The Garden of Happy Endings

by Barbara O'Neal

  “ ‘Joyful, joyful, joyful,’ ” Joaquin said, quoting Pablo Neruda, “ ‘as only dogs know how to be happy.’ ”

  She punched him in the arm. “It’s all good, old man. Have faith.”

  “Right.” He gave her a half smile.

  “Good morning,” Deacon said. He reached out a hand to shake Joaquin’s. “Father Jack. How are you this fine morning?” He tipped an imaginary hat toward Elsa. His eyes were startlingly blue against his sun-weathered face. “Miss Elsa.”

  She laughed. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Huh. Not ‘sweetheart,’ not ‘sugar,’ not ‘Miss Elsa.’ Any others I should know about?”

  “How about ‘Reverend’?” Joaquin said.

  Elsa glanced at Joaquin, scowling a little at the obvious ploy to make her less attractive.

  Deacon raised his brows. “S’at so? What flavor?”

  “Unity.”

  “My daddy was a preacher. Did Father Jack tell you that?”

  “No.” She smiled. “What flavor?”

  “Oh, hell fire and damnation, independent tent variety.”

  “Red hot, then.”

  He chuckled. “You betcha.”

  “And the Catholics are … what flavor would you say, Joaquin?” she asked, needling him back.

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Umami, sister. The flavor that is all flavors, bitter and sweet, salty and sour, for all souls in all the world.”

  Elsa laughed outright, and high-fived him. “Father Jack takes the gold.”

  “Hey, Rev,” Deacon said, “are you aware that you’re bleeding?” He pointed to his own neck, along the side.

  “Am I?” She put her fingers to the place and they came back smeary red. “Oh. Must not be much, because I don’t even feel it.”

  “Here.” Joaquin took a clean white handkerchief from his pocket and moved toward her. “Let me.”

  She tilted her head, giving him access, and he was not gentle as he showed her the smear of blood on the snow white cloth. “He cut you.”

  Elsa took his wrist, waited until he met her eyes. “He meant to intimidate me … and you. All of us. But this project is important, and you know it. Keep your eye on the prize, Joaquin.”

  He stared at her, his mouth sewn into a thin line. She shook his arm slightly. “Hear me?”

  Finally, he nodded, stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket. “Let’s get this plan going. I only have an hour.” He strode out ahead on his long legs.

  Deacon inclined his head, raising one eyebrow in a question.

  Later, she mouthed, and shook her head. “Have you ever had chickens?”

  “Sure.”

  She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm. “Just the man I need to talk to, then. Tell me about chickens.”

  He leaned into her, covering her fingers with his palm. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  An almost forgotten sensation of pleasure spiraled through her body as she smelled his skin, man and sunlight and line-dried cotton. It gave her a vision of his bed, covered in plain white sheets.

  How curious, she thought, and did not push it away. “Just tell me if we could raise them on this field, if it would be a good idea.”

  When Elsa returned to the house, Tamsin was sitting at the computer, drinking tea, her hair tied carelessly in a knot at the back of her head. She looked like hell, Elsa thought. “We need to get you some clothes, sister, dear,” she said lightly. “Ready to brave the milling beasts?”

  “I don’t have any money, and I’m not letting you spend any more on me.”

  “Well, I can’t buy you what you’re used to, but we can get some bargains at Goodwill or the Salvation Army. We can pick up new underwear and things like that at Target maybe.”

  Tamsin stared at her, bright blue eyes brimming with tears. “Goodwill? Really?”

  Elsa sat at the table. “It’s just to get you through until you can get some things of your own. You can’t keep wearing the same sweats and shirts.”

  “Why not? Wash one set, wear the other.” A shrug. “Not like I have anyplace to be.”

  “You have to find a job, Tamsin. I don’t have enough for us both to live on for any length of time. I’m not paying any rent, of course, so you don’t have to worry about that, but we’ll still need food and gas money and wine. I’m very frugal, but even I can’t stretch my little purse for very long if we’re both using it.”

  “I am so sorry.” Tamsin covered her face with her long, narrow hands. “I’ve been so thoughtless! The reporters, the money, the—” She stood up, her hip bumping the table and sending tea sloshing over the edge of the cup. “I can’t impose on you this way. I should …”

  Elsa let her ride the welling anxiety for a long moment, then said gently, “Sit down. I want you here, and I want to help you, but we have to be smart about it.”

  “What am I going to do if this isn’t resolved by the time Alexa comes home?”

  “You really are going to have to talk to Alexa, before some reporter gets to her.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “All right, let’s table that for today. We have enough to think about, I guess. First, we need to get you some clothes and figure out what kind of work you might be able to do.”

  “God. I haven’t worked in decades.”

  “One step at a time. Finish your tea and go take a shower. Put on your makeup and do your hair so you feel good, too.”

  “You don’t have makeup on.”

  “I have a little on, but I don’t really wear much. You, on the other hand, have always been as vain as a fashion model, so it’s important to your self-esteem.”

  “Very funny,” Tamsin said, but she got up to follow her sister’s orders.

  At home, Tamsin had at least forty pairs of shoes, in every possible variety. Only one pair was foolishly expensive, a pair of Christian Louboutin heels she’d bought for a ritzy dinner Scott’s firm had hosted for a presidential candidate. But she missed her collection of boots—flat heels and high, brown leather and black and even maroon. She also had hiking boots for trips to the mountains and running shoes for the gym and sandals in many different styles, both for beach vacations and the long hot summers in Pueblo, but the boots were a sore spot in her cache of losses.

  She also had excellent taste in clothes, if she did say so herself. Her colors were turquoise and hot pink and white. She was still the same weight she’d been in high school, give or take a few pounds, not that she could really take credit for that—she didn’t much care about food and ate, as everyone always said, like a bird. A nibble of this, a taste of that. Since all of this had happened, she’d had a hard time eating much of anything at all. Nothing sat well.

  Which was just to say that she looked good in clothes and liked them and had a lot of them. When she and Elsa walked into the Goodwill, the smell almost overwhelmed her. Nothing was unclean or anything, but there was that tired smell of old cotton, clothes that had been worn a long time. “Oh, Elsa, I don’t think I can do this. How can I wear things that other people used to have on?” She clutched her sweats in both hands. “On their bodies?”

  “We’ll take them home and wash them. Come on. You have to find a couple of nice pairs of pants, and maybe a few blouses. We can get new underwear and socks and bras at Target.”

  Reluctantly, Tamsin followed Elsa, who flipped through the racks with speedy efficiency. “No, no, no. Yes.” She pulled out a sweater in a soft rose and put it in Tamsin’s hands. “No, yes, no, no.” She grabbed a white blouse and handed it over, then paused, hand on a hanger. “You can look, too, you know.”

  “I’ll look for jeans.” Tamsin pointed to a rack with pressed ones hung neatly over hangers. Quite a few had good labels, and her spirits lifted the tiniest bit. There was a pair of Calvin Kleins in her size, practically brand-new, and a little more worn pair of black jeans that looked very good. She’d try them, too.

  She carried a pile of clothes into the grim, dark
dressing room and closed the door. The overhead fluorescents cast light in a thin green hue, making her eyes look even worse, and her nose about six miles long. She hung the clothes on a half-broken hook and leaned her forehead on the wall, suddenly airless.

  How could this be happening to her? How could everything just disappear in a single moment?

  If she had to live this way, shopping at Goodwill, surviving hand to mouth, for the rest of her life, she would kill herself. She and Elsa had been working-class children. Tamsin had hated being the girl with the out-of-date clothes, the cheap shoes, the raggedy backpack she’d carried for three years. By the time she got to high school, she’d figured out how to employ her sense of style and flair to turn old clothes into something more attractive, but she’d vowed never to do it again.

  And here she was.

  Where the fuck was Scott? Sitting on some beach drinking Mai Tais? Holed up in some mountain chalet in the Swiss Alps while his wife tried on clothes at Goodwill, and his daughter would never be able to hold her head up around here again?

  Once she knew, that is. Tamsin still didn’t know whether to tell her or not. Which would be worse? Every hour Alexa did not know was a gift of ignorance Tamsin could give her.

  With a vicious yank, she pulled the jeans off the hanger and held them in front of her. If it was the last thing she did, she would hunt him down and make him pay. Somehow. Someway.

  Shedding the gym clothes, she stared critically at herself in the mirror. Too thin, for sure. Arm bones showing. Hip bones sticking out. The size four jeans would be a little too big.

  They looked okay, though, once she got them on. The sweater was a loser, shapeless and wrong. The simple button-up white shirt was decent, and the price was right, three dollars.

  By the time she came out of the dressing room, she’d approved three pairs of pants and four shirts that were bearable. Price for all seven pieces, thirty-four dollars.

  Elsa gave her a smile. “Good work. And fast.”

  She nodded.

  “Let’s amble by the dishes,” Elsa said. “You never know when you might find some beautiful china.”

  “You seem to find good stuff like that,” Tamsin said, “but I never have.”

  “China karma?” Elsa laughed. As she tilted her head back, Tamsin saw an angry scratch on her neck. “What did you do to your neck this morning?”

  “Nothing big. It looks worse than it is. Ooh!” She pointed to a table piled high. “Look at all of those fabrics!”

  There were piles and piles and piles of them. As if she had turned a corner into a garden, Tamsin suddenly felt better. She moved her hands over them slowly, tracing the curves of a green and blue paisley cotton, the edges of a pile of squares in a palette of pinks and reds in stripes and prints and even gingham. “You go ahead and look at dishes,” she said. “I’m going to browse here for a minute.”

  As she plundered the piles of fabric, Tamsin felt potential rise within her. The promise of that pink against a deep magenta suggested Martha Washington geraniums. She saw them pieced in her imagination, with tubes of that green calico.

  Around the table she moved, using her thumb to shuffle the corners of neat stacks, pausing when one whispered to her, or sang, or shouted in a gruff voice like the black and white checks. A wisp of aqua organza caught her, mid-throat, and she tugged it out, putting her hand beneath it and admiring her skin against it. She heard the sea and saw the way ocean water moved over her skin, hiding and revealing a knuckle, a fingernail. There was at least a yard of this fabric, maybe two.

  She held it loosely, and mentally wandered the stacks in her tower studio, high above the earth, like an aerie. She had installed shelves in an arch beneath the windows. The fabrics were arranged horizontally by color, in a rainbow hue, red to green to violet. Vertically, the colors moved from lightest to darkest. Sometimes she would just sit and look at that arrangement of color and pattern and feel eased.

  In her imagination, she halted at the stacks of greens and held up the gossamer aqua, pairing it with—

  As if she had fallen from that nest so high above the earth, Tamsin slammed back into the reality of where she stood and why. She made a little sound, as if the wind had been knocked out of her. That room was lost to her now.

  What if she could never go back there again? What if all of those fabrics whose stories had yet to be explored were just stuffed in a box and lost forever?

  “That’s beautiful fabric,” Elsa said next to her. “Maybe you should get some quilting supplies. It would be something to do, right?”

  “I was thinking that, and then I thought about my studio, that beautiful, beautiful room! I worked so well there. Just last week, I finished—” She dropped her hands, spread her fingers over the stacks of cloth.

  Elsa touched Tamsin’s back, between her shoulder blades, and made a circle of comfort. “I know. It’s a beautiful room. But it’s beautiful because it’s a reflection of you, of the way you see the world.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes. How much are these remnants?” She looked at the tag. “Cheap! Let’s grab a bunch and bring them home.” She picked up the organza. “This one for sure. What else?”

  Tamsin took a deep breath, reached for the pinks, the green. Paused, narrowing her eyes and reaching for the organza.

  Elsa handed it over. “Do you need time?”

  “A little.”

  “There’s no hurry.”

  Tamsin was already lost in the tug of memory suggested by a scrap of yellow satin, a sunny afternoon when her daughter was small. Lost in her dreams, in that other world, she tugged it out, moved on, let the voices of the patterns and colors speak her name, raise their hands.

  Tell my story! Tell mine!

  Chapter Twelve

  Elsa rose at four on Thursday mornings, which were soup kitchen days. The alarm went off, yanking her from a surprisingly deep sleep. She climbed out of bed, stepping over her conked-out dog, who lifted his head, peered at her, then fell back asleep, his head hitting the carpet with an audible thump. She chuckled softly in the dark. Crazy dog.

  Nestled into a warm chenille robe, Elsa padded silently into the kitchen and made a pot of tea. While it brewed, she opened her email. There was a Daily Word, which she read every morning out of long habit. This morning’s word was “healing.”

  Ha-ha-ha. Very funny.

  There was also a note from the interim minister, asking for some clarification on an ongoing class she taught. At the end, he added,

  There are some issues I’d like to speak with you about. Will you kindly give me a call at your earliest convenience?

  Elsa typed,

  Absolutely. I’m working at the soup kitchen this morning. Will call you late this afternoon.

  Aside from a half-dozen advertisements and department store circulars, that was it. Elsa sipped her tea, thick with milk, and listened to the roar of silence, broken only distantly by Charlie’s intermittent snores. The lack of email was hard to get used to. In the past, it had often taken her a full hour to sort through it, morning and night.

  Bored, she opened the news websites and scanned the headlines. Nothing of interest.

  Except—there, in a small headline on cnn.com:

  COLORADO FINANCIER SOUGHT IN

  CONNECTION TO PONZI SCHEME

  In the accompanying photograph were Scott and Tamsin, dressed for a formal function. Tamsin was draped in jewels and a designer dress, looking like a movie star. Beside her, Scott was a little shorter and balding, but good-looking in a Stanley Tucci kind of way, that clean Italian robustness. The photo showed his adoration of Tamsin, the pride and delight that was on his face whenever he looked at her. Always.

  “Scott, Scott, Scott,” she said aloud. “Where have you gone? And what have you done to my sister? Couldn’t you have at least left her something in a secret stash?”

  But of course, he couldn’t have, not if Tamsin was to escape without criminal charges.

  The repo
rters had pretty much disappeared, but this would bring them back again. Tamsin would not be able to find a job easily with them trailing her every move.

  Insane. But staring at the picture, she noticed the earrings. Emerald earrings the size of almonds, which Tamsin had worn all the time. She said it was safe because people just thought they were fakes. She often forgot she was even wearing them. Elsa couldn’t remember seeing them since the first day Tamsin had arrived, so maybe she’d taken them off before the work in the garden. Or perhaps Elsa had grown used to them, too, a part of Tamsin like her hair or her long legs.

  If not, they could probably carry Tamsin through. But who would buy such emeralds? Quietly and quickly. Someone had to know.

  Her email dinged, and absurdly pleased to have a distraction, Elsa clicked back to the email program. It was from a name she didn’t recognize, but the subject seemed sincere. She opened it.

  To: elsa@unityseattle.org

  From: margaretreims@gmail.com

  Subject: A thank you note

  Dear Reverend Elsa,

  I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, how very much you have influenced and helped me, and I thought you should know. Even though you didn’t say so, it’s plain you’re questioning your abilities as a minister, or maybe you’re questioning your faith.

  Far as the first goes, as you always say, we have the work we’re supposed to do, which is what makes God’s ways work. I would hate it if I was quiet and didn’t say what I was supposed to say and you kept feeling despair.

  Wow, that’s a tangled-up sentence, but I hope you get what I mean. I’m not a good writer.

  “Despair” is a good word, right? That’s where I was when I came to the church, five years ago. I was going through my second divorce, even though I got sober after the first one, and it just seemed to me that I was not a very good person if even stopping drinking couldn’t help me make my life whole. I was very down on myself, hated just about everything about me, from my crazy hair to my belly to my fingernails, which I bite. I had a lousy little job in a convenience store, which was honestly one of the only good things, not the money, but the fact that people came there in even worse shape than me and it was good for me to be nice to them. My mom always said you should do something nice for people when you’re feeling sad or depressed or whatever. I never went to college, never had any kids, never did one single thing that would make a difference in the world, and I was already past 40, so most of that wasn’t gonna happen. There used to be this lady who came into the store before church on Sundays, and she was always really friendly and … I don’t know, glowy? And one time I heard her talking about her church, which was Unity, and I knew where it was because I lived pretty close by. Like close enough to even walk. But I worked most Sundays, so I didn’t go for a while.