The Wilder Sisters (27 page)

“This Buddy,” Tres said. “Do I have to beat him up, or can I intim- idate him with a few college degrees?”

“Buddy’s my dog, Tres.”

He took the cell phone from her and threw it on the bed. “Come sit with me by the fire,” he said.

“Like all we’re going to do is sit,” Lily said.

For a long time they kissed. Slowly the revelations that this was familiar territory came to them. Lily shook her head as if she needed to clear it. Tres kicked off his boots. Lily allowed him to pull hers off, first one, then the other, and when he came back to her on the blanket she undid the buttons on his shirt. He looked down and solemnly watched her fingers move against the fabric. When the two halves of the shirt hung loose, she slid her hands inside and shut her eyes, feeling the planes of his chest, the warm skin, the small amount of hair that grew around his nipples.

“There’s no way I’m doing this without condoms,” she said. “I don’t have any.”

“Well, I do,” Lily said, and went to fetch her purse. Inside, next to a MAC lipstick in a shade called Desire, she found three. She threw them across the room, and Tres caught them in his left hand. Back on the blanket, he set them aside. Lily lay down, and he pulled her arms above her head, holding them there with one hand. “I seem to remember you used to enjoy this,” he said, forcing her to lie still while he outfitted himself, and then began to enter her inch

by agonizingly erotic inch.

Lily remembered, too. How this had felt was a large percentage of why she’d failed to hook up with another man. It wasn’t sex, which she felt could be had with just about anybody, it was the entire package. No one else could compete with her past.

At first they took things slow, checking each other’s reactions, sighing over every successful stroke and shiver, but later the way they moved teetered on the brink of rough, pushing the boundaries of pleasure right up there next to pain. The edge felt necessary, as if in order to complete the telling of their histories this helped to dismiss their past lovers, and in doing so, allowed this touching to feel different, to belong wholly to them.

The next morning, driving down the mountain looking for a store that sold condoms, Lily was sorry she wasn’t repping for Trojan. She stood at the birth control display in the bathroom products aisle of the tiny

grocery store and weighed her options. Buying a three-pack, well, that seemed pessimistic. Just like carrying them in your purse, it smacked of one-night stands and low self-esteem. The box of twelve could mean one favored bargains, or expected the current affair to proceed with good sense, to set its own cautious pace. If things fizzled out after one more time, at least eleven USA-made brothers waited there in the box as a kind of consolation. Forget even consid- ering the twenty-four pack. Say she died in a car crash on the way home. No matter what good thing she’d accomplished in her lifetime, sold the most laparoscopes, taught Buddy to play championship Frisbee, won the Pulitzer, whoever gathered up her personal effects and returned them to her family would remember Lily Wilder as a nympho, and a nympho she would forever remain.

She opened her wallet and extracted more of Mami’s grocery money to pay for two turkey sandwiches on whole wheat, a gallon jug of apple cider, and most important, twelve condoms. She’d chosen four packages of three each—flavored, fluorescent, ribbed—let her fly-fishing-nature-poet-woodcarver who wouldn’t tell her what he did for a living make of her selections whatever he cared to—just so long as he did not impregnate her. The clerk in the general store she’d found at the junction of 150 and 64 was happy to wait on her. October was his slow season. The markup on condoms was over 200 percent.

For the sake of fairness, they gave all the brands a try. Vibra-ribbed Rough Riders caused Lily to philosophize, loudly, on what men as- sumed women wanted and what amounted to just plain
ow
. Tres countered, stating that Kiss of Mint was definitely slanted toward one partner’s pleasure, though he had to concede, they did leave a pleasant tang on her mouth. And the glow-in-the-dark kind that made Tres’s erection resemble Luke Skywalker’s light saber were responsible for so much silly laughter they both agreed they’d buy that kind again in a heartbeat.

Two days later Tres was at his notebook computer typing when Lily awoke. When she threw her arms around him and started kissing his neck, he peeled her away, put a finger to her lips and returned to typing. Lily walked over to the bench full of wood shavings and chisels. She picked up the statue of Jesus, which now possessed crude facial features, sorrowful eyes, and the beginnings of a beard. Carvings like this could

be found all over New Mexico; he could sell it just as it was and make money. But Tres was going for a more realistic finished product. He kept using the word
craft
. Lily drank her cup of instant coffee, daydreaming how good freshly ground Italian roast used to taste. She imagined the cupboard in California where she kept emergency jars of pesto, and the cute kitchen towels she never used, decorated with embroidered chili peppers, folded over the over door handle. Was she lonely or just bored? She got dressed in order to invoke the universal cure—shopping—which in this case meant driving halfway back down the mountain to the general store.

Around her the cold cases hummed, and an old woman asked the clerk if they had any tripe.
Posole
, Lily thought, and began to gather ingredients: She picked up a bag of fresh hominy, two cans of chicken broth, a fat yellow onion, a head of garlic, fresh oregano, a string of green peppers, and a packet of bay leaves. At the checkout stand, she tucked the twenty-four pack of condoms unobtrusively between the staples. When the clerk picked them up she asked, “Are you sure that’s the only brand you have?”

“We got plenty of those lambskin kind.” “Ick. Nothing else in the storeroom?”

“Lady, you bought out everything we had. That there is the last of ’em. I ordered more, but it takes about a week. They come from Los Angeles. It takes the truck awhile to get here.”

California—even hundreds of miles away she couldn’t escape. They were protection from pregnancy; that was all that mattered. “Can I get two more of those turkey sandwiches, please?”

He fetched the sandwiches from the cooler, totaled her bill, and counted back her change. Lily looked at the dwindling, crumpled bills and coins and felt a small pocket of panic catch fire beneath her heart. Each day that ticked by was like Mami’s money, irretrievably spent. Soon she would have to emerge from her comfortable little nest and face real life. During the five days she and Tres had spent together at his mountain cabin, the air had turned from a coppery fall with summer-warm days to thirty degrees at night. Their daylight hours were taken up with hiking and talking, fooling around out- doors. Tres showed her how to tie flies, and she made him let her wear his fishing vest, which hit her mid-thigh, which he found so sexy that it generally led to taking it off. She threw a softball to him and proved that the strength of her

pitching arm was intact. Sometimes he worked on the statues, and she was content to sit by the fire listening to his chisel plane away thin layers of wood. Every night was hers. They used every condom in the box, agreeing that plain old LifeStyles, which she’d just bought, was the worst. Tres said it felt like “sex in a wetsuit.” Lily dreamed about going to work in a laboratory where she devoted herself to engineering a prophylactic that felt more like skin than skin itself. These days protected sex was essential, but logic counted for zip when you wanted to merge with a man. And despite her vows not to let that happen, Lily wanted to be so close to Tres Quintero that not even atoms separated their bodies. Fine, okay, they’d get blood tests as soon as she could bear to let him out of the bed for longer than it took to empty his bladder so they wouldn’t have to worry, but six months, the waiting period from partner to partner, seemed like forever. She was on the pill, but no way was she going to take chances.
If
this was going to last, which was an if of the largest di- mensions, she was going to do things by the book.

The windshield of the Lexus was splattered with pine pitch, but until she got the wiper fixed the best she could do was smear it around. She drove squinting up the highway, her pager rattling around in the trunk, her car phone forgotten back at the cabin. She wore Tres’s old flannel camping shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and didn’t care how ridiculous that looked. The shirt smelled enough like him that she felt like he was holding her even when he was busy at the computer or hunched over the carvings. Her denim breeches were so dirty she imagined they could probably stand up by themselves. Every night she rinsed out her lacy panties in the sink and hung them over the shower door in his bathroom to dry. When she pulled them over her hips the next morning she told herself,
Just one more day, and then I’ll drive back to the ranch and explain to Mami that her two hundred dollars bought one of her daughters a little happiness for once in her miserable life, and hey, what a bargain. No, I won’t. I’ll go to the nearest bank, wire her the money, sneak back to Califor- nia, my lucrative career, and my Lilliputian condo, where the jets fly overhead every two hours but if I stand on tiptoe I can see Catalina Island from my deck when the smog lifts, which makes it all worth it. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’ll do. Sure thing
.

Lies were lies, no matter how you dissected them. It didn’t trouble Lily’s conscience to fib her way through a sales meeting or dinner with

egomaniacal surgeons and their well-dressed, culture-club wives. Unlike Rose the pious, Lily’d break commandments to accomplish her goal. Well, probably not murder, but all the others possessed some level of pliability. She wondered what her sister was up to. She hoped that Rose had taken her advice and hog-tied the veterin- arian to her bed. She probably hadn’t. For sex outside of matrimony, Rose needed an engraved invitation, a money-back guarantee, not to mention blessing from the Vatican. It was a shame, because life was too short not to have sex like this. She wondered how it was two sisters turned out so differently. Lily, born in the heat of August, socking away IRA-Keogh money, and the minute she could afford to, buying horse property, that leopard Appaloosa, sixteen hands high, and all hers, just chucking it all. Rose, born in one very unwel- come March snowstorm, had opted for motherhood, stuck close to her hometown, sewed curtains with lace edges. In spite of all that icky
domesticity
, it was Rose who had a horse in the barn and another at the ranch with a foal on the way. Lily’d been in the corporate game a lot of years, and her leopard Appaloosa was about as tangible as the drawings she and her sister sketched on each other’s backs.

Just like Pop said, love was dangerous business. It could slice your heart down to the bone before showing the glint of the blade. Lily prided herself on knowing when to put up her shield. No way would she end up like Rose, fading away, some beautifully wrapped gift that never found its way to the recipient. Lily knew how…
Oh, be fair
, she chided herself.
Rose isn’t the only fool in the Wilder family. Be- lieving some phantom leopard Appy was the answer to the gnawing hole inside your heart is just as pathetic. Day hikes by the river, making moony faces to Tres over her homemade posole, not even stellar sex constitutes a real future. Nobody, not even smart people, ever stops trying to find their one true one. What happens if you found him, Lily, for the second time, but you aren’t his
?

She gripped the steering wheel and bit her lower lip until it went blue under her teeth. They were old friends, using each other. She should have married him right after high school, had that baby in- stead of aborted it when it was no more than the size of a sneeze. But if she’d never had her career, she wouldn’t know what it was like to fly to London, or stay in fancy hotels, or stand at the front of a roomful of surgeons rapt at her instruction on the instruments she sold. And she

would have missed every moment of it; IQ didn’t evaporate when one procreated. She was thirty-five now, too old to have a baby—well, maybe not too old, but definitely too selfish. How could she remember what a baby needed when half the time she forgot to feed Buddy? She ought to call the ranch again. No, it would be okay. They knew how to get hold of her. Shep would take care of Buddy, maybe even teach him another trick. How could she abandon the beloved blue boy she’d dropped three hundred dollars on a collar for just a week and a half ago? Sexual amnesia, similar to post- traumatic stress syndrome, only this was more about the continual pursuit of relief causing you to do crazy stuff like waste your mother’s grocery money on condoms.

“I’m back,” she announced to Tres as he stood chopping kindling on the stump outside the cabin. “And I’m going to cook you supper from scratch.”

Tres sank the ax blade into the stump and turned to her with a smile. Lily’s heart skittered in her chest like it was spilling its rhythm forever. She went into his arms and breathed in all the complex scents of his body: He smelled like honest sweat from hard work, and that shaving gel with the stinging herbal aroma. Best of all, he smelled like her and all the things they’d done together. Another good thing about
posole
was how long it took to cook: You threw all the ingredients into a pot, and then let it simmer for hours.

“All I asked was what your job was,” Lily explained. “I don’t see how that’s prying. Did you get fired? These days everybody does, Tres, that or downsized. Please, please,
please
tell me. It’s driving me nuts not to know.”

“I wasn’t fired.” “Sued?”

“No. Please, let it alone, Lily.”

In addition to his job, they skated wide circles around the reasons they had left each other seventeen years ago, but each was thinking about it, and in those unavoidable awkward moments of silence, the other could tell. Lily sighed. “Well, we’re running out of topics. What can we talk about that’s safe?”

“Tell me about your family. What’s Rose up to? How’s her kids?” “Did you know that Philip died two years ago?”