T
hree weeks later, Elisa was addicted. She’d seen people addicted to the needle, but not to a quilting needle, a size 10 “between,” to be exact. Helen had been as good as her threat, and whenever Elisa had a few minutes to spare, Helen had insisted she perch on a chair at her own quilt frame and practice her stitches.
Hand quilting was as mesmerizing as the click and whir of the antique treadle. Elisa had quickly found she could lose herself in the rivers of thread. Helen, who had recognized the symptoms, stretched a simple rail fence top of red, white and blue on her mother’s frame, which was nothing more than boards and clamps on sawhorse legs, and turned it over to Elisa for practice. Her stitches were straighter now and much more even, but they were still too large. The quilt, meant for summer picnics and not for judging at the County Fair, stood up to Elisa’s practice sessions and seemed to preen under the spotlight.
Now, in the beehive at Community Church, Elisa was trying to pass on her new obsession.
“You think I’d really like this quilting stuff?” Adoncia narrowed her eyes at the nearly completed Christmas quilt still stretched across the Quilting Bee frame. “It doesn’t look easy.”
Elisa had invited her friend to visit
La Casa
that afternoon to teach the children how to follow the steps in a recipe. She planned to teach them how to make Mexican hot chocolate, and had even brought authentic chocolate tablets and her precious
molinillo,
the carved wooden stick that she balanced between her palms and spun back and forth to whip the finished product.
“Helen would like you to come.” Elisa traced a line of stitching with her fingertip. The quilt was nearly finished. “Everyone would enjoy having you here, and Maria and Fernando would have playmates.”
“Maybe…” Adoncia winked at her friend, then lifted the edge of the quilt where her children were hiding. “Oh, you’re still here? I thought you had gone away forever.”
Maria giggled. Fernando scooted out on his bottom and held up his arms, his trademark grin firmly in place. Maria followed, carefully pulling down the edges of the quilt, as if protecting her hiding place.
“Diego won’t like me coming here,” Adoncia said. “He does not trust this place.”
To some degree Diego and Adoncia had patched up their relationship. Elisa knew Diego’s experiences in this country had been mixed, and he wanted to protect his future wife from the same prejudices he had faced. But Diego’s desire to remain separate from the larger community and Adoncia’s desire to find a place in it was just another conflict. Adoncia had told her the atmosphere at the little trailer was still thick with tension on this subject and on the subject of babies.
“I don’t want to come between you.” Elisa reached down to reclip a barrette in Maria’s fine black hair. “Diego is already angry at me.”
“He is angry at me for asking you what I should do. And I worry, because trying to please him makes me forget sometimes what days I must be careful to stop a baby.” Adoncia lifted her son into her arms. “If I give in to Diego on this, I will be giving in for the rest of our lives together. Diego and I must learn to compromise or not marry.”
Elisa had hoped for the right moment to present her friend with a gift, and now it had arrived. “I bought something for you that will make it easier to be careful.”
“What, sleeping pills for Diego?”
Elisa opened her purse and pulled out a bag. “It’s very simple. Open it and see.”
Adoncia opened the bag, took out a box and removed what looked like a beaded necklace. “Jewelry? It won’t fit over my head.”
“They’re called CycleBeads. They help you chart when you’re fertile and when you aren’t. See this little ring? On the first day of your period you slip it over this red bead. Then every day after, you move the ring one more bead. When the beads are brown, like these, it is safe to have sex with Diego.”
“There are not so many brown beads.”
“There are many days that are safe, and fewer that are unsafe. The white beads are for days when you must not sleep with him.” Elisa explained briefly how to tell from the beads if Adoncia’s cycle was the right length to make the rhythm method safe.
“It’s just a way to make certain your timing is correct,” she finished. “The church would approve.”
“Diego will not.” Adoncia clasped the beads against her chest. “But this is for me to decide. Thank you. I will keep them where he does not question me every time I touch them.”
“He’s a good man. I think he just needs time to think about this.”
“He is a good man, but he is angry at you, as you say.” Adoncia put the beads back into the box and put it in her handbag. “He will make trouble for you if he finds out you gave these to me.”
Elisa remembered Diego’s threat in front of Helen’s house. “What could he do?” The question didn’t sound as offhand as she hoped it might.
Adoncia lowered her voice. “He says your green card does not look right, that maybe someone should be told.”
Elisa was at a loss for words.
“I told him that if I believed he would do such a thing, I would make him leave. I don’t believe he would do this. If he did, I would not stay with him. But I wanted you to know he is angry enough to say it.”
Elisa believed Diego was a better man than that. She also suspected his own documents might not stand up under close scrutiny. Even if she was wrong, he wouldn’t want to interact with the INS. Not unless he was so furious he was beyond intelligent thought.
“Maybe I won’t come around for a while,” she said.
“He has a new job. He’s not home during the day. You are always welcome, but most welcome then.”
“Job?”
“He is the foreman at Jenkins Landscaping. It’s not a happy place to work, but the money is good. He is saving to buy a real house for us.”
Diego and George Jenkins working as a team was something Elisa couldn’t picture. For all his faults, Diego had a good heart. She had few reasons to believe the same could be said of his employer.
Elisa checked the clock over the door. She knew better than to prolong the discussion. Adoncia had to make her own decisions, and Elisa had interfered too much as it was. “Time to get to
La Casa.
I’m so glad you agreed to help today. Some of the children speak almost no English, and you can prod them a little.”
“They are not like you, huh? They do not grow up speaking English with their parents?”
At moments like these, there was nothing Elisa could say.
“I am right,” Adoncia said as they exited into the play yard and started across the grounds. It was not a question.
“What does it matter?”
“To me? Not at all. To you? So many things you don’t talk about, Elisa. Are you afraid I will tell somebody?”
“I’m happy with things the way they are. I don’t want to dwell on the past.”
“Dwell? No. But mention sometimes?” Adoncia turned up her hands, not an easy feat with Fernando in her arms.
“You’re a good friend to care.”
“You need somebody else to care, not just me. You need a man. Men look at you, but you don’t look back. This is part of the past you won’t talk about?”
“First I have to find a man I want to look at.”
“I think you found one, but you turn away.”
Elisa knew Adoncia was talking about Sam, even though the subject of Community Church’s minister had until now been off-limits. “You have a good imagination, Donchita, but there’s no man.”
The air was crisp, and fermenting apples from the abandoned orchard bordering church property scented the air. Nature’s spectacular autumn pageant had nearly ended, and only the hardiest leaves still clung to the trees. Adoncia lowered Fernando to the ground, and he and Maria chased each other through the decomposing piles that lined the road leading up to the little yellow house.
Wisely Adoncia said nothing more, but thoughts of Sam were now firmly planted in Elisa’s mind. For three weeks they had avoided each other as often as possible. Most of the time Gracie gave her instructions and passed along messages. Sam was polite but distant. She was the same.
But she missed him. She had filled her time and erased what longing she could with quilting and with
La Casa.
Somehow, without really planning to, she had become a regular volunteer at the after-school program, spending most afternoons helping any way she could.
By the time they got there, the children had already arrived, and several were sitting on the steps, including a sixth-grade boy named Miguel who was new to the program. Elisa had tried to talk to him several times, but he didn’t respond to questions in English or Spanish. One of the volunteers who had elementary Spanish skills had expressed real concern about Miguel’s adjustment and gone to visit his parents. The family seemed close-knit and supportive. The mother was worried, too. Her older sons had stayed behind in Mexico, and Miguel missed them desperately.
Elisa introduced Adoncia and her children to Miguel and the others. Miguel managed the briefest of nods but didn’t reply when Adoncia tried to draw him out. The other children were more receptive and followed Adoncia inside to begin the cooking lesson.
Elisa dropped to the step beside Miguel. She remembered her brother at this age and the way that everything had seemed larger than life, one minute as bright as the north star, the next as dark as a cloudy night.
She spoke in Spanish. “Don’t you want to join the others, Miguel? I’ll work with you on the computer if you like.”
He shook his head. Once.
“I think I know how you’re feeling,” she said softly, so no one would overhear. “I had to leave my home, too, and I haven’t seen my brother since I did. I miss Ramon and all my friends.”
He glanced at her, as if trying to figure out whether to move away or answer.
She pressed this slight advantage. “I can’t talk about this to many people. It’s hard to understand unless your own experience is the same.”
She could almost see him processing her words and trying to decide if answering was worth the energy. In the end, though, he only shrugged. One brief shrug.
She was working on her next move when an aging green sedan came down the lane a little too fast and stopped, brakes screeching, just yards from the porch.
Leon got out on the passenger’s side and opened the back door, pulling out a couple of boxes, one which was oversized and nearly flat, before he closed the door and rapped on the roof. The driver, a teenager who didn’t look old enough to sit behind the wheel, backed into a parking space, turned and drove off.
“Hey, Leon.” Elisa stood up to help the boy carry the boxes up to the porch. “What do you have here?”
Leon’s cheeks reddened, but he smiled shyly. For the first time Elisa got a picture of the future Leon Jenkins and thought he was going to be quite appealing.
“I…well, I thought, you know, that I owed this place something.”
“Did you?” She smiled at him, and the color in his cheeks deepened.
“I, well, those guys might not have come here, if I hadn’t…you know.”
“You can’t take responsibility for the things other people decide to do. But I think it’s great you want to do something for
La Casa.
” She glanced down at Miguel as she spoke and saw something like interest sparkling in his eyes. “What did you bring us?”
By now Leon’s cheeks were nearly burgundy. “I, well, I noticed there’s not much to do outside. You know. So I got this basketball hoop. We can put it back there.”
He pointed in the direction of the ramshackle frame garage behind the house, which these days held only garden tools. The asphalt driveway circled the house and ended there, and the paved area to one side of the door was flat and perfect for basketball games. Elisa wondered why nobody else had thought of this.
“You know, you’re a genius. That’s exactly what we need. The days are still too beautiful to spend inside.”
He looked so relieved, she had to suppress a smile. “I can put it up for you, if you want,” he volunteered. “I just need a ladder. I brought tools and stuff for the backboard.”
“I’m almost sure there’s a stepladder in the garage.” She glanced down at Miguel again. Leon had opened the box to reveal the hoop and a wide composite backboard to mount it on, and Miguel was definitely interested.
“But you’ll need help,” she said. She fired off a rapid entreaty in Spanish to the boy sitting on the steps. At first it looked as if he would refuse or ignore her again. Then he got to his feet.
“This is Miguel,” she told Leon. “I don’t think he speaks much English, but he would be happy to help you. And he could use a friend.”
Leon frowned, and she thought he was trying to decide if he was able to cope with the language difficulties and the need to reach out to a sixth grader. But he spoke after only the briefest of hesitations. “Hi, I’m Leon.” He looked up at her. “How do you say that in Spanish?”
“Hola. Me llamo Leon.”
Leon wrapped his tongue around the words and did a credible imitation. Then he motioned for Miguel to join him around back. Miguel trailed the older boy, but even following at a distance was a breakthrough.