The Wilder Sisters (41 page)

One thing she knew for certain, until she formally resigned things between them would hover in this uncomfortable limbo.

Rose couldn’t recall the exact place where she’d sat, along with many other parents, watching as her son made his confirmation, but she remembered her gawky boy was dressed in a suit he could hardly wait to shed. She remembered swallowing hard against the lump in her throat so she wouldn’t cry and embarrass him as he walked past her, his hands held upright in prayer. After making her First Communion,

Amanda insisted that church was crap and she wasn’t going any- more. Philip said it was Amanda’s right to make the choice—she’d been seven at the time—he said she was old enough to decide. Both Lily and Rose had worn the handmade white lace dress for their communions. The day she received the host, Rose’s daughter looked angelic. Mami cried. Pop shot four rolls of film and gave Amanda a new saddle. The heirloom dress was tucked away into pink tissue paper in a box beneath Rose’s bed. It struck her that her bed was like a layer cake of human failings: dust bunnies, because she needed to clean more often but rarely got around to it; the abandoned communion dress, its lace yellowing and fragile; the money-and- photo wrapped statue of Saint Anthony between the box spring and mattress—
I have to remember to get rid of that
, she reminded her- self—the sheets newly laundered and redolent of fabric softener, but clinging unseen to the weave, the ghosts of the only two men she’d ever slept with.

In the morning she’d deliver Austin her letter of resignation, start looking for another job. It wasn’t just the proper thing to do, she wanted it face-to-face so he’d understand that she meant it. Rose turned away from the altar, walking past the font of holy water without blessing herself. Outside it was snowing, and she turned her face up to feel the light, dry flakes land on her skin. At the far end of the parking lot, the windshield of her Bronco was rimed with frost. She climbed inside and turned the key in the ignition, nursing the pedal with her foot until the old engine caught. The streets were nearly empty.

At home she walked directly to the barn and fed the horse. Chachi didn’t come out to greet her, and she wondered if the Jack Russell was parked indoors next to the woodstove. Probably he had peed on the throw rug, unwilling to venture forth in snow showers.
What a pair of hermits we make
, Rose thought, putting her key to the front door lock.

Inside, she set her purse down and whistled for the dog, but in- stead of racing over to beg for a treat, he merely looked up from the spot in front of the woodstove. She squatted down next to him and rubbed his chest, inspecting him for injuries, finding nothing unusu- al, no sore places, just a generally hyper dog acting aloof. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Do you have the holiday lonelies, too? Tell you what, let’s go to bed, Chachi. With a box of Milk-Bones and a pile of cheap paperbacks. Does that sound like a plan?”

The following morning she wrote out her letter and drove to the clinic. All the way there, her emotional side argued against leaving. She relived the casual banter she and Austin traded back and forth, and thought how every day she looked forward to the time when he’d end up in her office, sitting on a corner of her desk, telling her how his day had gone, which horse ran away with him, how far he’d gotten dragged this time, the two of them laughing, sharing jokes only they found amusing. The confidences they’d shared—like the time Rose found a Baggie of seeds in Amanda’s room and, fearful they were some kind of illegal substance, gathered her courage and showed them to Austin. He’d planted them under a special grow light in the lab, and when the green shoots came up in the recogniz- able shape of wildflowers, they laughed, equally relieved. He dealt with the animal end of things; she kept the numbers straight. Their friendship was a precious by-product of shared work, but Rose couldn’t help it that her feelings for Austin hadn’t stopped there. Like the seedlings, her feelings had continued to grow long past the embryonic pair of leaves connected to the stem into the determined flower it was their purpose to support.

She rubbed her eyes, gritty from reading too late into the night. At breakfast Chachi remained subdued, which she wanted to blame on the weather, windy and cold. Any other time it would have ticked her off to see the explosion of tricolored terrier running toward her, gleefully covered in dirt from his incessant hole-digging, or proudly dragging a rank, long-dead squirrel into her kitchen.

Paloma started crying the minute Rose walked in the door. Rose gave her a hug and patted her back. “We’ll still see each other,” she whispered. “It’s not like I’m moving away.”

“Yes it is,” Paloma insisted, stifling a sob that sent her into the privacy of the restroom until she could get hold of herself.

The roomful of clients and their pets looked up at Rose, as if they, too, deserved an explanation. She went in search of Austin, who she found setting a broken leg on a Jack Russell colored in almost the reverse patterns of Chachi, mostly black on her body, with occasional, haphazardly placed patches of white and brown.

“Whose dog?” she asked, laying the letter on the counter.

He continued winding the Vet Wrap around the splint. “Don’t know. I found her in a ditch on Vega Road when I was driving to work this morning.”

“She’s awfully cute.”

He showed her his hand, which was bandaged. “She has that Jack Russell spirit. There she was, dragging this leg behind her, I pick her up, and first thing she does is bite me.”

Rose smiled. “Are you going to put an ad in the paper to try to find her owner?”

Austin turned over the dog’s paws, revealing torn and bloody pads. “Looks to me like somebody abandoned her. I cannot fathom that there are people alive who still believe it’s humane to dump a dog in the wilderness. I’ll try to adopt her out when she’s healed up.”

Rose picked up the letter. “Here’s my resignation,” she said, handing it to Austin.

He pocketed the envelope without looking at it. “You really believe this is necessary?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Mind explaining why?”

Rose sighed. “Austin, if it’s your marriage you’re trying to resur- rect, that’s an admirable thing. If it means you and Leah can fix whatever’s broken, great, more power to you, but that doesn’t mean I have to stand here and watch. I have feelings too. It’s better for everyone this way.”

He shut the Jack Russell into a nearby cage. “Will you come with me a minute? Will you give me that much?”

She sighed. “What’s the point?”

He pulled Rose up the stairs into the supply room. Shutting the door behind them, he took hold of her upper arms. The look in his face was tender. “I don’t want to lose you. I can’t stand it if we’re not friends. You’re like a fixture in my life, Rose. Every day, rain or shine, drunk or sober, you’ve been there for me.”

“Don’t you see? That’s the problem. I’ve been a fixture, all right, like a sink or a stove or a wastebasket.”

He pulled her close to him and breathed into her hair. Rose marveled at how something so bad for her could feel so right, so necessary. The feeling lasted until she pictured him with Leah in the

¡Andale!, tipping the beer to his lips. She pushed him an arm’s length away.

“Rose, what’s happened between us scares me shitless. Leah’s a known quantity. I know it sounds cowardly of me, but things are familiar with her, even when they’re bad. We know how to do things.”

Rose felt like she’d been slapped. “If you’re with Leah because you’re scared of me, then you aren’t the man I thought you were, Austin, and you don’t deserve either of us. Maybe you think you can distract yourself for a little while, and maybe that’s true, but eventually Leah will do what she always does, which is hurt you and leave. And you’ll be left with that dark little cave in your heart she always carves out and only I seem to fill. You can’t have it both ways, my friend.”

He stood there silently watching her.

When enough time had passed for her to count to thirty, Rose moved past him and up the stairs to her office. She shut the door and began sifting through personal things that had accumulated over time, making the desk hers. A mug in which she kept pencils, a scented candle she imagined took away the doggy smells but really didn’t. A button Paloma had given her that read “Someday we’ll look back on all this, laugh nervously, and change the subject.” Most of it could go in the trash, but she was reluctant to abandon the donkey-tail cactus even if she couldn’t imagine how to transport it home without breaking the long, green, carefully tended tendrils. She left it hanging from its ceiling hook and hoped whoever took her place would appreciate it. When she gathered the framed pictures of her family, Rose paused to look at the photograph of her husband. It made sense to her now, that look of surprise in his eyes. This pic- ture was the closest she would ever come to hearing his confession.
Just for a moment
, she told herself as she walked into Austin’s office, but once there a kind of exhaustion overcame her, and she lay down on the bed, pulling his red plaid flannel pillow close to her chest. The whole place smelled of him: Oranges, a hint of sweat, antiseptic soap, unique smells, his alone. She switched on the reading lamp and looked out the window across the snowy lawn where the tattered American flags lay stiffly frozen against their poles. The futon sagged when she turned toward the window. The snow was coming down

hard. It made everything look so clean and pure.

She thought about how beneath Austin’s mattress lay all those books he revered, each one filled with a different story, each tale made up of labored-over sentences, each of those crammed with words, many of which she would need to look up in the dictionary to have them make sense. So much effort, when there was only one story, a poem she’d read it in a magazine she’d found while cleaning Amanda’s mess of a room:

The oldest story ain’t Jesus but men and women

who once touched

and now ain’t touching anymore.

Rose pulled back a corner of the mattress and pried opened one of the boxes. Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Tolstoy, dead men whose worldviews belonged to past eras. She would be more likely to bungee-jump over the Rio Grande than understand what it was he saw in them. She switched off the lamp. If she shut her eyes, she could imagine the sound of his bootheels striking the risers. When she lay back against the pillows, she could feel his hands on her body, his mouth at her ear. It was time to go, past time, actually.

Downstairs she stopped in front of the cage where the Jack Russell was rousing from her treatment, trying out how to balance with the splinted leg. Rey was cleaning cages. “Spunky little cuss,” he re- marked.

On a portable TV in the background, she heard the sound of a Dennis Miller monologue, his precise intellectual rant against all the world’s idiocy. Rey loved that show, often quoted from it. Rose found Dennis Miller funny, too, but essentially he said the same thing every time: Progress was impossible. It was disheartening news, particularly for a single woman recently unemployed who lived in a town so small it had to share a zip code. “Rey, can you come up with any reason this dog can’t go home with someone who has medical skills?”

He set the mop down in its bucket of suds. “I don’t think so. But you better ask the
jefe
. And watch yourself, he’s in a real bad mood today. I’d hate to be whoever pissed him off.”

Rose wrapped the dog in a towel and took the medical card with her. Austin was seeing a patient in exam room two. She tapped on the glass window in the door, motioning to him. “Excuse me for in- terrupting,” she said when he opened the door. “But I’ve decided I want to adopt the dog, if I can take her with me now.”

“She’s all yours,” he said.

“How cute,” the woman whose pet rabbit he was examining said. “What are you going to name her?”

“Joanie, what else?” Rose answered before she shut the door.

Pop was sitting on her front step smoking his pipe as Rose pulled into the driveway. He brushed the snow from his pants when he stood up.

“For heaven’s sake, you have a key. You could have gone inside,” she scolded him. “I hope you don’t catch pneumonia.” She handed him the terrier and fumbled with her key chain.

“A man doesn’t go into other people’s houses uninvited. You just missed your mother.”

“That’s too bad. How was the party?”

“Festive enough that half the artists in this town are waking up with king-size hangovers. Heard you worked the church supper.”

“That I did.”

“Heard who you had to serve, too. Dammit all, Rose. I’d like to punch him in the nose.”

Her face burned. “Don’t, Pop. It was my mistake and I’m handling it. I’ve finally found the
courage
you so desperately want me to pos- sess, and I’m dealing with the situation like an adult. To that end I just quit my job and adopted this dog.”

He stared at her, the pipe clamped in his teeth. “Looks like she’s busted up. What happened?”

“I don’t know. Austin thinks she was dumped.” She laughed. “I know how that feels this close to the holidays so I brought her home.” “Tell me something, Rose. Have I been so hard on you that you

couldn’t call your old man for comfort?”

“Every chance you get you remind me I’m weak.”

“Hell, that’s my shortcoming, not yours. That was wrong of me and I apologize. You know I’m not an educated man.”

“As if that has anything to do with it. I’m no more educated than you are.”

“Yes, you are. Educated hard by the adventure of your life. You’ve done all right, considering all your troubles. I admire the hell out of you.”

“Lily’s the one you admire.”

He shook his head no. “Your sister talks a great game, but you’re my rock. Always have been, always will be. Every night when your mother gets down on her knees to talk to the man upstairs, I tell her, ‘Sweetheart, send up all the prayers you got for Lily. Rose Ann can take care of herself.’”

Rose put her hand to her eyes, pinching back the tears, feeling the ache of restraint vibrate in her jaw. Pop’s kind words on top of having just quit her job were too much. Her father clamped his hand down hard on her shoulder and steered her inside. They placed the dog on the floor near Chachi, who growled once and then began to wag his tail and sniff her all over. When she nipped at him, Chachi rolled over and showed her his belly. “That’s right, girl,” Pop said. “You set the boundaries right from the start.”