“I don’t care. I’ll tell you. I was the getaway driver when my boyfriend tried to rob a bank.” She stirred the soup she was tending. “That’s how stupid I was. Men make women do some stupid shit sometimes.”
“Language, Crystal,” Elsa said, coming into the room. She carried a bag of apples. “And no man can make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
“Sorry!”
Behind Elsa came Father Jack, carrying more bags of supplies. He smiled at the volunteers, showing off those wolfishly white teeth, his slightly scarred skin adding to the appeal. “Good morning, ladies,” he said. “What’s on the menu this morning?” He poked his nose in the pots, lifted a lid. “How are you, Crystal?”
“I’m good, Father. And my baby boy is growing like a weed, you should see him!”
“Bring him to church when you come.”
She rolled her eyes, cheerfully.
Tamsin wanted his attention, too, she realized as he stopped and talked to each of them. The old woman painstakingly peeling potatoes with her gnarled hands got a quiet joke about angels, and he asked after her cat. Finally he stopped between Alberta and Tamsin. “Come see me later, will you, Tamsin? Let’s talk a little.”
She nodded, weirdly relieved. Father was safe, a calm port, who would be able to guide her if she listened. As he listened.
“Thank you.”
An hour later, she was manning the soup pots as people filed into the room. Tamsin had expected the ragged men with their dirty fingernails, and had braced herself in case they might smell. She wasn’t her sister, with a heart ready to embrace all the lost and lonely people in the world. Some of them scared her, like the gang boys she saw at Safeway, smoking cigarettes. Homeless men on street corners begging for change. Crazy old women with shopping carts.
But this morning, it was different. It was safe in the church, for one thing, making it easy for Tamsin to say “Good morning” over and over, and ladle up the soup, feeling something like kindness or honor fill her chest. The men met her eyes, one after the other, almost in challenge—Do you see me? It was hard at first, to meet those slightly hostile eyes, blue and brown and hazel and black. Some just stared at her with hostility when she spoke, saying “Good morning” and “How are you?” and “Would you like soup?”
Others spoke in return. “This is my favorite,” said one.
“You’re new,” said another, frankly appraising her. “You get in trouble or you here because you want to be?”
She laughed and pointed to Elsa, passing out bread. “My sister made me.”
“Mmm. Elsa’s good people. Good for her.” He held out his bowl and his thumbnails were black, as if they’d been hit by a hammer. It gave her a pang of worry—what had he done? “Good for you, too. Do you like us?”
“So far, so good.”
“I want a different spoon, please,” said another. “This is a baby spoon. I’m a man.”
There were others, too, who she had not expected. The teens, filled with bravado, coming in knots of two and three. A young girl with her hair chopped raggedly, a boy with shoulders hunched in an Army jacket, another boy with ashy dark skin who barely spoke. Runaways? she wondered. Crackheads? She wished for combs, for warm showers, for beds for them.
And then there were the families. Elsa said they were busy the last week of the month, always, because people on public assistance had run out of food and money and wouldn’t get any more until the first. Tamsin had imagined that would mean a lot more men, but of course it didn’t. There were painfully young mothers with toddlers, and tiny family units, mom and dad and little kid, washed and humble, waiting for bowls of soup. A three-year-old boy with a cowlick in his blond hair showed her his shoes—two left boots. “I just got these at the basement!” he chortled.
“Amazing,” Tamsin said, but she wanted to cry, too. His quiet mother gave her a sidelong glance.
She recognized one of the boys who had been at the church for the cleaning of the fields, a mixed-race boy with his skinny blond mother. “Hey there,” she said. “Calvin, right?”
He peered up at her. “Hey! You’re the lady who was supposed to bring back doughnuts!” He held out his bowl. “How come you didn’t?”
“It was kind of a bad day for me. Sorry about that.” She ladled soup carefully into his bowl.
He waited for a second ladle, his eyes canny beyond his years. He knew, and she knew, that she wasn’t supposed to give it to him. She did. He grinned.
His mother grinned, too, shyly. “He’s incorrigible.”
“Adorable.”
“Thank you.” She touched her boy’s back as they moved down the line. Tamsin ladled again. And again.
An old Native American man stopped in front of her. He hardly looked homeless. His hair was tidy in braids, and he wore a clean shirt with a vest over it, and silver bracelets around his dark wrists. “I saw you on TV,” he said.
She nodded.
Next to him was a plump boy Tamsin also remembered. He said, “Hey, I remember you! You were going to get us doughnuts last week, and you didn’t come back!”
She laughed. “Your buddy Calvin already said that. Sorry.”
“Maybe you could bring them some other time?”
“I’ll see what I can do.” She thought of her frozen funds. “But don’t hold your breath, okay?”
“If you do get some, will you get the kind with sprinkles on the frosting?”
“Now, that I can promise. I absolutely promise that if I can buy doughnuts, I’ll buy the kind with sprinkles.”
He gave her a thumbs-up.
In that moment, Tamsin realized she hadn’t thought about her problems for at least an hour, maybe more. Even now, it all seemed a million miles away, like something that was happening to somebody else.
She turned to the next man in line. Maybe this was why Elsa did it.
Because it felt good.
Chapter Thirteen
It was so warm after lunch that Elsa wandered into the field, where Deacon was supervising a crew of two volunteers, middle-aged men, who were laying rubber pipe for the garden’s irrigation system. The water would come from the church and the apartment buildings—the owner had been more or less shamed into it when Deacon pointed out how many city codes the buildings were violating.
In the bright light, the field stretched luxuriously, arching her back, her belly and legs beginning to sprout a pale green fur of elm seedlings. Elsa and Charlie strolled through them, and she imagined how it would all look later in the season, with hardy plants growing tall, and family plots boasting their own unique mixes.
She spied Deacon sitting on the open bed of his truck, legs swinging, talking on the phone, and a little flower of pleasure bloomed in her throat. She didn’t often meet men with his kind of outdoorsy good looks; his lean body, the sun lines by his eyes, his tanned skin were all very appealing.
He was plainly a man with a big heart, and she loved that he had adopted an old dog, and volunteered as a Big Brother. If she was honest with herself, though, it was the sheer physicality of him that kept drawing her closer. She had considered, more than once, what it might be like to kiss him.
Which told her that she hadn’t been so ridiculously picky before when she had resisted all of those blind dates. While it would be perfectly possible to arrange a nice match in order to have children, Elsa was a bit too lusty for that. From the first time she’d had sex at age sixteen, after nearly two years of foreplay with Joaquin, Elsa had loved it. When they broke up, sex had been one of the few things to ease the agony for a little while, and she had probably slept with a few too many guys during that lost year in England. Since then, she’d tended toward longish relationships with one man. One at ministerial school, another at her first church. One with a local cop in Seattle that had seemed as if it might lead to marriage and children, until they had both realized their values were simply too different.
He’d been the last one. And it had been several dry years since then.
Deacon was relaying instructions to someone on the phone as she approached. “All right, then, my friend. Call me when it’s done.” He ended the call, palmed the phone, and gave a nod toward Elsa. “Afternoon, Rev.”
She smiled slightly and jumped up to sit beside him. “You’re moving right along.” The plots were all divided neatly by two-foot posts at each of four corners. Rolls of low fencing waited for the gardeners to erect around their plots. “How many families have signed up so far?”
“Thirty-four,” he said with satisfaction.
Elsa dropped her mouth open. “Get out!” She smacked his thigh. “That’s fantastic!”
“Yep. Almost all of them are from the apartments. Nine are from the church and two are neighborhood people.”
“I can’t wait to plant. It’s going to be such a great community builder.” She pointed at the center, left open for her picnic idea. “I think we should have our first meal there after the planting, depending on the weather.”
“We should do it no matter what the weather.”
Elsa pursed her lips. “You’ve obviously never experienced a Colorado thunderstorm.”
“I have, actually. But it’s not thunderstorm season yet.”
She nodded. “How long have you been here, then, Deacon?”
“I’ve been in Pueblo four years, since I got out of prison.”
That would account for the extra weariness in his face. “Were you there for a long time? In prison?”
“Three years and some change. Vehicular manslaughter.” He brushed at a patch of dust on his jeans. “Drunk driving.”
“I’m sorry.”
He glanced at her. “Thank you. Me, too. But you can’t undo a thing once it’s done. I’m making amends the best I can.”
She nodded.
In quiet, they watched the men connect piping. “How about you, señorita? How long have you been in Colorado?”
“I grew up here, then left for college, and now I’m back. I came here only a few months ago.” He’d been straight with her, she thought. She would tell the truth, too. “I left a church in Seattle. I’m trying to figure out if I’m going to go back.”
“Anything in particular weighing into that decision?”
“A lot of things.” She smiled up at him. “I’m feeling a little sick of my own story today, though, if you don’t mind.”
“Tell me something else, then, why don’t you?” he said, and bumped her arm with his. “I’d like to know a little more about you.”
“Well,” she said, “I …” She stopped, at a loss for something to say that wasn’t connected to the church or her ministry, her identity as that person. “Wow, I’m stumped.”
He chuckled. “Do you like to roller-skate?”
Elsa laughed. “Yes. Do you?”
“Nope. I broke my arm in two places when I was eleven. Haven’t put on skates since. You ever break any bones?”
“My nose. A baseball hit me in the face when I was in fourth grade.”
“Oooh. Let me see.” He peered down at her, touched her chin to move her face side to side. “Can’t tell at all. That’s a cute little nose.”
She gave him a wry smile. “You’re flirting with me.”
“You came over here to flirt with me, don’t lie.”
Her blood bubbled. “I would never lie.”
“Good.” He dropped his hand. Paused. “So, what’s with you and Father Jack?”
Elsa frowned. “Nothing. We’re old friends, that’s all. Since the fifth grade, actually.”
“Huh.”
“What does that mean?”
His mouth worked a little, a southern thing she liked. “Just that I would have said it was a tetch more than that, at least at some point.”
“And you would be right,” she said. A lock of hair blew into her mouth, and she pulled it away, trying to catch all of it in a scrunchy she pulled off her wrist. “We were … almost married. Once upon a time.”
Deacon’s attention was quiet, his face turned toward hers as he listened. Sun angled across one deeply tanned cheekbone with its fan of laugh lines, pierced the collar of his shirt, and landed on his collarbone. “And then what happened?”
“He was called to be a priest.”
“I see.”
She studied his face and he studied hers back and there was suddenly a lot blooming in the formerly empty space between them. She jumped off the truck. “I guess I’m going home for a nap. It’s been a long day.”
“I didn’t mean to run you off.”
“You didn’t. I’ve been up since four.”
“All right, Reverend. Sweet dreams.”
Elsa couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder as she walked away, toward her house, Charlie trailing behind.
Deacon waved.
Elsa napped for a couple of hours, cocooned in the quiet of her bedroom at the back of the house, low dog snores a comforting lullaby. In the late afternoon, a commotion from outside awakened her. Blinking, she got up to see what was wrong, and Tamsin slammed inside, hat askew. “Argh!” she cried when she saw Elsa. “They’re so rude!”
“Yeah, they are. So sorry you have to go through this.” Yawning, she headed for the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. She drank deeply and turned around. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” She threw her hat on the table. “I’m afraid to turn on the news to see why they’re back. Do you know?”
“I saw a headline on CNN.com this morning, nothing new, but it was national. The story is catching on. Everybody loves to hate a rich guy.”
Tamsin sank down on the couch and rubbed her face. “I know. I get it. It’s a good story—the disappearance, the big house, the younger wife.” Her hands went flat on her thighs. “You don’t think they’ll bother Alexa, do you? I mean, how would they know where she is?”
“You still haven’t told her?”
“No! I’m not going to!”
“Tamsin, she’s going to hear.”
“I know that. But every hour she doesn’t know is another hour she keeps her innocence.”
“That’s pretty shortsighted.”
“Mind your own business. This is my decision.”
Irritated, Elsa waved a hand. “You are stubborn as an ox.”
“And you think you know everything.”
“I’m going on record as your sister and Alexa’s aunt that you might need to prepare her for what’s coming.”
“Her boyfriend is a count, did I tell you that?”
“And? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Oh, I’m sure all those wealthy nobles would love to know Alexa’s father is a criminal!” She made a low moaning noise and banged her head on her wrists. “If I ever find Scott, I’m going to kill him. How could he leave Alexa destitute?”
“How could he bilk thousands of people out of all their money?”
“I know.” She kept her hands over her face, tips of her fingers pressed to the delicate skin of her eyelids. “It’s all so insane. I can’t believe he would do this to us. To himself. To all those people.”
“Do you think he had some weird midlife crisis or something? I wouldn’t have thought he had it in him.”
“I don’t know. I keep thinking back, wondering if I missed something. He’s been traveling a lot, but he always has.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m never going to see him again, am I?”
“I don’t know.” Elsa reached for her sister’s hand, rubbed it between her own. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry for calling you a know-it-all.”
“I am, kind of.” Turning Tamsin’s hand in hers, she touched her palm, traced the lines there. “How did you like the soup kitchen?”
“Honestly, I loved it.”
“Yeah? What particularly?”
Tamsin raised her shoulders, pulling her hand back to herself. “I don’t know. I mean, I guess I should say their problems made mine look small, but that’s not really true. I’m pretty scared.
But I forgot about all my stuff while I was there. And it felt good to feel like my being right there was important. Meant something.”
“I’m glad.” She remembered that the interim minister had asked for her to call him. “I have to make a phone call. You okay for the moment?”
“Of course.”
“And that reminds me of something else. Where are your earrings?”
Tamsin pulled her hair back to show a pair of small opal studs. “These?”
“No, the big emeralds you always wear.”
“Probably on my dresser.”
“Too bad.”
“Why?”
“I saw them in a photo on the web and thought you might be able to sell them for money to live on for a while. But if they’re in the house, I guess they’re part of the seized property.”
“Maybe I should sneak in there and steal them.”
“No, that’s a really bad idea.”
“You’re probably right.” She fell back against her chair. “Go make your call. Do you want me to cook supper?”
“I’d love it.” Elsa found her phone in the pocket of the jeans she’d shed in favor of her baggy cotton pajama bottoms. The church office phone number was engraved in her brain. When Reverend David answered, she said, “Hello, it’s Elsa. How are you?”
“I’m so glad you called. I’ve been praying for you.”
“I appreciate that. How are you doing?”
“Well, I have some bad news, I’m afraid. I have injured my knee again and they’re going to have to do surgery within a couple of weeks.”
Elsa’s breath gusted out of her. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“So, the board will be in touch, and you might want to petition them to let you return sooner than planned. Otherwise, they’ll have to hire another interim minister.”
“I see.” A hurricane of conflicting emotions sucked the air from her lungs. “Do you know who they’d ask?”
“Allen Tall Pine.”
“Oh.” Reverend Tall Pine was a charismatic, long-limbed Lakota who’d entered Unity, as Elsa had, as a fallen Catholic. Elsa knew him through various regional meetings and committees, and also knew he’d had an eye on the Seattle church for a long time. His wife’s family lived in the area and she wanted to come home. “Will he do it for only a couple of months?”
The Garden of Happy Endings Page 14