Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel

by Jannifer Chiaverini

  One afternoon, after a rare pleasant lunch with Lars that had concluded with a long kiss good-bye over her desk, her mother suddenly appeared in her office doorway. “Mamá,” Rosa exclaimed, bolting out of her chair and greeting her with a kiss on the cheek. Lars had left only moments before; her mother must have passed him on her way through the lobby. What had she thought? What had she guessed? Rosa felt her knees trembling as she offered her mother a chair. “What a surprise! Is everything all right?”

  Her mother regarded her sternly. “No, in fact, something is very wrong.” When Rosa sank into her own chair with the desk between them, stricken, her mother’s expression softened. “I didn’t mean to worry you, but mija, I am very troubled by your secrecy. I know—your father and I know—that you are in love. We think we know why you’ve been hiding this from us, but the time has come for you to tell the truth.”

  Shaking, scarcely able to breathe, Rosa clenched her hands together in her lap. “How long have you known?”

  Her mother put her head to one side and regarded her as if to say they had known for a very long time. “We waited as long as we could, hoping you would tell us on your own.”

  Rosa hesitated, bewildered by her mother’s calm demeanor. “You aren’t angry?”

  “Because you have deceived us, yes, very. Because you have fallen in love, no. Never.” Her mother smiled tenderly. “You’re a beautiful, loving young woman, Rosa. If you’ve found the love of a good man, we’re happy for you. We want to share in your happiness.”

  “I—” Rosa could not believe what she was hearing. “I didn’t think you would approve. And I love him, but—I’m still not sure. He’s a good man, but—it’s just so hard to know what to do. There are things about him I wish he would change. I pray for him to change. Can I really love him if I want him to be different?”

  “Oh, Rosa.” Her mother rose and came behind the desk to embrace her. “Why did you keep your troubles to yourself for so long? I’m your mother. You can always talk to me about anything. You know I will always love you.”

  “And I will always love you.” Rosa’s vision blurred with unshed tears. “And I will always love him. I know I will. But that doesn’t mean I should marry him.”

  Her mother straightened, her brow furrowing. “Has he asked you to marry him?”

  Rosa nodded.

  “He should not have done that without speaking to your father.”

  “You’re right. I know that. But it’s—well, you know how things are.” Tentatively, Rosa added, “I’m surprised you’re taking it so well yourself.”

  “There’s no need for secrecy any longer,” her mother assured her. “Invite John to join us for Sunday dinner. We need to get to know the man who wants to marry our daughter.”

  Rosa stared at her mother, as numb as if the air around her had frozen solid. As if from a very great distance, she heard herself say, “Invite…John?”

  “Yes, and without delay,” her mother replied.

  Rosa could not take a breath or find the words for a reply. John. Her parents thought she loved John.

  John courted Rosa for two years. Once a month he came to Sunday dinner at the Diaz home, and every other Saturday he took Rosa out on a date—a picnic, a dance at the Arboles Lodge, or a day at Lake Sherwood with friends, outings from which one of his oldest friends, Lars, was conspicuously absent. The longer Rosa misled her parents and John, the more difficult it became to extricate herself from the tangled threads of her lie. One morning in the hushed gray hour before dawn, her mother met her at the door when she returned home after a night at the cabin with Lars. “Why don’t you just marry him?” her mother implored, distressed and bewildered. Shaken, Rosa apologized for upsetting her mother, but she would not promise to stop slipping away at night. She knew she was moving inexorably closer to the day when she must elope with Lars or lose him forever, but as long as her mother believed Rosa went to John when she stole away from home under the cover of darkness, Rosa could defer that irrevocable choice.

  And then, unexpectedly, the choice overtook her.

  Her brother, Carlos, had finished school, and thanks to Rosa’s recommendation to Mrs. Diegel, he had obtained a job as a handyman at the Grand Union Hotel. He had inherited their father’s friendly, cheerful disposition as well as his gift for storytelling. One day in late July, Lars brought Rosa a basket of apricots fresh from the orchard, and to her relief, he did not remind her of her long-unfulfilled promise to come to the ranch for harvest someday. She savored the sweetness of one perfect apricot alone in her office and carried the rest home to share with her family. But her joy vanished the moment she entered the house and met her mother, who went impossibly motionless at the sight of the ripe fruit.

  “Where did you get those?” her mother finally asked quietly, her dark eyes fixed on the basket.

  “Mrs. Diegel gave them to me,” Rosa said lightly, setting the basket on the kitchen counter too quickly, as if the woven slats had burned her palms. “She didn’t want them, so she gave them to me.”

  A cold silence descended. Rosa was afraid to turn around and meet her mother’s gaze, but she felt her accusing stare boring into her back.

  “You will never see him again,” her mother said in the same quiet voice.

  Rosa whirled around to face her. “Mamá?”

  “Marry John or don’t marry him, but you will never see Lars Jorgensen again.”

  Shocked and dismayed, Rosa tried in vain to defend Lars, to defend herself for loving him, but her mother was resolute. Sick at heart, Rosa fled to her room, accidentally overturning the basket of apricots in passing.

  Much later, Carlos knocked on her door and called softly to her, and when she allowed him to enter, he stepped cautiously into the room, white-faced and apologetic. He had not meant to divulge her secret; he had not even known she and Lars were in love. He had come home from work earlier than Rosa, as he often did, and when he told their mother about his day, he remarked that the Jorgensens’ apricot harvest must have gone well, because he had seen Lars carrying a basket of the fresh, ripe fruit into the hotel office. He had joked that Lars had probably given it to Mrs. Diegel to pay off his bar tab. He never could have imagined that barely an hour later, Rosa would walk through the front door with that same basket in her hands.

  Rosa did not blame him for unwittingly divulging her secret—but now they were all complicit in keeping the secret from their father.

  Through August and September, Rosa managed to see Lars only twice, by leaving work early to meet him at the cabin. “Come away with me,” Lars urged moments before they parted, taking her hands and clasping them to his heart. “We’ll get married, and once it’s done, everyone will just have to get used to the idea. Your parents will forgive you eventually. You know they will.”

  Rosa wanted desperately to believe him, but he was hungover from another drinking binge and she could not bear the thought of exchanging marriage vows with him so haggard and shaking and ill. “If you can go two weeks without a drink,” she said, “I swear I’ll marry you the next day.”

  Elated, Lars vowed that not a drop of alcohol would touch his lips until they toasted each other with champagne on their wedding night. Since it was unlikely that she would be able to meet him each day to verify his sobriety, they agreed that he would light a lantern in the oak grove every night he kept his promise.

  For five nights Rosa woke shortly after midnight, peered out her window, and glimpsed a pinprick of light like a distant star gleaming amid the oaks. On the sixth night, she woke to the sound of the wind stirring the curtains in the moonlight, threw off the quilt, and went to the window—but saw no glimmering light in the oak grove.

  She took a deep breath, rested her arms on the windowsill, and stared into the shadows beneath the boughs. It was a windy night. Perhaps the shifting leaves and branches momentarily blocked the lantern from her view, and if she was patient, it would appear.

  She waited.

  Perhaps, she told he
rself, pulling her robe over her nightgown, the wind had put out the lantern. On bare feet she crept silently through the living room past her mother, who breathed deeply and steadily on the sofa. She eased open the front door and swiftly ran to the stand of live oaks where she had climbed upon Lars’s horse and ridden off to the cabin on hundreds of other nights—but he was not there, nor did she find a darkened lantern, its flame extinguished.

  The wind whipped her hair into her face as she turned back to the house. Unable to believe that he had failed her, she stayed awake all night at the window, hoping and praying that some unforeseen emergency on the ranch had merely delayed him. But the oak grove remained shadowed and still until the sunrise illuminated the valley.

  Shame or gin kept Lars away the next two nights. The third night, exhausted from disappointment and heartache, Rosa slept until dawn. When she woke, for a fleeting moment she wondered if he had come, but then she remembered that it did not matter if she saw the distant flame the next night or the next or any other. Lars had broken his promise, he had made his choice, and she could not marry him.

  On the morning of the fourteenth day, he came to see her at the Grand Union Hotel, his face pale, his eyes bloodshot, his hands shaking. He swore that he would never drink again, but she didn’t believe him. She couldn’t believe him. She told him it was over, and she told him good-bye.

  She knew she had broken his heart and could not forgive herself for it. She confessed her sins to the elderly priest who had known her all her life and she did the penance he assigned, prayers and good works that seemed bewilderingly inadequate to atone for all the wrong she had done. As the days passed, exhaustion, worry, and guilt plagued her, and her appetite fled. At breakfast even her favorite dishes turned her stomach when her mother set them on the table before her, and although she would shut her office door against the aromas wafting from the hotel kitchen, her queasiness often did not dissipate until early afternoon, if at all.

  Rosa was nearly eight weeks pregnant when she realized—first, with a steadily growing awareness intertwined with dread and denial, and then with a shocked dismay so intense and sudden it left her breathless—that she was carrying Lars’s child.

  She did not tell him. She did not tell anyone, though she knew it was a truth she could not conceal for long. For days her thoughts darted wildly, desperately, as she tried to stay calm and sort out what to do. The shame and humiliation she would bring upon herself, she would endure as the inevitable consequence of her poor choices and the just punishment for her sin. When she thought of her innocent child, however, and her parents, and her brother—then her heart broke again and again. Though they had done nothing wrong, they would share her disgrace.

  Through all the turmoil and distress, Rosa had continued to let John court her. Lars’s profound failure cast John’s best qualities into a far more favorable light. John was pleasant company, and he was reliable and diligent. He did not drink. He would be a good provider. And then, when John came to Sunday dinner a week after Rosa discovered she was pregnant, her mother happened to remark that the Barclay farm had once been part of the old Rancho Triunfo, one of the sections the Norwegian immigrant who purchased it from Rosa’s great-grandparents had sold off to his more recently arrived countrymen.

  Suddenly Rosa realized how she could give her child a father, spare her family shame, and regain part of the land her mother had longed for all her life. It would mean losing Lars forever—but she had already lost him.

  John had often hinted that he wanted to marry her, and always before she had replied with gentle discouragement, emphasizing how much she valued him as a friend. Now, with her circumstances entirely transformed, she responded with new warmth borne of desperation and hope. One evening she overheard her parents talking earnestly in hushed voices, and she knew John had spoken to her father. The following afternoon, John was waiting for her on the front verandah of the Grand Union Hotel as she left work. He took her hand and invited her to walk with him through the hotel’s citrus grove, and when they were alone, he knelt in the middle of the stone path, took from his coat pocket a ring that had belonged to his grandmother, and asked her to marry him. Her thoughts flew to Lars, but she reminded herself what she owed her family and her unborn child, and she told John she would marry him.

  Her parents rejoiced. Rosa and John met with their priest, and the banns were announced on the three following Sundays. Throughout that time, Rosa and her mother quickly planned the wedding celebration—but not without some bewildered protests from her mother that there was no need for such haste. Rosa braced herself for an outburst from Lars that did not come. Perhaps he did not know about the upcoming wedding. He was not Catholic, and so he wouldn’t have heard the banns announced at Mass. Word of the upcoming nuptials spread from neighbor to neighbor, but slowly, and it was possible the news hadn’t reached the Jorgensen ranch. Rosa didn’t know, but she wondered.

  As her wedding day approached, Rosa felt jumpy and unsettled and yet filled with a strange, fatalistic hope. She was fond of John and was confident she would grow to love him; she was determined to be a good wife and mother, inspired as much by love as the need for atonement. Successful marriages had been made from far less.

  Rosa and John married in the church where she had been baptized, surrounded by her family and friends and his. She felt quietly content as he took her home to the small, cozy adobe amid the fields of rye along the mesa near the Salto Canyon, her mother’s favorite vista. That night, she could not hide her tears after John made love to her, but he misinterpreted her grief and kissed her lovingly, assuring her that all would be well. She wanted to believe him, but apprehension had taken root in her heart, and she feared that a marriage founded upon a lie was doomed to failure despite all her good intentions.

  Two nights later, she woke groggily to a furious pounding on the front door. “Rosa,” Lars shouted, pounding again. “Rosa, come out!”

  “What the hell is going on?” mumbled John, turning over in bed beside her.

  Outside, Lars’s voice broke and slurred. “Rosa, come out of there! You don’t belong with him. You belong with me!”

  Rosa felt a cold fist grip her heart. She sat up, heart pounding with dread, and when Lars persisted in shouting for her to come out to him, to run away with him, John sat up too.

  “Is that Lars Jorgensen?” he asked, suddenly wide awake. “What does he mean, you belong to him? I know he was fond of you when we were kids, but you said that was over.”

  “It is over. Don’t listen to him. He’s drunk.” More drunk than he had ever been, from the sound of it. Trembling, Rosa forced herself to lie down and draw the quilt up to her chin as if she meant to try to sleep through the tumult. “If we ignore him, he’ll go away.”

  John threw off the covers. “If I get the shotgun, he’ll go away faster.”

  “John,” Rosa cried, seizing his arm. “You can’t shoot him!”

  “Of course I won’t shoot him.” John shook free of her grasp. “I just mean to scare him off.”

  As John climbed out of bed, they heard the rumbling of a truck over gravel. Another man’s voice rang out, shouting for Lars to come away from the adobe. John went to the window and peered outside. “Oscar’s come for him.”

  Quickly Rosa joined John at the window and watched with horrified dismay as Oscar dragged his shouting, weeping, stumbling brother to the truck and half shoved, half lifted him into the front passenger seat. Oscar did not spare a single glance for the adobe as he hurried around to the driver’s side, climbed in behind the wheel, and sped off.

  “I guess he heard about the wedding,” John remarked, letting the curtain fall and guiding Rosa back to bed, his satisfaction unmistakable even in the darkness.

  “I suppose so.” Rosa sank into bed, sick at heart, wondering how Lars had heard the news. Despite their estrangement, she should have told him herself. To let him find out any other way, after all that they had meant to each other, was cruel.

  She had
been cruel and thoughtless and worse, but somehow he must have forgiven her, or he would not have rescued them from the canyon, nor would he have joined them on their pilgrimage.

  The children woke early, and although Marta tried to keep her younger sisters and brother amused by watching the passing scenery, the novelty eventually wore off and they came to Rosa pleading hunger and boredom. When Lars suggested that they visit the dining car, the children seconded him so eagerly that Rosa didn’t have the heart to refuse, despite her reluctance to abandon the security of their private car. She tugged Elizabeth’s tan cloche snugly upon her head so that it pushed her short, dark locks forward, concealing some of her bruises. Even so, as she and Lars and the children seated themselves at two tables for four on opposite sides of the center aisle, a few other diners glanced at her face only to look quickly away again. She noted their reactions with grim satisfaction as she draped her napkin over her lap and encouraged the children to do the same. Perhaps, for the first time, people’s inherent cowardice and reluctance to involve themselves in the aftermath of a woman’s battering might protect rather than harm her.

  The full-course meal of fried eggs, bacon, hash brown potatoes, toast with jam, and coffee would have been filling and delicious if Rosa had been able to relax enough to eat rather than glancing warily about for suspicious police officers and vengeful mobsters toting tommy guns. Nothing on the menu suited Ana’s and Miguel’s new diet, so after watching Ana glumly sit on her hands so she wouldn’t be tempted to sample any of the tantalizing dishes on her plate, Rosa left Marta and Lupita to finish their lunch with Lars while she took Ana and Miguel back to their private car for another meal of cold corn tortillas. “I hate being sick,” Ana confessed as she washed down another dull bite of tortilla with water.

  “The doctor in San Francisco will help you,” Rosa said, and for the first time, it felt like a promise she could keep.