Spider Web (2 page)

“It’s okay,” I whispered.

One brown ear was in radar position, the other floppy but alert. Still, his eyes watched me. He sensed my anxiety but trusted my words.

Another fragment of song echoed up the hill. It sounded farther away, though Trixie and I hadn’t moved, keeping still as possible on the spongy new grass. Was the person inside carrying a radio, a tape player? Had they moved deeper into the empty house?

I closed my eyes, recalling the house’s interior landscape. The living room walls were knotty pine, lacquered to the color of vanilla wafers. The red and white kitchen had a porcelain farmhouse sink, chipped in the top left corner, and a milk glass chandelier with six pebbled globes that had been a pain to keep clean hung over the small dining area. A scarred butcher block squatted slightly off center in the room. The strutting wallpaper roosters always seemed to be laughing, like Jack and I when we’d first moved into the house. Two bedrooms. The larger one faced east and had a padded window seat. That was the room where Jack and I had first made love.

John Harper Jr.
Jack.
My first love, husband of my youth. A hundred years ago, it seemed. Another lifetime. The Harper ranch had gone into foreclosure not long after Jack was killed in an auto accident. Over six years ago now. His family—once mine—scurried back to their home state of Texas. I exchanged western-themed Christmas cards with Sandra, my former sister-in-law, wife of Jack’s only sibling, Wade. She was the one who told me a few years back that a group of Southern California investors bought the ranch with the intention of growing wine grapes, but the grapes were never planted. She thought that maybe they’d sold it, though she wasn’t sure. I possessed the ability and contacts to find out. But I never did.

Early in my grief, I would ride the three or so miles from my family’s ranch weekly to check on our house, traveling the same cattle paths that Jack and I rode when we were teenagers, sneaking out at night to meet under the stars and kiss. Gradually the house checks became monthly. Then once every three or four months. Now I only occasionally made the long trek to this hill. I could take the Jeep, which would be faster, but I preferred to ride one of our ranch horses, who always needed exercise. It was what Jack would do. I would pause on the rise and observe the land he and I had worked together, loved together, the home where we’d once planned our lives.

His death was no longer a painful throb but more a soft pinch to my heart. Though you never believe it in those first horrific moments of loss, life does keep moving forward. My life today was full. Gabe Ortiz, my second love, proved to me that even in the darkest times, there was hope. Five years we’d been married. I glanced at the diamond ring he gave me last August. Even on this cloudy March day it sparkled on my blunt-nailed finger. My plain gold wedding band bought in a Las Vegas jewelry store had been enough for me, but he wanted to give me more. We were on top of a Ferris wheel at the county fair when he slipped the diamond on my finger. A Ferris wheel was an apt metaphor for our marriage—the second for both of us. Jack and I had been a merry-goround—steady, predictable, but beautiful with its detailed carving and rich, solid colors, but Gabe and I were definitely a Ferris wheel with brilliant neon lights and unpredictable seats.

“. . . shall I come back again . . .” Elvis’s silky voice floated up and lost itself in the high branches of the oak tree. Trixie was quiet, trusting me to be in control, to let her know when it was time to move on.

Elvis Presley. I’d been listening to his albums all my life. My mother played his music while she lay in bed dying and I scrambled over her rumpled bed quilts with my plastic Breyer horses pretending to be Annie Oakley or Roy Rogers. Dove played Elvis’s albums for years, keeping my mother’s memory alive for me. Right before Mama died, at my dad’s request, Dove had come from Arkansas to help raise me, her oldest son’s only child.

Thinking of my mother caused a moment of sadness to envelop me, like misty fog floating over the hills. She was twenty-six years old when she passed. I was six. It could overwhelm me if I let myself dwell on it. We both seemed so impossibly young for something so tragic. I was now thirty-nine—forty this month—acutely aware I was entering the second half of my life. I’d already lived almost fourteen years longer than she had, a fact that felt odd and troubling.

Here is a truth: Losing your mother when you are young changes you; the ground beneath your feet is never quite firm enough. You never completely trust happiness again.

But I had learned to embrace what happiness was sent my way, to push the distrust into an attic corner of my brain. Despair rarely held me captive because I was surrounded by older women who tackled life as if it was the final quarter of a Super Bowl game. There was my steady yet dramatic gramma Dove, not contradictory adjectives when applied to her; my ever-surprising great-aunt Garnet, whom I grew closer to daily since she’d moved here from Arkansas with my uncle WW; the women in my quilt group at the Oak Terrace Retirement Home who, with wicked good humor, voted unanimously to name themselves the Coffin Star Quilt Guild; even Constance Sinclair, my cranky but dependably generous boss at the Josiah Sinclair Folk Art Museum where I was curator.

The timorous sound of older women’s voices warmed me like a flannel quilt, softening the frantic edges of my life. These women I loved and respected had seen much in their years on earth, had experienced sorrows that would fell an ancient redwood. But they endured. They prospered. Shoot, they
laughed.
They amazed and delighted me. And sometimes they drove me head-twisting crazy.

My current project was recording their stories as part of an oral history project I’d undertaken with the celebrated photographer Isaac Lyons. The working title was “San Celina at Home.” He’d approached me with the idea a few months ago proposing a collaboration—he’d take the photos; I’d write their stories. It was an incredible opportunity that countless writers and historians would have killed to have been offered. Isaac was renowned for his insightful portraits, had photographed presidents and popes, movie stars and politicians. He’d studied with Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, argued form and composition with Dorothea Lange. His work hung in the Smithsonian.

It was a position I did not deserve. My education was not impressive, nor was I even that talented. However, I did have an inside track. He was married to and loopy-in-love with my gramma Dove. And because he loved her and she loved me . . . well, I got the job.

“Ask them what home means to them,” he’d instructed me when we first discussed it sitting on the front porch of the Ramsey Ranch, owned jointly by my dad and my gramma. “Ask them where they feel the most at home, anything you can come up with that encourages them to talk about home. I’ll take some of the photos while you’re interviewing them or later if they seem nervous. The best photos happen when people forget themselves.”

Because Isaac was weary of traveling, and because San Celina was now his home, he decided to concentrate on the people in San Celina County, on the coast halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Our county actually provided him a wonderful cross section of people—Cal Poly, a state university that still held strong rural roots, a rich Hispanic population, a smattering of Chinese and Japanese, African Americans and Swiss Italians, Portuguese and Basques, artists and musicians, retirees and homeless, ridiculously wealthy and no-nonsense working class, the always struggling small business owners. We’d started the project a few months ago, and it was apparent already that we’d end up with more photos and interviews than we could fit in one book. Culling them would be a painful job.

When the music from the ranch house abruptly stopped, jarring me from my thoughts, other sounds reasserted themselves; the distinct tip-tip of a downy woodpecker, the sucking noise of Trixie’s hooves on the soggy March soil, the chatter of crickets. A sharp, cold wind circled around us, swooping over the hills from the Pacific Ocean. I shivered inside my denim jacket. Like Scout, I lifted my head and sniffed the briny air. Rain was coming.

I studied the gray sedan parked in the driveway. It had been there when I crested the rise. How long? The vehicle’s make was nondescript, at least to me. If it wasn’t a truck, they all looked the same. Was the person who owned the car buying the land? Did they plan on living there? Alone or with a family? This person was walking through the original ranch house. Had he or she already inspected the newer one where Wade, Sandra and their children had lived with Jack’s widowed mother? It was more attractive and definitely bigger, but I always felt it had less history, less soul.

The thought of another family living in what had been my and Jack’s first home made me anxious, a little angry. For some reason that bothered me more than when it was rumored that both houses might be razed and wine grapes planted. I could watch them be destroyed, but I didn’t want anyone else to live in what had been my first home as a married woman. Unreasonable, but it was how I felt. I selfishly didn’t want someone else’s memories supplanting my own.

A rumble came from Scout’s throat. I glanced down at his square, tense body. In that second, the front door of the ranch house opened and someone stepped out. Tall, thin, wearing blue jeans, a dark knit watch cap, sunglasses and a heavy jacket. From my distance, it wasn’t apparent if the person was male or female. If I’d only remembered to bring binoculars. The person carried a radio or tape player, the source of the music. I watched the vehicle move away, braking occasionally on the rough gravel driveway. One red taillight was burned out. I watched the gray car until it turned the corner and headed for the highway. An uneasy feeling pressed down on my chest; the air seemed to grow heavy, like the drop in barometric pressure before a storm.

I was tempted to ride down to see if this person left any physical evidence, but I wanted to beat the rain home. I turned Trixie around, clicking softly. It was probably nothing.

“Let’s go,” I called to Scout. “We’ve got chores to do.”

CHAPTER 2

“S
OMEBODY’S POKING AROUND THE HARPER PLACE,” I SAID, walking into Dove’s red and yellow kitchen. Daddy was pouring himself a cup of coffee.

Outside, the rain that had threatened the whole ride back started an Irish river dance on the roof. Trixie, Scout and I made it back with seconds to spare.

“Hide me, pumpkin.” My father’s craggy, sun-browned face was desperate; his pale blue Australian shepherd eyes flashed white. “Someplace where the girls can’t find me for the next hundred thirteen days.”

Lord forgive me, I laughed.

“It isn’t funny,” Daddy said sharply. A sheen of perspiration glowed on his upper lip. “They’re threatening to sign me up for some kind of nutty computer dating service.” He shuddered beneath his blue plaid cowboy shirt. “It’s this whole Memory Festival business. Got them all in a lather. They keep saying that I’m living in the past. They claim I need to make new memories. Benni girl, I
like
the memories I got. I don’t want new ones. And I certainly don’t want to date nobody off no dang computer.”

I opened the refrigerator. “Meat loaf! It’s almost noon. Want me to make you a sandwich? Is Isaac around?”

“Sure. Put on some of that wasabi mustard. It’s pretty darn good.” He sat at the breakfast bar, his work-scarred hands wrapped around a chunky tan coffee mug. “I think Isaac went to town. Said something about a new camera.”

“He’s been waiting for that for weeks. It’s the latest thing. I think they call it digital. Doesn’t even use film. Apparently you can see the photo on a little picture screen before you take it, then delete the photo if you don’t like it. Crazy, huh? There aren’t even any negatives. All the pictures go on a computer.”

Daddy frowned at the word. “Computers are going to ruin this world. I don’t want to go to dinner or anywhere else with no computer woman.”

Though tempted, I knew better than to argue with him. Actually, I’d read an article in the
San Celina Tribune
a few weeks ago about computer dating and it insisted that, if you’re careful, it could be helpful in connecting people with common interests. Much more reliable than barhopping, not that Daddy would consider either option. My dad had been alone a long time, though he’d never given any indication he was lonely. But, no doubt my gramma and her baby sister knew things about my father’s life that I didn’t. After all, they lived with him.

“Where
are
the sisters?” I sliced thick hunks of Aunt Garnet’s spicy meat loaf and arranged them on slices of wheat bread. Plain yellow mustard for me. Scout bumped my shin with his nose, angling for a taste.

“Just a smidgen,” I said, tossing him a piece of meat loaf that was onion-free. “You need to maintain that svelte figure.”

I placed the sandwich with a scoop of potato salad and two pickle spears on a plate and slipped it in front of my dad. “It might do you good to enjoy yourself a little. You work really hard.”

“I enjoy myself just fine,” he said, picking up his sandwich. “I enjoy myself by working.”