The Wilder Sisters (19 page)
Lily sat up straight in her chair, giving her sister a shocked look. “Rose Ann!”
“What? Because I got widowed I’m not allowed to think about sex?”
“It’s just that I’m so impressed. So I know it wasn’t a fluke, do that guy.” She pointed toward a medium-tall, skinny man of about fifty. He was graying at the temples and carried a leather backpack. He wore little wire-rimmed glasses, a nondescript flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows, Levi’s jeans, and Birkenstock sandals with red socks. Trade in the sandals for Dan Posts and he could have passed for Austin’s brother.
“Well,” Rose said, her eyes tracking the man as he stopped to buy some tea, not coffee, from the cart vendor who was making a killing since airlines never stocked anything but icky Lipton’s. “Here we have a man who is far too intelligent for whatever crappy job he does to make a living. He’s so overeducated he’s still paying off student loans. Divorced, I bet.”
“Why?”
“Again, the shoes. He thinks they make him look hip. They remind him of college, when girls asked
him
to go to bed if he so much as looked twice at them. He lives on frozen dinners and nine-grain bread he buys at Wild Oats. He has two daughters, a single one he worries won’t settle down and one who married wealthy, to a guy that makes more money than he does.” She stopped.
“Jeez, I didn’t ask for a biography,” Lily said. “What’s he like in bed? Not my type, but he’s pumping out the pheromones like sweat.” To go there wounded Rose the same way that song in the jewelry store made her want to switch off the radio. To imagine this man with the red socks in her bed blew out every candle she’d lit, erased
the
prayers she’d whispered in church. What the hell, why not say out loud what vexed her dreams and occupied too many of her waking hours? “It would be difficult to get that man into your bed, Lily. He has some overblown idea that he’s a romantic, that there have to be hearts and flowers before so much as one button comes undone. The art of the chase is what he lives for. He treats a woman like his own personal yo-yo. This man would put you through all kinds of tests before turning down the top sheet. He’d make you say ‘I love you’ first. He’d let you sweat a couple weeks before saying it back, that is,
if
he ever got around to saying it. He’s still furious that his wife left him,
and
he resents Mommy for whatever she failed to do for him. The reins are in his fist, and he’d let the bit slice your tongue in half before he’d give you an inch.”
“Whoa.” Lily fanned herself with somebody’s leftover
Albuquerque Journal
. Her lips came up in a smirk, giving her cheekbones just the faintest hint of blush. “My, my,” she said. “I’m coming by your work tomorrow to take you to lunch. I have to meet this veterinarian who has infected you with heartworm.”
Before Rose could say,
You will not
, Pop was there, grinning around his pipe stem, his arms full of flowers. “My girls,” he said, as if they were still teenagers, kissing them each one on the cheek. He was carrying three bouquets, yellow roses—always available in Texas—tiger lilies, and a nosegay of coral poppies, their petals de- ceptively frail.
rom the passenger’s-side floor their father picked up a FedEx box that had gotten wedged between the console and the seat.
A McDonald’s wrapper stuck to its edge. He rattled the box as if it were a Christmas gift. “Anything important in here?”
Lily grabbed it and peeled away the wrapper. “Only about five thousand dollars’ worth of laparoscopic instruments.”
“If they’re so all-fired expensive, maybe you should lock them in the trunk.”
“You know what, Pop? I haven’t lost any of the company’s products so far, so why don’t you quit worrying about it?”
“There’s enough trash in her backseat to choke a landfill,” Pop said, handing Lily his carry-on bag. “Your sister have a policy against throwing things away?”
Rose was just standing there by the car, her hands full of flowers. She set them down on the hood and raked up empty cups and a few Styrofoam salad containers into an empty shopping bag. “There. Now it’s clean. Pop, you sit down and
cállate
, or I swear we’ll drop you off at the bus station.”
Whoever had peed in his morning Cheerios had done a thorough job of it. Lily wondered if that someone was Mami. They weren’t even out of the parking lot, and already Lily wanted to charge him for the ride. She strapped herself into the driver’s seat and started the car. “Rose, where did you put that parking receipt?”
“On the dash.”
Lily held the ticket between her teeth while she maneuvered into
the long line of cars waiting to pay so they could exit the airport. It was rush hour, the congestion typical for California driving condi- tions, but seeing the endless pairs of brake lights ahead of her in Albuquerque pissed Lily off.
In the backseat, Lily heard the sound of Rose carefully wrapping the flowers in an old newspaper. “I hope these last until we get home,” she said.
Lily, growing increasingly weary of creeping along in the traffic at fifteen miles an hour, hoped the flowers were edible. Ten miles later she’d had it. “I vote we stop for dinner and let this thin out.”
“There’s that Australian restaurant that serves kangaroo and os- trich,” Pop offered.
Rose groaned. “Does every meal out with you and Mami have to be an adventure in courage? How about someplace ordinary?”
Pop turned so he could look at Rose in the backseat. “Courage.
Now that’s an area you could work on, Rose Ann.”
Lily checked the rearview mirror. The embarrassment in Rose’s face made Lily want to slap her father. “Pop?” she said. “Isn’t Mami the one we should be consulting about living the bold life?”
Her father clamped his teeth down on his pipe stem. “Sass from the daughter who can’t buy an American automobile to support our failing economy is just what I need to round out my day.”
“Hey. I support the snot out of America by paying way too much in taxes. When somebody American designs a car that isn’t as ugly as sin and has the features of this one, I’ll be first in line to buy it.” She checked the rearview mirror again, and winked when she saw her sister looking back.
Just past the upscale community of Rio Rancho, Rose said, “By the way, Pop, it turns out my mare’s definitely in foal. Austin says it looks like she’ll deliver next summer.”
“Good news. I was starting to wonder if she was barren.”
“Why does everyone always blame it on the mare?” Lily asked. “Stallions shoot a blank now and then.”
Pop ignored her. “Make sure to give her the proper supplements. It’s a known fact that only forty to sixty percent of pregnant brood- mares deliver viable foals. The high rate of miscarriage and still birth is largely due to protein, vitamin and mineral allotments, plus the necessary vaccines. I can’t tell you how many sad stories I’ve heard that didn’t have to happen.”
“Well,” Rose said. “I guess that shouldn’t be a problem, since I moved Winky up to your ranch.”
“You’re going to dump her on Shep?”
“Of course not, Pop. I’m entrusting her to
you
.” She paused, and Lily savored the expression on her father’s face. It wasn’t often either of them could render him speechless. “Of course,” her sister contin- ued, “I’ll pay for her feed and vet care. And drive up every weekend to do my part.”
Chance Wilder was a proud man, and the offer of Rose’s money left him chagrined. But he had held the door wide open. He abso- lutely deserved everything she’d said.
Good for you, Rose
, Lily thought.
Smack them in the crotch with your lunchpail once in awhile
.
Finally he said, “That sounds like a sensible plan. We can work the money issues out later.”
Rose unbuckled her seat belt, leaned forward, and kissed him on the cheek. Lily smiled. She knew he’d die before he’d accept a dime of Rose’s money. She also knew that her sister would find some way to make him take the money, even if she had to make a donation in his name to an orphaned horses fund.
“How about this place?” Lily said just south of Santa Fe, when the sign for the Wolf Creek Brewing Company appeared on their right. The place was new enough that no Wilder held an opinion, so she pulled on to the wide curving exit and parked the car behind the restaurant. It smelled good, which when you came right down to it was the sensory equivalent of a billboard. They walked inside and found a table near a window.
Pop chatted up the waitress, ordering
carne adobada
for all of them. The spicy dish was the house specialty, but after a few exploratory pokes into the meat with her fork, Lily stuffed the complimentary tortillas with her vegetables and dipped the makeshift burrito into salsa. They talked about her father’s new mare, a dark bay whose paper name was Dulcinea’s Bailador. “This might be the last horse I buy for awhile,” he said, tearing a tortilla in half before smearing it with butter.
“Why?” Lily asked. “Is business slow?”
“No more than usual, but Shep’s making noises about retiring. I don’t want to haul in somebody new just yet. Rancho Costa Plente can afford a slow season while he makes up his mind.”
“I’d be glad to help out,” Rose said.
Her father patted her hand. “And I’ll call you if I need you.”
Rose had sat quiet most of the meal, occasionally glancing up at her father, as if seeking the approval he generally withheld. It was as if their father spoke only to Lily, when Rose was the one with horses. Why was it that one on one, the man behaved like a complete teddy bear, but put his two daughters along either side of him and at once things turned prickly? All around them in the restaurant happy families and groups of vacationers sat enjoying themselves over various microbrews. The laughter was way up there on the decibel scale. Lily had no doubt the out-of-staters imagined that if they lived here year round, their lives would be meaningful in a way that people who were allowed to start over fresh savored, saw as a turning point, a landmark from which to chart a better life. She couldn’t blame them. There was a presence here she never found in California, not even walking along the edge of the Pacific Ocean in the wintertime. There, even next to the roaring waves, she felt that the sand underfoot was constantly shifting, and all those earthquakes made her nervously anticipate the next, larger tremor to come. Here her feet dug happily into solid earth, and the sun beat down baking the adobe. Sometimes home was as simple as believing that what was under your feet would hold you. “Hire somebody part-time,” Lily said. “Shep won’t feel threatened. He loves ordering people around, or me, anyway.”
“I’ll think on it,” their father said.
Which struck Lily as odd, because Chance Wilder hardly ever took time to decide anything unless he was buying a ten-thousand- dollar horse.
“Lily,” he chided at the end of the meal. “You left more food on your plate than you ate.”
“Can I help it if they serve portions large enough to feed a family of five?”
“You don’t eat right.”
“I’ll take my leftovers home and feed them to Buddy.” “You spoil that animal.”
“Have me arrested.”
Her father reached over and lifted the edge of Buddy’s collar, which Lily was still wearing around her neck. “That necklace you’re wearing’s a tad on the showy side, wouldn’t you say?”
Lily flashed him a smile. “God, I hope so. It cost buckets of money.”
Rose covered her mouth to stifle her laughter. Pop took out his wallet, picked up the check, and headed for the cashier.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get to have our private dinner,” Lily said. “There’s still time.”
True, but Lily had imagined sitting alone with her sister in some fancy restaurant where, after a glass of halfway decent wine, Rose would spill her innermost secrets. “I know. I’m just tired.”
“Me too. This has been a long day.”
“Plus I didn’t get to buy any new clothes.”
“Now that’s what I’d call a tragedy,” Pop said, returning to the table with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “Come along, girls. Let’s go home.”
It had rained while they were eating. Wide, reflective puddles filled the dips in the parking lot asphalt. The evening air smelled scrubbed clean.
One of those typical hard, brief, swift-moving rainstorms must have passed through on its way to Texas or Oklahoma
, Lily thought,
and I missed the whole thing. Damn
. Pop lit his pipe, and the cloud of aromatic smoke drifted by her, mingling nicely with the odor of re- cent rain. All around them the gently sloping hills were covered with grasses beginning to brown in anticipation of the coming winter. Lamentably, certainly, but inevitably, this part of Santa Fe was just beginning to be developed. Lily wondered who would settle here. New Mexico’s blend of cultures imparted to each distinct community the feeling that the history of the Old West hadn’t taken place all that long ago. One great thing about life in a state possessing a frontier mentality was the determined way newcomers sent down roots. Yet if smalltown hardware stores stocked men like Tres Quintero, no matter where a person traveled to in an attempt to start over, the past followed.
Rose took hold of Lily’s shoulder. “You look as if you’re plotting your next battle.”
There it is—proof that sisters can read each other so keenly they might as well have walkie-talkies implanted in their brains
, Lily thought. “I was only wondering whether it’s ever possible to take a step backward and not regret it, Rose. Do you think that’s asking for trouble?”
“I don’t know,” her sister said. “Look at us. All that time we didn’t talk. What a waste.”
Lily brightened. “No kidding. We can’t let that happen again, even if we only stay friendly to team up on Pop.”
“He’s not all bad,” Rose said. “Though he’s in a foul mood today. You should let him drive the Lexus home. You know he’s dying to.” Lily whistled, and their father, who had been walking several paces ahead of them, turned at the sound. “Catch, Pop,” she said,
and threw him the keys.
After Santa Fe, there were so few city lights he turned on the high beams. Lily dozed against the backseat, inhaling the gentle decay of the floral bouquets. The roses smelled the strongest, but there was a sharp undercurrent of her lilies, too. Only the poppies were scentless. Idly she listened to her father and sister’s conversation.
