The Wilder Sisters (50 page)

ity, except for maybe one tiny slip. What an idiot I was.”

“You’re wrong,” Lily said. “Philip was the idiot. I’m sorry if I hurt you, bringing this up, but I should have years ago.”

“You didn’t hurt me. Philip did. All the way from the grave. I think I felt it was my fault, being so naive to assume he was faithful. It’s been bothering me a lot lately.”

“Why didn’t you talk to me about it?”

Rose shrugged. “I don’t know. After Austin, maybe I felt I had to prove I was strong. The Widow Flynn routine.”

Lily placed her hand on her sister’s arm. She rubbed it up and down for a moment. “Rose, he didn’t sleep with just anyone, he slept with Leah Donavan.”

Rose turned her head to look into her sister’s face. Lily stared back, unblinking.

“I saw them once, in Taos. I confronted him, and he made me promise not to tell you. It was easy at the time, since you weren’t talking to me anyway. Funny, isn’t it? The one time I have something important to tell you and I couldn’t. I intend never to let that happen again.”

Rose looked up at the altar with its gilt statuary glinting in the candlelight. Somehow the idea of Philip’s infidelity had been so much easier to bear when the woman involved was faceless. Leah Donavan—that made his cheating something else entirely, like learning your parents had adopted you but never told you, or leaving the scene of an accident that was your fault—acts that were harder to forgive. She thought of Thanksgiving night, the stupid incident with the potatoes, and Austin cleaning up after Leah—one way or another he was always cleaning up after her. Rose wished she’d flung the potatoes in Leah’s face. It struck her as absurdly funny that yet again, as if their lives had intersected in some Gordian knot, this knowledge tied her more firmly than ever to Austin. “You probably know what to do next,” she said to her sister. “How to put this in perspective. I envy you, Lily.”

“Don’t. All my life I was so jealous of you. You had this perfect life, two babies, your own little house, all the things I said I never wanted but ached for. When I figured out what Philip was doing, it hurt me, too. I felt like he was cheating on all of us. But not even that stopped me from wanting what you had. I still want that.”

Rose closed the prayer book and ran her thumb down its leather binding. “Excuse me? You had college and a career, and you got to travel all over the world. You make your own way, and you’re a better rider than I’ll ever be. If there was any envy involved, it was
me
wanting to be like
you
.”

“Stop it! I’d’ve traded all that in one single heartbeat to have what you had. I felt like I wasn’t allowed, like Mami didn’t want that kind of life for me, that only you deserved it.”

“Lily, I felt exactly the same way! Keep Rose in her little house, work-

ing menial jobs; don’t let her step outside that definition. Only Lily gets more. You don’t know how many times I hated you for your successes.”

They were quiet for a few minutes. Rose didn’t know what else to say, and every time Lily opened her mouth, she shut it. The repressed emotions eventually transformed into giggles. “You know what our problem is?” Lily said. “We know how to fight, but we can’t figure out how to get along.”

Just then it became very cold inside the church. Rose could hear the wind rattling outside, determined fingers working their way through the walls, as if the adobe were full of chinks. One of the doors bumped open, and both sisters jumped. An eerie howl of wind followed the blast of cold air, and the candles in the wrought-iron grate guttered. All but one of them blew out.

“Shep!” Lily cried out. “I can feel him here, can’t you?”

The skin on Rose’s cheeks felt prickly. For a fleeting moment it almost felt like fingers touching her face. Then the wind moved on, and the single candle remained, burning, in a church that had been built more than a hundred years ago by Spaniards who believed in their religion enough to leave behind this architecture as a testament. They were two sisters whose blood, however diluted, connected them to that. No more secrets remained between them. Rose took Lily’s hand and squeezed it tight. “Are you positive it was Leah Donavan?”

Lily nodded. “She really gets around, I guess, because Tres told me he slept with her once himself. Busy lady.”

Rose sighed. “Well, that’s going to take a while to sink in. Maybe I’d better light another candle to keep Shep company.” She got up and did just that, stood at the altar awhile, watching the wax puddle around the wick before she sat down in the pew and took her sister’s hand again.

Long ago Mami had told her daughters that the dead could see light, that lighting candles provided a medium through which some people could communicate with those who’d departed this earth. Perhaps because of that, or innately, both girls grew up adoring candles. They lit them for meals, during baths, and set birthday cakes ablaze whenever the opportunity arose. Rose closed her eyes and forced from her mind the image of Leah Donavan with Philip. She remembered Shep in a dozen different ways: Cutting the clinches on various horses’ shoes, mending fence felled by bad weather. Dog- cussing the fact that

nobody had invented affordable post-and-rail, let alone something that would last ten years. At her wedding reception, she’d witnessed Shep and twenty other cowboys performing the “gator,” that silly all-male line dance fueled by beer and bravado, in which they snaked across the dance floor in some kind of cut-loose brotherhood they would deny as soon as the sun came up. She thought of the proud way he’d insisted on taking care of himself after his pacemaker op- eration, the utter doggedness of the machine, and how Lily’d had to scream to it get disconnected in order for him to die. Even after he’d had the contraption installed, Shep still worked horses, but Pop usually managed to be alongside. He had taken CPR classes. He was always watching Shep out of the corner of his eye. How he must have worried. How much this must hurt him. It was like losing your brother, only worse, because Shep was more loving and faithful than any brother could be.

And she thought of Philip, too, taken from her in an instant by some drunken skier who probably had all manner of rationalizations for the “accident” and had tucked that unfortunate little episode into his past. How only now, after Lily telling her, she was able to understand what in the hell he was doing in that part of Taos when it wasn’t even his territory. Leah’s father had a furniture store there, and sometimes she helped out—or in this case, helped herself. Anyone but Leah Donavan, and the whole thing wouldn’t seem so ludicrous. She let go of Lily’s hand, which she had been grasping so tightly that her fingers tingled. “Maybe someday I can grow a big enough heart to forgive Philip, but I doubt I’ll ever forgive myself for being that blind. Like Shep used to say, ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’ I am going to miss him so much.” They put their heads together and cried, trading Shep’s dopey old sayings back and forth because it seemed important to share that, and to leave their tears in a place used to sorrow. They swabbed their faces with all the Kleenex Rose could scrounge from her purse, and exchanged tentative smiles. Whatever happened after today, the things they’d said to one another had made them equals. At the holy water font on their way out of the church, Rose dipped her middle fingertip into the water. Touching Lily’s forehead, between her breasts and each shoulder, she made the sign of the cross. “Even if you don’t believe,” she said, “What harm can come from a bless-

ing?”

Lily responded by dunking all her fingers—her thumb, too—then flicking the water in Rose’s face.

Rose gasped. “That’s sacrilege.”

“No, it isn’t,“ Lily said. “This is how bad girls bless themselves.

I’m sure it says so, somewhere in the Bible.”

Shep’s body was to be released the following day, to Mami and Pop, who in the few hours since his death had managed to get hold of both a plain pine casket and a friend with a backhoe who owed them a favor. Lily and Rose spent the night at El Rancho Costa Plente, beginning in their old bedrooms, and then around three in the morning, sleepless and hungry, they bumped into each other in the hall on the way downstairs to the kitchen for a snack. They ate crackers on the couch by the fireplace, which was still burning and, with the addition of another log, began to blaze. They intended to sit by the fire and keep each other company only until they could face their pillows again, but the next thing Rose knew, she awoke with Lily’s arm around her, both of them flopped back against the couch hugging throw pillows, eye level with two inquisitive grey- hounds who had very cold and equally wet noses.

“Oh my God,” Rose said, bolting upright. “I totally forgot Joanie and Chachi!”

“They won’t die one night on their own,” Lily said, rubbing her eyes. “I leave Buddy alone all the time.”

“They’re not alone. I left them at Austin’s clinic. It’s Max. Some- body has to give him his morning Bute. I better drive home before he goes so lame he can’t stand up.”

One of her mother’s neighbors stuck her head into the doorway. She was a ranchwoman all the way—short, blond, with leathery skin and heavy-duty turquoise jewelry. She stood there towel-drying a Nambé platter Rose remembered Mami using for every major holiday. “All that’s been taken care of by people who rise at a decent hour. Look at you girls. Sleeping like puppies, at your age. Get showered and dress. There’s a lot to be done before tonight, and your mother needs help.”

“Where’re Mami and Pop?”

“Went to the hospital to pick up the body. There’s rolls and coffee for breakfast, and somebody brought by a real nice honey-glazed ham. One thing for sure, girls. Nobody ever starves at a funeral.”

Around noon she and Lily pulled on boots and jackets to watch the men dig the grave. Pop and a few of his buddies dismantled the fence that surrounded the family cemetery, and then Denny Wayne drove his 416V CAT backward through the snow, stopping just short of where they planned to bury Shep. The ground was frozen a good twelve inches deep, so he hooked up the chisel attachment and hammered until the earth was tillable. Then the men removed the chisel, reinstalled the bucket, and he dug the grave.

Lily held Jody Jr. by the collar. The scent of dirt was strong in the air, and the mother of all the ranch dogs seemed bewitched by it.

“She wants to help dig the grave,” Rose said.

When the men got to the hand-shoveling part, Lily let Jody Jr. go. “I think Shep would have approved,” she said.

It hurt Rose’s eyes to behold that red earth, so out of season in December. Railroad ties separated the individual graves, which went back further than the Wilder family, to long before Pop had inherited the land. Out of respect for those buried here who weren’t his family, he’d fenced off the older section in chain link. When they were kids, it got Lily all spooked—
Think of all those dead people
!—but Rose kind of enjoyed walking around over there, though Pop had forbidden her to do so. He’d take off for town, and she knew the exact spot where the chain link sagged, just how far to pull it away without bending it permanently, how to slip under the fence and explore without anyone finding out.

The gravestones were so old that many of the inscriptions were no longer readable. The ones that were bought tears to her eyes:
HIJO MIJO
(little son of mine);
ADORADO MADRE
(beloved mother);
NUESTRO QUERIDO
(out dear). There were two, side by side, bearing the Montoya cattle brand, which went clear back to the time of land grants. And
MOTHER OF NONE: MOTHER TO ALL
, that one made her throat nearly close up. But some of them were so funny she couldn’t help but laugh, like
DUN LOGGIN, DUN COWIN, TOO
. And others were so plain and poignant that Rose could only imagine the whole, sad cloth of the stories that accompanied them, like the old rotting wood pieces that lay in the dirt in an unmistakable crib shape surrounding a pint-size headstone bearing the words
PRIMOGENITO HIJO
—firstborn son. Her absolute favorite remained the pink marble headstone etched with clouds, a single bird winging his way across the words:
GONE HOME
.

Leaning against the pile of shovels was a crucifix that would mark Shep’s grave, constructed of horseshoes welded together to form a cross. Rose wondered if the farrier had finished assembling it last night, if the silvery seams might still hold the torch’s heat. Later on her father would order a headstone similar to the other Wilder graves, and Pop would know just the right words to put down, or maybe it would simply be Shep’s name, the dates, and a design of a man on horseback. Then, on November the second of every year, like she always did, Mami would come here to decorate the final resting places, to leave behind some earthly token of what Shep had loved best, probably a paperback copy of
Leaving Cheyenne
.

“Rose!” someone called, and she turned away from the business of sober-faced men lifting shovels, aiming them at the broken earth, huffing out hot breath into the cold air as they squared the corners, and went to see how she could help.

“Don’t you wonder how Shep could have stood this?” Lily asked as they made their way through the crowd gathering at the graveside. Everyone was dressed in Sunday clothes, which for many meant flannel shirts that had been ironed. “Not the horsemen—he would have expected them—but all the others.”

Rose nodded. An endless trail of artists, musicians, photographers, not to mention the mayor of Floralee, Judge Trujillo, those few among the bedrock of Santa Fe—neither the new-money people nor the elite—but the old-time cattlemen, Hispano shopkeepers whose families went way back, the few journalists who still cared enough to write the truth about the state, even several priests were in attend- ance. “I didn’t realize this many people knew Shep.”

“Me neither.”

Mami shushed them. “Girls, this is the holy part of the service!” Rose noticed Paloma and Nacio in the crowd; then, standing a few people away, Benito, the restaurant manager—her boss, she guessed, if things worked out—and next to him, Austin Donavan, who held on to dog leashes, which must have meant Joanie and Chachi were in attendance. Benito held up his hand in greeting but didn’t smile. Rose fluttered her fingers in return, and she saw Austin