The Secrets She Keeps (18 page)

“The goddamn AC broke yesterday. Sorry for the heat,” Kit said. He put on his sunglasses.

“I don’t mind.” I was sweating from the temperature and from watching that jawline of his as he drove. I tried to imagine him as a father and what he was like as a husband with a wife. We jounced and jolted around Washoe Lake, past its farthest side, out beyond where I’d ever gone before. I knew the area was spotted with many old divorce ranches; I recalled hearing about the Flying W and Washoe Pines. Harris had worked at Washoe Pines when he was young, if I remembered right, and even for a few years after that, when it, like the rest of those places, became a cattle ranch again after divorce laws began to change.

It looked so dry and desolate out there, you’d think the land was dead or dying. But the desert crackled with life, thriving on that very deception; the animals blended in, the plants looked long gone but were only waiting for the renewal of a rainstorm. I saw a burro, and tumbleweeds, and cacti. This was a place that had lasted, in good part because only certain plants, animals, and people could take the heat.

“Here,” Kit Covey said. He yanked the parking brake.

“Here?” I asked. There was only dry brown hills and a single saguaro.

He fished around under his seat, retrieved a leather case that held a pair of binoculars. “Come on.”

We got out. I stood beside him, aware of his shoulder next to mine. He looked into the binoculars and then handed them to me. They were unfocused or I was being stupid, because I could only see my own eyelashes.

“Nothing?” Kit asked. He stood behind me. I could feel his chest against my back, and then his arms reached around. He turned the ridged dial and pointed me in the right direction.

“Wait!” I said. “There they are!”

Brown, white, black—a grouping. They were huddled near a small creek bed that looked dry. Some had their heads down, as if for a drink, and some stood nearby, tails flicking.

“Is there even any water in there?” I asked.

“Not much, and that’s the problem. We’ve been monitoring drought conditions since summer started, and it’s bad. No water, and decreased vegetation because of it. We’ve been supplementing the natural seeps and filling tubs and troughs and even giving hay to the horses. Unfortunately, these animals are skittish. They won’t drink from the man-made containers. Even with the extra water, the seeps don’t provide enough to sustain them.”

“You bring them water.” It seemed impossible.

“We do. Still, you can bring a horse water, but you can’t make him drink. Do you see that black one?”

I did. He stood on a small dirt-and-rock hill, grazing, though there wasn’t much to graze. “Yeah. He looks like Jasper.”

“He’s the stud. That’s his harem.”

“Every guy’s dream, huh?” I said.

“Not mine.”

I watched for a while. It felt astonishing to find myself where I was right then. I watched those horses with Kit beside me, and I felt a soaring inside my chest. Life seemed so beautifully large. I spotted a foal, and then another. I thought of the chutes and mazes and what they would mean to these animals.

“They’re families.” I could see that now. There’s where the problem deepened. “You said you try to keep the mares and foals together, though, right?”

“We do our best,” he said.

I handed Kit his binoculars. He took the two lens caps from his pocket and replaced them. His head was bent down, and after the extraordinary thing I’d just seen, it was such a familiar, ordinary gesture that I felt like I’d known him for years. I was struck by it. I might have lived this life if my mother had made different choices, or if I myself had. I still could. There were so many possible lives to lead. Every day, you chose your life, even if you could forget that.

“Ready?” he asked.

—

“Maybe you should let me off here,” I said, when we reached the tall arch of Tamarosa.

Kit yanked the brake but left the engine running. “Your aunt knows the sound of my truck, probably.”

“She’d send me home packing, sitting here with the likes of you.”

“How many boots does the woman have?”

“She has a whole room just for the ones with steel toes.”

“I believe it,” he said. “Hey, Callie…”

I waited. We sat there a minute. Had he shut off that engine, it would have been silent.

“Thanks for not jumping to conclusions. For being interested.”

“I think it’s fascinating,” I said.

“And thanks for the fine company. It’s good to remember what that’s like.”

“For sure,” I said.

The wrinkles by his eyes, and the way he smiled, and this quality he possessed, a combination of gentleness and strength—I didn’t know what to say for myself. He did a small thing then: He took my wrist. He circled it with his thumb and index finger and gave it a little shake. That was all, and then he let it go.

My wrist kept feeling those fingers around it as I walked back toward the house. Hours later it did. The gesture was a conversation. Something had been acknowledged and agreed upon. I could never hurt Thomas, and that was understood.

Still, I thought about that raccoon, the one Thomas hit on our first date, the one he wanted to bring into the car. I thought about Kit Covey speaking the word
protect.
It was an old word, a powerful word. A word you felt in some deep, ancient part of you.

The thing was, I had lived long enough to know that the ancient places were the ones that kept calling, with the hushed persistence of troubled ghosts.

—

“How’s work going?” I asked.

“Stop trying to change the subject.”

“Have you been able to go to Greenlake and do some swimming?”

“Swimming? Really? What does it matter? You should see him, Mom!”

“Melissa,” I said. “Calm down.” I sat in the kitchen chair near the old wall phone, feeling calm myself, calmer than I had a right to. Actually, what had settled inside me was more likely one of calm’s relatives: resoluteness, or maybe surrender. I felt it curling up and tucking down its chin, same as Hugo used to.

“Mom!”

“You need to relax.”

“He’d gone through all the cereal bowls. They were stacked in the sink. It was disgusting!”

It was hard for children to understand that there were things about their parents they didn’t know. We parents accepted that fact about them much more easily than the other way around. Oh, how I loved my babies; oh, how large was the loss of their growing up, but your children could be such know-it-alls. “He’s a grown man. He shouldn’t have gotten you involved.”

Shaye stood nearby, mouthing
What? What?
as I talked on the phone, which was still attached to the wall by this relic that was once called a cord. You can see them in museums. I couldn’t walk away from Shaye if I wanted to, so I waved my hand at her to go away, turned my back.

“
I
was the one who went over there; he didn’t invite me. I brought him some brownies, since I knew you were gone. He was freaking out. He said he tried to call you all day and you didn’t answer.”

“I told you, I was on a nature hike. My battery drained, searching for service. I didn’t even know it was dead.”

“You always told us it was irresponsible not to keep our phones charged!”

“You were learning to drive. I was trying to make you feel guilty so I wouldn’t have to worry you were lying in a ditch somewhere.”

Melissa sighed loudly and dramatically. In the moment of silence that followed, I was sure she was considering her options: send me to my room, or ground me. I admit this was slightly thrilling. I really should have rebelled all those years ago; a lack of teen rebellion must guarantee a crisis later in adult life. “Do you know
why
he was in a panic?” she asked.

“Given that he encouraged me to stay out here, not exactly,” I said.

“This morning, when you guys talked, you asked him to overnight you your camera.”

“Yes? So?”

“You haven’t cared about your camera for a long, long time. When was the last time you even wanted to take pictures?”

“There are some things I’m dying to capture out here. It’s beautiful, Mel.”

“That’s what I’m saying, Mom. That’s exactly what I’m saying! That kind of stuff doesn’t matter to you. No wonder he’s freaking out.”

“Melissa. You’re—” My darling firstborn, with her beautiful shiny hair and ability to dance and her stubborn streak—I loved her more than life itself. They would never know, your children, how full your heart was for them, aching full. They’d never understand the way you saw them all ages at once, from their first day on earth to now. When I looked at Melissa, I saw her newborn eyes asking mine every significant question, and I saw her in that pink apron offering me Play-Doh food, and I saw her as a Disney princess on Halloween. I saw her left-out junior-high self and the first time she was someone’s girlfriend. I saw the small daughter and the joyful daughter and the door-slamming daughter and the newly adult daughter with her own tiny refrigerator in her own kitchen. They were all one to me, familiar as my own self. I guess I was a pretty big know-it-all, too.

“I’m what? What, Mom? Tell me.”

“There are things you—”

“There are things I what?” she said.

“I know you mean well. But this isn’t your business. And your dad can do his own dishes, if he feels like it. Or not.”

“You need to come home!”

Who could blame her for her frustration and her outrage? It was our fault, Thomas’s and mine. Not for where we were now, but for what we’d abandoned in all the years of her growing up. Our lives were about our children, and now our daughters rested in the power and certainty of that. It was a good thing, a fine thing, as long as no one changed the rules.

“I’ve got to go. Aunt Shaye is making breaded veal cutlets.”

“You and Dad have lost your minds,” she said.

—

“Shaye, do you care if I shut that off? That show just gets to me.”

Dr. Yabba Yabba Love had cut to a commercial for J. J.’s Autos and Annabelle’s restaurant, but now she was back, shouting from the radio in her silk-gravel, tough-love preacher voice.
A bad childhood is no excuse for being an asshole
.

“Go ahead, but every other station out here is fuzzy,” Shaye said. “I’m surprised she can say
asshole
on the air.”

“Nash probably has some old records
.
”

“Look around. I have to watch so these don’t burn.”

I found a stash of albums in the old cabinet under the record player, and I slid an LP from its sleeve. It was a sense memory—holding the disc by its edges, hearing the crackle as the needle hit vinyl. This was four goofy guys in bow ties, not the Earth, Wind & Fire of my youth, but still. Records. Tex stood at the living room window, looking out into the darkness, waiting for Nash’s return. I turned up the music, left Tex to his work.

The crooners were going at it. “Sentimental Me.” I danced Shaye away from the frying pan, her spatula just over my shoulder. “Dip me, baby,” she said, but when I tried, she said, “Oh, shit, ow, that hurts,” and I gave up the idea.

I tried to sing along, making up the words. “So in love with you, bring me back my shoe, if you ever do…” I belted.

“Set the table, would you,” Shaye said.

I made couples out of the knife and spoon, just as I did when I was a child, leaving poor fork out by himself. “She’s been gone a long time,” I said to Shaye. “Maybe I should go check on her.”

“I’m sure she knows the way to her own mailbox. Wait ’til you taste these. Why do people not eat these anymore?”

“Um, you remember what veal is?”

“I’m trying to forget that part. It didn’t bother anyone in the old days.”

“In the old days, they ate liverwurst. And, oh, man, liver and onions. When I was a kid, I never thought of it as an actual
liver
.”

“Tomorrow I’m making stew.”

“I remember stew! And biscuits?”

“White bread with margarine. We had that every night. When did every loaf of bread become
artisan
? Don’t get me wrong, I love artisan bread. I could live off the stuff.”

“I’m going to check on her.”

Tex agreed it was a good idea, and about time, too, because he scurried to the door and pushed ahead of me. Outside, the swing was still lying at an angle on the porch, as if it had suddenly needed a rest. I could hear the crooners far away now. It smelled good out there, like warm clay and dry herbs. Still, desert dark was darker than any other, and that old pool looked sad and abandoned in the light of the moon, and I shivered. I wondered what Kit Covey’s room looked like at the Carson Nugget.

“Nash?” I called.

No answer. I began to worry. There was a lot of rocky ground and dead-of-night out there. I remembered what Harris had told us. Maybe she took off somewhere. Maybe, not in her right mind, she was wandering out by the lake. We would have to make plans to put her in a home, a care facility, her uprooted belongings stuffed into one wretched room.

But then I saw her walking back up the road, her back hunched as she sorted through the mail. “I can’t see a damn thing out here,” she said.

“I told you I’d get it,” I said.

“Probably I could get back to the house with my eyes closed,” she said.

“Let’s not try that.”

“Oh, let’s do. I’ll be Helen and you be Anne Sullivan.” Nash cracked up at her own joke, her shoulders moving up and down as she chuckled away. Tex trotted happily ahead, lifted his leg on a creosote bush.

“Safe and sound,” I called to Shaye when we were back in. It smelled so good in there. Frying food, and something with garlic.

“I didn’t kick the bucket while I was out getting the mail,” Nash shouted. “The Ames Brothers! Listen to them. Now, that’s music.” She snapped her fingers, three jazzy clicks to the beat. “Mmm, that smells delicious.”

Nash sat in a kitchen chair, shuffled through bills and ad flyers. “Fix me one of those drinks you girls made the other night, would you?”

I got out the small glasses and the ice-cube tray—one of those kinds from the dark ages, metal, with the little handle you pulled up. I cracked them free, chased one escaping cube across the kitchen counter. With the Ames Brothers and the popping of grease and Shaye shaking the pan against the burner while chatting about the time their mail went missing for three days, I didn’t notice that Nash had gone silent until I turned to give her the drink. She sat in that kitchen chair and clutched an envelope. She didn’t look well. Her skin had gone slack, and I realized just how old she was.