gave up on love, all that was left was money and horses. Horses got old. You had to constantly break in new ones. Money went hand in hand with paying taxes, and what remained wasn’t any fun if there wasn’t somebody to spend it with
you.
In the gravel driveway in front of the house, Buddy was perform-
ing some odd little dance, trying to get Lily’s attention. He looked like a doomed helicopter might look, had important blades been shot off by the enemy, and fatal impact imminent. Chachi sat calmly observing the show. Lily figured Shep had fed the little beggars along with the ranch dogs, so she ignored his antics, curled up in her sleeping bag, and waited for the wine to deliver her to dream- land.
“I’ve decided we’re going shopping,” she said at breakfast.
Rose set her spoonful of blueberries back into the dish of milk. “The outlet place?”
Lily snorted. “Those places are a total rip-off. Nothing under size twenty-four and ugly colors. We’re going to Santa Fe.”
“Maybe you can afford the shops there; I can’t.”
Lily poured herself a cup of coffee and added cream. “There’s all kinds of shopping, including window. Come on, Rose, it’s civiliza- tion.
“Everything’s changed,” Rose said. “Mediterranean restaurants. Year-round tourists. Unbelievable traffic. Cerrillos Road is the biggest eyesore ever invented.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Lily said. And then her pager went off.
They could hear it trilling from the confines of her purse.
“Philip had one of those things,” Rose said. “He wore it clipped to his belt as if he couldn’t breathe without it. It always managed to go off at the damnedest times.”
“Really?” Lily said, thinking that there were a lot of things Philip couldn’t seem to get along without, and how it was likely that they paged him, sometimes pretending to be customers, and probably met him for long, slow afternoons in really nice hotels. Well, if Philip was dead, what good would come of telling his widow what a cheating s.o.b. he was? “It’s probably nothing. Let me check my messages and then we can blow town. Dress nice, Doctor Flynn.”
“Doctor?”
“Yep. Today you are going to be Doctor Flynn of the Santa Fe Medical Center, and I am going to take you to lunch and explain how you cannot live without my company’s medical products. Then we are going to eat a really good meal, starting with appetizers, and charge it to my American Express corporate card. Next we’ll shop LewAllen and LewAllen for some silver trinkets, ogle whatever walks by in trousers, and decide if it is worthy of Wilder women’s attention.”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“Rose!” Lily took her bowl away, ate a few spoonfuls of the blue- berries, and then pointed the spoon at her. “This is how
regular
people live
regular
life. Corporations expect it. It’s like golf for men. They build greens fees and expensive booze into the budget. Now go take your shower and leave off worrying for ten minutes already.” Lily recognized the flashing number right away; it was Eric, her boss, calling from California. She punched in her blocking code so he wouldn’t know where she was calling from. Then her calling card number, the secret access code that was the same as her PIN number at the ATM machine, finally his number, and then she waited for
him to answer. “What now, Eric?”
“The personal relationship you’ve developed with your clients is in peril, Lily. Get your ass back here and smooth plumage.”
“Haven’t we been through all this already?”
“Ty’s doing a really good job, better than I thought he could. I’ve been thinking maybe I should give him half your territory.”
Lily scratched Buddy’s head, which was resting on her knee. “Nice try, but you forgot I have a brain and Ty can’t find the john without a detailed map.”
“You want the truth?”
“Well, I like it a whole lot better than this lame bullshit.” “There’s been a dip in your sales, and if you aren’t back by the
end of the week, I’m going to have to replace you. Understand that’s not what I want to do, Lily, it’s just the way things are. Policy.”
Lily covered the phone with her hand so Eric wouldn’t hear her laughing. “I’ve been gone what—four days? I have two massive bonus checks coming from orders I placed
last week
. How can my sales be dropping?”
“Where are you, Lily?”
The connection sounded like her boss was in a wind tunnel. She bit her thumbnail and straightened a painting on the wall above her father’s desk. It was new, but its subject was the same: Poppy Wilder, nude, artfully draped in a blanket. Artists waited in line to paint her even though she was sixty-two. Lily wondered how warped her own psyche must be, having seen so many nude photos and paint- ings of her mother from such an early age. That had to leave scars. “On vacation, just like I told you.”
“Physically, where might that be?”
“This great little town, Eric, just north of None of Your Business.
If this isn’t life or death, I’m hanging up.”
“Wait.” She could hear the nerves in her boss’s voice fraying. “There’s a rumor going around that Manhattan Instruments might be staging a buyout.”
“Rumors are rumors. No reason to panic.”
“That means we might not have jobs next month.”
“Good. Aren’t you tired of working? I am. Maybe I’ll start a new career as a waitress.”
“Right, Wilder. I can just see you scaling down to an ’89 Tercel and a studio apartment. Yeah, that’ll happen.”
“Stranger things have.”
“What if it’s true? You know the first thing they’ll do is clean house. They’ll bring in new people, and we’ll be out on the side- walk.”
“Then dust off your skateboard. I wouldn’t fret this, Eric. Worrying will give you an ulcer.”
“If I were you, I’d cancel your leave and get over to every account, reassure the docs, bring doughnuts, CYA big time.”
“But you’re not me.”
“Hey,” he said, “Fair warning. You don’t believe me, log on to the Internet and see for yourself.” He hung up.
Lily groaned, switched on her laptop, which she never traveled without, waited forever for the damn AOL link, and hit the graph icon at the top of the screen. Her company’s stock was up. Every fifteen minutes the exchange updated the figures, so it was a trust- worthy indicator. A rise could mean great things, or it could mean an impending buyout. Rumors like that flew all the time, though. She clicked on
Reuter’s
, didn’t see anything besides some new Mi- chael Jackson baby stories, clicked out, then noticed she had an e- mail flag.
“I miss your sweet little box. Give me another chance, baby,” Blaise had written. Two whole sentences. He’d even spelled the words right.
She thought of the good sex they’d enjoyed on those rare but memorable occasions he hadn’t drunk so much he lost his erection. She tempered this memory with the numerous times he’d embar- rassed her in front of clients by talking stupid, or kicked Buddy out of the bedroom, or—for a really pleasant memory—called her Squaw, which roughly translated to the
c
word. She logged on to Mail Center
Controls, put a block on his incoming e-mail, and then deleted him and decided there was time to wash her hair.
They paid five bucks to park the Lexus in La Fonda’s lot, walked around the plaza once, then ducked into the Plaza Café, ordering lattes to go. While their drinks were being made, Rose stood at the cashier’s island, chatting with the hostess, who had gone to school with Amanda. She was a pretty girl, Indian, but in Lily’s opinion she could have stood about three grand worth of orthodontia. Rose insisted on paying for the coffee, and Lily thought it was pointless to argue over five dollars, so she let her.
“Coffee,” she said, taking the cup in her hand. “If we can only find pesto, this day will be perfect.”
Outside the fall wind blew, and there was a huge line—it stretched almost to the plaza—for the O’Keeffe museum. At first Lily thought perhaps that was what the commotion was about, but then she saw a stream of people advancing from the opposite direction. It was a film crew, everyone wearing surf-company shorts, expensive sunglasses, and acting as if Rolexes and attitude meant they owned the town square.
“Wonder what that’s all about,” she said, nudging Rose.
Rose pried the lid off her coffee and sipped. “They’re always filming something or other here. It’s gotten so trendy to have New Mexico as a background in your movie. I think lots of stars just want to hang out where the sky’s not smoggy. It makes money for the city, but just like nuclear energy, the fallout left behind is ours to clean up.” She pointed in a southeasterly direction. “There’s no ugly blue sign to warn you, but that shop second from the end is a Gap.” “A
Gap
?” Lily was furious. The only chain business in the plaza had always been—and always
should
have been—Woolworth’s. Now going-out-of-business signs plastered every window. She snapped her head to look where Rose had pointed and saw the reason for the film crew, the move-your-ass-this-is-important attitude of the pho- tographer’s assistants. Dressed in something from the late great Versace, walking their way, leading a brace of six greyhounds, was
their mother, Poppy Wilder.
Rose dropped her coffee. Lily felt the hot liquid splatter her ankles, but no pain registered. She took a firm hold of her sister’s arm. Just
look at the woman: She qualified for the senior discount, but that body filled the gray evening dress the way cognac spilled down the bell curve of a brandy snifter. Not to mention her racehorse neck, ancestral cheekbones, the waist-length black hair with the silver streak spreading out from her widow’s peak. Add to that some nervous, elegant dogs, and Rose and Lily were immediately cast out as understudies to the star who never got laryngitis and wore shoes two full sizes smaller than they did.
“You want to skip the manicures?” Rose said.
“Sure.” Lily threw her coffee into a trash can, and the sisters raced toward the nearest establishment that served alcohol, which just happened to be La Fonda hotel.
ose stared down into her tumbler of ice. A few minutes ago there had been several dollars’ worth of rum and Diet Coke in
the glass. Now it was sloshing around inside her belly, warming her from the inside out. Lily had ordered the drinks. “They’ve been away a couple of weeks,” she told her sister. “You know how Mami gets restless. She probably flew the plane back alone.”
“I don’t care,” Lily said, peering down from the Bell Tower Bar on the hotel roof. It was the perfect spot to observe the sunset, in addition to the plaza spectacle, now proceeding down toward Paseo de Peralta. “I’m just not ready to see her.”
“Why not?”
“Because Mami will give me that look, and then she’ll want to know every little detail about my life. Then she’ll start in with the hocus-pocus and I’ll lose it, Rose, I swear I will. It’ll be worse than when I saw Tres Quintero in the hardware store.”
“You saw Tres? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Lily stirred her drink with her finger. “It was one of those moments I’m trying like hell to forget. Talking about it only makes it worse.” “And you expect me to talk to you about Philip!” Rose sat back against her wrought-iron chair. The bar wasn’t crowded. Only a few tourists speaking another language sat in the alcove by the trademark bell. From this distance she and her sister could be anyone, but Poppy Wilder knew things sometimes even before they happened.
Fear of her mother’s premonitory abilities had kept Rose’s sex life in check until
she married Philip Flynn. The extent of Rose’s ESP reached far enough for her to be sure it was only a matter of time before Mami discovered them.
Her mother walked the elegant hounds back and forth across the plaza grass. Camera flash glinted off her hair, causing Rose involun- tarily to reach up and touch her own. This probably had something to do with shutting down dog tracks, as Mami was death on grey- hound racing. Austin treated several pets that had been retired from the track, and Rose had heard the horror stories: Dogs that didn’t place in the money or broke a toe ended up dead, with their left ears cut off so they couldn’t be traced back to a breeder. She thought greyhound racing was shameful, too, but nobody was champing at the bit to take
her
picture in an evening gown. Mami’s beauty had always struck Rose as a lot like the state of New Mexico itself. Take your basically rocky, water-deprived land, beat religion into it, throw in the persistence of culture, endow it with chiseled cheekbones, and watch it give birth to art, whose main purpose was to disturb, provoke, and above all commemorate. The best her daughters could do was stand back in awe.
Austin’s remark about her mother’s extramarital affair had struck something deep inside Rose—she didn’t quite know what. Instead of listening to Lily, Rose found herself thinking of ways to justify the eccentricities of her parents’ marriage. Her mother was at ease with the rich and famous, and because of this her causes flourished, so she was always raising money for one thing or another. To that end her photograph was often in the paper, which made it difficult to think of her as belonging exclusively to their family—her mother, Pop’s wife. Sometimes it seemed as if the union had endured because Pop willingly took a second chair to Mami, yet in the early years, as far back as Rose could remember, there had been tight-lipped silences and occasional absences. Rose believed wholeheartedly in the sac- redness of vows. It wasn’t morally right to look outside your mar- riage for happiness, but it was certainly human to try to make yourself happy. Rose had just never expected to exercise that partic- ular argument using her own mother as example.