The Wilder Sisters (36 page)

He acted as if he didn’t hear her. When she noticed a leather-bound photo album and the treasured collection of his competition days clippings going into the mix, she held out a hand to stop him. “Let me help you organize this stuff.”

“No,” he said firmly. “It’s all going. Every last bit of it.” “Shep, this is your history. You can’t just throw it away.” “Yes, I can. I won’t have it, Rose Ann.”

“Won’t have what?”

“Your pop wading through all my rubble after I’m gone. If nothing else I intend to leave behind a clean house.”

The set of his jaw reminded Rose of Austin on one of his post- Leah encounters. So much pain locked up behind the steeled muscle that it bowed out from under his chin. Rose sat down on Shep’s cot. He clung stubbornly to his task. For an hour things continued in that fashion until Shep stood up, swore once, dropped the bag on the floor and took off on his horse in the dark.

Rose watched him go. She carefully emptied each trash bag, sep- arating the photographs and memorabilia into decades. Shep had been so handsome in his youth, raven-haired, stocky, that mischiev- ous grin playing across his face in the majority of the pictures. Such a variety of women graced his arms it was impossible to recall all their names. What tore her heart was the handmade Valentine cards she and Lily had made for him, the crooked construction-paper hearts he’d saved all these years, with their crayoned messages, backward Ss, and childish declarations of love. She packed all of it neatly into boxes, marked them with pen, and stacked them in the barn next to a rolled-up carpet and the sled she and Lily had once fought over and Amanda and Second Chance had inherited, then grown too old to use. When Shep didn’t return, Rose groomed Winky head to toe, administered the injection, and noted it on the chart. She stood awhile hugging her horse around the barrel, running her fingers through the thick winter coat the mare was growing along with her baby. As long as procreation continued she supposed hope existed. That evening, however, the notion didn’t strike her as at all convincing.

She scraped her shovel down to earth, exhaling visible plumes of breath under the deceptively blue sky. In late October there had been subtle warnings of the coming season. The skies had gone dark, and some days the rain nearly blinded her as she walked from work to her car. As if fed up with itself, the sky delivered occasional mo- mentary flurries that hit Rose in the face like a handful of sand, but the following days were generally sunny, burnishing Floralee’s old adobe buildings to a rich, warm red. Every year the season fooled her. Rose never

accepted that winter had arrived until she was forced to carve a path through it.

She leaned the shovel against the fence, catching her breath. In the barn she fed and groomed the old gelding, crushing three tablets of Bute in with his vitamins, mashing everything up good so he’d take the medicine he needed in order not to stiffen up in this bitter weather. She straightened some fallen tack, ran her fingers over the faded blue ribbons hanging on the wall, glanced at her son’s shotgun that hadn’t been fired in years, covered with cobwebs, looking more like an antique than a weapon. Amanda had won the blue ribbons back in a time when loving her horse was the most important thing in the world. Second Chance had earned a Scout’s patch for his sash by shooting that gun—it was tangible proof of progress, and she wished she had some of her own.

She dragged out a fifty-pound sack of grain to replace the one she’d just emptied. A small tear at the bag’s seam left behind a trail of corn and oats. Across her boot tops, fat brown mice scurried from old hiding places to new ones. Mice were supposed to be Chachi’s detail, but in cold weather the Jack Russell ventured no farther than the back porch to relieve himself before retreating indoors to the woodstove. Rose hung up the shovel, walked out into the arena, and leaned against the fence. The bare branches of the trees glistened as the sun melted the ice from their branches.

She heard Max’s whinnying before she saw Austin’s truck pull up. The driver’s door opened and he got out, holding two Styrofoam cups of coffee. Wisps of steam rose from the perforations in the lids. She had no idea what merited the early-morning visit, and whistled so he’d see her. Austin stepped carefully though the snow until he came to the path she’d cleared and handed her the coffee. “Thanks,” she said. Isn’t this kind of early for you?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Figured I might as well get up and start my day.” They walked into the barn, where Austin placed his hand on the gelding’s back. Max, thrilled with so much attention this early in the morning, trembled and nickered, lowering his neck in anticipa-

tion of the chiropractic adjustments he’d come to love. “You Bute him already?”

“Yes.” Austin lifted his cup to his lips. Rose saw the telltale shake visit his hands and set her cup down on top of the grain sack. “What’s the matter?”

“Just a bad morning,” he said, steadying his drink with both hands. “Following an equally vile night before. I’ll be all right. I just need some caffeine in me and a meeting or three.” He tilted the cup to drink and spilled hot coffee down the front of his jacket.

Perhaps every cuss word Rose knew existed made its way into Austin’s next sentence. She flinched as he hurled the cup across the yard. A swash of brown liquid arced across the snow. Rose let herself be pulled into his embrace and felt the shaking in his shoulders.

Austin had doubled up on his AA meetings, gone way past the thirty required by Eloy. He no longer drove all the way to Taos. These days he marched into the Floralee church carrying his
Big Book
around like Papa Hemingway had autographed it for him personally. He saw patients and kept on schedule, and those days he fell off the wagon, it didn’t take more than a day for him to climb back on. The judgment he heaped on himself only seemed to increase, however, and nothing seemed to quiet him except moments like these. Rose laid her head against his chest and listened to the racing of his heart. Sometimes it felt as if they had skipped all the fun parts of courtship, gone straight to the ingrained habits of a couple married forty years. He kissed the top of her head, a chaste demonstration that deliberately held back what she knew lay hidden there. Austin expected her to wait forever.

She set her coffee down on a box of Philip’s old power tools she’d been meaning to donate to the church rummage sale. Austin’s neck smelled like shaving cream, his jacket strongly of coffee, and deeper still, his own unique citrusy aroma added to the blend. “This isn’t fair,” she said.

“What isn’t fair?”

She pressed her fingers to the stain on his jacket. “You showing up after I’ve finished shoveling the snow. Got to tell you, doctor, coffee, a hug and a brotherly kiss no longer cuts it for this lady.”

He pulled the snaps on her down vest apart, pushed her thermal shirt up far enough so that her bare breasts were exposed. She watched his hand move up her skin, take hold of one breast and squeeze hard. She gasped, her own shocked intake of breath surpris- ing her.

“That any better?” he asked.

“You want to take this inside, cowboy?” she said, laughing nervously, but Austin didn’t answer. He bent her back against the grain sacks, kneed her legs apart with his own, and the chill air against her

flesh was beyond bracing. “That’s enough, Austin. Stop it right now.”

Rose shoved him away and pulled her clothes together. Her eyes stung with cold. She retrieved the fallen coffee cups and threw them in the trash. Inside at her kitchen sink she stood trying to remember how exactly it was one washed a dish, because in front of her the basinful she’d left overnight were still dirty.

The door opened and shut. Austin came up behind her. He laid one hand across hers, the hand that held the soapy sponge she now let drop into the sink. “Rose Ann, I’m sorry.”

She straightened her back. “I know you’re having a hard time, but sometimes you make me feel like I’m nothing to you but a place to stow all your anger. I’m not Leah. Why do I get the feeling that I have to spend the rest of my life making up for how she hurt you?”

“You don’t.”

“Bull. And that business in the barn? Good Lord, Austin, what were you thinking?”

He pulled her close, breathed into her hair. “I don’t mean to put you through all that. I thought you wanted me to touch you.”

She shut her eyes, embarrassed. “Yes, I do, in spite of how you went about it, but does that mean gentle and kind suddenly got outlawed?”

He let her go. “I feel god-awful. Last night she walked into the restaurant where I was eating dinner. She had some Texan with her. He didn’t even look thirty years old. Hanging all over him, half in his lap, giggling. Waitress comes up and asks me if I want to switch tables. I swear, the whole damn town knows my business. What in the hell’s wrong with her?”

“She’s trying to make herself happy, Austin.” “Why’s it make me so damned miserable?” “Because you let it. Next time change tables.”

He picked the sponge up and squeezed it dry. “I want a drink so bad I dream about it. I taste in my mouth when I wake up. I’m dizzy with meetings and talk about higher powers I don’t believe in. I say the words, but they don’t feel real to me, they don’t drown out what I need. You’re the one person I can go to who never calls me on my bullshit.”

Rose laughed dryly. “Well, guess what, Austin, you just ran out of places.”

He turned her face to his. His eyelashes were thick with tears. “Tell

me what to do here. I don’t think I could stand it if I lost your friendship.”

Rose reached above the sink to straighten the metal crucifix from Chimayo hanging there. When the tiny church of miracles had been reroofed, some artist had bought the scrap metal and fashioned crosses from the worn-out roof, over a hundred years old. There were a lot of things about Catholicism that rubbed her the wrong way, but not this symbol of sacrifice. Lily made fun of her sister for praying, but Rose knew that if it weren’t for her faith, she’d be in worse shape than Austin. She caught hold of his hand and laced her fingers through his, still damp from the dishwater. “We haven’t lost our friendship, exactly, but things are different. It’s time, Austin. Take me to bed.”

He stood there looking at the weave of their fingers, squeezing hard. “What if I’m no good to you? What happens if I can’t satisfy you?”

“Why don’t you let me worry about that?”

The bedroom was cool. Rose wanted to dive into the tangle of sheets and bury herself behind the covers. Instead, she stood next to the bed, directing Austin’s fingers under her clothes and up her flanks, where all her ignored nerve endings were jumbled up, so desperate for attention just the graze of his fingers made her excited. She closed her eyes and gave herself over to sensation.

When her shirt was off, Austin ran a fingernail across her inner arm, causing her to tremble. “Jewel quakes like that when a horsefly lands on her,” he whispered. “Me, I practically have to get slapped in the face to feel anything. I keep telling you, I’m not ready.”

“
Shh
.” She turned to face him, then moved her fingers down the length of his body and pressed against him with the palm of her hand. He was only semi-erect. All that guilt and rage inside him had locked up in one eternal fistfight.

Give up
, Rose mentally commanded him, stepping out of her boots and pulling off the rest of her clothing. Every place she explored, she touched him as gently as she could. That business about needing to be slapped was so much manure. Yes, he was in pain, and she understood how that felt, how sometimes only more hurt allowed one to break through what already felt like agony. But familiar pain wasn’t the only emotion one could feel. When his clothes were out of the way, she ran her fingers up either side of the fold in his groin and felt him shudder.

She knelt down and pressed her face against him, began kissing her way toward his center. Austin made a sound like a sob, and his fin- gers locked tight in the hair at the nape of her neck.

Rose could count on one hand the number of times she’d felt this close to Philip. In bed her husband had been a meat-and-potatoes kind of man, quick to inform her there was no need for her to “act that way” when she wanted to try something different, that he was just fine with “regular sex,” which, of course, made her feel cheap and ridiculous for suggesting anything new. She imagined other women were expert, other women—say it,
Lily
—knew how to do all kinds of things, perform fellatio with a finesse that rendered a man speechless. Moving up his body, Rose laid her cheek against Austin’s, and with her fingertips traced the whiskers on his chin. She waited for whatever would happen next, even for Austin to say he was leaving, because even if he said that he was never coming back, she understood he would be lying. They were connected in a way that never seemed to unravel. They lay down on the bed. Rose felt calm and quiet, deeply immersed in this, astonished by the power of love. All those years with Philip, and she’d never arrived at this place, not once. They were both going to be late for work. The coffee on the stove was probably down to an inch; any minute now it could burn down to a thick caramel and the house catch fire. The whole day in fact might slide down the drain. Right now, however, this quiet moment that elevated them both seemed more important than any of that.

She let the silence carry her like a jet stream, that long, meandering wind that blew in from the west, pulling inside it whatever was nearby, feeding itself in order to continue. His fingers began to ex- plore her body, revealing the vulnerability he was finally willing to allow her to witness. Her own pulsing, unrelieved desires made her groan, and Austin hauled her to him, kissed her full on the mouth. “Rose,” he said into her neck. “I don’t deserve you.”

She traced her tongue along the curve of his ear. “No, you don’t.” He took hold of her upper arms, climbed up her body, pushing himself against her as if nothing had better try to stop him, a lost man in search of relief. It was the most eloquent prayer he knew, and the old Rose would have gone ahead and parted her legs for him, thrown open her heart, making believe the gift of her body was enough to heal him, but this Rose had a clearer head. “Austin,” she