The Wilder Sisters (53 page)

Inside the tack room, she measured out individual buckets of bran mash, adding molasses and vitamins, following the detailed instruc- tions designated for each horse. Then, patiently working her way through the snowy arena, one by one, she haltered the horses, taking them into the barn, letting them enjoy the rib-warming treat alone and unrushed. While they ate, she spoke soft and low into long, shaggy ears, notched ears—all kinds of different ears that needed to hear the same story:
Everything’s going to be okay. Tomorrow morn- ing, flakes of rich, green hay will arrive, on time, and yes, I promise, there will be enough to go around
. When the last horse had been fed, she felt as calm as they did, and for the first time that day, she too felt hungry.

“Benito wants your body,” Lily said as the sisters stood by the fire- place sampling tiny portions of all the desserts. “Looks like he wants it bad.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Rose said, then spooned some coffee soufflé into her mouth. “This is so good,” she said, “it’s almost illegal. I wonder who made it.”

The string quartet her mother had hired began to tune their instru- ments to the violin’s pure, solid A. People quieted for a moment, then continued talking. Benito, cameraless, his hands in his pockets, walked over to the fireplace. “How do you like my soufflé?” he asked. “It requires eight eggs.”

As unobtrusively as possible, Lily elbowed her sister.

“It’s wonderful,” Rose said, setting her plate on the fireplace mantle. “I hope it’s on the menu at the restaurant.”

Pride blazed in his dark eyes. “It is.”

“Well, then. That’s lucky for the people who eat there.” “I’m glad you think so.”

“Let me have a bite,” Lily said, and took a taste off Rose’s spoon. “You’re right, this is great.”

“Is that your daughter?” Benito said, pointing across the room where Amanda and Second Chance were filling plates with food.

“Yes,” Rose said. “And my son. I’d probably better go catch them before they bolt.” She smiled and set the soufflé dish down on the table. “See you later, Benito.”

“What am I doing wrong?” he said straight out to Lily as Rose hurried across the room. “Is it my suit? My breath?”

“Who do you take your greyhounds to,” Lily asked, “when they need their shots and so forth?”

“Doctor Donavan. Your mother says he’s the best.” Lily patted his shoulder. “There’s your problem, pal.” “My veterinarian?”

“Yep. A definite dating impediment. Will you excuse me? It ap- pears I’m needed to perform a miracle on my niece’s hair. Wish me luck. And Benito? About my sister Rose. She doesn’t fall in love very often, but when she does, she gives it her whole heart. She also makes a great friend.”

He nodded soberly. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Upstairs, they sat on Mami’s bed, combing conditioner through the ratty mess of dreadlocks. It was taking forever, and Amanda was growing more impatient with every pull of the comb. “What if I hate it?”

“Then you can knot it right back up again. Just give it a try, Sweetie, for one day,” Rose said. “That’s not too much to ask. Come on, Lily, you do this side, and we’ll finish twice as fast.”

Slowly, patiently, the two sisters worked their way through Amanda’s tangles. “This reminds me of that time in kindergarten when your whole class caught head lice,” Rose said. “You were so horrified.”

“That was gross,” Amanda said. “I still have nightmares.”

Rose laughed. “It’s just something that happens. You survive it.”

“Yeah,” Lily said, setting down her comb. “Wait until the first time you catch crab lice.”

Amanda laughed. “Already been there.”

Rose sighed, shook her head, and ducked into Mami’s bathroom for a clean towel. “Guess I missed that particular rite of passage.”

“Now that you’re dating again,” Lily pointed out, “anything’s possible. Could still happen.”

Rose unfolded the towel and draped it around Amanda’s shoulders. “Let’s hope not.”

“You really
date
, Mom?” Amanda said. “Like, he picks you up and takes you to a movie?”

“Something like that.”

Lily laughed. “Tell us the name of the last five movies you’ve seen, Rose. I dare you.”

“Hush. I think we’re ready to shampoo this.”

They scooted Mami’s dressing table stool up to the sink, and Amanda sat down and leaned her head back. They rinsed the condi- tioner out, washed her hair with baby shampoo, and then Lily towel- dried it. She rubbed a handful of leave-in conditioner into the chestnut hair, then went after it with a brush and a blow-dryer.

Meanwhile Rose gave her daughter a “facial,” basically rubbing cold cream into her skin to remove the ghostly makeup. She used a facecloth to wipe it off, then blotted her skin with some costly toner that Mami had sitting on the edge of her sink. The label on it said 10,000 Waves, the spa Mami frequented.

“Someday we have to go there,” Lily said. “Imagine all the Wilder women in our own private tub. The water would boil.”

When Lily finished, Amanda looked into the mirror. The two sis- ters leaned down so that they could put their faces alongside Amanda’s. Rose’s smile was the first to arrive. “
Damn
, we are good- looking women,” Lily said. “And I think very soon we deserve a four-star shopping trip.”

“Yeah,” Amanda said, touching her pink cheeks. “I could use some new makeup.”

The next morning, when the funeral get-together had dwindled down to a hard-core few—alcoholics, artists, single men with nowhere more interesting to go and horsemen so fueled by good food and spirits felt they had

to stick around and help with chores—Lily got a phone call from Eric.

“Where in the hell have you been?” he demanded, and before Lily could say, “Right here,” he was off and running, frothing at the mouth about how she’d embarrassed the company, let Dr. Help-Me down, and worst of all, made him look bad.

“Bring me up to speed here,” she said calmly. “If I’m going to lose my job over this, I want to hear what I did wrong.”

Dr. Help-Me, killer of gallbladder patients, pathetic dropper of laparoscopes, had apparently had a sterilization patient on the table when he had some trouble with the scope. It rarely happened, but it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. He claimed he’d tried Lily at her pager, but when he didn’t receive an immediate callback, he bypassed all the other numbers he could have tried, instead calling the company headquarters back East. The technical-assistance people talked him through the problem—it was a simple tubal ligation, women could practically perform it themselves—and thankfully, everything turned out fine. But before he could embark on his Christmas holidays in Cabo San Lucas, he just felt he had to call her boss and tell him how badly Lily’d let him down.

“He said, and I quote, ‘If I can’t count on her to be there when I need her,’” Eric said. “‘I want a new rep—somebody who’ll be there all day, every day.’ You know, Lily, we’re dealing with human lives here, not lab rats. The man has an oath to uphold.”

Lily stopped taking notes in order to digest that last comment. Truly, her boss had to think she’d been struck with the convenient amnesia that frequently overcame soap opera characters if he expec- ted she’d forgotten one single patient that had died while she was in the OR alongside a surgeon she’d personally trained. “I’ll give him a call,” she said, forcing calm into her voice.

“Whatever you do, don’t make a bad situation worse.” “Not to worry, Eric. We all want the same thing here.” “Suppose you remind me what that is.”

She held her hand out and studied her chipped nails. Manicure today, no doubt about it. “Profits for you and me, laurels for the surgeons, and cures for the patients. What else is there?”

He hesitated. “I don’t feel good about this. E-mail me later, and let me know what happened. I expect a full report. And you get your butt back to California by tomorrow.”

He hung up without saying good-bye, yet another nasty little social ill that made Lily’s arm hair lift. She’d e-mail him, all right. But first, damage control. She poured herself a cup of coffee, added a shot of Amaretto, yawned, and stood looking out the window at the men feeding her father’s horses. Floralee might not boast a multiplex capable of showing ten newly released films at the same time, but it did have a Good Samaritan policy. She drank her coffee, took a shower, dressed in her jeans—funky by now from all that travel, plus the kind of sweat one produces when fear boils in the veins, but the closest person to her size was Amanda, and her clothes looked like they ought to be burned. She swiped one of Pop’s flannels from the dresser and tied the shirttails around her waist.

She telephoned Dr. Help-Me first. “I understand I’ve let you down,” she said. “I’ve come up short as a rep. I hope you’ll accept my sincerest apology, because aside from the success of your surgical procedures with my company’s laparoscopes, maintaining a good working relationship is my primary concern.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Eric explained about the surgery last night. I wish you’d tried my cell phone. I carry it with me everywhere. I was at a family fu- neral, and I apologize for not returning your page immediately. Even if it were Christmas Eve, I’d drop whatever I was doing if you needed me.”

“I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of all this, Lily. Are you trying to make me miss my plane?”

Dr. Help-Me also hung up on Lily without saying good-bye, which provided further opportunity for reflection. Lily pulled the door to the study shut, sat down at Pop’s desk, and plugged in her laptop. While she waited for the computer to cycle through its various menus, she inventoried the misery required to earn her yearly salary. An exorbitant car lease was a peripheral concern. The amount of hairy M.D. buttock she’d had to kiss was not. She once recalled re- ceiving a Christmas card from a chief surgeon at the hospital all the stars used for their plastic surgeries. “Hark the herald angels high, my dick’s thicker than your thigh,” it read. She told herself,
Just smile, and tuck this puppy into a file for later
. And eventually the card had friends. The medical world was hard at work on an AIDS vac- cine, and had recently identified the gene on which Alzheimer’s disease was located. Giant strides were being made on a daily basis. Believe it or not, there were

still doctors who tried to cop a feel in the scrub room. And the con- stant innuendo—unrelenting comments regarding her breasts, or out-loud speculation on how well she could perform fellatio, or the reason she was working in the first place, had to be due to some kind of hormonal imbalance—she wondered why these men felt the need to go out of their way to make it difficult for her job to be about providing innovative medical equipment that helped them save lives.

Finally the AOL link connected. Lily’d intended to get in on the group lawsuit thing regarding the inaccessibility of on-line hours but had been too busy to fill out the forms. The only new mail she had was from her corporate headquarters. She sighed. It had to be more Dr. Help-Me fallout. She might as well get it over with. She double-clicked on the first message and learned she had been named top salesperson for the fiscal year, beating out even the midwestern sales rep who’d won it eight years running. For her effort, she would receive a cash bonus, more stock options, and another week of vaca- tion Eric would never let her take.

She paused a moment before she clicked on Reply and typed: “I resign.”

Just for fun, though she had no intention of mailing it, she CC’ed every administrative person and surgical doc in her address book, sending it to the Mail Later queue. Next she scrolled through her personal address book. Most of the names were old boyfriends who’d dumped her for a variety of reasons. One guy actually told her that her breasts were too small, as if somewhere there existed a chart denoting acceptable sizes. Another pointed out that horses would never be equal to mountain bikes, and Lily hated mountain bikes and those stretchy black pants with the fanny pads, which she thought men looked particularly childish wearing. She clicked on the address of one guy she’d believed had such great potential that she had actually looked at a
Bride’s
magazine while standing in line at the supermarket. He had left because her “opinions were too strong.” Blaise, the only man she had ever told to leave first, had frequently pointed out that he felt Lily was too forward in the bed- room. What he’d said had shamed her down to her bones, at least until this moment. One thing they all had in common (in addition to telling her she used words they had to look up in the dictionary) was that they felt the inevitable crumbling of the relationship lay with
her
shortcomings. Lily supposed it
was
her fault, in a way. She’d chosen them. She’d used

them as much as they used her. Maybe the true impediment to in- timacy wasn’t their fault but hers, for comparing every one of them with Tres, who might end up saying the exact same thing and leav- ing. There were no guarantees. When she arrived at Blaise’s address, who was still blocked from sending her mail, it surprised Lily to discover that the pain she’d felt she’d lug around for a year had dwindled down to a small twinge. She wrote:

Dear Blaise
,

How strange life is. A few months pass and the world changes so profoundly I can’t believe you ever made me cry. We had some good times, I know we did, and I’m grateful for them. It’s funny, but I didn’t realize until now that when you called me names and told me how to cook or that I wanted sex too often that you were giving me a gift, too. As I sit here typing, I tell myself hate doesn’t do any good in this world, what we need to aim for here is progress, not perfection; one infinitesimal nudge up the evolutionary chain for the both of us would be something to name a new holiday after. To that end, I want you to know I forgive you. But I also want you to know you’re the one, the first man who made me see that I’d be better off alone rather than settling for less. So, thanks. I hope you have a happy life, you win all your softball games, and your beer never goes flat
.

Good-bye forever
,
Lily