The Secret of Everything (13 page)

In his imagination, he arrived at the lake without any children in tow. Just him, discovering her there on the beach,
topless, a treat for him only. He stopped beside her and he bent to put his palm flat on that belly, the skin so hot it practically blistered his palm, but she didn’t wake up, not until he flicked his tongue over the pink nipples and made them hard, sucking them into his mouth. She woke up, pleased, and reached a hand out to stroke him.

Yeah.

In the darkness of his living room, all alone, Vince gave himself some comfort, thinking of Tessa’s tits, then hauled his ass up and went to bed, too damned tired to care when the dogs leapt into bed with him.

Vita’s day began at three a.m. It made people wince for her, but she loved it. Loved rising in the dark while the world slept and putting on her clothes and going downstairs to the café to make a pot of coffee. The kitchen was starkly clean, its tile floor swabbed with bleach water by the dishwasher the night before, all the stainless counters polished and empty, utensils neatly in their drawers and on hooks—whisks and spatulas in a dozen sizes, ladles and spoons and knives. The pots, battered and sturdy, in every imaginable variety—stockpots to sheet pans to skillets to tiny saucepans—were stacked below the counters and on the shelves around the room. The grill had been scrubbed clean with a brick after the last meal was served and now waited for the new day, when it would give its heat to nourish the humans who would pass through on her watch today.

Wednesday’s special was an egg casserole that never failed to sell out completely, usually before eight-thirty Which was fine. Letting it run out rather than making more gave it a special cachet.

She poured a cup of coffee, stirred in heavy cream and two
teaspoons of sugar, and took her first sip of the day. Coffee was her constant companion, coffee made just like this—from freshly ground, excellent-quality beans, brewed strong enough to put hair on your chest, so that it
needed
heavy cream and some sugar to thin it out. No lattes for Vita. No extra whip mocha bravo whatevers. She loved good, plain coffee as much as anything in the world, and she drank a lot of it. It was a great smug pleasure to hear science upholding her claim that it was a health drink—nothing that smelled that fantastic could possibly be bad for you.

On a shelf above the main work counter was a small stereo. She used to go through radios at a pace of about one every six months; now she used an iPod deck with an iPod encased in a vinyl sleeve. The first had lasted almost a year. This one was well past the year and going strong. She didn’t allow individual players for the staff, even when they were working alone—it was too dangerous to be unable to hear what was going on around you, especially in an environment riddled with fire and sharp knives—but she did allow people to bring in their own mixes and play them. Sometimes. She had a preference for Bob Dylan and the Stones, Canned Heat and It’s a Beautiful Day, the soundtrack of her youth, when she’d drifted west from Ohio on a cloud of patchouli and pot, riding in a van with a cluster of college friends. They landed in Boulder, sharing a ramshackle Victorian house that was freezing all winter and had plumbing problems year-round. Still, there were plenty of bedrooms, a wide porch that looped around the downstairs, and a kitchen that could seat twenty along a wall of windows overlooking the mountains.

It was in that kitchen that Vita first learned to love cooking, love the pleasure of nourishing and feeding other people but also the pleasure of handling food, preparing it, enjoying its
beauty. A good number of her recipes came directly from those gilded days, when she was young and listening to rock that wasn’t yet classic but was fresh and passionate and capturing everything about the world that they wanted to say and couldn’t. Some of the happiest days of her life, those years in Boulder in the late sixties.

This morning, as she hummed along with the raw, hungry voice of Janis singing “Turtle Blues,” Vita broke eggs and sliced organic naturally smoked ham into thin, elegant slivers and let the spirit of those lost days waft over her. All that youth and happiness. The memory of them could give her a sense of wist-fulness that could still rip her heart out.

Funny how you didn’t know when you were happy.

She was happy now, too, of course, but not with that same sense of gilded … what? Expectation. The sense of possibility and wonder. Anything could happen. Life could carry you anywhere. When you were young, you didn’t realize that the “anywhere” could be a place you didn’t want to go.

The man who tried to steal Vita’s life had drifted into that joyful Boulder house with another man, the boyfriend of one of the other girls. Vita was sleeping with a philosophy student at CU, but one look at Jesse and she was lost, lost in his unholy, unwholesome beauty—eyes dark as a midnight dive, lips like slices of overripe melon, hands as lean and graceful as a musician’s to pluck the strings of a woman’s body.

And God knew he could play. He could make love for hours, days, twining his spell tighter and tighter around her, until she could not move unless he pulled the strings. He followed work to Texas, then to Arizona, and Vita followed him, tugged along in his wake like a leashed dog.

She lost herself so slowly, she was shocked to realize one
morning that she had become a shell, something empty and echoey, filled only with reflections of Jesse and his cruelty. That, too, had begun so slowly she barely recognized it. A nip or a pinch, a sharp nudge, a criticism that stung and then was smoothed away by those sweet melon lips.

People never understood how an abuser worked. It wasn’t all abuse, because who would ever put up with that?

No, Jesse was masterful, alternating terrible cruelty with grand gestures, genuine remorse, and that mind-blowing sex. She always knew she was safe if he was making love to her.

By the time she got away from him, she’d lost that woman who cooked so joyfully in a house in Boulder. She weighed less than one hundred pounds and had the marks of him all over her, in bones that had been broken, in scars where he’d broken the skin, in a thousand broken things in her psyche. She ran away from him after he killed her bird, and she had never quite forgiven herself for putting a helpless creature at risk. She ran under cover of night and didn’t stop driving until she came to Los Ladrones. She’d never heard of it and trusted that Jesse never had, either. The commune took her in.

She’d started cooking again and running for simple, easy hours along the banks of the river. Slowly, she came back to herself. An egg and a smile, a hearty burp and the sizzle of onions in a pan, a gleaming sink and baking bread. It fixed her. Even after everything fell apart at the commune, she didn’t lose herself again. Vita came into town to cook for the hotel first, then to open 100 Breakfasts.

Because breakfast was the secret to everything.

And here, making breakfast, she could offer healing to other women.

By five a.m., when her crew began to trickle in, she’d long
since had her own breakfast—a hard-boiled egg and toast with butter and jam—and had baked casseroles, fresh and steaming, to serve to the customers who would file in the doors the minute she opened them at five-thirty sharp. Together, she and the line cooks and dishwashers and waitresses bustled around, starting pots of coffee, setting up stations for the cooks, measuring out pancake mix, and heating up waffle irons. Annie, the new girl, had her badly dyed hair pulled tightly away from her face, and Vita thought again that a little weight would do the woman a world of good. She was so thin you could see the bones in her arms, the ribs across the top of her chest.

“Good morning,” Vita said. “Are you ready to handle the waffle station this morning?”

“I guess. Am I ready?”

Nancy, a sturdy woman in her fifties with the red-tipped nose of a long-term drinker, rasped, “Piece of cake, honey. Come on over here and stand by me and we’ll get you going. You can do the bacon, too.”

Vita touched Nancy’s shoulder, quietly thanking her, and moved into the dining room to open the blinds, run a check to make sure it all looked clean and tidy. When she was satisfied, she headed for the front door. “Ready, gang?” she called.

“All systems go,” someone called, and Vita turned the
Closed
sign to
Open
.

   T
essa made it over to Green Gate Farms on Thursday morning. After the hike to the lake, her foot needed some coddling, and she gave it without question, lazing around the pool, reading, and watching a movie in the cool depths of the Chief Theater, which was hung with old velvet drapes, the walls painted with murals of the Old West.

According to Google, Green Gate Farms was just on the other side of the river, but the bridge was nearly five miles north of town. It was a cloudy morning, for which Tessa was grateful, since she had managed to get sunburned reading a ghost story she picked up poolside yesterday. High-altitude sunlight was nothing to mess with.

Right after she crossed the bridge there was a sign, with the main portion carved in exuberant, colorful script:

Vegetables and flowers were painted on the sign. Her father’s elegant hand could have provided the pattern for the carved lettering, and she definitely felt his spirit here. Following the road beneath a stand of thick pines, she noticed that the landscape rose steeply to her right. The road curved and then opened into a wide green clearing that overlooked the river, the valley with the town of Los Ladrones lined up in rows and, farther north, the San Juan Mountains. It looked like something that could be drawn on a label for luscious, healthy food, for sure. Breathtaking.

She heard herself humming and took a moment to listen. Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Guinnevere.” She frowned. Odd choice for her brain to make. Maybe she’d heard it without realizing it.

A cluster of modern buildings sat beside a gravel parking lot, with wooden signs on a post pointing visitors toward the cabins, the produce stands, the farms, the cooking school, and the main building. Vegetable plants and herbs grew in all the whiskey barrels and vined around signposts. As she stepped out of the car, Tessa smelled thyme.

Pushing her sunglasses on top of her head, she gathered a few long shots of the river running silver through the middle of fertile fields, the rustic-looking buildings, the trees and mountains.

None of it looked familiar. Nothing made all the jumbled pieces of memory suddenly align themselves. Which she supposed she had been expecting.

“Hello,” said a young woman in a pair of loose, vibrantly printed trousers and a simple white T-shirt. Her dark hair was cropped close, and a pair of delicate silver earrings hung in her lobes. “Can I help you find something?”

“I was just admiring the view,” she said.

“Are you the one who’s here from Rambling Tours?”

“Yes, actually.” She stuck out her hand. “Tessa Harlow.”

“Jessica Cunningham. I’m interning here. They sent me down to meet you. Some crisis in the greenhouse this morning.” She gestured toward the café. “Let’s get a cup of tea and you can ask me some questions while we wait for Cherry.”

“Sounds good.” She wanted to continue shooting the area, but that would wait. From the big shoulder bag she carried, she pulled out a stenographer’s pad and a pen instead. “What kind of intern are you?”

“I’m on the farm side.” They stepped onto a deep porch furnished with rocking chairs overlooking the view, and Jessica pulled open the wooden screen door. “Organic systems. I’m taking a degree at Colorado State University.”

Tessa ducked inside the café. A blast of exotic scents hit her—ginseng and cinnamon and something else. “Is that tea? Smells fantastic.”

“Our own secret recipe. You can buy it in bulk, of course.” She pointed to small bags lined up along the counter, each with a stylized, beautiful label bearing the name
Green Gate Farms
. “Would you like to try it?”