by Liz Durano
He looks unconvinced. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Alright then,” I say, turning away. “Just say the word then and I’ll be on my way.”
Benny opens his mouth to say something but stops. Then he nods. “Alright, nurse Sarah, I’ll take you up on your offer, but you better not be doing this out of pity.”
“Not out of pity, no,” I reply, pushing his basket down the aisle. “As a friend... a former friend or whatever the hell we ended up as after I… well, whatever.” I take a deep breath. “Anyway, I’d rather you not go home alone, not when you look the way you do and it’d be nice to have some company tonight. Maybe we can catch up on what we’ve both been up to.”
He arches an eyebrow. “That’s all?”
“I was going to visit my family in Taos but since my Dad’s in town, I figured I’d give Mom space to be with him.”
Benny looks at me, his eyes narrowing. “There are twenty-four hours in a day, Sarah. Surely she’ll have time to spend with you while you’re there.”
“Dad comes in every two weeks to visit her,” I say, my excuse sounding thin. “I figured I’d give them time to be alone.”
“He still live in New York while your mom and brother live in Taos?”
I nod. “Yup.
“And they’re not separated or anything? Divorced?”
I shake my head as he stops in front of the meat aisle. “Hell no. They just have this weird arrangement where he works there but flies back to Taos twice a month, spends time with Mom, Nana, and Dax and then flies back again. It’s crazy.”
“Why does he do that?”
“Because he handles other people’s money and he loves what he does. Mom would like him to work from Taos but big money’s back east, you know?” I pause, choosing two packets each of precut pork shoulder and pork belly and putting them in the basket. I don’t know why I’m telling him my life story all of a sudden. But then, there was a time when we used to have the same exact conversations. “Anyway, I don’t know if you remember, but my dad owns an investment firm that handles rich people’s money.”
Benny nods. “I remember. I met him the night you graduated. He didn’t like me too much.”
“He doesn’t like any guy being within ten feet of me,” I say, chuckling dryly. “Anyway, his business has gotten pretty successful that it allows him to charter a plane on weekends if he has to.” As I speak, I notice the furrow on Benny’s brow as he studies the stuff I’ve put inside his basket.
“You’re making hominy stew?” he asks and I can spy the hint of a smile on his face.
“Why not? It’s your favorite, isn’t it? You’ll just have to settle for frozen hominy as the base. I don’t intend on soaking dried hominy overnight.”
“You’re welcome to,” he says as I glare at him. “Alright, frozen is fine. It’s better than canned.”
“I don’t know if you’ve got spices in your kitchen–”
“Salt and pepper count?”
“–so I’m going to get everything just to be sure.” I stop in front of the spices aisle and take a jar of cumin seeds, Mexican oregano, and bay leaf from the shelf and toss them into the basket. “That okay with you?”
He grins, nodding. “You’re the boss.”
“And I’m just going to make this for you, make sure you’re not running a high fever or anything, and then leave, okay?” As the words leave my mouth, it almost seems like I’m trying to convince myself that’s all I want to do. After all, this is me being the compassionate person I really am underneath all the armor I need to wear around Benny, even as the broad grin on his face makes my belly do flip flops.
“Alright,” Benny says, grimacing as he rubs his bicep before stifling a yawn. “Deal it is.”
I follow him to his apartment and help him with the groceries. He tells me it’s a fully furnished long-term rental, one he uses when he’s in town since he’s mostly assigned in the Taos office. But with his last assignment sending him to Colorado on a weekly basis, it was better to simply stay in Shiprock.
After taking a painkiller, Benny sits on the couch to watch me prepare dinner, yawning until he falls asleep while I’m chopping the onions and garlic, his boots still on his feet. I wake him up just long enough to help him get them off and cover him with a blanket I retrieve from his bed.
“I really should help you,” he says, yawning.
“Nope. Your job is to rest right now.” I lay the blanket over him. “In case you’ve forgotten, you hit your head and you cut your arm this morning. The adrenaline has pretty much worn off after your grand adventure and that’s one of the reasons you’re tired. So rest.”
He smiles. “Is that an order, Nurse Sarah?”
“Yes, it is.” I wish I could stop myself from grinning as I make my way back to the kitchen and wash my hands but it’s useless. Having Benny in the same room with me is making me feel giddy. “Now sleep and don’t worry about me. The stew will take some time to cook anyway.”
Benny rubs his eyes. “Will you stay and have dinner with me? It would suck to eat it all alone. I’ll take care of the clean-up.”
Suddenly I feel silly thinking I’d leave as soon as dinner was ready. Who am I fooling. “Alright, but only if you go to sleep, Benny. I’ll be right here.”
This time he doesn’t reply and it doesn’t take long for him to fall asleep the moment he closes his eyes, his uninjured arm draped over his eyes. The poor guy is exhausted. The tetanus shot got him good and it didn’t help that he went straight to work after the whole incident with the truck. He should have gone home.
But if he did, then I wouldn’t have run into him at the store and I certainly wouldn’t be in his kitchen right now. And for the first time since I started working in Shiprock, I’m actually happy, almost content as I get everything ready for the hominy stew—jalapeños, chiles, tomato and pork join the onions and garlic in the pot along with the hominy I’d defrosted in the microwave. It’ll take awhile for the meat to soften but I figure Benny will be out for about two hours or so, just enough time for the stew to almost be ready.
Hopefully, it’ll be enough time for the butterflies in my belly to settle down, too.
Chapter Four
I don’t mean to fall asleep as soon as we arrive at my apartment but that’s exactly what happens the moment I sit down on my couch after downing the two pills Sarah hands me. Whatever stuff they put in those tetanus vaccines, it’s strong enough to make me feel like shit but thank God there’s stuff to counter that. Sarah also tells me that it’s more likely all that adrenaline from this morning’s incident finally wore off and my body just needs to rest. If she meant the excitement of seeing her again, she’s probably right.
“What time is it?” I ask when I wake up.
“About seven. You were out like a light after you took the Tylenol. But you should feel even better when you get something in you,” she says as I get up from the couch. “You look better than you did earlier, that’s for sure. You’ve got some color back.”
“That bad, eh?”
She chuckles. “Not really. You were looking just a little pale, something I’m not used to seeing.”
“In that case, I better pretty myself up for dinner.” I head to the bathroom to wash my face, brushing my teeth for good measure. Then I take a good look at my reflection in the mirror. Sarah’s right about one thing. I do have some color back and I feel better. The headache’s gone, too. Now I just need to get homemade food inside me.
The aroma of hominy stew fills my apartment and makes my stomach growl the moment I emerge from the bathroom. Sarah is kneading dough in a bowl when I join her in the kitchen.
“You didn’t have to make fry bread,” I say, grabbing a kitchen towel from the cupboard and setting it on the counter. She’ll need it to cover the bowl for the dough to rest before frying.
“You on a diet?”
I chuckle, shaking my head. “Do I need to be on one?”
Sarah eyes me, her gaze traveli
ng down my torso before moving back up to my face. “No, and it’s not like you didn’t already know that. You work out.”
“Looks like you do, too,” I say as she sets the ball of dough in the glass bowl and lays the towel over it. She lifts the lid of the pot and my stomach growls again as steam escapes.
“I really appreciate you keeping me company.”
“You don’t talk much so that’s a plus. Here, taste it and let me know what you think,” she says as I take a spoon and dip it into the pot. I taste it, closing my eyes as the flavors explode in my mouth.
“Wow.” I hand the spoon to her and she gently tastes the remaining half. She thinks for a moment and nods.
“You’re right. It tastes good although it probably needs another hour for the meat to be really tender. But for now, it will do in a pinch.”
“I don’t think I can wait another hour,” I say, patting my stomach. “I haven’t had anything since this morning.”
“Half an hour then,” she says, laughing. “I still have to prepare the fry bread.”
“Need help?”
“You can set the table,” she says as she sets the lid back on the pot. “The posole should be done by the time I cook the fry bread.”
I open the windows to let the apartment air circulate, the stars already lighting up the sky. In the distance, lightning flashes followed by thunder. Just another light show in New Mexico, something Sarah and I used to enjoy watching back when we lived in Albuquerque. We used to pull the couch in front of the window, prop our feet up on the ledge and talk about anything and everything… except anything related to dating.
And here we are again. Friends but not exactly friends, both of us almost cautious as we navigate around each other in the kitchen, trying not to touch, doing our best not to look.
“Dinner’s ready,” Sarah announces and I pull a chair for her and wait for her to sit down.
“Thanks so much for making this, Sarah. It smells amazing.”
“Wait till you taste it, and then tell me then whether it’s still amazing,” she says, chuckling. “I just eyeballed everything.”
“You can eyeball anything you want. You were always a good cook. Definitely a hundred times better than me.” I pull up my chair and sit down across from her.
With that, dinner officially begins which is good because I can’t talk when I’m enjoying my food, home-cooked, at that. Even the fry bread is still warm and fluffy, the perfect companion to the stew. Still, it’s difficult to concentrate on the food when I’ve got Sarah sitting across from me. Far from the impersonal clinic meeting of this morning, she’s even more beautiful, her blue eyes still able to pull me from across any room or in this case, from across the table.
But things have changed between us and we’re not exactly friends anymore. We’ve let secrets destroy what we once had, her secrets and mine.
“So tell me about yourself,” Sarah says ten minutes later. “What have you been up to since UNM?”
I tear a piece of fry bread and dip it in the stew. At least she waited until we’re finishing up the first round. I suspect I’ll probably end up getting a second helping later tonight. “Work, mostly… and I finished my Doctorate six months ago.”
“You’ll be running for a chapter seat next.”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah, right. Let’s say my goals don’t include running for anything local. I’m happy just doing my own thing.”
She wipes the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “I honestly thought you’d be married by now, Benny, with one or two kids.”
Sarah’s words bring back Noelle and the six years we’d been dating on and off. We’d mostly cooled off when I lived down in Albuquerque studying for my Masters and so I dated a lot of women. Earned myself a nasty reputation but one could say I was busy sowing my oats since I couldn’t exactly do that while living on the reservation.
“I’m not thirty yet, Sarah. I’m in no hurry.” Or I wasn’t until I announced to my family four weeks ago that I’d get back with Noelle and finally ask her to marry me.
“So how come you don’t have a girlfriend? Or a side chick, for that matter?”
I wait until I swallow the last of my dinner before answering. “Why so curious?”
Sarah shrugs. “I don’t know. You don’t look like the type to be unattached.”
“I could say that about you, too,” I say carefully. “What does your boyfriend think about you working out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“I don’t have one,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “So what he thinks doesn’t matter.”
We don’t talk for a few minutes, our focus on the food, but I can tell there’s something she’s not saying.
“What are you doing out here, Sarah?” I ask. “I could have sworn you’d been accepted for a job back in New York before you graduated from UNM. You’d been so happy to have a job lined up so quickly after graduation.”
“I decided to give travel nursing a try,” she says, picking a crumb from the table and dropping it into her empty bowl.
“Why here?” I ask. “This is so out of the way it’s not funny.”
“Why not? You said so yourself, Benny. The turnover is high around here. People come in to do their sixteen weeks and leave.”
“Is that how long you signed up for?”
She nods. “Yup. I might put in for another round. It’s only four hours away from Taos and normally I’d be there on my days off, like tonight.”
“Yet you’re not. How come?” I push my bowl away from me and rest my forearms on the table. “Surely it’s not because you wanted to make me dinner… which happened to be amazing, by the way. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She folds her arms across her chest as she studies me. “You haven’t changed, you know. You’re still as vain as they come.”
“You mistake my confidence for vanity,” I say, chuckling. “But forget I asked why you’re not with your family–”
“If you really want to know, it’s because I don’t want to talk to my dad,” she says. “That’s why I’m not there tonight. My mom could have let me find out for myself but she called me this morning. Told me he was flying in to spend the next few days with us.”
I’ve been through conversations like this before with Sarah. She has a love-hate relationship with her father, Daniel Drexel, who owns an investment firm in New York. She wants so badly to make him proud of her and when he doesn’t tell her the actual words, she’s devastated. I couldn’t understand it at first—after all, the guy paid for her education, her apartment and her car back in Albuquerque, even a membership at the country club—but when I learned about what happened between Sarah and some married professor she got caught seeing, I kinda got it. It had been a big scandal in Manhattan and so her dad basically sent her away and that’s how she ended up at UNM to finish her Nursing degree.
I’d been perfect in his eyes until then, she told me one night when she’d had a lot to drink. That was the thing with Sarah. On the outside she was tough but inside, she was this little girl looking for her father’s approval. I was never one to do any armchair psychology but when she asked me to do those things to her that last night she was with me, the same night she strode across the stage to accept her diploma, in the back of my mind, it kinda made sense. But it also didn’t.
I’d never done the things she wanted me to do to her that night and I wasn’t about to start, not even if we’d end up having the most amazing sex. It was a line I refused to cross and it cost me our friendship.
“Why don’t you want to talk to your dad?” I ask, forcing myself back to the present.
“If I tell you, will you promise not to tell anyone?” When I arch an eyebrow in disbelief—like I have time to spread gossip around—she continues. “Let’s say I have terrible taste in men. Well, present company not included.”
“Thanks, because that would have been a huge blow to my ego if I were.”
She glares at me, before sighing. “Anyway, aft
er I left UNM, I went back to New York for a job and I started dating one of the doctors.”
“Is that allowed?”
“It’s not encouraged but it happens. If anything, we were discreet,” she replies.
“Was he married?”
“No. I checked this time. Thirty-two-years-old. Ivy League and all that. No kids. We had fun together and we did some crazy things until one day I realized he just wasn’t the one for me.” She pauses to play with a loose thread on the place mat in front of her. “When I broke up with him, he didn’t take it too well.”
“How did he take it?” I ask as Sarah bites her lower lip, her eyes lowering, the picking of the loose thread is her only focus. I lean forward on the table. “How did he take it, Sarah?”
“It started with notes,” she says. “Notes on my locker door, the gym, the front door of my apartment.”
“What did the notes say?”
“That he missed me and that he’d do anything to get me back,” she replies. “When that didn’t work, he posted my naked pictures online and the hospital fired me for violating the morality clause.”
“Shit, Sarah. That’s sick.”
She looks at me but not at my eyes, her gaze on something else behind me, maybe my TV or the picture of Tsé Bit’ai’í or Shiprock as it’s usually called, hardened magma that was once a part of a volcano and is a highlight to any visit to Northern New Mexico. My sister had taken the picture a few years ago and I liked it so much that I had it enlarged and framed. “He included my address and phone number,” she adds in a whisper. “I couldn’t answer my phone for weeks. The stuff they said in their messages… they were just vile. And then there were the men who’d wait for me outside my building. Some would make it through the lobby and wait for me by the elevator. I had to call for a restraining order. I had to move.” She pauses. “Of course, he denied it all. Claimed that his computer got hacked and that they got into his photo albums or something.”
“Yeah, right. Does he know where you are now?” I ask through gritted teeth.