Finding Casey (36 page)

“No,” Joseph said. “The museum has retablos coming out their ears. This one wants to stay here, where it's lived for two hundred years. We're going to move the doorway over a couple of feet in order to keep the nicho intact.”

Glory smiled. “I think that will make our Dolores happy. Who knows? Maybe she'll decide it's time to move on.”

“I doubt that very much,” Halle said. “Dolores is not going to abandon Colibri Road just because you found some old relic. We're her reason for being. Her audience.”

“You're probably right,” Joseph said. “Anything I can get for you?”

Glory smiled. “Right after you sweep up the dirt you tracked indoors you should call Juniper.”

“Sorry about the dirt. You know, I was thinking we could take Casey to visit my dad's farm. We could all go, even the dogs, get out of your hair for a few days.”

Glory reached over and tugged on his jeans. “No way. I like you in my hair.”

“Eww, stop,” Halle said. “None of that double-entendre mushy business while I'm in the room.” She added another pepper and Glory could hear the squeak of the needle going through the jalapeño's flesh. The smell was making her hungry, but then, what wasn't?

Joseph said, “
Hermana
, if that sounds suggestive to you, maybe you're the one with the dirty mind.”

“Right,” Halle said. “Takes one to know one.”

“I'm going to get the broom before this discussion goes out of control,” Joseph said.

Glory was ashamed of herself, complaining about a little bit of dirt, considering how full the house would be once Casey and Aspen arrived—and their dog. Such was life, handing you a new complication just when you thought your plate couldn't hold any more. Somehow you found the room. Besides, there was nothing she could do other than lie here, waiting. For Aspen to be released, for Casey to arrive; Halle, for her divorce papers; and, lest anyone forgot, the baby who was still without a name. They hadn't even gotten to Christmas.

Then she heard a shriek and saw that Halle was pressing her palms over her eyes and wailing. “I told you not to touch your eyes,” Glory said. “Joseph,” she called out, “there's eyewash in the master bathroom. Can you fetch it for my sister?”

“Right away,” he said.

“Does he have to be so freaking optimistic?” Halle said,
splashing water from her drinking glass onto her eyes, ruining the careful makeup she plastered on every morning.

“Unfortunately,” Glory said. “That's just the way he is.”

Juniper met Chico at the Plaza Starbucks. She walked in the door, looked around, and there he was, seated at the table near the front window, two coffees in front of him.

“Hi,” Juniper said. “I can't believe you'd voluntarily drive up in this weather.”

“I got you a latte, hope that's okay.”

“They're only my favorite,” she said. In her pocket, she felt her cell phone buzz. It was probably another text from Topher, and she didn't feel like answering it. After all she and Chico had been through, Topher's coffeehouse gigs and declarations of love seemed unimportant. Since the day they found Casey, Chico had called her every day, asking about her sister, how Aspen was doing, and what she was reading or listening to or just thinking about.

“The coffee's pretty good here,” Chico said.

“Not as good as the Standard's, but it's decent.”

Juniper's phone buzzed and vibrated. She took it out of her purse, frowned at it, and set it on the table between them.

“I heard from Louella,” Chico said.

“What did she say? I hope she liked my paper.”

“She loved the photos.”

“And the rest of it?”

“Well,” he said, “she said it was kind of ‘long.' ”

Juniper laughed. “It is. But it turned out to be a complicated story.”

“Speaking of stories, she had one to add to it. That's why I wanted to meet you.”

The cell phone buzzed again.

“Jakob Dylan?” Chico said.

She nodded. Fifteen texts this morning alone.

Why weren't you at my gig?

I thought you were going to help me proof my essay?

Where were you last night?

“At some point you're going to have to respond,” Chico said. He was dressed in a red-and-black buffalo-check wool shirt over a crisp white T-shirt, and one of those Elmer Fudd caps with ear flaps, and thank goodness, because they were so near the door that every time someone opened it to go in or out, it felt like a blast from the Arctic.

“I'm deciding what to say,” Juniper said.

“I bet I can help you with that.”

She handed him the phone. “Go for it.”

Chico turned it sideways and started typing. Juniper thought, Look at us, we're not even thirty years old, but we're all heading toward trigger-joint surgery. I should become an orthopedic surgeon. Too bad I hate blood. After a minute, he handed it back to her without having pressed SEND.

She read what he'd written and smiled. Then, looking up at him, making and without breaking eye contact, she pressed SEND. She turned the phone off and put it in her purse.

“I can't believe you did that,” he said.

“Why not? You pretty much said everything I was trying to say.”

“Do you want to go have lunch?” he asked. “My treat.”

“I'm not really hungry.”

“What about a refill on your coffee?”

She held up her hands, which were trembling. “I'm already flying on the caffeine express,” she said. “Tell me what Louella said.”

“Remember her saying one of her grandmothers worked for a white lady on Colibri Road?”

“Did she find any photos?”

He shook his head no. “Isn't it enough to discover that you guys are connected in another way besides Casey?”

Juniper sipped her latte. “I guess I'm addicted to sherds and bones, stuff I can hold in my hands. Was that it?”

“She said the lady she worked for took care of injured hummingbirds. Her garden was full of them.”

“We get a lot in the summertime,” Juniper said.

“I thought we might go to the Palace of the Governors's archives,” Chico said.

“Why would we do that?”

“Because if there are any photos or stories, that would be where to start looking for them.”

“Right now?”

“Why not?”

“Is this a date, or an anthropology thing?”

“Would that make a difference?”

She set her coffee down. “Let's go before you change your mind.”

“Don't forget your scarf.”

They stepped over the guitar player and his dog sitting outside Starbucks, and walked down San Francisco Street, passing holiday shoppers, women wearing Indian-blanket coats in patterns as old as time, couples headed for lunch at La Fonda. Even on the coldest day of the year Indians sat in the eaves of the Palace of the
Governors, jewelry laid out to sell. One vendor had a cache of antique postcards, and they stopped to look at them. “That's Acequia Madre,” Chico said. “Colibri Road is less than a block away. This photo probably dates to 1900, 1910.”

“If only there was a postcard of our street back then,” Juniper said. “Wouldn't that make the perfect Christmas present for my mom and dad?” She held up another card. “Look at that poor burro. He's got to be carrying an entire bale of hay.”

“Or you could think of it this way, he's packed his own lunch.”

She laughed and bought all ten postcards, thinking someday Aspen might like to see what old-time Santa Fe looked like. They walked down the sidewalk to the side entrance of the museum gift shop.

“They have the most popular photos for sale in the gift shop,” Chico said. “You can order anything from the digital archives.”

The computer in the gift shop provided instant access. While they browsed, the clerk chatted on the phone with some book vendor.

“No Colibri Road anywhere,” Juniper said, after trying all kinds of search options and coming up with the same result:
Your search has produced 0 records.

“Why does it have to be that exact road?” Chico said.

“Duh. Because we live there?”

“Think about it,” Chico said. “That's like saying only the turquoise mined in the state is worth making into jewelry. It all comes from the same earth. Try Acequia Madre, Canyon Road, and the Plaza.”

In a sepia-toned photo entitled “Acequia Madre near Manhattan Street,” they studied a mill built of adobe bricks and
stone. In another photo, dated 1910, a little girl with a bowl haircut stood in the road next to a dog that reminded Juniper of Curly, Casey's dog. That photo lifted Juniper's heart and at the same time broke it, because while it was a cliché that pictures could be worth a thousand words, it meant nothing if you didn't speak the same language. They tried to puzzle out a surviving page of a newspaper handwritten in a spidery, thin script.

“The handwriting is gorgeous,” Juniper said, “but I can't read a word of it.”

“There's actually a computer program that deciphers cursive,” Chico said.

“You're such a geek.”

“Takes one to know one.”

Juniper smiled. Chico leaned in so close to her that she could smell the soap he'd used to wash his face. They scrolled though photos of a fire at the men's club just off the Plaza, the smoke clouds reminding her of Casey's pot, the object that had taken Juniper from pride to anger to an unthinkable reunion. There was an article on a flood that had been traced back to the 1600s, decipherable by the absence of trash in a layer of strata, and there were so many portraits of white men with mustaches that a stranger might think there were no other ethnicities in early Santa Fe. “Rich men, outlaws, and criminals,” Juniper said. “Where are the ordinary people?”

“They're the ones behind the camera,” Chico said.

Juniper looked through every photo in the store, finally settling on the Acequia Madre photo of the girl and the dog. “If only this dog was a hummingbird,” she said. “Then it would be a great Christmas present.”

Chico opened the door for her. “This date isn't over yet. Follow me.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the Frank Howell gallery. We're going to find you a hummingbird.”

A few minutes later they stood in front of a print of Frank Howell's painting
Reunion.
A woman was front and center, the subject of the painting. Her eyes were closed, her arms lifted, palms facing upward. She wore some kind of deer-hide garment, and her long hair was streaked with silver, like a grandmother's. Surrounding her were twenty hummingbirds in flight. “Oh, my gosh, Chico,” Juniper said. “How did you ever find this?”

“School,” Chico said. “In Howell's biography, he said, ‘The painting is a wonderful kind of inner mirror, and reflects the inner you, not your external appearance.' “

“I'm impressed. How do you know so much about art?”

He shrugged. “A long time ago, I wanted to be a painter. I was never much good at it, but occasionally I dabble.”

“Are you kidding me?” Juniper said. “Can I see your paintings?”

“Let me think about it,” he said, and Juniper felt the distance between them return to TA and student.

She looked at the price tag. “Too bad this print costs more than my car,” she said.

“This isn't the only painting he did with hummingbirds,” Chico said. “Excuse me, where are your posters?” he asked the clerk. The man pointed toward a bin near the window. Chico began paging through them.

“There's something I've been wanting to say to you,” Juniper said.

Chico didn't look up. “Is this about your grade again?”

“It's not about school. There's something I want to tell you, but I'm nervous.”

He pulled three posters out and leaned them against the wall. “None of these is over forty bucks. My personal favorite is
White Hummingbird,
but
Two Sisters
might be the most appropriate choice.”

“You're such a damn stork,” she said.

“A stork? What did I do now?”

“Maybe you should be asking yourself what you didn't do. Did you even hear what I said?”

He looked at his watch. “I should get going before it gets dark,” he said. “One of my headlights is out.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

He looked back at her. “What did I do wrong?”

“Haven't you ever had a girlfriend?”

“Not since grade school. Harriet Wilkinson. I gave her my St. Christopher medal and she threw it in the dirt. I've kind of given girls a wide berth since then.”

“That's a good reason to retreat from the female gender.”

“It made sense to me.”

She reached out her hand and took his. “What a load of bullshit. You've liked me since the day I brought those pottery sherds into Dr. Carey's office.”

“I won't deny it.”

“Why didn't you say something?”

“For a brilliant student of anthropology, you are a very slow girl,” he said, and smiled at her. In fact, he couldn't seem to stop smiling. He squeezed her hand, got brave enough that he put his arm around her, and kissed her forehead. In the background, they heard the clerk clear his throat and they broke
apart. Juniper could feel the ghost of his lips against her cold face.

“So we're buying the albino hummingbird and the
Two Sisters
,” he said to the clerk. “Can you put on a ribbon or gift wrap?”

“Happy to,” the man said, and wrapped each print in butcher paper, applying a purple stick-on bow. “Thanks for shopping local, and happy holidays. After the first of the year we'll be relocating to Canyon Road.”

“Thanks,” Juniper said.

Posters in hand, they walked out onto the sidewalk, into the street, at the corner of Washington and Palace of the Governors, chained off from through traffic. They stepped carefully around icy patches, passing shoppers toting bags and gifts. A snowflake or two whirred through the air. A hotel van pulled to the curb of the Inn of the Anasazi, unloading passengers, and that was when Chico finally got up the nerve to kiss her. Topher had been an accomplished kisser with all the right moves, easy for her to follow. Chico was learning as he went along, and Juniper knew that what she would remember about this moment was that. Chico being so tall she had to stand on her tiptoes, and still he had to duck his head to reach her. It occurred to her that the more they kissed, the better he was doing. When they broke apart, they looked at each other and neither said a word. They began walking toward his car as if it had been the plan all along. Juniper tried to memorize every detail so she could relive the moment later: the sidewalk cold under their feet, the store windows lit up and decorated for Christmas, how the snow appeared blue in the shadows. The wind chapped her face and she didn't care how red her cheeks were, or that she
wasn't wearing makeup, or had coffee breath, or any of those things. Chico's walk relaxed, in tune with her step for step, and she thought,
I could spend the rest of my life with this guy. Out of all the people on the planet, how is it possible we found each other?