The Wilder Sisters (12 page)

“Good girl,” she told her every time, scratching the patch of white chest hair that grew between her front legs, the broken one healed so nicely she didn’t even limp. Faintly, from down the hall, Rose could hear the sound of the shower come on. Well, ambulatory was progress. “Morning, Austin,” she called out extra loud while she poured kibble into a grateful Bijou’s dish. Austin didn’t answer, but Rose hoped her voice had pounded another spike into his hangover. She went out back to check on Amanda.

Her daughter was just pulling herself up onto her horse’s back. Despite the rotten hair and the shapeless clothing, Amanda still looked graceful on horseback. Rose watched her gently leg Max forward at the walk and circle him to check for lameness. If a person could still be kind to animals, there was hope. Amanda was her old self murmuring encouragement to her horse.
If I could blink my eyes and erase the past two years
, Rose thought,
I’d have my daughter back
. But wishing didn’t accomplish anything, and the past was a door better left shut. As she watched the old horse give in to his affection for Amanda, her eyes threatened to spill over with tears witnessing that unbroken bond. Rose had learned to hold those kinds of emo- tions in. All it took was some hard swallowing and a series of deep breaths, and no one but her own self could tell how close she’d come to crying. On bad days it happened to her as often as a couple of times. On good ones she remained dry eyed and busy. Mostly she tried to put her sorrow in perspective by telling herself that this, too, would pass, that this undercurrent of sad-

ness would eventually deposit her on a different shore. But Philip’s death had torn a hole in her life she hadn’t managed to stitch up. Behind her she heard steps and knew that Austin was standing there watching the both of them. She could feel his eyes on her, examining the situation with a clinical eye, formulating his prognosis.

“Bye, Mom,” Amanda called out. “Thanks for the munchies and letting me crash.”

“I’ll see you back at the house. We’ll have lunch, okay?” Rose waved and headed toward the Bronco. The screen door slammed back against the frame as Austin stepped onto the porch.

“So,” he said. “Your prodigal daughter returns. I hope to hell you didn’t give her that horse.”

Rose thrust her chin up in the air and continued walking.

“Hold on there, Mrs. Flynn. I believe we’re good enough friends that you can spare me a minute.”

“What do you want, Austin? To steal my car, too?”

He came around to the driver’s side and laid his hand over Rose’s, which was clutching the chrome door handle. “I’d like a chance to explain.”

Austin was dressed in his jeans, an unbuttoned clean blue work shirt plastered damply against his shoulders where he had missed with the towel when he was drying off. He had his old glasses on, and either he needed a shave or he was growing one of those trendy goatees. It didn’t look half bad on him, but it wasn’t a style com- monly seen in Floralee. “Fine,” Rose said. “Apologize for stealing my horse so I can get back to my weekend. I don’t get paid for this. Actually, I don’t even have a job since you fired me last night.”

Austin took his hand away. “I did?”

“Yep. And then you stole my horse. I think it’s still legal to hang people for that in this state.”

“Forget about it. I was out of my head.” “What’s new about that?”

He frowned. “I had almost a week of sobriety down. I was doing good. You know I was.”

Of course she knew. For every sober day in a row Austin had, Rose marked her calendar with a little star. When he accrued seven stars, she made him a plate of cookies for a reward. Austin would eat amost anything except coconut macaroons, but he preferred Rose’s oatmeal-

and-raisin cookies. This last time he’d been only hours away from the seventh star. She’d already bought the bag of raisins, which was sitting on the counter at home, just waiting to be folded into the batter.

“Want to know what set me off?”

“Not really. I just want your word you’ll climb back on that wag- on.”

He opened her car door, and Rose started to pull herself up into the high seat until he took hold of her arm. “Leah,” he said, breathing the word out like cigarette smoke.

Austin’s face pinched with pain, and Rose could see tears gather- ing in the corners of his eyes. Any minute now they’d fog up his lenses, and she’d feel so sorry for him she’d get the urge to go bake him a coffee cake. But today it just made her angry. Leah wasn’t dead; they were divorced. “For crying out loud, Austin, why can’t you let her go?”

He gave her butt a push, and she sat down hard in the seat. “Just can’t. I know I disappoint you. I’m sorry.”

She took his whiskered chin in her hands. She meant every word she was about to say, and several others she wasn’t brave enough to try out loud. “It isn’t me you need to worry about disappointing. Think of your reputation, your clients. More importantly, your liver.” He reached up, encircled one of her wrists with a rough hand.

They knew each other so well they touched each other all the time. Yet now that Rose’s feelings had shifted, there was this continual sense of newness whenever his fingers met her skin. In a strange way this kindling of passion reminded Rose of grief. Both these very different feelings imparted a glistening edge to everything: the sound of birds singing first thing in the morning, the clarity of drinking water she poured into a glass, a shaft of sunlight streaking across her horse’s back, the autumn leaves clinging to the trees, even though soon enough that same tree would shrug them loose and away they’d blow in the wind, to crumble and be lost forever. Austin’s ordinary touch now felt intimate to her, and caught off guard by such a vis- ceral response, Rose accidentally bumped her purse, which fell to the ground and spilled its contents into the red dirt. Her face burned as Austin bent down and began picking up each item and handing it to her.

“I’ve always thought that you could just about draw a psycholo- gical profile of a woman by looking through her handbag. Let’s see what

we’ve got here. Lipstick, now that’s stock in trade, but whatever shade it is, it hardly shows, ’cause our Rose Ann doesn’t like calling attention to herself.” He picked up a Tampax Slender Regular and grinned. “The Girl Scout in her is always ready for emergencies.”

Rose couldn’t help but smile.

“And look here! We’ve got some sugarless gum in the wintergreen flavor, which just happens to be my favorite, and a little bottle of hand cream. Carmex for chapped lips, sunscreen, bug repellent—yes sir, you can tell this purse belongs to one true New Mexican. Let’s see what’s on her grocery list. ‘Pasta, tomato sauce, poblanos, chicken, milk, bread crumbs.’ Sounds like some kind of dinner I’d appreciate even if her wild-haired daughter does not. We’ve got a hairbrush for her curls, and three pens. Why three? In case one of them goes dry and somebody needs to borrow the second.”

She laughed, and Austin picked up her billfold.

“What’s this? One wide-open wallet. Rose, you should keep this thing snapped shut or all your credit cards could fall out. Let’s just check how much mad money she carries.”

Rose knew there was $110 inside. She’d gone to the bank yester- day, withdrawing grocery and gas money. Because she hated balan- cing her checkbook, she paid cash as often as possible. But when Austin separated the halves of the bill compartment, not even a stray dollar could be seen.

Rose laid her forehead down on the steering wheel and groaned. Austin gently touched her shoulder. “I didn’t mean it about firing you. Do you need a raise? For God’s sake, Rose, don’t cry on me.

Tell me what’s the matter, and we’ll fix it. Look at me, dammit.”

She couldn’t bear to. If the money was gone, there was only one place it had gone: into Amanda’s ratty macramé purse. The facts spoke for themselves: Her daughter was a thief, she was a rotten mother, and now she was a rotten mother $110 in the hole. “I have to go.”

Austin pulled her from the cab of the car and marched her inside his kitchen. He sat her down at the table and measured out coffee for the pot. His hands were shaky, and he spilled some on the counter, but didn’t stop to sweep it up. Eventually his grip on the measuring spoon steadied enough that he got coffee and water into the pot and it dripped down into the decanter. Neither of them said a word until he’d set the mug in front of Rose. All she could think when she raised

the Mimbres pattern china to her lips was,
I bet Leah picked out this pattern. It’s so beautiful. I can’t imagine why she left it behind. Myself, I have supermarket dishes, Corelleware, unbreakable, affordable, and com- pletely forgettable. Here I am, sitting at a custom-made table—I don’t know what kind of endangered wood—drinking imported coffee in the kitchen of an entire house designed for Leah Donavan, the woman who does not love him but whom Austin cannot forget. It’s a Leah museum. I’d drop a dollar in the donation basket, but thanks to my daughter, I don’t have a dollar to drop. I’d better get myself out of here before I start punching out windows
. But instead of moving, she sipped, swallowed, and thought about how every single day of her life she stepped blithely through the most painful situations making ordinary motions like normal people did while inside her heart was screaming like a coyote with his leg caught in a trap. Rose was a lot of things. She was a widow, the daughter of a difficult mother, a mother of two difficult children, a bookkeeper to a heartsick alcoholic who had no idea how she felt about him. People expected that she would behave in a predictable, dependable manner. No matter how many times they disappointed her,
she
couldn’t let them down.

“Two minutes after I buried Philip, I should have put a personal ad in the paper, gone out on dates, gotten married right away, given those kids a father figure. That’s where things went wrong, Austin. It has to be.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Her cheeks flamed, and she looked Austin in the eye. “One, be- cause I’m an idiot, and I figured my children needed my undivided attention. Plus I clung to the outdated notion that love had to figure into the mix.”

“Two?”

“Well, gee, Austin. Maybe nobody asked me!”

He put his thumb to the rim of Rose’s cup, smearing the pale lip- stick imprint. “Love only thrashes you around, Rose. It’s overrated. Marriage might work out better if people went into it for more practical reasons.”

“Name one.”

“Safe sex partners.”

“No sex is safe. Name another.”

“Shoot, I don’t know. Somebody to eat dinner with’s as good a reason as I can come up with. Who doesn’t mind watching reruns. To

bring you soup when you’re sick. Hell, maybe nobody should get married, maybe nobody’s really happy.”

“My parents have been married forty-five years. My dad still brings my mother flowers. She walks in the room, and his eyes light up like it’s the first time he saw her. Is it a crime for a woman to want that?” She made herself swallow more coffee against her closing throat.

Austin frowned. “Let’s see, wasn’t there a literature professor awhile back?”

“So she had one little dalliance! Men do that all the time and no one condemns them. She ended up back home with Pop, and that’s what matters.”

“Did you do that with Philip?”

“Fool around? Of course not. I took vows. Did you do that with Leah?”

“Why bother when she did it enough for both of us? Besides, who wants to take a broken-down vet stinking of worming medication into her bed?”

Only me
. Rose sat back in the chair, biting her tongue. Austin thought of her as his friend. He confided in her. How could she ever explain what she felt for him without forever altering—possibly ruining—their friendship?

Austin rubbed his face and sighed. “What in hell did I say wrong this time?”

There was no common language in which to discuss what she needed to say, and thanks to Leah, he would probably never be able to hear. “Never mind. I’d better go home and see if the little thief is still around. Maybe if I’m lucky, I can get half my money back. Thanks for the coffee.”

Austin walked her to the car, held the door, and when she was safely belted in, leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. In- stantly Rose’s hand flew up to touch where his mouth had been. “Thirty-four, twenty-two, thirty-six,” she said.

He laughed. “That’s about what I imagined, but why are you telling me your measurements?”

“I’m not, you idiot. That’s the combination to the safe where your stupid truck keys are.” She started the engine and pulled the door shut. He stepped back.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, Austin. Just don’t drink anymore.” He held up his coffee mug. “I’m working on it.” Rose shifted into reverse and raced home.

“Amanda?” she called into the kitchen. “I need that money, Amanda. No matter what you think, I’m not made of the stuff.”

Chachi sat in the middle of the floor with his head cocked and ears flattened, staring at her. If she raised her voice any higher, he would creep under her desk and hug the wall, develop an attack of colitis, require an enema, which would involve another visit to Austin, and that Rose could not bear right now. In Amanda’s room, where the unmade bed and the mess of discarded clothing and books reminded her why she rarely opened this door, she did not see her daughter. She wasn’t in the bathroom either, but her towel was on the floor and the soap lay in a gooey mess at the side of the sink, not two inches from the soap dish.
Face it
, she told herself, as she picked up a book of poetry and scanned a page, the words barely registering.
There is no note, no conscience, no nothing
. Exasperated, she walked out to the barn where Max stood nosing his empty hay chute, whinnying at her when she unlatched the gate. Winky’s was full, and she was making a great show of eating.
That child sat here eating my food, stole my money, and couldn’t even bother to throw hay to her horse. I’d’ve given her money if only she’d asked. Not $110, but something
. Rose measured out the alfalfa flake and threw some vitamins and sweet feed on top of it, drizzling the whole mess with blackstrap molasses. She licked her finger and replaced the cap on the bottle. It wasn’t even close to lunchtime, but maybe she’d go inside fix herself a bowl of ice cream. No, a banana split. With caramel sauce. Cherries. Why the hell not? Everyone had had a stressful morning.