by Amy Bourret
From this heart of the house, Celeste is cooking her way around the globe alphabetically. This week they are in Italy; last week, Hungary. Ruby takes a seat on a stool at the counter and lets the voices and aromas wash over her. Chunk’s great-grandparents built the original house. Its bones, and grace, have been well preserved through several updates. The history, the legacy, are layers of the thick adobe walls.
The older women jostle each other as they dance between stove top and oven and counter, putting finishing touches on the meal, pulling bright colored platters and bowls from the pine cabinets. Across the room, the younger generation, Antoinette and her cousins, set the long farm table with Fiestaware the colors of the New Mexico heavens: sunset red, sunrise yellow, big sky blue.
They all talk at once, voices in a perpetual game of rock, paper, scissors, Antoinette’s new job at the court house, a cousin’s new boyfriend, an aunt’s old pains. Sunday dinner at the Monteros’ is as much a ritual as morning Mass.
“Off your tush.” Aunt Tia pokes Ruby, points to the refrigerator. “Get the salad on the table.” Despite her redundant name—Tia is Spanish for “aunt”—she is Ruby’s favorite of Chaz’s aunts. Tia and two others are Celeste’s sisters; one is Chunk’s sister.
“Grab the water pitcher while you’re there,” Antoinette calls. Her own sister, Linda, holds the bucket of ice.
Ruby is grateful that they assign her these tasks, making her a part of the family rather than treating her like company. As she pours water in each heavy blue goblet, she tries once again to imagine growing up in this house, surrounded by abundance and mess and boisterous relatives, so different from the quiet space she and her grandmother inhabited.
All conversation halts as, in a grand crescendo, Celeste dumps a mound of pasta into the biggest bowl, steam rising like a choir of angels. In the time it takes Ruby to refill the water pitcher and return to the table, the TV is muted, children’s washed hands are inspected, and the throngs crowd around the table for grace.
Antoinette grabs one of Ruby’s hands in her slender fingers; the other is clasped in the farting uncle’s dry, meaty palm. Lark is across the table, between Chaz and Linda, the baby of the family and the only one of the three siblings who is married. Ruby likes her fine, but her suburban life down in Albuquerque is very different from Ruby’s or Antoinette’s.
Chunk says grace, adding an entreaty for God to watch over the Dallas Cowboys as they train this summer. The amens are whispered, mumbled, spoken, then punctuated with the traditional Montero squeeze. Antoinette holds Ruby’s hand a moment longer, gives it an extra squeeze, making Ruby feel all the guiltier for lying to her.
The dinner table looks like a crowded bazaar, platters circling, arms reaching, Chianti flowing. Ruby watches in awe as the prodigious amount of food disappears from the table. Even the mountain of pasta, which in most universes would be bottomless, is chiseled down to the platter in Monteroland.
Throughout the meal, Ruby thinks she’s faking it just fine. No one seems to notice that she doesn’t touch her wine, and for the first time in days, she is actually hungry, lustily munching warm, buttery garlic bread, shoveling in the rigatoni drenched in better-than-any-restaurant Bolognese sauce.
Then from across the table, a snippet of conversation wafts toward her. Lark and Chaz. Discussing soccer.
“When the community league starts up next spring,” Chaz says, “how ’bout I help out with coaching your team.”
“That would be awe-some, Chaz.”
Ruby feels the color drain from her face. Next spring. There might not be a next spring. Her stomach flails. Ruby covers her mouth with her hand, pushes back from the table, overturning her chair. She runs to the bathroom, falling to her knees at the toilet just in time.
Chaz opens the door as she stands at the sink, mopping the sweat from her forehead with Celeste’s guest towel of the month, cheery yellow with an embroidered beach umbrella.
“Well, that was one way to make the announcement,” Chaz says. “Maybe a bit dramatic, but hey…”
Ruby stares at him a moment, not comprehending his words. And then it hits her. “Oh, God. Oh, no.” The hot color floods back to her face. She buries her head against Chaz’s chest. “Oh, no.”
And he doesn’t even know the real reason she puked.
THIRTEEN
“It’s okay.” Chaz chuckles. “They were going to find out anyway. Come on.” He takes Ruby’s hand and escorts her back to the big eat-in kitchen. The faces staring up at her range in expression from glee (Celeste and Tia) to amusement (Antoinette) to shock (most of the aunts and uncles) to embarrassment (that would be Lark) to what Ruby can only read as disgust or utter disappointment (Chunk).
Amid the chatter of “Are you okay?” and “When are you due?” and “Saltines worked for me,” one comment stands out, the farting uncle’s words sloshing in wine. “S’a disgrace, what it is. A kid of mine gets knocked up, I’ll do some knocking around.”
Ruby motions to Lark and heads for the front door before the shushing and hand slapping is over. As they reach the gate across the small courtyard, Chaz grabs her arm.
“Ruby, wait.”
“You go back inside,” Antoinette says to Chaz when she steps in beside him. “Deal with them.” As Chaz retreats, she pulls Lark and Ruby to the bench swing that Ruby made for Celeste and Chunk’s anniversary. “They’ll come around.”
Through the screen door, gruff voices collide with one another.
Show her some respect. Chaz.
Respect? The farting uncle.
Like she respected the sanctity of marriage? Chunk.
Like she’s the first—like I’m the first in this family. Chaz again.
The swing glides back and forth as Antoinette pushes her feet against the ground. “He was my protector, you know, when we were in school. Worse than my dad when it came to checking out the guys. Gave one a black eye.”
Ruby tries to imagine growing up with a brother who would punch a guy out for you, a brother or sister at all. She is too raw for any of this.
When Chaz returns, he motions to Lark and Ruby. “Come on, let’s blow this taco stand.”
“Do you really want to say blow?” Lark chirps.
FOURTEEN
Lark has morphed into one of those creepy ancestral paintings. From the sofa, her questioning eyes follow Ruby around the room. Ruby paces, opening drawers, sifting through Mrs. Levy’s gadgets—garlic presses, apple corers, slicers, dicers, ricers, and a few items Ruby has yet to identify. While Lark watches.
Ruby had been shocked to learn that Mrs. Levy left the house and all its furnishings to her. The old woman was a difficult client to put it mildly, never happy with her hair, her nails. Ruby had just shown her the respect and kindness that had been ingrained in her, making house calls during those last weeks of withering. But Mrs. Levy had no family, and she had been very clear in her desire for Ruby to have the house.
This house has been a nest for her and Lark, safe, secure, since they moved in several years ago. Ruby usually relishes her Mondays off, puttering, cooking, spending time with Lark. Today, though, the house feels more like a cage.
“Why don’t you take Clyde for a walk?”
On the sofa, Lark scratches behind the dog’s ears. “That’s okay.”
“Molly dropped off some new paints and canvases.”
“Maybe later.”
Perhaps Ruby will make soup. Making soup is her winter therapy, arranging all those bright vegetables in tidy rows on the cutting board, dumping them into a stockpot aswirl with simmering spices. The soup won’t make Ruby feel better; if only this were some physical ache or a simple summer cold that would cure itself with a week of chicken broth. But at least her hands would stay busy. Idle hands, Ruby hears Nana’s gravelly voice say. Almost a decade gone, and the old sage still speaks to Ruby, maybe now more than back when she was alive. And always in those half phrases, letting Ruby’s own mind complete the maxim.
“Can I—
may I—have some gum?” Lark asks.
“Sure.” Ruby fills the metal watering can, walks out to the back porch to quench an urn of geraniums. Clyde slinks around her, lifts a leg on a scraggly lilac branch, scurries back inside. He, too, knows something is going on.
Why does it always come back to the if onlys? If only Antoinette hadn’t been late; if only the previous client had left any magazine but that one at Ruby’s station. The only if only she isn’t willing to entertain is the one about her actions nine years ago.
As she steps back into the kitchen, the sharp words slice into her soul. “Is this me?”
Lark stands in the living area, holding the tabloid page. On the old trunk that serves as a coffee table, Ruby’s purse gapes open. The dog stares at Ruby, accusation brimming in his rheumy eyes. And all she can do is wish that her idiot brain had thought about what was in her purse when she told Lark she could have a piece of gum.
FIFTEEN
Lark grips the article in both hands, reading it over and over as if she will be tested on the facts someday. From the side table, she grabs a framed photograph—one of the first pictures Ruby snapped of her—holds it next to the newsprint. Her chocolate-syrup eyes shoot up to Ruby’s face, registering the finest details, the pain, the fear, and, yes, the betrayal. Tossing the article and picture frame on the table, she stomps down the hall to Ruby’s bedroom.
Ruby follows, Clyde padding beside her. Lark digs through the wide bottom drawer of the dresser, pushing Ruby’s sweaters and winter socks aside. Stirring the drawer, Nana would call it, making a pot of sock soup.
Lark yanks the stuffed toy out from under the woolens, a limp-necked lavender and blush giraffe, one of the few items Ruby saved from Lark’s childhood. Lark jumps to her feet, pushes past Ruby. Back in the living room, Lark picks up the article, studies the photo—an infant sprawled naked on a fur rug, a vivid purple and pink giraffe screaming for attention between pale skin and white fur.
“Is this me?” Lark’s voice reeks of anger, confusion, and a little-girl wish for her mommy to tell her another lie.
“Shh. Baby, please.” Ruby steps to the window, peers through the slats. The street is empty, but she can feel it out there, the past, the truth, hurtling toward them, a boulder crashing down her mountain-side, snapping trees, devastating everything in its path. She twists the cord until the blind slats are snug, though such slight strips of aluminum will never stop that landslide. “Come sit down.”
“No.” Lark folds her arms against her chest. “Is it? Is it me?” She is small for nine, an old-soul sprite with gossamer hair. A truth this big will be a grenade tossed toward the feeble armor of those two skinny arms.
Ruby feels as if she is teetering at the edge of a flat world, wants to scoop up Lark and run, jump, praying all the way down to land someplace soft, mossy. She takes a deep breath. And tells her daughter about that day almost a decade ago.
For a moment, Lark just stands there. Then she hurls the giraffe across the room, crumples the page into a ball, throws it into the kiva. She trudges to her room with Clyde at her heels, her bony shoulders sag with the weight of it all.
Ruby resists the urge to follow them. Pulling the ball of paper from the kiva, she shakes off the soot, a vestige of the last spring fire that never got cleaned up. Was this self-sabotage? she wonders as she smoothes out the creases of cheap, weekly gossip paper. Why else would she have kept the article in her purse, unless deep down she wanted Lark to find it, wanted to force her decision?
She refolds the article, stuffs it into her pocket. From under a kitchen chair, she rescues the clump of faded, overloved giraffe, takes it back to her bedroom, slips it under the winter sweaters in the bureau. The drawer sticks as it always does. With a jerk on one handle, a lift on the other, the heavy wood slams against the frame, sealing this proof of her secret in a vault of layers and layers of time-yellowed paint.
Ruby forces herself to walk steadily back down the hall. The fear and confusion and hurt hang like basement dank outside Lark’s doorway. Ruby steps into the room, approaches the bed, tugs at a corner of crumpled purple sheet, tucks the blanket around the tangle of daughter and dog.
“Go away.”
Ruby pulls her hand to her side. “Lark, honey.”
“Go away.”
At the window, Ruby checks the locks, pulls the shade, turns back toward the bed. Clyde shifts, glares at Ruby with doggy reproach. Lark rolls over to face her. The breeze from the ceiling fan ruffles the honey hair around her face.
“You lied to me, Mama.”
Ruby would sell her soul to stop the ache in Lark’s eyes. If only she hadn’t already made that deal nine years ago. The books on mothering, those weepy women on Oprah, they are all on the mark. The worst pain in the world is the pain of a mother who can’t fix her child.
“Baby bird—”
“Go. Away.”
One backward glance, that is all Ruby allows herself at the doorway. Lark lies there under the smoky purple comforter, expensive Calvin la-di-da Klein designer bedding that Lark had begged and begged to get for her last birthday. To think that just a handful of months ago, Lark thought her world would end if she didn’t have grown-up sheets covering her little-girl body. To think that just a handful of months ago, Ruby thought she could keep her child happy, safe even, with a sackful of overpriced bedding.
She resists the urge to step back into the room, to tuck those sheets around her daughter’s prostrate form and sing the daffy song. Fancy linens and sentimentality aren’t going to fix this one, she thinks, as she crumples to the floor and sobs.
SIXTEEN
As the white afternoon light shifts to evening violet, Margaret and Molly show up, the greasy smell of Chinese food wafting around them like silk dragons in a parade. Margaret rustles in the kitchen, stashing takeout bags in the oven, while Molly heads down the hall. Strands of Molly’s dulcet voice curl around Lark’s higher-pitched tones, not quite damping the anguish.
“We’ll go for a walk,” Molly says when she reappears, herding Lark and Clyde toward the front door, where the Ms’ two dogs wait and whine.
Ruby wants to scream “No!” She imagines a black sedan pulling up beside them out there on the road, Molly returning with dog but no daughter. Be rational, she tells herself. Even if an article in a weekly gossip rag generated new interest in an old case, they couldn’t know Ruby was involved, couldn’t have tracked them here. Yet. She swallows the scream in her throat and watches her daughter disappear out the door.
“Okay, spill.” Matter-of-fact Margaret. She and Molly, the Ms Lark coined them, have been Ruby’s ballast all these years.
The day she walked up to the Jeep in that strip mall parking lot, finding bone-tired Ruby and a whimpering baby, Margaret had taken charge, in her comforting take-charge way. The room she rented out above her hair salon was vacant; it wasn’t much, but it was Ruby’s if she wanted it while she waited for the car to be fixed. One day turned into two, into a week. Margaret suggested Ruby work off the rent at the salon, keep Lark there with her.
The salon receptionist job gave Ruby the flexibility she needed with Lark, and the “room” above was a light-filled homey studio that Molly had decorated with her own art. When Lark started first grade, Ruby enrolled at the cosmetology school out by the airport and earned her nail tech certificate, and Margaret added the manicure station to a corner of the salon. Lark grew up in that salon, and, well, Ruby guesses, she did, too. They made a family there. They made their life.
A single sharp crack sounds from the kitchen behind her. She flinches, ducks, waits. When she looks up, the cutting board sits on the counter, mocking, after sliding from behind the paper towel roll, smacking onto the tile as it has done so many times before.
And Margaret stares at her, with a combination of alarm and amusement. “Spill.”
Ruby hesitates.
“Back porch,” Margaret says, and Ruby heads for the side door.
Even with the shield of lilac b
ushes that encircle the small porch, Ruby feels exposed, naked, beyond the walls of the house. Margaret steps out beside her, holding two goblets of wine. Ruby looks at the glass, looks down at her belly.
“One won’t hurt,” Margaret says. “It’s half full.”
“Half empty, I think.” Ruby forces a chuckle as she takes the goblet, sits in one of the deck chairs that she crafted with her own hands and her grandfather’s tools. She passes Margaret the article.
Margaret’s hazel eyes flick from line to line as she reads about the woman whose car was stolen from a gas station in Dallas, a car with her baby inside. Her cropped salt-and-pepper hair shines even in the fading light. “I guess I knew. That day in the parking lot. I just didn’t know I knew until now.”
And as dusk settles around them like silt, Ruby tells her story for the second time that day.
SEVENTEEN
“But how,” Margaret asks. “How did you know what to do with a baby?”
“I bought a book. And I shadowed this lady.” Ruby tells Margaret about the Wal-Mart glimmering in the dust on the edge of a Texas Panhandle town. As she stared at the rows and rows of baby formula cans, a shopping cart teeming with redheads stopped beside her. Two kids hung on the sides, one curled up underneath the basket, another teetering inside. And a baby about the size of Lark sleeping in a carrier up front. Every kid had the same fire-engine hair. The barest hint of that fire remained in the mother’s lank locks, as if the years of child-rearing had leached the passion from the roots.
The woman made a beeline for the yellow formula and tossed several cans into her cart, smiling at Ruby as she loaded up diapers from across the aisle. Ruby waited until the cart careened around the corner, like a biblical burning bush tumbling in a West Texas wind. Then she mirrored the woman’s choices of powdered formula and disposable diapers.