The Wilder Sisters (26 page)
As she dusted her breasts, her neck, her ankles, her wrists, Rose told herself this was no crazier than answering a singles’ ad. If this thing between herself and Austin was meant to be, maybe the powder would hurry it along. She emptied the last fine grains of the powder onto the hair between her legs and shivered when they met her skin. Like insurance, she tucked the remainder of the unused packets into
the medicine cabinet. She got into her bed and pulled the flannel sheets up to her neck. Sometimes it felt so good to sleep naked, her flesh clean and raw from a bath, nothing separating her from the bedding.
Between her mattress and box spring lay the statue of Saint An- thony, face down, wrapped in the ten-dollar bill and a photograph of Austin that had appeared in the
Floralee Facts
not long ago.
Austin Donavan, DVM
, the reporter had written,
donates his surgery to save the school’s pony from colic
.
Trying to get comfortable, Rose turned until she was lying flat on her back, staring up at the expanse of the ceiling. She couldn’t help but slide her hand down her belly and touch herself, there, between her legs, where she ached so much that the emptiness she felt kept her from sleeping. She imagined what it would feel like to have Austin inside her, his fingers touching her instead of her own, or his mouth, the ghost she confronted every time she touched a lipstick to her lips, the mysteries and surprises they would encounter if they lay in this bed together. She told herself that it was foolish to believe she could heal him, and he her. But she had done exactly what the weaver told her to with the statue. She’d lit the candles, taken the bath, rubbed the powder into her flesh, every last bit of embarrassing hocus-pocus.
When it didn’t work, somehow she would learn to live with it.
’m pretty sure there’s no Starbucks in northern New Mexico,”
Lily said at their cars. “Probably we should wait until they build one.”
Tres laughed. “I know of one or two cafés where people can drink plain old regular grind and talk over old times.”
And get into real trouble
, Lily thought, because she was afraid that was exactly what was happening. Tres tucked his keys into his hip pocket and led her up the block to the Loving Oven, where the
i
had been cleverly fashioned out of a rolling pin. Tres sat down in a booth, and Lily took the place across from him. There were no other cus- tomers at this time of day, nothing to focus on except the lone waiter setting up tables for the dinner crowd. “Be with you in a minute,” he said, and Lily decided she’d just lay things on the line.
“Why now, Tres?”
“Why not now? Damn, it’s good to see you. I was worried I’d miss you. Your mother said this was the market you’d probably go to. You look wonderful, by the way.”
I look like hell
, Lily said to herself.
In my closet back in California I have Italian pumps that flatter my calves, and a black Armani sheath that would leave you breathless. Today, however, I’ve donned a sweat-stained denim ensemble, just for this reunion. Well, at least the manure caked on the soles of my riding boots is fresh
. She tried to smile. The waiter abandoned his task of smoothing tablecloths and attending bud vases and came over to take their order. “We’re not open for dinner for two hours yet,” he apologized.
“That’s okay,” Tres told him. “All we want is coffee.”
With a practiced calm, Lily ordered a latte.
It was New Mexico, not Santa Monica. The costly machinery and bottles of flavoring hadn’t made their way into the smaller eateries. “Can you tell me how to make that?”
Lily tried to explain. When he took out a pen and began taking notes, she said, “You know what? Just heat up some milk, fill a mug half full of coffee and pour the milk on top.”
“Okay.”
Tres ordered decaf.
“See what California’s done to me, Tres? I’m hopeless. I can’t order regular coffee.”
“From where I sit you don’t look terribly damaged.”
Lily leaned across the table. “Oh, but I am,” she whispered. “Driving in traffic all day, I want to murder old-lady drivers who can’t help getting feeble. If I met those women in New Mexico, I’d respect their age, their background, maybe even let them pass, but in California I just want to erase them.”
“I lived in northern California for ten years before I came home. If you don’t take public transportation you spend half the day on one bridge or another, tuning the radio for traffic updates. And for some real fun, try being on board BART when it breaks down and you realize you’re under water. Claustrophobia.”
Lily shuddered.
“What do you do that keeps you in your car so much?”
“I have a great job,” she said, explaining how she repped medical equipment, participated in research and development studies, trying to punch up success stories because being negative was such a drag. “Sometimes I’m right there in the room when they save a life. Once, this new mother, twenty-five years old, stroked out following a de- livery. There’s this new catheter device now that can seal off an- eurysms, stop bleeding in the brain. That girl woke up right there on the operating table and started talking to me. Got to send her home to her baby instead of a mortuary. I’ll never forget it.”
“You’re lucky,” Tres said. “To you like what you do for a living.” “Hold on there, cowboy. I said it was a good job, I never said I liked it. You remember how bad I wanted to run away from this
place twenty years ago?” “Sure. We both did.”
“Why is it when things get tough, the first place I run back to is Floralee?”
“There’s comfort in familiar places.”
“I don’t know. I think it goes deeper than that. Besides making me a lot of money, that job was making me nuts, Tres. It’s as if New Mexico’s the only place where I feel like my true self. What kind of cake career do you have that lets you hang around here instead of working nine to five?”
He made a face. “You’ll find this ironic, but my job was in the medical field, too. I took a personal leave.” He adjusted the salt and pepper shakers so their glass cylinders were evenly aligned. “It sounds stupid.”
“Just say it.”
“Okay. I wanted to do some writing.”
Lily grinned. “I remember you filling up those spiral notebooks in high school. You were the only person I knew who actually used every page. You had that cool fountain pen with the turquoise ink. It absolutely killed me that you wrote poems.”
“Yeah, I thought I was pretty deep.”
“You were deep enough to make me take off my clothes. Is that what you’re doing now? Writing poems?”
He shook his head no. “I’m keeping a journal.” “About what?”
“How it felt when my grandfather taught me to fly fish Navajo Lake, in the old days, before the tourists and speedboats ruined it. The change of seasons. Modern-day
penitentes
, you know, your basic New Mexico stuff.”
“Penitentes?” Lily said. “Those guys who flagellate themselves and lug crosses to Chimayo? Ick, Tres. That always gave me the creeps.”
“It’s fascinating,” he said. “One of the carvers who makes the statues of the
santos
is letting me apprentice to him. A few Anglos have joined the brotherhood. Spirituality’s good thing.”
“Just tell me you’re not into the cutting part of it.”
He spread his hands out on the table. “As you can see, I nick my- self with the chisels, but I promise I don’t do it on purpose.”
Lily regarded his beautiful, dark hands. She wanted to take them in her own, look them over closely. She wanted to see those carvings, too. “Thank God for that.”
“I need some time to consider all my options, decide where I want
to go from here. Up there in the cabin, on good days, the answers almost come to me.”
“Is all this reorganizing because you got divorced?” “Nope.”
He looked out the window at the passing traffic, and Lily studied the close-up view of his profile. In California he’d be lumped into the category of Mexican, all the subtleties of blood and family dis- missed due to the color of his skin. The prominent brow and ancestral cheekbones connected him to this particular region of the state, however. The full lips she used to kiss until they were sore made a part of him hers forever. Stepping back into that time when the whole world was open to the seemed about as possible as stepping forward into something else.
“I expected I’d be married forever, like my parents were. Whatever crossroads I was standing at way back when, I think I made a wrong turn.”
Lily imagined their daughter seated with them at this table, a family discussing her education versus a future with some young guy she was head over heels in love with. No way on earth would Lily have known how to advise her. “Everybody has regrets.”
“Yeah.” The coffee arrived, and they took hold of their cups. “Are you dating anybody special? Has one of those California muscle guys got hold of your heart?”
She took a sip of her coffee and burned the tip of her tongue. “Hey, did you know there’s no such thing as a California native? It’s true—even the surfers were originally from Cleveland.”
“So if surfers are out, what’s in?”
Lily peered into her mug, filled with more milk than coffee. “
Mas que nada
. Well, until recently, I was dating this cabinetmaker.”
“Hope he at least left you with custom cupboards.” Lily laughed. “I wish.”
“So, what did he do that caused him to go from recent to late?” “Where do you want me to start?”
“The end’s usually a pretty good place.”
“Blaise was a lot of fun when he wanted to be. We played softball on his construction crew’s team. You’ll be glad to know I’ve main- tained my stellar pitching arm. We rode horses, even though Southern California has maybe one trail left. He took me country- and-western dancing,
which they’ve turned into some kind of weird religion, I swear. All the couples wear matching shirts! When it came to the important stuff, though, he was selfish. I made myself believe that didn’t matter. One day he called me squaw. Then he did it more than once. It’s impossible to educate someone who says it twice. So,
adios
cabinet- maker.”
“Guess he didn’t know any better than to mess around with a Wilder woman.”
“Guess he learned. So how about you? Did you go through Hillsborough debutantes like M&Ms?”
“I’m afraid my most successful long-term dating relationship in the last three years has been with my left hand.”
Lily laughed. “I’m sorry. It’s just such a relief to talk to someone you’ve shared a past with, someone who doesn’t need to be wined, dined, or impressed, isn’t it? No stupid games.”
Tres took a drink of his coffee. “Whatever game we’re playing, at least it’s aboveboard. Lily, do you ever—”
The nostalgia flooding his face caused her to hold up her hand. “You would have gotten sick of me. One of us would have felt the other held us back. Bottom line, we were too young.”
“Sounds like a lot of good reasons.” “You got married to someone else, Tres.” “Only because I didn’t want to be alone.”
They were quiet. Lily wanted to run to her car, drive back to California, and quick find some brain-dead handsome hunk to take her mind as far from all of this as possible. “Weren’t you happy?”
“Tried to make myself believe I was. What I liked best about being married was just renting movies on the weekend, kicking back in my blue jeans, eating popcorn, reading the paper. Of course, most of the time it was Leah and I who did that. Debbie traveled a lot for her work. Which was where she met the guy she left me for.”
“Debbie’s an idiot.”
“Not really. We’re still friends on the days I don’t hate her. What made you run away from your job?”
Lily tried to paint an objective portrait of that woman dying during the gallbladder surgery. “Anymore good doctors are rare, it seems like. After the gallbladder lady it felt like my world was one of those Malibu landslides. Suddenly no place but Rancho Costa Plente made
sense. So here I am drinking makeshift latte and telling you my life story. Okay, man of mystery, your turn.”
At that moment he bumped her knee with his under the table. Lily pressed back. Tres laid a five-dollar bill down, anchoring it with his spoon. Pretending there was no urgency, they walked toward their cars, which were still in the market parking lot. Before Lily could open her door, Tres took hold of her, pulled her close, and held on. A minute later, he kissed her forehead. Kissing at eighteen was like the forest fires that had claimed so much of Bandelier a few years back, Lily imagined. Seventeen years later, people are aware of how long it takes to reforest the landscape.
Thirty-five miles up into the mountains she followed Tres’s truck to his parents’ old cabin. They parked alongside each other under the tall pines, and he unlocked the door. He laid down a Pendleton blanket in front of the fireplace, knelt and lit the logs in the grate. She set her purse on the table, next to his notebook computer and the stack of paper lying facedown next to the printer. Part of her wanted to go directly to the blanket, just lie down and get this over with. She looked around the cabin at his simple digs: There was a workbench with blanks of cottonwood and curly shavings. On it a half-finished statue of Jesus was wrapped in a green cloth. One glass, one plate, one bowl were stacked in the dish drainer. The neatly made double bed had a sleeping bag for a bedspread, pulled flat like a comforter. She was disrupting this peaceful den Tres’d made for himself. If she let him back into her heart, even briefly, those earlier losses that haunted her would ache even more. He came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.
“I’d better give my parents a call,” Lily said. “Where’s your phone?”
“Don’t have one.”
She reached for her purse and retrieved the cell phone, punching in the number of her parents’ ranch. Shep answered. “Sheppy, it’s Lily. Tell Mami I ran into an old friend and won’t be home—” she looked at Tres before finishing her sentence. He held his fingers against her cheek. “For a couple of days, maybe. If it’s important, she can reach me at the cell phone number. Please take care of Buddy for me.” She hung up before Shep could protest.