Sisterchicks in Sombreros (18 page)

I turned to offer a final wave to our send-off party. With Tom Sawyer charm, Cal placed his dirty hand over his mouth and threw a mock kiss at the two of us in our revved-up Jeep.

Blowing a kiss back at him, I called out, “I hope the rest of your vacation goes great for you and your dad.”

Cal’s forehead wrinkled. “My dad? He’s not my dad; he’s my uncle. He doesn’t have any family, so he likes to borrow me.”

On a crazy whim, I did something that to this day I don’t think Joanne believes happened on purpose, but it did. I made the engine stall. All went quiet.

“You’re not married?” I asked Matthew without batting an eyelash.

“No.”

“Aunt Caroline died when I was a baby,” Cal volunteered. “She was my mom’s sister, just like you two are sisters.”

“Is that right,” I said without moving from my position. I
knew I was blocking Joanne’s view of Matthew. The only thing I regretted at that moment was that I couldn’t see my sister’s face.

Señora Valdepariso said something to Matthew and pointed to a thin silver band on her finger. Then she pointed to me.

“The señora wants to know if both of you are married,” Matthew interpreted.

“I am,” I said quickly, feeling like Rosa Lupe was right there with me in this spontaneous matchmaking scheme. “But Joanne is available.”

My sister pinched the underside of my upper arm with such a vengeance I knew I’d have a bruise for a month.

“Start the car,” she growled, reaching for the key in the ignition.

The second thing I later regretted was that Joanne was so embarrassed and so determined to get out of there that she didn’t see what I saw. The look on Matthew’s face was priceless. The man was delightfully intrigued, and I knew it.

Unfortunately, Joanne didn’t. She turned the key in the ignition, and the Jeep roared back to business, ready to hit the road. Everyone waved as I turned the Jeep around and headed down the bumpy dirt trail.

Everyone but Matthew.

He stood there, his startled expression frozen. I watched him in the rearview mirror.

“Why did you do that?” Joanne squawked.

“Turn around,” I told her.

“Why?”

“Just do it. Turn around. Wave one more time.”

This was the wrong moment for my usually pliable sister to adopt my stubborn characteristics.

“No,” she said. “Keep driving.”

“But, Joanne, you have to see his face.”

“I’ve seen his face.”

“Not looking like this, you haven’t.”

“Keep driving, Melanie. I’m too angry to talk to you right now.”

“Please, Jo. Before it’s too late. Turn and look at him.”

She would not.

We endured the horrible ruts in dismal silence, feeling every jolt with already sore muscles. The route back to the highway seemed twice as long in the daylight as it had in the night. I used the rumbling ride to review what had just happened and to evaluate whether I had done the right thing in promoting Joanne the way I had.

A memory from summer camp came back to me with the bumps. The last night of camp all the girls in our cabin had “dates” to the final banquet except Joanne. A “date” simply meant that one of the boys from the camp had worked up the nerve to ask if he could sit by you at dinner. All the girls took showers and wore their one nice, clean outfit instead of grubby jeans to the “banquet.”

I had secured a date by Thursday afternoon at archery
practice and had focused all my efforts after that on finding someone—anyone—to ask Joanne so that we could all sit at the same table together.

From the previous year at camp, I knew that all the girls who didn’t have dates ended up at the table in the back of the dining hall across from the table with all the boys who hadn’t showered all week and still thought girls had cooties.

In my desire to spare my sister the humiliation of being relegated to the back of the banquet hall, I went all out to solicit a date for her. All the really cool guys were already spoken for, but in my campaign, I’d inadvertently made it clear to all those cool guys that my sister was desperate. Or at least that’s how she framed it for years afterward.

By Friday afternoon I’d managed to fix her up with the shyest guy at the camp. Two of his friends had to do the asking on his behalf. My mission was accomplished, so I was happy.

My sister, however, was not.

Joanne sat with us at the popular table beside a tall, slender, shy boy who didn’t say one word to her the entire time. The cute and popular guys teased Joanne’s date as their evening entertainment, and to my sister’s way of thinking, all of this was much more humiliating than being relegated to the all-girl table. At least at the “leftover” table, someone would have spoken to her, and she wouldn’t have felt the pity of all the cute guys, who now knew she wasn’t capable of stirring up any admirers on her own.

Just about the time the Jeep connected with the main road,
my clueless brain connected with the fact that I had embarrassed my sister all over again.

“Joanne,” I spoke above the sound of the wind coming at us. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I apologize. Really. I’m sorry.”

For a moment Joanne didn’t move. She was looking straight ahead at the two-lane road. She reached over and rubbed the back of my upper arm. “Sorry about the welt you’re going to get there.”

“That’s okay. All my welts from the allergic reaction have gone away, so I guess I needed one more.” I intended my comment to be funny, but instead of smiling at my joke, Joanne cried.

“You okay?” I glanced at her and then back at the road.

“I will be.” Turning away from me, my sister went into a quiet place inside herself and didn’t invite me to come along.

T
he first thing I noticed
when we were less than a kilometer outside of San Felipe was all the motor homes that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Joanne was driving now. We hadn’t talked much during the past hour or so while traversing the desert on the winding road that lowered us into view of the spectacular coastal waters of the Sea of Cortez. The bright blue of the water and crisp white of the beach contrasted sharply with the muted grays and browns we had been viewing since we left Ensenada.

“Where should we go first?” Joanne asked.

“A gas station,” I suggested.

“Good idea. We’re almost out of gas.”

I hadn’t been concerned about filling up our tank as much as I was eager to use the facilities. If this sleepy town had any running water at the gas station—even from a spigot—I was
going to wash my face and hands thoroughly and cool off the back of my neck.

By my watch it was nearly ten o’clock. The dust from the road and the sun in our faces, along with a mouthful of unbrushed teeth, made me feel grungier than I remembered ever feeling in my life.

Joanne pulled into the first Pemex station we saw. While she communicated with the attendant in English, I made use of the less-than-premium facilities. At least the black-encrusted sink had running water. I was learning to be thankful for little things. But I was careful not to drink any of the water, even the drops that lingered on my lips.

Our next stop was at an organized and fairly modern grocery store. We stocked up on food for our stay at Uncle Harlan’s and on bottled water that was outrageously expensive but obviously a tourist favorite because of the label “Bottled in California.” The water could have come from a garden hose on the other side of Tijuana, but Joanne and I fell for the marketing ploy and bought two cases.

Loading our abundance in the back of the Jeep, I noticed something significant as I lifted our straw sombreros and handed one to my sister.

“Joanne, where is our luggage?” I pictured us spending the rest of the week in our already sweaty T-shirts, dirt-streaked jeans, and the outlandishly floppy sombreros.

“I thought I told you.” Joanne contentedly plopped her sombrero on her head. “I paid the guy at the gas station to keep
our suitcases safe for us inside his office. I knew we’d be driving around town, and I didn’t want to tote our luggage inside the bank.”

“We didn’t think this through.” I let out a sigh and tightened my sombrero’s string under my chin. “Since we can’t lock up this vehicle, what are we going to do? We shouldn’t have bought all this food yet.”

“There’s nothing perishable.”

“I know, but we can’t park the car and leave it all, can we?”

“Let’s find Uncle Harlan’s house and leave everything there, and then go to the bank,” Joanne said. I noticed she was beginning to look “normal” in her sombrero, now that I’d seen her in it for nearly an entire day.

“We can’t go to Uncle Harlan’s first,” I said. “The bank has the key to let us in.”

“So we ask our guardian angels to keep an eye on the food while we’re in the bank, then we pick up our luggage, and take all of it to Harlan’s.” Joanne twisted the top off a bottle of water and held it out to me.

“What? You want to see if I die when I drink it?”

“No, you paranoid petunia! I was trying to be polite.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Joanne twisted off the lid on another bottle and took a long swig just to prove she was fearless or something. She came up coughing, and I paused before placing my lips to the bottle in my hand.

Her hand flew to her throat, and her eyes widened as she
gasped for air. Then, just as quickly, she straightened up and said, “Just kidding!”

A wild smile returned to Joanne’s face for the first time since we had left the Valdeparisos’ casa that morning. “I’m just giving you a hard time,” she said with a ripple of giggles. The air around us filled with Joanne’s huge laugh.

“You brat.” I squeezed my water bottle so that a straight stream of the precious commodity zipped through the two feet of warm air that separated us. My aim was perfect. The water doused my sister’s dust-caked cheek.

“Hey, don’t start anything you can’t finish.” She squirted me back.

The shot of water from her bottle felt heavenly as it ran down my chin and neck.

“Oh, I can finish this all right. I have plenty of ammo.” I squirted my laughing sibling with a stream that landed in her mouth.

Now she really was choking. That didn’t stop her from squirting me again. This time she stuck the neck of the bottle down the back of my shirt and emptied the contents.

I did the same to her, laughing and threatening to reload with another bottle.

Joanne paused, looking over my shoulder. I turned my head to follow her line of sight. We had a small audience watching our water ballet. Two weathered-looking fishermen stood in the shade along with a distinguished gentleman wearing a dark business suit. They were grinning and speaking
Spanish; one of them pointed to Joanne.

“Come on.” I reached for another bottle of water—this time to drink it. “We can finish this later. Without an audience.”

Joanne pulled the car keys from her pocket and swung into the drivers seat with a gleam in her eye. “I’ll hold you to that.”

Backing up the Jeep, Joanne nearly collided with an off-road motorcycle that was going far too fast. The helmeted driver halted and motioned for us to go first. “I had no idea this was such a recreational destination, did you?” Joanne asked.

“No, San Felipe is a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be.”

“And more spread out. I’m sure it wasn’t much when Uncle Harlan first built his place in the sixties.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. Joanne, what do you think his house looks like?”

“I don’t think it’s going to be very large. But you know how he and Aunt Winnie always have lived with the finest of everything. I’m thinking it’s simple but elegant.”

“That’s what I thought at first, but now I’m not so sure. What if it’s a little nothing place?” I asked. “Then what do we do?”

Joanne turned to look at me and then focused back on the traffic at the upcoming intersection. Clearly she never had considered that bleak possibility.

“We’ll figure that out when we get there. I think it’s going
to be run-down and old, but it seemed to me the lawyer made it sound like something of value.”

“I don’t doubt the land is of value, especially since the area obviously is a growing tourist attraction. But don’t we only lease the land from the Mexican government? It’s not as if we can sell the land.”

“Like I said, Mel, we’ll figure that out when we get there. First, let’s retrieve our luggage, go to the bank, pick up the key and directions, and see what we see. We’ll know soon enough what we’ve inherited.”

“I thought we were going to go to the bank first and
then
pick up our luggage.” I felt perturbed that Joanne was messing up a perfectly good plan by switching the order of things—without conferring with me.

“I just realized we have no idea where the bank is, and the guy at the gas station spoke English. We might as well pick up the luggage now. Then one of us can stay in the car while the other goes into the bank.”

It took everything within me not to open our suitcases inside the gas station office and do a careful inventory to make sure nothing had been touched. Joanne was much more trusting as usual and handed over several dollars to the attendant. He seemed grateful.