by Amy Bourret
Lark washes her “toeses,” chanting the “Moses” song from the movie they’ll watch after her bath. “Do you think the other kids will think I’m a total nerd if I put old movies on my list of things I like, on my shirt?” Her elfin face is earnest.
“Some of them might.” Ruby folds her arms in her lap. “You can’t control what other people think, baby bird. Sometimes you can’t even control what you think. You can only control how you act.”
“Rinse, please.” Lark tilts her foamy wig backward, ropy collarbones jutting out, the shampoo aroma a halo of that peculiar mix of strawberry and banana that the makers call kiwi. Ruby fills the plastic cup again and again from the faucet, and pours it over her daughter’s corn-silk head. “Besides. Why would you care about the thoughts of someone silly enough not to like old movies? Okay, stand up.” Ruby holds up a blue towel. “Just be your own wonderful self.”
The phone rings as Ruby enfolds Lark in the towel. A second ring, a third, shriek. Ruby rushes to the kitchen counter, picks up the receiver as if it might bite.
“Hello?” Her voice is old-man gruff as much from fear as the instinct to disguise. “No, no. There’s no one here by that name.”
Slamming the receiver onto its cradle, she lays her hot forehead against the cool counter. A telemarketer, just a pesky telemarketer asking for Mrs. Levy.
She raises her head, clasps her hands behind her clammy neck, then she hurries into the living area. A yank on the cord beside the large picture window sends the rarely closed blinds crashing to the sill. Coughing through a cloud of sparkly dust, she leans over the sofa, peers through the slats, down the street, looking for cherry-topped cars or big, black government sedans.
Ruby’s brain scoffs at her flailing heart. They’re not going to call first; they’re just going to kick in the door.
FOUR
In the shed, Ruby works her grandfather’s special concoction into the weary bones of the wood. Mineral oil, carnauba wax, and lots of elbow grease.
This slab of wood gets a rubbed-in dose of Ruby’s fears, too. The furniture she makes is not typical Santa Fe, no pine and antlers but rather clean lines and Midwestern sensibility. Hers is a rescue mission, salvaging used and abused planks from castoffs, painstakingly removing nails, and caressing life back into their arthritic joints. Fur-nurture, she thinks of it.
A splash of white moonlight from the door mixes with the yellowier overhead light into a lurid square on the workbench. Ruby rubs and rubs the oil into the wood, as if quenched grain will reveal the future like tea leaves scattered in a cup. Yet she sees only the past, all those hours spent in the basement watching, and helping, her grandfather work.
He died when Ruby was twelve; she has coopted the story of his fall from an ornery John Deere tractor to explain the absence of Lark’s father. After he died, Nana avoided his corner of the basement as if it were a pit of snakes, but Ruby fiddled there now and then, kept his tools from rusting. And all those basement lessons come flooding back to her with the tang of sawdust and turpentine each time she steps into this shed.
She listens to her grandfather’s music when she works, old standards she finds only on AM and only on a clear night like tonight. What would he say, what would her grandmother say, about this mess? You’ve made your bed, Nana’s voice whispers in her ear, and Ruby thinks about all those moments that added up to make this particular bed. She never even considered that someone was out there looking for Lark. Ruby could have made it right, back at the beginning, but now, now she isn’t sure anything can be right ever again.
From the shelf above the workbench, a toddler Lark stares at her. Picking up the ceramic frame, Ruby traces Lark’s face with a finger. Cow eyes, that’s what her grandmother would have called those huge pools of knowing. Lark has always been cautious, watchful, as if she knew from the start that life, even mountain life, was not to be trusted.
Back then, Ruby thought of life as a cosmic crazy quilt. Like maybe on the way to being born, a person was handed a gunnysack full of scraps to be pulled out one by one. At the time, the pieces might seem totally unrelated to each other, ugly even. A person might come across a piece that didn’t make any sense, or hurt someone terribly. Yet at the end of her days, she would be able to take a big step back and see that all those raggedy scraps came to be stitched together by time and toil, and tears, into a beautiful blanket that would warm her ancient bones.
Back then, she truly believed it was all some grand scheme. She lost Nana; she found Lark.
Back then, Ruby thinks, I didn’t know squat.
“Ahem.”
Ruby’s heart slams against her rib cage as the sound of a voice clearing punctures the quiet of the night. This is it, she thinks.
FIVE
She is still calculating the distance to the house, to Lark, when she recognizes Chaz’s little-boy chuckle. Her elbows smack the table as her knees sway in her relief.
Chaz swings a white mouth shield from his finger. “You promised to wear your mask.”
“But I am,” Ruby says under her still-heavy breath. She gestures for him to follow her into the house, motions to the refrigerator as she moves toward the hall.
Summer moonlight shimmers across Lark’s bed. Clyde raises his head, his eyes accusing, scolding, then nuzzles back onto Lark’s hip. The dog, a stray that Lark brought home a few years ago, is one-quarter heeler, three-quarters God-knows-what, and 100 percent heart. He and Lark sleep each night like embracing lovers, moving in a bed ballet.
All the Larks this child has ever been are here on that silver-washed face, the watchful infant, the four-year-old who ruled the salon, the seven-year-old who played nurse to Ruby when she had the flu, the imp, the old soul, the all-eyes-and-heart kid who tries to rescue every animal in sight. They are all here, a part of the Lark asleep in this bed. Ruby can’t imagine a Lark other than this sum total of all the experiences the two of them have shared.
Lark’s eyes open, two slashes of obsidian against milky skin. “To the moon and back, Mama,” she mumbles in a fairy-tale voice.
“Shh,” Ruby says. “Go back to sleep. I love you, too.”
Ruby pulls the door shut, crosses to the living area, watches Chaz drain his beer bottle in a few quick swallows. His charcoal hair is finger-raked; he sports a three-day beard.
“I just got off duty. Your message sounded…” Chaz rubs his T-shirt at his breastbone. When he removes his finger, the shirt is marked for a second with the indentation of the Saint Christopher medal that he always wears, a gift from his aunt Tia when he joined the police force. “What’s going on?”
She plops down beside him on the squishy sofa. “Just the usual.”
His dark eyes scan her face.
She reaches out, traces the stubble along his sharp jaw. “Really.”
“You always do that, chew on your lip, when something’s bothering you.”
Ruby shifts away from him, feeling shy, uncertain. Her hand brushes against the bump that used to be her waistline, jerks away. In all her pacing and hair pulling, she has avoided this part of the equation, this lima bean inside her. With her long waist and birthing hips, a baby has lots of room to hide; though she’s barely showing, she’s four months along.
“I missed you.”
Ruby leans against his solid bulk. “I missed you more.”
Antoinette had bugged Ruby for weeks to meet her brother. “He’s a bit of a player, but, girl, you need some fun.” Antoinette kept pestering her, at the salon or over dinner. “Just one drink. Just once.”
Ruby hadn’t been on a date—a real date—in years. When Lark was a toddler, she went out for a few months at a time with this Bob here or that Bill there. She even had a few sleepovers, at the guy’s place, of course, and only planned in advance, with the Ms on hand to baby-sit. She was young still, only twenty-seven, and she was single. She was supposed to be out there hitting the bars. Frankly, she was content with her life the way it was.
But one night, after a couple
of margaritas at a favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant, Ruby said, “Why not?” Antoinette whipped out her cell phone and called her brother, before Ruby could change her mind, she said. And when Ruby looked up from her enchilada plate, up almost to the strings of lights and hundreds of piñatas hanging from the ceiling, dark-stranger eyes stared at her from beneath little-boy lashes.
At first she thought he was just another too-macho, too-full-of-himself mama’s boy. Until he smiled.
“I’m Chaz,” he said. He joked about appearing too eager, running like a dog to Antoinette’s whistle. But he was pulling double shifts the next few days and wanted to stop by to say hello.
Now, here they are almost three years later. Both of them are still getting used to the idea of a baby, trying to figure everything out. Can they make something permanent work with Chaz’s crazy schedule? With Lark? And now, nothing about that everything looks the same.
Ruby breaks the silence. “How was your day?”
“Just the usual,” Chaz says with a smirk. He is a detective on the Santa Fe police force, heading up the gang-intervention unit. He, too, is a rescuer of children. Yet Ruby is terrified that he will never understand, let alone accept, what she did.
SIX
The first of the summer peaches rest like crescents of sunset in the pie dish. Ruby dots them with biscuit mix, dusts them with sugar, pops the cobbler into the oven.
“So how was camp?” She dumps steaming macaroni into a two-legged colander.
In her bright green Girls Inc. T-shirt, hair a ponytail of white cotton candy, Lark doodles in a notebook at the kitchen table. “Actually, kinda cool.” “Actually” is her new favorite word.
Ruby slices the hot dogs into nickels, tosses them into the cheese sauce like coins in a well, stirs in a spoonful of horse radish. After calling the salon to cancel her appointments, she herself spent the day at the library, searching computer databases, chewing on every morsel of the scant information beyond what was contained in the article.
“Mo-om.”
Ruby jumps at Lark’s bleat. Her hand knocks into the drain board; a coffee cup shatters in the sink. She turns to see Lark pointing at the kitchen counter, at the groceries Ruby has yet to put away. “What, what?”
“The environment? Phosphates? Our rivers? That’s not the good detergent.”
Nestled in a cloud of white—paper towels, a four-pack of toilet paper, a jug of bleach—the bright orange Tide box is conspicuous. For a moment, Ruby is miles, and years, away. “Oh, uh, someone must have put it in my cart by mistake.” She knows that she is the “someone,” grabbing the laundry soap she hasn’t used in ages.
The shards of pottery are Anasazi bronze gashes against the creamy porcelain of the sink. She unwinds a wad of paper towels, scoops up the mess, tosses it into the garbage can. Pull yourself together, she tells herself as she finishes preparing the meal.
The blue willow plates are a riot of color, macaroni and cheese, green beans, a smile of cantaloupe with raspberry and blueberry teeth. A regular June Cleaver Ruby is, without the heels and pearls. She sets Lark’s plate in front of her, takes the catty-corner seat.
Lark looks down at the plate, over at Ruby. “Thanks, Mom. But what happened to pizza night?”
Lately, Ruby has been so tired by Friday evening that calling in a pizza order is the pinnacle of her culinary ambitions. “I was just in the mood…. So what did you draw for your shirt?”
Lark eats a forkful of macaroni and gives Ruby a cheese-streaked grin. “You’ll see.”
Ruby pushes food around her plate. Playing June Cleaver is one thing; swallowing food is quite another under these circumstances. While Lark eats, Ruby flips through the spiral notebook, pages crammed with self-conscious schoolgirl cursive and guileless doodles.
As usual, Ruby is astounded at the complexity of this child’s thoughts. She writes poems full of love and loss and longing, when the biggest heartbreak she has suffered—so far anyway—is seeing a deer dying at the side of a road. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”
Lark kisses a raspberry with an exaggerated smack, pushes it through her cherub lips. “I don’t know.”
What will these poems look like when her heart breaks for real? Ruby turns her body away from Lark as a single fat tear smacks the page, spattering lilac ink like a bug on a windshield. She remembers reading somewhere that an African language has two different words for rain, the plump round female drops and the sharp needles of males. This tear, she thinks, is definitely a mother tear, a pendulous, pregnant mother of a tear.
Ruby busies herself with Lark’s backpack, empties the bottom-of-the-bag detritus onto her lap. A few colored pencils, a crumpled granola bar wrapper, a Baggie of uneaten carrots. She assumes the carefully folded piece of white paper is one of those pop-up Ouija games the kids make, providing sage answers to all the questions of the universe, like will Tom kiss Jane on the playground. If only, Ruby thinks. Then she hears the tinkle of metal inside.
SEVEN
“What’s this?”
“Nothing.” Lark’s cheeks flush pink. “Just a present. From the new girl. Olivia. They were her mom’s. She gave some to Numi, too.”
When Ruby unfolds the notebook paper, a pair of earrings drops into her palm. Dangly earrings, silver and amethyst and pearl. Pierced earrings. She looks at Lark, waits.
“You said I can pierce them.”
“When you’re eleven.”
Lark takes a swig of milk. “But…”
Ruby sets her plate on the floor, where Clyde promptly inhales her supper. The plate clinks against the tile as his enthusiastic tongue pushes it across the floor. “You’re nine. And these are very grown-up earrings.”
She carries the rest of the dishes to the sink and stacks them with the pans and the star-holed colander, then turns back to look at Lark. “Do you really want someone to bribe you to be her friend?”
Lark shrugs her shoulders while Ruby grabs an oven mitt off the counter, pulls the dessert out of the oven. The smell, of golden sugar and syrupy nectar, transports her across miles and years to her grandparents’ kitchen. For a moment, she aches down to her viscera to be there, safe amid the speckled white Formica and harvest gold appliances.
A headshake brings her back to Santa Fe. “And are you sure Olivia’s mother gave her the earrings? What if she just took them? You know the difference between right and wrong. If she is giving you something that doesn’t belong to her…”
Ruby’s words echo in her own head.
Later, Ruby takes pajamas from the dresser drawer—boy jammies like Ruby’s. Neither of them likes to be tangled in a nightgown.
“I’m sorry, Mama.” Lark sits on her bed, looking like Clyde after he’s been scolded. “Don’t be mad. I’ll give them back.”
Ruby hugs Lark against her chest. “No, baby. I mean, yes, I know you’ll do the right thing and give them back. But I’m not mad at you. I’m…it’s…”
She feels Lark’s hand patting her back, like she did as an infant when Ruby held Lark against her shoulder, and Ruby strains with every cell of her body to keep from wailing as if she were the infant. She forces her face into a semblance of composure, turns down Lark’s bed and fluffs the pillow, straightens the stack of books on the nightstand. Lark devours library books like some kids do candy bars. “You can read for a while.”
“Mama?” Lark asks for the daffy song, a ritual she abandoned as too babyish a year or so ago.
As she sings the familiar verses, Ruby tucks the purple sheets along one side of Lark’s bony frame. Clyde nestles against the other. Maybe Lark needs the comfort of their old routine because of the earring incident, or because her antennae are twitching at the signal of Ruby’s distress. Probably a combination of both.
At Lark’s doorway, Ruby pauses. “When you’re eleven, we’ll pierce those ears. And buy you your own special earrings.” And as her mouth says the words, her heart prays that she isn’t telling her daughter yet another lie.
/> EIGHT
The Santa Fe sky is O’Keeffe blue above the Saturday flea market. The light that attracts all those artists to this corner of the world really is different, and the God-skies, billowy clouds backlit and pierced by sunbeams, are amazing. The flea market, though, reminds Ruby of a refugee camp in some drought-ravaged corner of the world. Rows of canvas and plastic awnings tethered to rusted-out campers, rickety card tables piled with the dregs of attics and garages, broken blenders and eight-track tapes and chipped tchotchkes.
One person’s junk is another person’s, well, junk. Yet if that person sifts patiently enough through the yard-sale rejects, a real treasure can be found, a hundred-year-old reliquary or an ancient African fertility stick. And then, interspersed among the clutter, are the booths of true artisans, the wares of potters and weavers and sculptors and painters worthy of the upscale galleries in town.
Ruby and Jay’s booth is down the second dusty aisle, between a rug dealer with heaps of Indian rugs, their reds and oranges flapping on clotheslines in the always present breeze, and a jeweler with three slender glass cases, chunky turquoise displayed on black velvet lining. Across the aisle is Benny, who sells local honey and all sorts of gadgets and tools. In the past, Ruby has marveled at the number of people who can’t resist owning a scary-looking dental hygienist’s tartar scraper of their own. Today, though, she can barely focus on her own work.
Near the front of the booth, Lark’s head shimmers in the sunlight as she lures passersby under the blue canvas awning. Clyde wiggles at her side, greeting each dog like a long-lost sibling. Assorted tables, bureaus large and small, and patio chairs intermingle with displays of Jay’s pewter vases and bowls and serving utensils, Arthur Court knockoffs that he brings back from regular runs to Mexico. Ruby’s reborn furniture gleams as proudly as the platters in the Saturday sun, and their booth, as usual, is crowded.