Mothers and Other Liars

by Amy Bourret

  Tourists fly, drive, and bus their way to this adobe paradise, said by the woo-woos to be one of the handful of portals to some great beyond. For Ruby, the central core is a half-mile walk down the hill, past the formidable pink Scottish Rite Temple.

  Antoinette waves from a wrought-iron table when Ruby walks through the arched entryway of the restaurant’s patio. Ruby weaves her way around the umbrellas that shade tables, filled with a mix of summer tourists and upper-crust locals, to join her friend. This patio is a secret garden. Adobe walls shield it from the street on two sides, and the indoor part of the restaurant completes the square. Ruby doesn’t lunch here often—smack in the middle of the plaza, it is inconvenient to reach from the salon out on Cerillos Road, not to mention pricey. Yet each time she does, her blood burbles with anticipation, as if she herself were prettier, smarter, chicer just for sitting in these stunning surroundings.

  The two hug while a waiter pulls out a chair for Ruby. Antoinette looks like she belongs on this beautiful-people patio; her hair is pulled back into a sleek chignon, and her work dress is liquid silk flowing over her curvy figure. No dowdy secretary clothes for her.

  Antoinette is a waterfall of small talk, barely pausing to offer a flirty smile when the model-pretty waiter offers them menus. She regales Ruby with stories of her latest bad dates—the letch with Listerine breath, the Aramis cloud who turned out to be married, the self-loather. She pauses again while the waiter takes their orders, then continues with a tale of a guy who took her out to the Camel Rock casino, asked her for money, then left the casino, stranding her at the slot machines.

  Ruby laughs. “For an attractive, confident, accomplished woman, you are the world’s biggest magnet for the dregs of the male species.” She points out a few good-looking men at other tables. “Why not him, or him, or him?”

  “The blond over there sleeps with his sister, the dark brooder is obviously a serial killer, and the other dark brooder, well, let’s just say that he has a teeny-weeny weenie.”

  Antoinette and Ruby exchange mirthful looks as a shy young busboy tries not to look at Ruby’s stomach or Antoinette’s breasts while he refills their water glasses. They survey the lunch crowd, create bawdy scenarios for various groups—the table of businessmen who are all wearing ladies’ pan ties, the trysts, the improbable threesomes. And for a moment, Ruby forgets the elephant of worry crushing her chest, the elephant squeezing her bladder, the elephant on this patio.

  When the waiter arrives with their food, they are still giggling like schoolgirls. He sets a seafood salad that looks like a museum painting in front of Antoinette, the braised pork special—Midwestern comfort food—for Ruby. Antoinette deftly switches the topic to her job at the court house, how much she enjoys working for the judge, dissecting the guts of the system.

  Ruby sinks her attention into her plate, trying to taste her way back to Iowa. When she was in high school, her classmate Joe, the one who took Ruby’s virginity in the backseat of a turquoise Caprice before dumping her for that cheerleader who wouldn’t put out, told her that when he graduated, when he left behind that stinky pig farm that they called a state, pork was never going to pass his lips again. But for Ruby, a crisp BLT or golden pork cutlet took her right back to her grandparents’ kitchen table and all the goodness there.

  Antoinette interrupts Ruby’s reverie. “Chaz told us about your idea.”

  Ruby leans back in her chair, braces herself.

  “My dad, he’s all for it.” Antoinette spears a shrimp with her fork.

  “Let the gringo give the kid away, you mean,” Ruby says. “Problem solved.” Ruby has known all along that Chunk is not her biggest fan. “Non-Catholic and knocked up…two strikes and counting.”

  Antoinette’s chuckle comes from a place of years of pain. “Three. You’re out. You’re cooking a girl.”

  Ah, Ruby thinks. The Hispanic cultural thing, valuing boys more than girls. The Monteros’ ancestors were on this land before the Mayflower set sail, and sometimes they seem as Hispanic as Ruby seems German, yet the culture is strong in this region. Ruby has seen it in the street kids, the machismo, the sense of entitlement, the belittlement of the girls around them. And she has seen it in the way Chunk favors Chaz over his sisters.

  That is one more thing she loves about Chaz; he couldn’t be more delighted to have a daughter. He would have been happy with a boy, but during the sonogram, his face radiated pure joy when the technician told them she couldn’t see a penis. “That’s my girl.” He stroked Ruby’s cheek. “I want her to look just like her mama.”

  “He loves you, you know.” Antoinette takes a drink of her tea. “He was always such a player before. When you two started dating…I’ve never seen him stand up to my dad the way he stood up for you. He likes to think of himself as in de pen dent, the fifth generation breaking the mold. But breaking a mold is one thing, breaking up family…”

  Ruby places her hand on Antoinette’s arm. “And you? How do you feel about it?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Antoinette says. “I’m not a mother. I thought I was, pregnant I mean, once. But the wonder of actually growing a life, giving birth…” Antoinette tells Ruby about watching a litter of puppies being born when she was young. “They were just puppies. But all of a sudden I understood God. I believed in miracles. A child…I can’t imagine.”

  Antoinette is a good soul, cares deeply, but she is not shy about sharing her opinions. Ruby waits, but the diatribe doesn’t come. Instead Antoinette tells her that she has thought about Lark and the baby, that the closest she can come to an analogy is if she were given the choice between having a hysterectomy, of never having children, or never seeing her own mother again. “I’d dump the uterus in a heartbeat.”

  Ruby surprises herself by playing her own devil’s advocate. “But that’s just giving up the possibility of maybe having a child somewhere down the road. This is actuality. This is your own flesh and blood.” Ruby points to her belly. “This is your niece. Are you really okay with me giving her away?”

  Antoinette squeezes Ruby’s arm. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m okay with it. But Lark…Lark is my niece, too.”

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  Chaz spits the words. “But Lark isn’t even your own child.” He sits on the edge of his bed in his striped pajama bottoms and no shirt. The late-morning sun blares through the window next to the pine head-board. His chest looks too bare without the Saint Christopher medal that he gave to Lark, and now Ruby can’t even remember if Lark was wearing the necklace at the court house.

  Ruby sets the tall coffee cup beside the pile of books on the nightstand, pulls off the plastic lid. She pushes aside a book butterflied on the blanket next to him and sits. “Try telling that to the millions of adoptive mothers out there. Try telling that to their kids.”

  Chaz’s face is dark with fatigue and a two-day beard. He worked extra-long days—well, mostly nights—last week, played basketball half of Saturday, attended Mass and his mother’s Sunday dinner. Now he is spending today, Monday, in his bed. This is what he does, runs and runs and runs until he hits the wall, then crawls into his cave to recharge his batteries. A “jammie day” her grandmother would call it. Ruby remembers one school day shortly after her grandfather had died when Nana crept into Ruby’s room, turned off her bedside alarm clock and declared a jammie day. Ruby and Nana spent that day watching old movies, eating popcorn made in the heavy metal pot on the stove, and napping in the den. For Chaz, books and bed are his therapy.

  On the phone last night, Antoinette filled Ruby in on Sunday dinner—Celeste is up to Russian on her gastronomical globe. And Ruby knows Chaz well enough to know that she would find him here today. She picks up the coffee cup, hands it to him. He holds it in both hands as if they were frostbitten.

  “I understand, I think. How you feel.” Chaz sips the still-steaming coffee, jumps as it scalds his tongue.

  Ruby takes back the cup, sets it again on the nightstand. “I thought you felt the same, ab
out Lark.”

  “I thought you felt like I did about our baby.”

  She knows the enormity of what she is asking of this man who reveres family. And she doesn’t know how else to explain to Chaz that she loves the child inside her fiercely. That her plan is the only way she sees to save both of her daughters.

  Flecks of dust pirouette in a shaft of sun. Oh, to be that carefree, Ruby thinks, that exuberant. At first, she and Chaz were dizzy in their love, until just recently really. All the attention he garnered from pretty girls when she and Chaz were out never bothered her a bit. For her, the attraction was instant. His tall frame, thick hair, soul-seeking eyes. A big part of the allure, though, was his love for his family, and the chance to belong to the whole auntsunclescousins swarm. A passport to Monteroland. As much as Chaz’s laugh, even his voice on her answering machine, stirs up a flutter in her chest, that sense of belonging calms a restless place deeper inside her.

  “My goodness.” Ruby can’t resist running a finger across the paler patch of silky skin on the underside of his wrist. “You told me you fell in love first with my goodness…so, what do you love now, now that you know I’m not so good after all?”

  “You know I love you….” Chaz takes her finger, grasps it in his fist as his voice tapers off. “We can get through this. Together. Lark’s a good kid, a strong kid. She’ll adjust. And when she’s older—”

  Ruby jerks her hand away. “You didn’t see her, hear her.”

  Chaz stands, paces past the black-and-white photographs of New Mexico landscapes that hang along his wall. He stops at the dresser, sprinkles a dusting of food into the fishbowl; Glug, the electric blue tetra, is the only pet he can handle with his work schedule. He walks around to the foot of the bed, fusses with the thick gray duvet folded into tidy thirds, walks back to stand in front of Ruby. His torso is baby-sleek—if a baby had six-pack abs and the pecs of a gym fanatic. “I can’t. I just can’t give away my child.”

  “Maybe it could be an open adoption.” Ruby tries to modulate her voice, keep out the desperation she feels. “You, we, maybe we could visit. And the Tinsdales, they want this. This is how I can make it up to them, what I did.”

  Chaz picks up the coffee cup, sits back down next to Ruby. “What I don’t understand is this. If this is about nurture over nature, if Lark belongs with you because you have nurtured her, that she is who she is because of how you have nurtured her—” He stops, takes a slug of coffee, swallows as if swallowing the whole distasteful subject. “Well, then answer me this. What will become of our kid if she is nurtured by the Tinsdales? You don’t even like those people.”

  From the beginning, Chaz has had a remarkable ability to home in right on the nagging voice in her heart. Ruby can read wood; Chaz can read Ruby. This is the rub, the stick in her craw: if those people aren’t good enough for Lark, how can they be good enough for her other daughter?

  She quiets the voice the way she has quieted it all these eternal nights, by reminding herself that her plan is not about whether the Tinsdales are good parents, it’s about whom they should be parenting, or rather whom they shouldn’t be parenting. She stands, pulls the ring box out of her purse, sets it on the nightstand.

  “I’m going to do this.” She pauses at Chaz’s door. “I’m going to find a way.”

  SEVENTY-SIX

  The Santa Fe chapter of the Sierra Club rates the La Vega trail as a moderate seven-mile hike. Moderate maybe for a nonpregnant person. Anger and confusion sear Ruby’s lungs as much as the exertion.

  “So, what are you thinking?” Molly asks at the top of the first steep climb.

  Ruby eases herself down in the flower-studded meadow. “I’m thinking I want to be a lesbian.”

  Margaret sputters, spits a mouthful of water on the ground.

  “Seriously. Men, they’re just…alien.” Ruby takes a long pull from her water bottle. The cool liquid sloshes around in her stomach. “You have it easy, dealing with someone from the same planet.”

  Molly tosses a few hunks of biscuit in the air. Gray jays swoop in to catch the pieces; the dogs leap to try to catch the birds. The Ms’s little terrier mix, Dudley, jumps several times his height but barely nips at the bigger dogs’ heels. “Chaz still won’t agree, huh?”

  Ruby gazes across the meadow. The peak of Santa Fe Baldy looms just beyond, a few patches of winter snow hiding out in crevices. “He’s…”

  “Easy?” Margaret says.

  “Everything but. Or everything b-u-t-t.”

  Margaret shakes her head. “No, I mean us. You know us too well to think a relationship is easy because it’s between two women.”

  “You’ve made it fifteen years. Even with all you went through.” Ruby recaps her bottle, secures it in the loop of her fanny pack. “That’s a way longer shelf life than any of my relationships.”

  “Well, once you get past the freak-show looks and blatant discrimination, the rest of it, the day-to-day stuff, is easy,” Margaret says.

  Molly stuffs the empty bread bag into her pack, helps Ruby to her feet. “Stop baiting her. You know she’s just pissed at Chaz.”

  “Except for the toilet seat thing.” Margaret stands, snakes an arm through the strap of her pack, hefts it onto her back. “You breeders are alone with that one.”

  The next section of the hike is downhill, a gradual descent through evergreens and aspen trees shimmering silver in the light. The Ms lead the way; Ruby follows, listening to their banter, while the dogs nose through the underbrush, darting back and forth across the trail in pursuit of chipmunks and squirrels.

  Margaret raises a fist, counts off with exaggerated flicks of her fingers. “Stealing bedcovers. The endless toilet paper debate, over or under, how should that roll hang?”

  Molly chuckles. “Over, obviously. Everyone knows that.”

  “And in-laws,” Margaret says. “Let’s not forget about dealing with the in-laws.”

  Molly looks over her shoulder at Ruby. “There is something to be said for being an orphan.”

  They can laugh about it now, but Ruby knows the story of when they first got together, Margaret twelve years senior to Molly’s just-out-of-grad-school twenty-five. Molly’s parents were livid, apoplectic, threatened to take out a full-page newspaper ad labeling Margaret a pervert sex offender. Then they cut Molly off. Shunned her, like she was an Amish girl betraying the fold. Molly had only the support of her grandmother, and the not-insubstantial trust fund from her grandfather.

  After a few turns in the trail, Ruby lets herself lag behind, hoping to find a solution as her pounding heart keeps rhythm with her boots pounding the earth. She catches up to the Ms in a clearing beside Nambe Creek. Clyde and Daisy, the black Labrador, flank Ruby like soldiers attacking a foxhole. Cold creek water flies from their fur, sprinkles her legs.

  She chooses a flat place to sit on the big rock where the Ms perch, stretching her legs out in front of her to ease the constriction in her calves.

  “You figure anything out?” Molly holds out a bag of trail mix.

  “Nope. Not a clue.” Ruby frees her second water bottle from the elastic loop on her fanny pack. “I can’t fathom leaving her there.”

  “Well,” Margaret says, “if the thought of not going through with it is unbearable, then we have to find a way to do it.”

  “Except the thought of doing it is unbearable, too.” Ruby’s feelings and Chaz’s points are waging a boxing match inside her. As fervently as she believes she must go forward with her plan to bring Lark home, she knows that executing the plan means losing her baby. “I want them both.”

  The irony is, she keeps wanting to turn to Chaz for advice, like a twist on a twisted O. Henry story. He would help her sort through her feelings. He’d do his Chaz thing and home in on the one nugget of right in all the wrong.

  Molly shrieks. “Oh, Dudley!”

  The smell reaches them first, then the dog, wagging proudly at their feet, his coat more green than tawny.

  “Horse manure,”
Margaret says. “Again.”

  “That is disgusting,” Molly says to the dog. “Look, even the other dogs are embarrassed for you.”

  Dudley wiggles and wags, decidedly unabashed.

  “Better than dead animal,” Margaret says. “Now that is disgusting.”

  Molly shakes a finger at the dog. “Oh, Dudley. You’re not my favorite anymore.” The black Lab perks her ears, as if she understands exactly what Molly said. “That’s right sweet Daisy-girl. You’re Mama’s favorite now, aren’t ya?”

  Ruby knows Molly is just kidding around; she loves both those dogs with all her heart. A good mother wouldn’t pick favorites.

  No mother should have to choose between her children.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  The radio keeps Ruby company as she carves the wood. The AM station is static-free on this snow-globe night, confetti stars strewn across the glassy dome, the real moon paper-pale and low outside the shed door.

  The words to one of her grandfather’s favorites, the song playing, fit Ruby’s mess like the long-lost piece to a jigsaw puzzle: if only Chaz believed in her. Perhaps theirs was only a paper moon after all. Earlier tonight, they had an ugly fight. Their battling ultimatums still hang sawdust-heavy in the shed.

  The argument had started softly.

  “I’m tired of this,” Chaz said.

  “You have to understand,” Ruby said. “I love you so much.”

  Chaz’s reply was a statement, not a question. “But.”

  “But I have to get Lark back. We can have more babies.”

  Their words escalated, sibilant s’s flying around the room, hard consonants smashing against walls like family china thrown in a rage.

  “I’ve talked to a lawyer. I have rights. If you don’t want our daughter, let me have her.”

  “You know this isn’t about want.”

  “If you push this…” Chaz said. “There won’t be other babies. I won’t—I couldn’t—be with you.” He wasn’t sure he could even be in the same town. Maybe, he said, he would take that job with the national gang task force, or pursue an opportunity with the LAPD.