Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

  She argues more with Blake than with Mason. She argues more with Blake than with anyone. They’re always at each other. If it weren’t for me and Mason, I don’t think those two would ever willingly hang out. Everything he does annoys her, and her criticism bothers the crap out of him. Their personalities clash and have always clashed. He doesn’t want to go here, she doesn’t like to eat there, it’s not the eighteenth hole, it’s the sixteenth, Gone with the Wind was absolutely Margaret Mitchell’s only book, Dodgeball was stupid, “Una Palabra” from Man on Fire means “One Word” not “One Act.” On, and on, and on. Ad nauseam.

  And he, to torture her, calls her “Haiku”, even though he knows it drives her crazy.

  Why can’t Blake go with Chloe to the orphanage? Why do I have to?

  18

  Cherry Strudel

  Chloe

  So apparently for boys, the sun brightly shining in at four in the morning is like sleeping with an eye mask, because Blake and Mason didn’t stir until Hannah and Chloe kicked them awake at eight. Carmen’s mother Sabine, who had arrived with bread, fresh eggs, and thick-cut bacon, in her energetic Latvian way was already frying up a feast for eight people.

  Sabine and her husband Guntis took the things Varda grew and sold them at the market. That was how the family made its living.

  Guntis set up the stalls, and ran the unsold produce to sell it on the pigfeed market at the end of the day. Varda had told Chloe all this and more last night at dinner.

  “So not only is there a dad,” Blake said to Hannah when he’d heard, “but he’s a good one. See, Hannah, men aren’t all bad.”

  At odds with yesterday’s disrespect was Sabine’s reaction to Otto. She and Guntis had been away last night in Valmiera, trying to get a contract from a local seed farmer. But though there were guests from America, the first thing Sabine did when she walked into the kitchen, her arms full of squash, was go outside to find her father. Chloe watched them through the glass door. The woman put her arm around Otto, leaned down, hugged him, kissed his head. They spoke. He smiled! Otto looked positively benevolent in the morning sun, looking up adoringly at his daughter. He was wearing the same baggy uniform as yesterday and the sticks were in his hands.

  Over breakfast, Blake planned his and Mason’s day in Riga. He was sunny like the morning, rumpled, unshaved, wearing a plaid cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, jeans, and cowboy boots. It was supposed to hit ninety in Riga this afternoon, but according to Blake a long-sleeve shirt was what Latvian weather called for.

  “You sure you’re not underdressed?” Chloe asked. “You might want to bring your parka. You know, just in case.”

  “Tell that to the cold rain in Liepaja,” he said. “Because that’s where you’ll be in your sleeveless pink blouse.”

  Chloe asked Hannah to hurry up because they needed to leave. It was Sunday and the trains might be running poorly. She read in one of Blake’s books that sometimes there was trackwork. And Liepaja was a long way away, over two hundred kilometers, not that anyone had any idea how far that was. You could’ve said seventy cubits, and they’d be none the wiser.

  Hannah, who was not speaking to anyone this morning, shot Blake a lethal glare.

  “Hannah, honestly, you don’t have to go with me,” Chloe said. “Blake, I know you’re trying to guilt her into going. Stop it. It’s fine. I’ll go by myself.” Chloe didn’t mean it. She’d never been on a train by herself.

  She’d never been on a train.

  Mason said he would go. But first he asked Carmen if the family went to church on Sundays. It was nine in the morning. He would go with Chloe after church, he said.

  “No, you’re coming to Riga with me, bro,” Blake said.

  “Church was at six,” said Carmen. “Market opens at nine. We already went.”

  “You woke up at six o’clock?” said Hannah.

  “No, we woke up at four. To water fields and harvest vegetables. But church at six.”

  Mason looked disappointed he had missed it.

  Blake elbowed him. “Mase, it’s in Latvian.”

  “So? God is God.” Mason seemed happier this morning. He ate ham, and even tried the black bread, which he said was not the worst thing he’d ever tasted.

  Having cooked, Sabine cleaned up and talked to her parents in the manner of a hectic, harried spitfire. Black-haired and black-eyed, she looked like Varda, a little taller, a little thinner, her face already weathered, her skin scarred with work, the hem of her dress fraying.

  “How old is your mom?” Chloe asked Carmen.

  “Thirty.”

  Chloe tried to hide her American shock. “Wow. Huh. She doesn’t look thirty.” Chloe took a long sip of her coffee. She looked fifty. What did the world do to you to age you like that before your time? Her mother—despite everything—didn’t look as old as Sabine. “She must have had you young.”

  “She was fifteen. She had older sister. Killed in wagon accident before Mama was born. Then Grandmother lucky to have Mama when she was almost forty.”

  “And now you all live in this house?”

  “Yes. Grandmother wants Mama to have another baby. But Papa says it will be with another woman because Mama too old.”

  “Ah. I think your father is joking, no?”

  Carmen didn’t reply. But Chloe, having absorbed the proximity with which Carmen had been nesting near Mason even at a casual breakfast, suddenly understood some things.

  “Did you hear what that girl just told me?” she whispered, pulling Mason into a corner of the kitchen, pretending to look for a butter knife.

  “No.” He was eating a ham sandwich so heartily, he hadn’t bothered to swallow. “What she shay?”

  “Mase, a little distance, please. I’m seeing that girl in a new light.”

  “Why?” He grinned. “She so nice.”

  Chloe rolled her eyes.

  “She’s just a kid,” he said.

  “Yeah, like us. Just—keep away, that’s all. I worry for Carmen’s future if this is what she’s like already.” Chloe started collecting her wallet and book to read on the way to Liepaja, but Carmen stopped her.

  “Mama says too late to go,” the young girl said. “When you woke up so late, we thought you not go.”

  “Late? We woke up at seven-thirty.”

  “Too late. Liepaja train runs once a day.”

  “That can’t be true,” Chloe said. “It says the trains run from Riga. Our guidebook said. Blake? Right?”

  “They run from Riga,” said Carmen. “Once a day. Once there, once back. You missed train there. Try again tomorrow. You have to wake up early if you want to go. Grandmother says she didn’t want to wake you after long travel. But she wake you tomorrow.”

  Seven-thirty was too late to wake up?

  “Much too late,” said Carmen. “If you serious about Liepaja, you wake up at five, and then really hurry.”

  “What time would we need to wake up if I wanted to take my time?” Chloe said, dazed. She turned to Blake and Mason. “Guys, did you hear?”

  Blake shrugged. “What can we do? You’ll come with us to Riga. We’ll find out what time the Liepaja train is for sure. You’ll go tomorrow.”

  “You won’t see Riga today. It’s going to rain,” Carmen said. She seemed delighted by this. She was dressed in a pretty frock and had flowers in her hair and pink gloss on her lips. “You can stay here. Come with us to market. We can play cards. There is beach nearby, I can take you.”

  “I thought you said it was going to rain?” Chloe said suspiciously.

  “If it stop,” the girl said without a beat. “We can talk about how you can adopt me instead of some Liepaja boy. They dangerous. They get into all kinds of trouble. But not me. I come with you to America.” She smiled at Mason.

  All right, Chloe thought, let’s just drink some chamomile tea and chill the crap down.

  “My parents want to sponsor a male child,” she said, disbelieving Carmen about the trains. How would Carmen even
know? When did she ever take a train? Rain! Look what a beautiful day it was. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The girl simply did not understand boundaries. And Mason, harmless and friendly, wasn’t going to inform Carmen of them. He loved the attention. He never informed anyone of the boundaries.

  “Okay, quick, let’s go to Riga,” Chloe said to Blake.

  “Only one train a day from Riga to Liepaja,” Carmen repeated. “Everybody in Latvia know this. Otto know this.”

  Sabine said a bunch of words.

  “Mama says orphanage will not be close to station.”

  “How does she know?”

  Rapid fire from Sabine’s mouth.

  “Because,” Carmen said, “Mama says kids all runners. You don’t want them close to train station. You will have no orphans left.”

  Chloe, Hannah, Mason and Blake had a meeting outside in the garden, with Patton underfoot and Otto nearby, already drinking beer, his rough hands shaking through his miter cuts. Blake watched the old man, chewed his lip uncertainly, and then opened his journal. They revised the countdown of their days. Where was this extra day of unexpected delay going to come from?

  “How long do we absolutely have to stay with Varda?” Blake asked Chloe.

  “Three days. Minimum.” She didn’t tell him what Moody had told her, that she better not stay one minute less than five days.

  “Does yesterday count?”

  “Yesterday’s gone,” Mason said.

  “Okay, not helpful. Chloe?”

  “I don’t want to stay in Latvia an extra day,” Hannah said, “just because Chloe couldn’t be bothered to check out the train schedule.”

  “You didn’t check out the train schedule.”

  “I didn’t have to.”

  “I didn’t have to either.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Blake interrupted. “Hannah, no one was going to get up at four in the morning today, even if the train made a special stop at Varda’s house to pick you girls up. Let’s go to Riga, and then get to bed early tonight, so you can get up as early as you need to. Mase and I will go to Jurmala. Frommer’s says it’s a must. The day after, the four of us will get a tour guide for Riga, and the following morning we’ll head out to Poland.”

  “Except this day, the day you’re standing in presently, in Otto’s yard, doesn’t exist on your little schedule,” Hannah said. “It exists in reality. Here.” She waved her hand. “But not in your chart of meaningless numbers. You didn’t budget for stay-in-the-house-and-Mason-flirts-with-Carmen-all-day day.”

  “I’m not flirting with Carmen.”

  “He’s not flirting with Carmen,” said Chloe. Ugh.

  Blake put away his notebook. “We’ll have to make it up down the road,” he said. “In Poland somewhere. Nothing we can do about it now.”

  “Except not go to the orphanage.”

  “Hannah!” Chloe and Mason shouted. Hannah stormed off.

  “Thanks a lot,” Blake said. “Only one of us is going to have to grovel, and it’s not going to be the two of you, wiseacres.”

  Inside the house Sabine was talking again with great urgency, as though it was the only way she knew how to speak. She pointed to some distant location and pushed Carmen forward.

  “Mother says I should come with you to Liepaja,” Carmen said to Chloe with a saucy smile. “They do not speak English at orphanage.”

  “Of course they do,” Chloe said. Someone had to be able to translate the sponsorship papers for the Americans.

  “Mother says I should come with you,” the girl stubbornly repeated.

  Hannah nudged Chloe in the back. “Yes let her come!” she whispered. Chloe turned around and fixed her friend with the stare she had learned from her mother. The stare that said you better shut your mouth when you’re speaking to me.

  “You are being a really bad friend right now,” Chloe said. “Really really bad.”

  “Okay, fine.” Hannah raised her hands in frustrated surrender.

  Chloe turned her sights back on Carmen. “Carmen,” Chloe said, “the boys are not going with us to Liepaja. Only Hannah and I are going. You know that, right?”

  After that, Carmen lost interest.

  Mason

  The orphanage is dividing us. No one listens to me when I keep quoting Lupe saying and saying that together we travel down one river, we all meet up at the end, why worry about the tributaries. I feel guilty for not going with Chloe. I feel guilty for wanting to go with her when my brother clearly wants and needs me to go with him. Wait, that’s not actually true. I don’t want to go to an orphanage. I want Hannah to go, and I don’t care if she doesn’t want to. The more she doesn’t want to, the more I want her to. There’s a word for that, isn’t there? Schadenfuckingfreude.

  The commuter rail station was in stony Carnikava, a mile away or, as they say in this part of the world, something something kilometers.

  Blake and I wore boots, Chloe flat sandals. Hannah of course wore some impractical thing like ballet flats a size too small, and defended them by saying, ballerinas practice eight hours jumping on their toes in these, and I can’t walk to a small village? After two sheppeys of walking down a paved road, she began to complain of breaking blisters and open sores and general exhaustion. It was barely noon.

  The trains to Riga ran once an hour on Sundays. We had just missed one and had to wait fifty-five minutes for the next. On the platform we bickered about why it didn’t occur to anyone to bring a schedule? Why didn’t the station house have a schedule? Where was the ticket seller?

  The train was late. Blake was drenched in sweat in his plaid shirt by the time we climbed aboard, and then it had no air-conditioning and was crammed with hundreds of under-deodorized Latvians taking a Sunday trip to the big city.

  We got off at a big old Communist-style train station, which is to say that the station was built in pre-Communist times, taken over by them, and never renovated. Everything was falling apart: bricks, windows, frames, stairs. I said to Hannah, look, here’s that Communist architecture you wanted to see so much. She ignored me.

  Blake wanted us to spend a day together, just me and him, researching things, taking notes, making observations. But every time he opened his journal, Hannah groaned. So you know what we did?

  We went where Hannah wanted to go. We marched through the Old City as if it meant nothing, through a park, past the Riga Canal, on which it would’ve been so nice to stop and meander, to the white Opera House. It was an impressive building. Maybe we could check out the Daugava River after? No. Hannah wanted to buy some dresses, wanted to go to the World War I zeppelin hangars of the Central Market. Chloe wanted to walk in the park by the winding canal. Blake wanted to find some spies. No one wanted to do what I wanted to do, which was go inside a great big old church called St. Peter’s with the gray spire. Chloe said she’d go with me while Blake went skirt-shopping with Hannah, but Blake didn’t want to split up the group. Chloe said to him, why not, you don’t care about splitting up tomorrow.

  I said, Hannah, if we go to your stupid market, why can’t we go inside my stupid church? But then they all made fun of me for wanting to go inside a stupid church. So I dropped it.

  You know how Blake dealt with having to spend all day with his girlfriend? By talking to me and Chloe about The Blue Suitcase and looking for places to eat and mostly ignoring her. Hannah didn’t want to eat, or have a beer, or be in the sun. Fair enough, it was really hot out, like HOT. Like Maine sometimes gets. Not New Hampshire. It’s always cool in the White Mountains. I miss them.

  Blake said that according to his guidebook, Rigensis was the best bakery in Riga, so we had to stand in line, no matter how long it was. The bakery was between the Daugava and the Riga Canal in the Old City. The line looked to be two furlongs and one zork. The last man standing told us it was an hour wait. Chloe said it must be good if people were willing to stand in the heat on a Sunday afternoon for a Napoleon and a cherry strudel, but
Hannah said she wasn’t one of those people. Blake told me not to worry, we’d go to the bakery tomorrow when the girls were in Liepaja.

  Chloe said she really wanted a cherry strudel and Hannah said, yes, but do you really need a cherry strudel?

  Blake and I exchanged a weary glance. Let her eat what she wants, Hannah, Blake said. We’re on vacation.

  All the more reason to watch your figure, Hannah said. Don’t you think?

  Hannah is right, Chloe said, deflated. Last thing I need.

  The three of us started to walk away, but Blake didn’t move. Dude, we gotta go, we said. He didn’t move. What are you doing? He was standing in line.

  I’m getting myself a cherry strudel, Blake said. Who’s with me? Chloe, you want one?

  So we all waited.

  Aside from Hannah whining about her shoes, the sun, the heat, the smell, the walking, the heat, how she didn’t have a good enough pair of sunglasses to see the colored buildings, and how she didn’t want to have warm beer, even though it’s nearly impossible for us to drink back in Maine, blisters, saying she didn’t like raisins so why would she eat an apple strudel with raisins, oh and did I mention the heat, and being bored with every topic of conversation anyone brought up, making the rest of us want to scream, and I’m not a screamer, we had a good day. Was Hannah always like this? We’ve been hanging out a long time. She was fun once. She used to ice skate and come sledding. She used to like ice cream. But not anymore. You’d think Blake would be fed up, but no. He says, baby, come on, look at the cobbled Old City, isn’t it pretty? Want to walk down to the river? Don’t you love the way the Opera House and the canal divide the Old City from the new? Which do you like better, the old or the new? Want a sweet pretzel? An ice cream? He’s got his hand on her back, caressing her, and she says, please, can you not touch me, I’m hot like glue, and he just smiles and pats her and says I’m glued to you, and continues talking and laughing, and touching her.

  I’ll give one thing to Hannah—the strawberries at the dumb market she dragged us to were unbelievable. Juicy, sweet, like nothing I’ve ever had, even in Maine. We bought two baskets, devoured them between the four of us, and bought two more. Blake had strawberry juice all over his plaid shirt. Chloe said his shirts always looked like this, and that’s why he wore them plaid: so no one could see the stains. Ignoring her, he wondered if we could work strawberries into our story. The girls groaned. I remembered Lupe telling him anything can be worked into the plot, and Blake laughing and saying, that’s right, baby, because the whole world is my research.