The Wilder Sisters (17 page)

The photographer handed his camera to an assistant. Mami was laughing. He kissed her cheek. Rose’s heart skittered in her chest. Maybe
nobody
was happy within the confines of marriage. Then, for no reason at all, she thought of Philip and got mad at herself that she’d more or less sat with her hands in her lap the entire length of their

marriage, allowing him to make out the budget, say when they could afford a vacation (usually fishing, camping—something he wanted to do), choose a new car without asking her input. When he’d died Rose felt as if someone had dunked her face first into ice water. Over the past two years she’d learned the ropes, even if sometimes they felt like barbed wire in her hands.

“Can you believe that smart-ass waiter is ignoring us?” Lily said, holding up her hand like a second-grader who needed permission to go to the lavatory. “You’d think they could lay out a few chips and salsa if the service is going to be this slow.”

Rose shrugged. “It’s La Fonda. What did you expect?”

“I don’t care if it’s the freaking White House, Rose. How much can a bowl of chips cost?”

“A fourteen-ounce bag goes for $1.79 at the market where I shop.” “My point exactly.” Lily waved her napkin at the waiter. Her semaphoric antics were amusing the people at the next table. “So

glad someone is getting a thrill out of all this,” she remarked. “Look at the greyhounds,” Rose said. “Aren’t they beautiful? They

look like echoes of one another, almost coordinated in size and stature.”

“The blue one’s kind of cute,” Lily offered, “if you like bony.”

Blue was the color everyone associated with greyhounds. Racing had all but bred it away, believing blue to be unlucky. Their long narrow muzzles pointed this way and that. A makeup person touched a powder puff to the blue dog on the far left. “I wonder what shade of powder matches a dog,” Rose asked.

“Probably eye shadow,” Lily said.

The animal wrangler stood behind the makeup lady, every now and then shaking a rattle that made the dogs prick their ears and look his way. Thin, in a cowboy hat and faded jeans, weathered in the face, he was as about as Santa Fean as they came. Rose tried to imagine what amount Californians would pay him for handling these utterly docile animals. Probably enough to cover his winter rent, keep him in beans and rice until spring. In the end the photo would go on some fundraising poster for a soirée to which only important people would be invited. Mami would make an entrance late in the evening, leading one of the dogs, looking so gorgeous that she would touch everyone’s hearts, and their wallets would fall right open.

The waiter arrived, and Lily begged for chips as he set down their second drinks. “I have hypoglycemia,” she told him.

“Really. Can you spell that?” he said as he turned away.

“That was friendly.” Lily rested her face on her arms, spread out on the table in front of her. “Maybe we should go back to the ranch.”

“We just got here. What about my free dinner?”

Lily pulled her cell phone from her purse. “I’ll phone Pasquale’s.” “If they don’t have any reservations, we could always eat at the

communal table.”

The rum appeared to be having its effects on Lily, who pushed away her second drink. “By then I’ll have sobered up.”

“It’s pretty hard to get a table at Pasquale’s unless you know God,” the waiter offered, setting a teacup-size bowl of tricolored tortilla chips down on the table. The salsa container he placed alongside it reminded Rose of Amanda’s old doll dishes. It couldn’t have held more than two tablespoons. “Harry’s Roadhouse. Down toward Lamy. Half the price and twice the atmosphere. Interested?”

He spoke to Lily alone, as if Rose were her imaginary friend. Lily gave him double-stink eyes, cold enough to stop his heart.

“Wait a second. I was
invisible
for the last ten minutes while I was desperately trying to get your attention, I was too stupid to spell a valid medical condition, and now you want me to go to dinner with you? I’m confused. I thought you were here to serve, not annoy. FYI, pal, I am not
remotely
interested in anything you have to show me except a few more chips than this.”

The way he studied Lily, it crossed Rose’s mind that the waiter could be a writer. Frequently they bothered people just to catalog their reactions. It seemed you couldn’t throw a rock in Santa Fe without hitting one. They worked the galleries, bussed tables, or gave massages while they waited to be discovered, and resented every customer who walked in the door. Of course, to be fair, that pretty much described artists, too.

He pocketed his order pad and smiled. “So, do we have a date?” “In your dreams.” Lily dunked a twenty-dollar bill into the dregs of her drink. She took Rose by the hand and led her toward the elev-

ator. “This town has definitely changed.” “I warned you.”

The drinks, the chips, plus tax—Rose figured Lily had stiffed the

waiter for at least three dollars of the tab, not to mention leaving no tip. Embarrassment factor aside, she thought her sister had behaved like a hero. She was smiling when the elevator let them off in the hotel lobby, immune to the flash of the tourists’ cameras angling for a shot of the O’Keeffe painting next to the registration desk. More than anything, it resembled a slice of burned toast. Rose could look at that any time she wanted in her own kitchen. “Okay, Lily. You said you wanted to go shopping. I know just the place to spend your money.”

The narrow streets off the plaza sloped down toward Water Street. On various corners shrubs of pale green native sage gave off a faint perfume. It was a lovely fall day, warm enough for sunscreen and a hat. The sisters blended in with the constant swarm of visitors. “If we run into Mami, we run into Mami,” Rose said. “Let’s just not sweat it.”

She waved hello to various shopkeepers she knew, and made Lily stop in front of the Raven Gallery window display so she could look at the new Kit Carson jewelry display. His silver work had ushered in the “new” New Mexican trend—zoot-suited coyotes, Grateful Dead guitar-playing skeletons, cacti studded with coral where the blossoms should be. “Oh, look at those,” Rose said, pointing to ear- rings featuring a coffee cup with two gold beans dangling beneath.

“Buy them,” Lily urged her.

Rose laughed as she pulled her sister away. “Sure. Right after I win the lottery.”

At Chelsea Court she opened the door expecting to give Lily a thrill, because Ginny, who ran the place, sometimes brought Rio, her red Queensland heeler to work with her, along with the grey- hound she’d adopted from Mami. Ginny’s clothing line was distinctly non-Santa Fe, so tailored it reeked of class. Her stock was upscale but not entirely unaffordable. On a shelf in her closet Rose had a black cashmere sweater from this store that was five years old and still looked as nice as the day she’d bought it—on sale. Ginny hugged Rose and said hello. “It would have to be the one day I leave Rio at home,” she apologized.

“That’s all right.” She introduced her sister, and the two women talked heeler stories for a few minutes.

Behind them a customer was flipping angrily through the racks, her arm full of things to try on. Rose was wondering what had upset

her when she realized that the customer was Leah Donavan. Rose studied her beautiful, bored face and tried to imagine Austin kissing it.

While Ginny rang up a customer’s purchases, Rose touched Lily’s arm and whispered, “That’s her.”

“Who?”

“The ex he can’t get over.”

Lily walked over, stood alongside Leah, and began collecting her own assemblage of try-ons. Periodically she turned to Rose and flashed a wicked smile.

Don’t you dare
, Rose mentally begged her. She wished she’d called out to Mami, because surely that would be easier to endure than whatever Lily was up to. When her sister ducked into the fitting room, Rose saw two choices before her: She could sit on the couch and wait for Lily to come out and model or more likely make a scene, or she could walk over to Leah Donavan and say hello first. Fueled by her rum and Coke, she opted for the latter.

It was easy to see why Austin couldn’t forget her. Some women were put together better than others—finely boned in the face, eleg- ant hands with tapering fingers, legs so long regular pants had to be let down to touch their ankles.
The rest of us console ourselves by being good cooks
, Rose thought. “Leah?” she said, and extended her hand. “Rose Flynn. I wonder if you remember me? I work for Aus- tin.”

Leah’s anger dissipated, replaced by a brief, automatic smile. “Oh.

You’re the girl who does the books, right?”

Rose nodded.
I am that forty-year-old girl, indeed
. “That’s a lovely jacket,” she said, pointing to a hanger Leah was holding. On it hung a sage green silk blazer studded along the lapels with bugle beads. “It almost looks like an antique. Ginny finds such unique things.”

Leah held it up, reconsidering. “I was thinking of putting it back.” “It seems perfect for you.”

“Yes, but Austin hates this color on me.” Leah set down her armful of clothes on a sale table and slid the jacket on. She stood in front of the three-way mirror and looked at herself, carefully assessing the angles. Rose knew before she’d tried the jacket on that it would look good, but Leah’s dark hair, her olive skin, even her burgundy nail polish complemented the jacket as if it had been designed for her. It fell to mid-thigh and made her blue jeans look formal.

“Austin’s wrong,” Rose said, and meant it.

Leah buttoned the jacket, looked over at Rose, and this time her smile was genuine. “Ginny,” she called out. “Put this on my account. Hold all the other stuff for me, will you? I’ll be back.”

Then she was gone, wearing the jacket as if it had belonged to her for years. The shop door’s old-fashioned bell tinkled as she pulled it shut. Lily tapped Rose’s shoulder. She was dressed in the very same jacket, and all it did was make her look short and slightly an- emic. “Ginny,” she whispered mockingly to her sister, “hold the earth for me, will you?”

“Like poking fun at her’s going to accomplish anything.” “Hey, at least I wasn’t telling her how great she looked.” “She did look great. Why should I lie?”

“Oh, Rose,” Lily said. “You’re so naive. I’ve half a mind to force you into buying those earrings.”

“Sure. Then next month when my mortgage payment’s due, I’ll seal them in an envelope and send them to the bank. I’m sure they’ll love that.”

Their next stop was LewAllen and LewAllen, where Lily pored over the jewelry cases while Rose read a pamphlet on custom-designed silver charms. Her eye was immediately drawn to one called “Homespace,” which featured a tiny adobe compound carved into the cylinder-shaped bead. “We all need a Sacred Homespace,” the copy read, “a place to rest our weary souls.” “Stand Up and Look Over the River,” was the name of another, which basically translated to, “Lift your head out of the sand, you dodo.” Amanda would choose that charm, Rose knew. In all endeavors, including theft, her daughter looked forward. Lily didn’t believe Amanda had taken the money. What Lily knew about motherhood could fit in the Bell Tower Bar’s salsa dish.

Lily smoothed a length of variegated purple rock climber’s rope across the counter. On each end were S-shaped silver clasps, which could be removed to slide charms like the ones Rose was admiring over the rope. From a box with tiny separate compartments, Lily selected letters to spell out Buddy Guy. Each charm cost ten dollars. Lily said, “Plus I want a dog bone charm on either side and a couple of those ones with hunks of turquoise, too, separating his names. A dog that has never let me down deserves this collar.”

“Absolutely,” the clerk agreed.

Over the store’s piped-in music came that song Rose always switched off when she heard it on her car radio. She didn’t know the title, and she didn’t care to, but the girl who sang it was named Jewel, just like Austin’s horse. In a voice that sounded husky from crying, the singer tried to explain to a man who didn’t want her that they were meant for each other, that their being together was larger than trying to stay apart. Standing alone at the store’s window just now, and plenty of other times, say five miles from anywhere riding Max, deep in her marrow Rose felt drawn to Austin Donavan exactly that way. It was as if an invisible hand had been placed against each of their necks and were slowly guiding them one toward the other, toward the never-ending near misses. Mami insisted that God had a plan for every single person, and that occasionally he erased and penciled in new events, but that most of them were written in that really soft black pencil that smudged to unreadability if you tried to change your answer. Rose couldn’t believe that Philip’s death had been part of a larger plan. They’d married when she was eighteen. After twenty years and two kids together, God needed him back? If a person looked hard enough, reminders of inevitability were everywhere, even in these foolish silver charms.

All that belly-warming rum and Coke began to turn on her. Rose knew she’d better sit down, or better yet, breathe some fresh air. Maybe what Paloma had been warning her all along would happen had happened. But she could’t fall in love with a drunken vet who would never love her back. That was downright stupid.

The final figure on Lily’s invoice horrified Rose, who couldn’t imagine spending that much money on a necklace for herself, let alone a dog. “I’m going to duck into the cathedral for a minute,” she said.

Her sister sighed impatiently.

Rose pointed her finger. “Don’t go making that noise at me. Nobody asked you to come along. I can light a candle all by myself.” “I just don’t get it. What has God ever done for you, especially

recently? Your husband croaked, your kids are all screwed up.”

Rose knew Lily was right about her children, but it still stung to hear anyone talk like that. “I can’t explain faith to someone who doesn’t have it. Either you feel the presence of God or you don’t.”

Lily tucked her receipt into her purse and waited for the clerk to

box up the dog collar. “You’re not getting me inside a church.” “Nobody asked you. I’ll meet you outside in half an hour.”