“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“My parents are throwing the usual bash. Loads of guests, and Mami’s making tamales. If that sounds like too much, you could come over to my place.”
Austin flashed a quick smile. “Let me think on it and get back to you on Monday.”
Monday? Did that mean she wasn’t going to see him at all this weekend? Distant because he was struggling to stay sober was one thing, but this chill felt entirely different. She didn’t like the way her stomach clenched. Gathering up the envelopes, she grabbed her coat and strode out of her office. “Well, I really have to go if I’m going to get these in tonight’s mail. Bye, Austin.”
He glanced at his watch. “I’m right behind you.” And he was, until the parking lot, when he turned his truck in a different direc- tion.
There was a line at the post office, and no available parking spaces, so Rose circled the block and came around again, parking next to the Sage Bakery and the ¡Andale! roadhouse. She shut the car door and, enticed by the mouthwatering smells emanating from the bakery, decided why not pick up a cinnamon bun for tomorrow’s breakfast? Once she was inside, the small loaves of molasses bread looked perfect for toast. She took a number and waited her turn in front of the well-stocked cases, chatting with her old high school English teacher, remarkably sharp for a woman of her years.
Purchases made, she put her hand on the door handle and was about to depress the old-fashioned brass plunger, when she saw a familiar, thin man accompanied by tall, dark-haired woman entering the ¡Andale! Austin’s hand slid across the woman’s shoulders, and they turned their faces to each other, laughing in that familiar, intim- ate way that only lovers do. The Sage Bakery had a bay window, which—courtesy of the curve in the road—stuck out three feet farther than the
¡Andale!’s glass front. Rose had a clear view of them inside the bar. They sat down at a table near the door, right there, in plain sight of whoever walked by. For a moment the waiter blocked her view, but when he moved away, Rose saw Austin lift what looked like a longneck beer, toasting the woman across from him. She felt a shocky heat pump through her heart, cause the organ to beat double time for a few seconds as the realization hit her. Austin wasn’t just drinking, he was drinking in the company of his ex-wife. Rose wished she could return the bun and the bread, because she knew she was never going to be able to eat them.
She walked in the other direction, to the post office, and dropped the letters into the slot. Then she returned to her car, sitting inside for a long time, not bothering to turn on the heater even when her face and fingers began to feel half frozen. She had to wait for them to come out of the bar. She needed to see for herself where they would go next. By the time they did, Rose was hugging her knees, hollow inside, feeling like she might be sick. Not fifteen feet from her Bronco—everyone in Floralee knew her old Bronco—she watched dry eyed as Austin and Leah hurried across the street to the Apple Tree. Hundreds of tiny white Christmas lights were strung in the restaurant’s trademark trees. Combined with the softly falling snow, the scene couldn’t have been more romantic. How easily they en- twined their hands. Their bodies seemed to possess a memory that caused them to lean into one another as they made their way across the snowy street. They were a handsome couple. It was a shame they’d never had children, because any child born of those two sets of genes would have had to be beautiful.
She drove home and parked next to the barn. Chachi came flying down the gravel and leaped at her feet. She picked him up and rubbed her face against his familiar doggy stink. Max neighed and pawed at the snow, missing his exercise. She threw him his evening flake of hay but didn’t linger. On any other Friday night, with the snow coming down so hard, Rose would have curled up on the couch with a blanket, an apple, and a pot of cocoa to lose herself in one of her novels, enjoying all that fabricated emotional triumph, perfectly willing to suspend her disbelief in the name of love. The most impossible of situations could turn out happy inside those pages. Tonight darker thoughts prevailed. Had Lily been there, she would have scolded her sister, told her
how foolish it was to make love to any man without using a condom. “Six months of panic,” Lily would say, referring to the amount of time to wait for blood tests clearing one of the HIV virus, if Lily cared to say anything.
Rose fed Chachi his supper and sat on the floor petting him while he scarfed down his food. Her house was still. She dredged up echoes of happier times, replaying them in her imagination: Second Chance running toy motorcycles across the kitchen floor. Amanda in her room, trying to play the guitar. Philip making a face at the noise and whispering, “Do you think our daughter’s tone deaf?” None of that compared to the resonance of Austin’s bootheels on the bedroom floor. Her house simply felt more like a home when he was in it. Not just when they were eating dinner or talking, but the way his body took up space in her life, and how when she was with him, she felt like her truest self. When they made love, it was as if a whole new possible life she’d never expected stretched out before her, beckoning. Loving Austin Donavan made her feel less alone in the world. But even before Philip had died, or she’d come to accept that he’d cheated on her, or the kids had left in search of their own lives, she’d been alone, too. It was always the animals she felt needed her most.
She hoped the kittens would get adopted, be loved as part of somebody’s family, in a house with kindhearted children and merry noise and lots of spontaneous laughter. She sat on the floor of her kitchen for a long time, staring at the crumpled bag of bakery goods she’d set on the counter. With every passing second, they were turning stale.
That was where Lily found her, sitting in the dark in front of the stove. When her sister switched on the light, Rose looked up and blinked. It never crossed her mind that Lily standing there consti- tuted the rarest of firsts: her sister coming to her to say she was sorry. Rose didn’t give her sister the opportunity to apologize, because it seemed important that she tell her what she’d been thinking first. She cleared her throat. “Lily, did you know that if you add up all the years and multiply them by three—breakfast, lunch, dinner—I’ve cooked over twenty thousand meals here? Twenty thousand,” she repeated, as if this revelation had somehow tipped her over, de- livered her to a place where she was too far gone to cry. “Can you believe that?”
hat I can’t believe is how many dishes you had to wash,” Lily said as she listened to the story of Austin falling off the Leah wagon. She sat down on the kitchen floor next to her sister. “I have a theory on heartbreak, if you care to hear it. Like taking algebra, it’s one of those things nobody escapes. Anyway, factor in the amount of time you were involved with Austin, double it, and when that much time has passed, you’ll be over him. Of course, that’s discounting the first six weeks, which—no getting around it—are unspeakable hell. But I promise you, Rose, after that you’ll at least
be functional.”
“I’ve known Austin my entire life. Define ‘functional.’”
Lily reached for the bakery sack on the counter and peeked inside to glimpse the silver lining to her overcast winter day. She’d taken a six
A.M.
flight to Albuquerque and stood in on three surgeries be- fore noon. She’d driven the four hours it took to get to Floralee without stopping. During the drive she’d rehearsed any number of scenarios involving the apology scene. She was determined they resolve things before the holidays, not just because Tres hadn’t called, but for a lot of reasons it was difficult to articulate. A full itinerary for one day; however, she’d forgotten to eat. Should she have the bread first, which was technically good for her, or should she go straight for the cinnamon bun? Baked goods were tricky. No matter how healthy the bread appeared to be, it was likely to possess secret, hidden fat calories. “Just imagine yourself ambulatory,” Lily said. “With a hardly noticeable limp.”
“Great. Terrific. And how long before I get my regular life back?”
It had been so long since Lily had heard from Tres Quintero that she wondered if he’d moved. “Regular life is boredom interrupted by periods of intermittent devastation. Okay if I eat part of this cin- namon thing?”
“Be my guest.”
While her sister pulled at a thread on her sweater, Lily unwound the cinnamon bun’s snail-like spiral. Sugar, nuts, and butter oozed onto her fingers. When it came to grief, all dieting rules were suspen- ded. Once broken, the female heart reverted to survival mode, and saturated fat provided the closest thing to Valium without a doctor’s prescription. “If you ask me, happy endings and heartbreak both lurk in that first kiss. What was yours like with Austin? Awkward and shy? He seems like the type who’d bump noses.”
Rose shook her head no. “I didn’t know men could kiss like that.” “Like what?”
“Like how it must feel to shoot heroin into your bloodstream. I swear the rush took my breath away.”
Tres kissed like that, too. Lily pictured him at his notebook com- puter, the pine boughs swishing at the cabin windows, and how Rose’s simile would so captivate him he’d whip out that pad and write it down. “Oh, Rose. I’m telling you, when lips meet lips and everything feels that good, you might as well buy stock in Kleenex.”
Her sister’s laugh was fake and polite.
“Handsome as he is,” Lily continued, “no two-timing veterinarian is worth your tears.”
Rose sat up straight, and here came her real voice, the one that had survived losing her husband and raising two self-centered children. “Am I crying? Why would I cry when this is all my fault for being so stupid and blind in the first place?”
“Because you have to.” Lily had finished half the cinnamon bun, but it hadn’t satisfied her, and now she regretted not eating the bread. If she ate it, too, that would constitute a day and half’s worth of allotted calories. She took a small bite of bread. “Loving some- body’s not a crime, Rose. You just picked the wrong somebody. Every woman does it once or twice, or in my case perpetually. We start out with the best intentions. It’s in our genes to caretake. You’ve been out of the dating game so long you didn’t know what to ex- pect.”
Rose rolled the sweater thread around her finger. “We slept in my
bed for weeks before finally making love. You wanted to know those details, Lily? Well, guess what? I had to talk him into it.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything.”
But her sister went on. “He’d stopped drinking. He was leading meetings. Next thing I know he’s in the ¡Andale!, in full sight of the whole town, drinking a beer with Leah. Was I somebody to waste time with until they reconciled?”
Rose let go a mammoth sigh, as if she wanted to exchange every molecule of air in her body for a disinfectant. There wasn’t a woman on earth who didn’t understand that particular exhalation of female breath. Women heard it coming from their sisters and welled over with compassion, all the while believing it would
never
pass through
their
lips. Never, could not, would not, but somehow it always did. Lily got up from the floor and filled the teakettle with water. She set it on the burner and turned on the heat. There was a teapot in the cupboard, an English import patterned with flowers—so typical of Rose to choose frilly china. Lily set two teacups in their matching saucers and, after sniffing all the boxes of tea in the cupboard, settled on peppermint, which she measured out loose into a strainer fash- ioned to resemble a schoolhouse. She stared at the kettle, waiting for the water to boil.
“It takes a pretty colossal hole in the security blanket to break people’s hearts instead of loving them, Rose. You’re going to live. You’ve survived much worse.”
Rose looked up. “I’m ashamed to tell you this.” “Tell me anyway.”
“It hurts worse than when I lost Philip.”
Lily folded the hot pad in half. “I understand. Your first time out, and you got third-degree burns. But right now touching the wound is something to hold on to. Eventually you’ll be able to let him go. You will.”
Rose laid her head down on her knees. “I’d do it this instant if I knew how.”
“Well, you can start by picking yourself up and building a shield out of all that hurt. There. I just saved you five years of therapy.” She handed her sister the teacup. “Drink this, and write me a check for ten grand. Hey, I’m going to Mexico over the holiday.”
Rose accepted the cup and took a sip. “That sounds fun.”
The bracing scent of the tea permeated the small kitchen. It was
pretty difficult to feel morose with mint steam in your face. After a few swallows Rose got up from the floor and sat in the kitchen chair across from Lily. She carefully placed her saucer on the table and touched a fingertip to the cup’s rim, where a small chip marred the porcelain finish.
To Lily her sister’s face had never looked more beautiful. All that sorrow did something to the facial bones, apparently, because even though Rose resembled Pop more than Mami, Lily could see their mother there now, too, maybe just the hint of her cheekbones, de- termination lurking below the surface. Way back in her ancestors’ genes, struggle had been passed along to Mami. When life seemed particularly hopeless, when Lily got the urge to lie down and never wake up, it was generally her mother’s attitude that rose up, and suddenly Lily was lifting life’s metaphoric equivalent of the truck that had rolled over the trapped child. “Yeah, Mexico
sounds
fun, but my company will wrap back-to-back meetings around Thanks- giving, so I’ll be too exhausted to enjoy my one day off. They’ll pack us into airless convention rooms and tell us how if we sell more stuff, it’ll only
seem
like we’re making less money for more work. When I’m allowed outside I’ll have to medicate on piña coladas so I don’t die of boredom playing golf with the honchos. On the plus side, the beaches are packed with surfers this time of year, so many kids someone’s sure to have seen Second Chance. I’ll ask around, and maybe we’ll get lucky. Want a shot of crème de menthe in your tea?”