“Tickets and everything,” said Wren.
Jake gaped at Amos. “You are so bad. And so rich, apparently.”
Everyone but Amos laughed awkwardly, since no one seemed to know the full truth of this. Amos just ducked his head with a modest smile.
“Wait’ll you see what we made for you,” said Jake.
Anna widened her eyes. “For me?”
“I think,” said Brian, jumping in, “it’s time we let our ladyship go to bed. Everything will be a helluva lot more fun in the morning.”
Anna ignored him. “You don’t know where we can find Michael, do you?”
“Sure,” said Jake. “They’re over on Edelweiss. Want me to bike over there and tell him you’re here?”
“Would you, dear?”
“Should I tell him to join us in the morning? We do a bitchin’ breakfast here.”
“A bitchin’ breakfast sounds heavenly.”
And with that Jake and Amos left, and Wren and Brian began helping Anna prepare for bed. She looked profoundly weary to Brian, but he also detected a certain restlessness as he pulled off her slippers and adjusted her sheets. The chill of a desert night had crept into the Winnie, so he pulled a blanket from the overhead compartment and placed it at the foot of the bed. “Just in case,” he told Anna.
“You’ll wake me, won’t you, dear, when Jake gets back?”
“Of course,” he said.
But fifteen minutes later, when Jake got back, the news was hardly worthy of a wake-up.
“I couldn’t find them,” he said at the door. “Nobody’s seen them for a while.”
Brian stepped out of the Winnie and shut the door.
“They’re gone?”
“It’s possible, I guess. The car isn’t there.”
“Shit.” Brian thought for a moment. “What about Shawna? She’s supposed to be staying at their camp.”
“I checked. She’s off with some chick named Juliette.”
“Of course she is.”
He knew he sounded like a cranky old dad, but he couldn’t help it. Anna wanted the family together, and he would do his damnedest to make it happen.
His damnedest was not enough. The next morning at Trans Bay’s traditional flapjack breakfast—a long trestle table under a lavender awning—he broke the news as gently as possible. “It’s looking like they may have left,” he told her. “But we could still run into them. Same goes for Shawna. This place is like that.”
“I understand,” she said, a strangely placid light in her eyes.
“And we can stay here as long as we like.”
“That’s very nice of them.”
“It takes a while sometimes for people to come together here, but that’s the beauty of—”
“Brian, dear—you mustn’t try to tidy things up. You’ll just exhaust yourself.”
“What?”
“There’s no tidying up to be done . . . with the possible exception of this hat.” She fiddled with the loose ends of the turban that Sergeant Lisa had presented to her as soon as they had left the Winnie that morning. “What I mean to say is . . . I’ve said all I need to say to each and every one of you. Michael included. It’s in you now for good.” She reached over and took his hand. “Do you understand me, dear?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“There’s nothing you have to say, nothing you have to do . . . and nowhere I have to be. It’s all free time from here on out. For both of us.”
Wren, sitting across the table, noticed this exchange and smiled at him. Then her beautiful lips went oval in amazement. “You are shitting me,” she said.
He turned to see what she meant.
It was that monarch butterfly, looming above them like the inevitable.
Chapter 32
THE RIDE
She was amazed at the practiced grace with which they placed her in the highest seat. Jake and Amos led her up the ramp, holding her arms, while Sergeant Lisa, quite literally, brought up the rear. She landed in the pod (as Jake called it) much the way she landed in her favorite chair at home. They gave her a thermos of cold water and a pretty Edwardian parasol and a silver bell to ring whenever she wanted their attention. The ride would last fifteen minutes, they told her, unless she wanted it to end earlier. The three pods beneath her held Jake, Amos, and Sergeant Lisa.
Then the machine began to move, and she heard a squeal of delight from Wren and a manly hoot from Brian and waves of applause—applause!—from the people assembled along the road. She assumed they were clapping for this wondrous human-propelled creation with its flapping jack-o’-lantern wings until she heard the chants as she moved toward the blazing white ocean of the open desert.
Anna Madrigal, Anna Madrigal, Anna Madrigal . . .
How on earth did they know?
She looked down and saw Jake beaming up at her, pointing to a sign on the front of the butterfly. She could not read it from this height and angle, but she assumed it bore her name. A name she had chosen herself, by way of reparation, all those years ago.
The glorious machine picked up speed. The wheels were singing to her now, the warm wind caressing her face like the softest yellow chiffon. She could feel the freedom in her hair as she raised her arms, ever so briefly, to the welcoming sky. The cheers grew dimmer, fading away at the moment of release. A single voice remained, redolent of love.
“Be good, lamb! Live long and be good!”
Margaret was running after her down the train tracks, blowing kisses and weeping copiously. She could barely manage it in those heels, but she was trying.
“Remember to call my aunt on the Embarcadero!”
“I will.”
“And use the money for something nice!”
“I will.”
“And don’t forget to—”
Anna couldn’t hear the rest, but she knew she would have to learn her own lessons now.
There was a city waiting for her.
About the Author
Armistead Maupin is the author of the nine-volume Tales of the City series, the first three books of which were made into a television miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney. Maupin’s other books include Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener. A stage musical version of Tales of the City premiered at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater in May 2011. He lives in Santa Fe with his husband, the photographer Christopher Turner.
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ALSO BY ARMISTEAD MAUPIN
Novels
Tales of the City
More Tales of the City
Further Tales of the City
Babycakes
Significant Others
Sure of You
Maybe the Moon
The Night Listener
Michael Tolliver Lives
Mary Ann in Autumn
Collections
28 Barbary Lane
Back to Barbary Lane
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE DAYS OF ANNA MADRIGAL. Copyright © 2014 by Literary Bent, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, with
out the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Epub Edition FEBRUARY 2014 ISBN 9780062196309
FIRST EDITION
Cover illustration by Richard Laschon/Shutterstock, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-06-219624-8
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The Days of Anna Madrigal Page 23