The Wilder Sisters (52 page)

room so our guests can enjoy the show.”

“There isn’t anybody out there under forty years old,” Second Chance said.

Lily smacked him on the knee with the spatula she was holding. “Excuse me? I’m not forty yet.”

“You know what I meant.”

“
I
happen to be forty,” Rose pointed out.

“Mother,” Amanda whined. “Make Second Chance say he’s sorry about my hair.”

Rose gave her daughter a weary look. “Amanda, if that was all it took to get you two to behave peaceably, I’d’ve done it years ago.” “The two of you stop acting like brats,” Lily said. “I hate to tell you, Amanda, dreads will make your hair fall out. It’s true; this doc I know from South Africa tried it. Ended up having to shave his head, and when it grew back, the hair was all thin and different. Not even Rogaine helped. He ended up having to get hair plugs. His was more damaged than yours, though, so if you got rid of them right this second you might be okay. You might want to try combing them out with this conditioner I’ve got. It costs fifty dollars an ounce, but it’s worth every penny. Hey, Rose, remember what Mami always

said about our hair?”

She and Lily put their arms around each other’s shoulders and recited the line as if they were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. “Your hair is your flag.”

Amanda touched the ropy strands. “Caleb thinks my hair is cool.” “Caleb?” Second Chance said. “What kind of dopey name is that? Sounds like a rap singer. No, I take it back. It just sounds made up.” Amanda tore her cape off and threw it on the table, just missing the pasta salad, into which Lily was sliding some roasted peppers. Underneath the cape she was wearing a shapeless gray dress not even an Amish woman would be caught dead in, and tall black boots that needed resoling. “Like ‘Second Chance’ doesn’t sound about as pathetic as your life is? How many bones have you broken this year? How many of your teeth are capped? You suck as a brother.

I don’t even miss you.” “Same to you, rat-hair.” “Mother!”

At the stove, Rose emptied a can of chopped tomatoes into a pot. “You’ll notice the only thing I’m paying attention to is my spaghetti sauce.”

Lily watched her niece and nephew escalate from chop fights to childish faces to mock blows and finally end up in mutual friendly laughter. She and Rose had been the same way. The bond between these two spoiled children would carry them a long way. Someday, when they’d weathered enough road, they might even be nice to each other, and reap the benefits of family.

Second Chance slid down off the counter. “So, dogface, you want to see my bike?”

Amanda shrugged. “Why not. There’s nothing else to do.”

“Put the lid back on those olives, please,” Rose said as she stirred the mushrooms Lily handed to her into the pan.

Lily inhaled the comforting aroma of Rose’s spaghetti sauce. Her sister grated carrots into the tomato puree, tempering the acid with sweetness. Seconds before she ladled the sauce onto the pasta, she’d bunch up fresh basil, coarsely chop it, and sprinkle it in. Like an ar- ranged marriage, those disparate flavors had no choice but to fuse passionately. The end result was a close enough cousin to pesto that Lily could eat it on Krisprolls. All she’d had today was coffee and a piece of bread. The fact that there seemed to be no end to the food made her nervous, because no matter how full people became at this party, somewhere out there another person was hungry. When the music started, and the dancing got under way, Shep’s funeral would transform into a typical New Mexican hoedown. Lily ached for some time alone, so she could take in what had happened to her world, not to mention the horses’. First chance she got, she planned to sneak away on the pretext of feeding them.

“Your boots are fine, but you’ll have to lose the skirt,” Second Chance said. “And the Elvira face has to go, too, or I’ll ditch you in the first snowbank deep enough to hide your body. You got jeans in that skanky backpack, or just ganja?”

“Of course I have jeans, but I’m not changing my makeup. It took me an hour to get it to look this way.”

Rose turned to say something, apparently thought better of it, and clamped her mouth shut.

Lily knew if she were the one to suggest helmets, the kids might comply. “No way either of you’re riding in this weather unless you’re both wearing brain buckets. I mean it, Second Chance. I’ve seen emergency room carnage like you wouldn’t believe. Brains coming out peo-

ples’ noses. Faces scraped down to bone plastic surgery couldn’t repair.”

The dirt-bike king remained unfazed. “I’ve only got one helmet with me.”

“Then she can wear a riding helmet. There’re dozens in the barn.

Come on, Amanda, let’s go find you one.”

Lily pulled on her coat, and they sidled through the partygoers to the outdoors. The snow had stopped. The horses meandered around the arena, anxious about the ruckus taking place in their normally quiet world. They lingered by the fence, hopeful that the number of people increased their chances of handouts. Lily spotted Winky, paired off with another pregnant mare, and wondered if mare talk, that almost imperceptible exchange of nickers between female horses, intensified during the gestational period. She was curious if their conversations focused on the developing foals they carried or if—like most women—they spent the majority of their time discussing stallions.

In the tack room she and Amanda stamped their feet at the cold coming up through the floorboards. Second Chance lingered by the fence patting the necks and blunt muzzles of curious horses. “Hey, look,” Amanda said. “That’s my yellow schooling helmet from when I used to show Max. What’s it doing up here?”

“I don’t know,” Lily said. “Your mom probably left it. Sometimes she trailers Max up and rides with Pop. Maybe it fits her better than any of the others.”

“Lame,” Amanda said, as if once claiming ownership made a thing hers for life. “She could buy her own.”

Lily bristled. “Hey, your mom is living on a budget, ska girl. And speaking of money, what is the deal with you swiping her grocery funds? That was a perfectly rotten thing to do.”

Amanda’s face reflected total innocence. “Aunt Lily, I swear—”

Lily held up a hand. “Please. Anytime you start a sentence with ‘I swear,’ I’m sure you’re lying. Jeez, Amanda. How old are you now? Twenty? Twenty-one? You could go to jail for that if you did that to anyone but your overly understanding mom. Cop to it for once. Pay her back. She’s had a pretty rough couple of months.”

With her sleeve, Amanda rubbed a clear spot into the old mirror that hung on the wall alongside bridles and spare bits Shep had carefully arranged with the name of each horse penned in marker beneath.

She pulled the helmet down over her awful hair, and except for where the ends stuck out, she looked like Lily had always re- membered her: attractive, insecure about it, feisty, because she had Wilder blood running through her veins, and intelligent—so smart she hadn’t yet scratched the surface of what she could do with her life if she ever settled down and followed just a few of the rules.

“What happened? Was there a crisis at the church potluck? Somebody forgot to bring the green beans and not all the food groups got represented? Unthinkable.”

Without a moment’s hesitation Lily gave her niece a slap across the face. Not hard, not mean, but to get her attention, the way she sometimes had to give Buddy Guy a whack or he’d amputate the legs of the UPS delivery man. Amanda cried out in shock, pulled the helmet off and touched her cheek.

“As a matter of fact, there were a couple of personal crises thrown in there along with constantly worrying about you two. It just kills me how you and Second Chance think Rose will always be there, like she’s some endless freaking well you can dip into for a meal, a few dollars, to pay your parking tickets, never once giving a thought to putting anything back. When’s the last time you remembered her birthday? How about Mother’s Day? Not to mention Thanksgiving, when normal families at least call each other.”

“We’d probably still have a family if she’d paid Daddy more at- tention,” Amanda said, pouting.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Amanda scuffed the toe of her boot against a sawhorse. Her eyes glittered with tears. “Just that if she had, he wouldn’t have needed to look for it elsewhere.”

Lily sighed. She guessed maybe the whole town knew about Philip’s wanderings, which let her off the hook as the unwelcome messenger, but somehow that wasn’t much of a comfort. “Take it on faith, Amanda, you do not want to get me started on your dad, not while I’m feeling this raw. Do not say one more word. In ten years we’ll talk about this, and believe me, you’ll see it in a different light. For now, you go ride the damn motorbike with your brother and zip your lip. Don’t either of you get hurt or I promise, I will hunt you down and hurt you worse. And as soon as you get back, meet me in the upstairs bathroom and we’ll do something about your hair.”

Lily stomped out of the tack room. She knew she’d better take a walk and cool down. Faintly, in the distance, she heard Amanda say to Second Chance, “God, Aunt Lily’s on the rag today.”

Shep’s studio adjoined the tack room. Lily opened the door and walked inside, intending to stay only long enough to forget how badly the kids were behaving. His room was so cold. Somebody had turned off the heater. Well, of course. Why waste electricity if there was no one to warm? His iron-framed cot was covered with a faded red-and-green trade blanket that had been there since time itself. All the corners were tucked, and the pillow case looked crisp, fresh from the laundry. Leave it to Shep to make his bed before he went off to the hospital to die.

A deck of Bicycle playing cards sat on the table, waiting for someone to shuffle and deal, get the pants beaten off him, and lose a week’s wages. On the small bookshelf were three choices of reading material: the King James Version of the Bible,
Xenophon’s Illustrated History of the Horse
, and Larry McMurtry’s
Leaving Cheyenne
. Lily picked up the hardcover novel, which was a first edition, inscribed to Shep from the author. One Christmas her father had gone to Texas and found Mr. McMurtry. God knows what he’d paid the man, but he returned with the autographed book, and on Christmas morning, Shep sat in the living room of the main house, running his hands over the cover, so tickled he couldn’t speak. He kept paperback reading copies galore, buying them five at a time, because he liked to give them away, but this particular book he kept in its original jacket, taking it down from the shelf only when he wanted to savor the story in its purest form.

Lily opened the cover and ran her finger across the inscription in black ink.
To Shep Hallford, horseman
. “Oh, Shepherd,” Lily said to the empty room. “Already I miss you so bad I can’t stand it.” She sat down on his bed and pulled the blanket folded at the foot of the bed up over herself. She lay there hugging the book to her breasts and staring at the ceiling, done up so well in pseudo viga that matched the main house and looked nearly authentic.

Maybe slapping Amanda was overstepping her boundaries as an aunt, but the gesture was long overdue. This year had been rough on Rose. That heartbreaking business with the vet, coming to realize Philip had been unfaithful—and with whom—Lily couldn’t wrap her mind around the irony there. Maybe someday Rose would stand up to her kids,

but somehow, in her heart of hearts, Lily knew that the essence of her sister was and always would be a mother rocking an infant too helpless to lift his head. Lily tried to imagine what it would have been like to hold her own baby. How watching her daughter grow into her own person would have been as fascinating as it was terri- fying. A day of rocking a baby versus power-lunching with surgeons? Bliss, probably. She reminded herself of the statistics for birth defects. She’d never be able to erase medical worries from her brain. There would be amnios and sonograms, and she’d have to eat real food and gain so much weight and get stretch marks, plus it would ruin her breasts. Tres would run for the hills if she so much as broached the subject. Well, aunthood was better than nothing. Maybe it would sustain her if she didn’t think about it too much.

Remembering the beep she’d gotten during the funeral, she reached into her jacket pocket and dug out her pager. Lily had just about all her docs’ numbers committed to memory. The area code was Orange County. She figured she’d better return the call now, before she forgot, so she dragged the blanket with her to the table and used Shep’s phone.

It was Dr. Help-Me’s hospital. Lily asked the woman who answered the phone what was up. “I got a page,” she said. “Does he need technical assistance?”

The woman said she’d take a message. Lily gave her all five numbers: cell phone, voice mail, 800 number, Pop’s house, and once again the pager. “I’m at a family funeral,” she explained. “But if there’s a physician who needs assistance with any of my company’s products, absolutely go ahead and interrupt me.”

She hung up the phone, shelved the McMurtry, and walked out- side toward the house. The horses spooked at the sound of her shutting the door, performing the nip-and-bite cha-cha for her atten- tion, which made her miss Buddy something fierce. The amount of squealing and fence kicking showed just how deeply the loss of Shep affected the horses. The transition was bewildering for her, too, but in equines the fight-or-flight response ran deep. It was the first thing a trainer learned to respect about the horse; then he spent the rest of his life learning how to work around it. With luck some horses came to trust that the human in charge would see the inherent danger in situations and calmly work a way out of whatever terror that might be. Laundry hanging on the line or mountain lions, it made little difference to the

animal. The danger was there in the dark, waiting. Any horse trainer worth spit could tell you that the way to a horse’s trust didn’t mean “whispering,” for Pete’s sake—he needed to
listen
to what the horse was trying to tell him. Hollywood, glorifying that crap, was responsible for generations of equestrian ignorance.

Lily wondered if Pop would hire somebody young to take over as wrangler right away, and they’d continue business as before, selling horses and breeding a select few; or if Pop might begin selling off his stock, slowing down, aiming toward retirement or whatever Mami had on the back burner.
Please, not yet
, she sent out to Rose’s God and beyond, into the universe.
If Pop gets old, then we all do. I’m not ready to be old. I have twenty more years before I want to even start to feel like that. I haven’t done half the stuff I want to
. T.C., lonesome for attention, whinnied from his stall. The sound rattled Lily’s bones. “Hang on,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.”