Sisterchicks in Sombreros (21 page)

“There might be other words for such manifestations of creativity.” I looked for the date on the newspaper. “Like you said, we have very strange relatives. Look at this date, 1992. I’m surprised the paper didn’t disintegrate.”

“It feels as if we stepped inside a time capsule.” Joanne reached for a framed color photograph on one of the built-in shelves. “Look, it’s Aunt Winnie. She was so young! Check out those sunglasses. If the points stuck out the sides any farther, she’d have birds landing on them as a perch!”

I laughed. “Pink, even. Aunt Winnie, you were all class in your day. I want to know where she found the hot pink lipstick to match the glasses. We’re definitely taking that picture back with us.”

Joanne looked at me. “Is that what you’re thinking? We should dismantle the place, take home whatever we can salvage, and sell the trailer?”

“I hadn’t gone that far in my thinking, but you tell me. What would we do with this place?”

Joanne looked around. “I don’t know. Let’s bring the groceries in out of the sun and think about it. We have a couple of days to mull it over.”

As she headed down the steps, she called over her shoulder, “Did you catch this view? I mean, really? This is incredible. It’s like the cover of a travel magazine.”

I joined Joanne at the door and gazed at the rolled-out white sand that stretched like an elegant rug between the turquoise waters and us. The radiant blue sky that met the sea was a different hue, but they blended perfectly at the horizon where a seamless line separated heaven from earth. A single fishing boat bobbed in the calm bay.

“I could live here,” Joanne said.

“It’s December,” I reminded her. “How much heat do you like?”

“I’ve lived through my share of sweltering heat waves and drenching monsoons. I like it here. This is a nice place.”

“Yes, it is.” I followed Joanne to the Jeep where we began to unload our goods. The design of Uncle Harlan’s little alcove began to make sense. He had built a wall around the sides and back of the trailer with some sort of large cement blocks that formed an embankment. On top of the embankment, he’d planted the hearty grasses that rose high enough to partially conceal the back side of the trailer from the nearest main road. The design undoubtedly had deterred many potential intruders
from knowing the trailer was there. I felt fairly isolated and safer than if we were sitting out in plain view.

The ingenuity of his plan was that once you were in the trailer or on the front patio, the entire bay seemed to belong to you. I paused under the towering palm tree and looked up, smiling. Joanne stopped beside me with a bag of groceries in each hand and said, “Now all we need is a hammock.”

“That’s what Aunt Winnie said about this palm tree. Uncle Harlan planted it so he could string up his hammock. But we need two palm trees.”

“No we don’t. Do you see the hook?” Joanne nodded at a huge eyebolt that protruded from the trailer’s end. The distance from the bolt to the palm tree seemed just far enough to comfortably hang a hammock. Or at least a clothesline. The beauty of the potential hammock location was that for part of the day the trailer provided shade and part of the day the palm tree provided shade.

“Clever Harlan,” I said. “His recurring theme seems to be, ‘why use two when one will do?’ ”

“Yes, clever Harlan and his dancing marlin. Why have two stuffed fish when one is all you need to frighten away bandidos? He could have taken his show on the road. Although the marlin’s wardrobe would have taken up at least several steamer trunks, and that would have been hard on Harlan’s back, since I would guess that the marlin was reluctant to help carry any of the luggage.”

I laughed and gave my head a shake. Joanne didn’t need
much encouragement for her imagination to ignite its quirky fuse. “Now I know where you get it,” I said, carrying the rest of our supplies into the trailer.

“Get what?”

“Your wit.”

“Get what wit?”

Joanne said it so fast, and the ‘get-what-wit’ line came out so funny, that we both paused the same exact three seconds and then burst into laughter. I had to put down the groceries and place a supportive arm across my stomach while the tears rolled down my face. The insanity of all this was catching up with us.

“We have to move Mr. Marlin,” Joanne said between her chortles. “Look at him, Mel. He’s giving me the evil eye.”

“He only has one eye,” I spurted.

“Well, it’s an evil one. I don’t trust him. He’s gotta go.”

“Where?”

Joanne looked around the confined quarters. “How about back to sea? It’ll be the sequel to
Free Willy
. You and I will free marlin, and they’ll make a movie about us. Or,” Joanne continued, wiping away her laughter tears with the back of her hand. “We could put up a sign at the road that says, ‘Free Marlin,’ and someone can come and take him away for us.”

I held up my hand to stop her so I could catch my breath. “We can’t set the old guy free.”

“Why not?”

“Aunt Winnie wants him back. She wants the fish.”

“Why? I thought you said the fish made them fight.”

“It did.”

“Well, I can’t imagine
why!”
Joanne said with fresh sarcasm that started us on another laughing jag.

“All I know is that the last thing Aunt Winnie said to me right before I left was, ‘Melanie, I want that fish. I want you to get my Harlan’s fish and bring it back to me.’ ”

Joanne opened her mouth and her eyes wide. “Melanie, you sounded exactly like her! Don’t do that again! That was frightening!”

We sniffed together and caught our breath. I leaned against the counter. “Ahh, the wonders of heredity.”

“No joke,” Joanne said. “So, what do we do with the fish?”

“Ignore him. At least for now.”

“I don’t think that if we ignore him his feelings will be hurt sufficiently for him to go away.”

“We can cover him with a blanket,” I suggested.

Joanne reached for one of our Mexican blankets. Instead of draping it over him, she treated the fish like a big doll, laying him on his side on the couch and tucking him in with the blanket.

I probably would have laughed again, but something about Joanne’s actions was endearing. They were tender, motherly, and nurselike.

In typical sisterly fashion, we set to work side by side, unpacking our groceries and examining the contents of each of the cupboards and drawers. I thought I scored when I found a
broom to sweep off the patio. But Joanne trumped me when she found the deluxe-size hammock made from thick, unbreakable nylon cords.

She was quite proud of herself and went right outside to set up Uncle Harlan’s hammock. It worked like a honeybee, and Joanne called for me to come see her once she had managed to clamber into the swinging contraption.

“Now,
that
looks like it was worth the drive from Ensenada,” I said.

“You know it.” Joanne stretched out her arms behind her head and swayed back and forth with her legs crossed at the ankles. “I think I’ll sleep out here tonight.”

“I wish I had a camera,” I said. “Aunt Winnie has to see how Harlan’s palm tree sprouted and how relaxed you look in his little paradise.”

“If you had a camera, I’d take a picture of you right now, too. You know this is your childhood dream come true.”

“Why do you say that?” I leaned on the broom’s handle.

“Your favorite books, remember? The Boxcar Children. You are now the owner of a shiny silver boxcar, and you can set up house to your heart’s content. All you need is a little dump where you can dig up a chipped cup, and some berry bushes so you can harvest our dinner.”

For a moment I considered using the broom to swat my sassy sis on her sagging backside or at least using it to rock her boat. But she was right.

When we were children, I always wanted to be Jessie from
the Boxcar Children books. One time I tried to convince Joanne to play dress up with me. I told her she could play the role of Henry, the older brother who left the boxcar to “mow the doctor’s lawn” and then came back and fixed things. Joanne said she would rather be Violet and lie on the couch coughing and fanning herself, as if she had a fever.

Here we were, grown-up Boxcar Children, and she was playing Violet by lounging in the hammock and fanning herself. We were living out a silly sort of childhood dream. I was, indeed, sweeping the porch of my own shiny silver boxcar.

You didn’t really have anything to do with this silly little dream, did you, God? This is more like one of Your personal little jokes, right?

Squinting, I looked up into the flawless, sapphire sky and wondered if God had heard me.

M
el?” Joanne called to me
with a lazy dip in her voice from her reclined position. “Let’s keep this place. Don’t you think? Everything but the fish. The fish has to go.”

“Scoot over.” I muscled my way onto the hammock.

“It’s not going to hold both of us.”

“Yes it will. Uncle Harlan made it, right? It’s designed to stand the test of time.”

“He should have made two,” Joanne protested, inching to the side so I could position myself with my head at the opposite end from her head.

“Why make two when one will do?” I adjusted my hips slightly and—voilà!—we both fit.

“This isn’t so bad,” Joanne said. “No sudden moves, and we should be okay. Although you better keep your feet away from my face, or I’ll topple you.”

“Same goes for your feet.”

We lilted from side to side with comfortable ease and remarked about the peacefulness and simple beauty of the place.

“The colors are true,” Joanne said. “The blue is really blue, not fogged-over gray-blue like the sky I’ve been living under. And there isn’t any gray here, did you notice that? Silver, of course, in the trailer, but not gray. The clinic where I work is all gray. It’s not white. It’s gray. I’m tired of gray.”

“The dentist’s office where I work is creamy vanilla and pale blue. I can live with creamy vanilla.”

“Sounds like a latte,” Joanne said. “Doesn’t an iced latte sound delicious right about now?”

“We have water,” I suggested.

“No, I’m not thirsty. Just dreamy.”

We rocked together in silence a few more minutes before I lifted my head a couple of inches to see Joanne’s face. I wanted to see her expression when I asked the question that still plagued me from that morning.

“Jo?”

“Hmm?” Her eyes were closed.

“What were you feeling when Matthew said he wasn’t married?”

Her eyes flew open. Her gaze pierced mine. I didn’t flinch. A single tear came out of her heart and took a shy stroll in the sunlight across Joanne’s cheek. “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. What did you think of him?”

“I thought he was marvelous. Skilled and compassionate. He was wonderful. I assumed he was married, so of course I didn’t allow myself even an inch of hope.”

“And how did you feel when you found out he wasn’t married?”

“Too much.”

“Too much what?”

“Too much of everything. I felt ripped off, like why didn’t I know he was single when we picked him up? He didn’t wear a ring, but a lot of doctors and nurses don’t because they have to wash their hands all the time. I felt embarrassed, too.”

“I know. I already apologized, but I am sorry that I embarrassed you by saying you were available.”

“I was more embarrassed by the flood of feelings that came over me.” Joanne’s first shy tear now was joined by a whole club of droplets that had congregated in a corner of her heart. Their meeting was adjourned, and all the teary colleagues came out together, scrambling down my sister’s face, as if no one had told them the location for their next meeting.

“It’s crazy, I know.” Joanne sniffed. “Or maybe I should say I know that if I think about him, it will drive me crazy. Been there. Done that. Gained ten pounds.”

I suddenly understood her need to head to the bakery and stock up on “dainties,” as Aunt Winnie called them.

“I’m hopeless.” Joanne used her T-shirt’s sleeve to wipe her dripping nose. “I should have turned around and waved like you told me to. Now I’ll never see him again.”

“Oh, come on!” I snapped with all the finesse of a bulldozer driver who’s a little inebriated on hormones. “What happened to all your great spiritual insights from a couple of nights ago? Remember when you were saying you were in love with God?”

“I still am.”

“I don’t doubt that. But you said that didn’t mean you were going to take a vow of solitude, that you still wanted to get married, right? You said you had surrendered to God’s will and to His kingdom coming, and now you were waiting for His dreams to come true.”

“Yes, I believe that.”

“Well, what if Matthew is God’s dream come true for you?”

Joanne looked at me, as if I were the one making up the fairy-tale endings. I chuckled at her incredulous expression. “I’m not the one coming up with this stuff. You told me that everything happens for a reason and that we were on God’s time schedule, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, doesn’t it seem to you that our schedule was altered all day long yesterday so we would end up at the right spot in the road to stop and watch the sunset when Matthew’s car died? Wouldn’t you call that a divine appointment?”