“Thank you,” he said. He lifted his good arm and put it around her. “I’m sorry, too. Me, too.”
They stood there on the edge of the orchard, on the edge of their past lives. He held her, and he could feel her shake, and he shook too. Since Caryn died, he hadn’t hugged even his mother this way, only Sean. Dani Newell, his first love whose heart he’d broken, leaving her retching her Thanksgiving dinner on the carpet. And here they stood, in the orchard again, bound by time and memory and all the things they’d once said, and the things they hadn’t known to say. I love you, they’d once said. God, I love you so much, they’d said, over and over, and they had meant it, their bodies joined under the naked sky. They hadn’t known any better then. They hadn’t known anything yet.
At the ball fields, Paul unbuckled Sean’s belt with his good hand. He bent down and checked his reflection in the side mirror. His eyes were puffy, a bit red, but he looked okay. He could use a shave, but oh well. He greeted the other parents, some of whom he knew from high school—there was Warren Smith, Smitty, his track mate, now plump around the middle and holding his chubby son’s hand. He said to Paul, Good to see you, good to see you. He whacked Paul on the back with a meaty paw.
Paul met Sean’s T-ball coach, Coach D, who’d been sending e-mail introductions and reminders. He hadn’t realized D stood for Drennan, and she was the woman he’d seen walking on the trails. The woman who’d found the bones. The new professor at the Syc. Coach Laura Drennan.
Laura gathered her young charges while Paul and the other parents lingered behind the fence. She squatted at eye level and spoke in a loud, cheerful voice. “We’re going to learn so much about baseball and sportsmanship, but your number-one job is to have fun, okay? Do you think we can do that? Let me hear you.”
The girls and boys cheered, hopping up and down. The kids took turns swinging wildly at a Wiffle ball on a post, and Coach D helped them choke up on the bat, showed them how to stand at the plate. Eye on the ball, she said. She clapped at every single swing. When Sean got up to bat, he turned and looked for Paul. Paul waved, his eyes filling. His first milestone without Caryn. Sean connected, and the plastic ball dribbled toward the mound. Paul yelled, “Go, buddy, go!” But Sean took off for third instead of first, hopping on the bag with both feet. Everyone cheered anyway, and Coach D guided him over to first.
After the game, while the kids sucked on orange slices and juice boxes, Coach D handed out schedules and snack rotation lists to the parents. Paul thought she looked different, though he couldn’t pinpoint why. Calmer, maybe. More open. Out on the trails, she’d struck him as one step away from falling down.
Someone asked how she was settling in at the Syc.
“Great!” she said, still in her coach voice. “Keeping busy.” She clapped. “Okay! See you next Wednesday night for practice!”
While the parents gathered up their kids, Paul lingered as Sean stood with another boy at the pitcher’s mound, throwing rocks toward home plate. He introduced himself to Coach Laura, sticking out his good hand to shake hers. She had a strong grip.
He said, “We’ve crossed paths before, I think. Out on the river trail.”
Laura tilted her head. “Right. You’re the runner.” She seemed to blush when she said it. Perhaps because she didn’t want to talk about the bones. She let go of his hand and pointed at his arm in the sling. “You’re having a bad day.”
“Lost a fight with a ladder,” he said.
“Ladders. Sneaky sons of bitches.”
He laughed. He nodded at the field. “Hey, thanks for doing all this. I’m sure you’re busy.”
She shrugged. “Busy’s good. I like busy.”
“I haven’t seen you out lately. Walking.”
“No,” she said, looking down. She tapped the tips of her tennis shoes together.
He said, “Are you coming tonight? To the orchard?”
“The memorial? Oh, I don’t think so. I didn’t know her,” she said. “I’d feel out of place.”
“I always feel out of place,” he said, “and I’m from here.”
She smiled. “I actually would like to pay my respects to Maud. She’s a great lady. The first one here to welcome me.” She pulled on her ponytail. “It’s been very strange. A lot of people know who I am, but I barely know anyone.”
“I can introduce you. If I don’t know them, my mom will.”
“Thanks. Maybe. It’d be nice to know people. It’s been a long summer.” She pulled a baseball from her shorts pocket and gripped it in her right hand. She threw the ball, hard. It went all the way to the right-field fence.
He whistled. “Good arm, Coach D.”
She grinned and pointed at the field. “Looks like we’re the last ones standing.”
Sean sat on the pitcher’s mound, alone, burying orange slices in the dirt at his feet. “I should get going,” Paul said.
“Me, too.” She nodded. “It was nice to meet you. See you later. Or next practice.”
“You bet,” he said.
He watched Laura Drennan walk toward the neighborhood behind the fields, her ponytail swinging between her shoulder blades. He called to Sean, who jumped up and ran at him, his knees and hands brown with dirt. Forgetting his shoulder, he swung the boy up in his arms. He cringed, biting at the pain, but he didn’t set him down. He shifted Sean’s weight, smelling oranges. He tightened his grip.
“You did great,” Paul said. “You played like a million bucks.”
* * *
Laura Drennan walked home. She walked through the metal gate, trailing her fingers on the latch. She walked, and her stomach growled, and she thought of the leftover burrito in her fridge. She thought of the quizzes she needed to grade, the prep she needed to finish. She walked across the bridge and down the gravel path that led to the streets of her neighborhood; she walked the same path to and from the college on her teaching days, too. She walked, and she said the street names in her head before she reached them. She knew them now without looking. She knew her students’ names, too, here with classes a month in. She knew her new colleagues’ names, the names of campus buildings, the names of the mountains, the names of trees. She knew the name of her mail carrier and the name of her mail carrier’s daughter, the girl whose bones she’d found in the wash. She knew the name of the woman who served her pastries at the bakery. She knew the names of her T-ball kids. She knew the names of the T-ball parents. She knew that father back on the field was the runner with the sexy legs on the river trail. She knew the woman at the auto shop and her chatty wife—look, there they went now in their cool vintage car, their teenage girl at the wheel. Laura waved, and they waved back.
Before Laura reached the street, she turned and looked behind her. The grass of the fields rippled in the gentle wind. Paul Overton, his arm in a sling, carried his son across the gravel parking lot. She turned and kept walking. She smiled. It was almost fall, she was coaching Little League, and the sun was shining on her face. When her feet hit the pavement, she gave a little skip. Skipping. What a childish thing to do. What was next, hopscotch? Hush up, you, she told herself. Just be among the goddamn living. She skipped, the soles of her tennis shoes scuffing the pavement, until her breath came hard and fast, heavy in her ears. She skipped all the way home.
* * *
From the passenger side of the Impala, Rose said, “Ten and two, Hazel. Stop slouching.”
Hazel shifted her hands on the wheel. “I’m not slouching. These seats are slippery.”
Angie sat in the middle of the back seat, offering advice and directions. Hazel was a good driver, attentive, cautious, defensive. Better than Rose, that was for sure, who’d always been a lead foot and a talker at the same time. A damn sight better than Beto, god love him. Hazel’s personality probably came from her father, though Angie had never met him, so she couldn’t say for sure. She didn’t know much about those two years after Rose had called off their secret relationship, their clandestine trips to the motel, to the alleys of Jerome, t
o the desert pullouts outside of town, atop the slag heap behind the fairgrounds with the sharp ore cutting into their skin. She only knew Rose finally came home—with Hazel.
Rose turned around to Angie in the back seat.
“I said to her, I said, Stevie, where is this coming from? Why do you suddenly want to go to Paris?”
“Watch this corner, Hazel,” Angie said. “People speed here.”
Hazel said, “Got it.” She slowed down, looking both ways.
Rose slapped the dash. “She bought a one-way ticket. Got right on the Internet and ordered it up. Says she’ll be home in a few months. I swear to God. I swear to God. Mom’s about to have kittens.”
Hazel said, “I think Aunt Stevie is smarter than everyone gives her credit for.”
“I agree,” Angie said.
“I’m not saying she isn’t smart. That motel is the tightest ship in town. But there’s smart, and then there’s prepared. There’s smart, and there’s—whatever it is she does. My sister wandering the streets of Paris, having one of her space-outs. How’s that going to go?”
“Fine,” Angie said. “It will go fine.”
“What if it’s not? I mean, what if we never hear from her again?”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“It happens,” Rose said. She was suddenly near tears. “You know it does. We all know that. Look at Jess.”
Hazel braked at the stop sign on Arrowhead. “Which way? Right or left?”
“Left,” Angie said. “Then take a right on Main.”
“Where are we going?” Hazel said.
“Not Paris!” Rose folded her arms.
Angie laughed. “It’s a surprise,” she said. “I was going to show you after the service tonight, but let’s go now.”
“A surprise?” Hazel and Rose said together.
“Jinx, you owe me a Coke,” Hazel said, grinning at her mother. She reached over and punched Rose gently on the arm.
Rose reacted in mock pain and then tucked a piece of Hazel’s hair behind her ear. “Watch the road,” she said.
“I am.”
Nearing the Woodchute on Main, Angie said, “Turn left here.”
“Here? The motel?”
“Yep.”
Hazel turned the car in smoothly, slowly. She pulled into a parking spot in front of the office.
Rose stared at the front office, where a college student was filling in. “I can’t believe she did it,” she said. “I can’t believe she’s not in there. She’s always in there.”
“Things change, hon,” Angie said. “It’s only for a few months. She’s coming home.”
Rose turned around again. Her blue eyes, those sweet, coy, flirtatious baby blues she’d first seen over the Patty Melt counter when they were both teenagers, when things like eye color and hair curls and beauty obscured everything. For nineteen years now, she’d seen those eyes flare in anger, crinkle shut with laughter, well up in fear and sorrow like they were now.
“What if she doesn’t?”
They were, Angie thought, like the blue of a winter sky at dusk. Someday, she would see them close forever. Like she’d seen her father’s. Or Rose would see Angie’s that way. But not yet. Not just yet.
“I love you, Rosie. Did you know that?”
Rose nodded and wiped her eyes. “I love you back.”
Hazel sighed. “Oh my god. Get a room, you two.”
“We are,” Angie said. She climbed out of the car and headed toward Room 7. She unlocked the door and looked in at the decorations, at the banner, the plane tickets and hotel reservations she’d spread out on the beds. She turned around, and she met Rose Prentiss’s eyes again. They both grinned. Their room. That crazy, sexy girl. Somehow they’d made it. Past the looks, past the sex, past the immaturity and denial and secret shame. They’d made it this far.
Hazel let out a whoop. “Disneyland! Are you kidding? Cool! Oh, wow.” She threw her arms around Angie, and Angie remembered that day in the mud, her father lifting her, pulling her to safety. How much he could carry. Love, that glassy orb of a word, took shape over Hazel’s shoulder, and Angie coughed.
“You don’t turn sixteen every day,” Angie said. She held up the car keys. “I think it’s time the Impala had a young driver again.”
Hazel screamed. She hugged Angie and hugged Rose and hopped around the room and out into the parking lot.
Rose sat on the corner of the bed. She looked at Angie now with solemn eyes.
“I’ve been feeling stuck. Wanting to get away.”
Angie nodded. “I know.”
“How? I didn’t even know. Not really.”
“Rose. Come on. I know you.”
Rose threw out her arms. “I want to go places. I want more. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you or our life.”
“I know,” Angie said. She sat on the bed next to her. “I used to want that too. Then we got busy, with Hazel, the shop, the motel, family. All of it. Somehow it got lost.”
“Yeah,” Rose said. “Lost.”
So much lost. Angie thought of heart-shaped rocks, of bones beneath the earth. But so much found, too.
“Run away with me,” Angie said. She pulled out the tickets she’d been hiding under her shirt and inside her waistband. “Paris in December. You and me. Your mom will keep an eye on Hazel. We’ll meet up with Stevie.” She flapped the tickets against her palm.
Rose stared at Angie, at the tickets. She took the tickets and held them in her lap. “Oh, you’re too much, Angela Juarez. Too damn much.”
Hazel yelled from the parking lot, “You guys, come on! Let’s go for a ride in my new car!”
“Roller-skating on the moon,” Rose said. She stared out the open door.
“What?” Angie pulled at one of her curls.
She smiled. “Nothing. Something Stevie used to say.” She laid her head on Angie’s shoulder. “But I know what she means now.”
* * *
Down the hill in Phoenix, Stevie Prentiss sat buckled in her window seat on the plane. She patted her money belt inside her new jeans, where she had carefully placed several hundred-dollar bills. She had her hotel reservation and a new cell phone with overseas access. She had her neck pillow and eye mask and a coupon for one free drink. One suitcase was in the bin over her head, another was in the belly below, a puffy red coat nesting in the bottom-most layer. The rest, she’d buy when she got there. Paris. She reached up and adjusted the air vent, smelling the jet fuel as men with orange jackets and sticks bustled under the wing.
She turned to the woman sitting in the aisle seat. “I’ve never been on a plane before,” she said.
The woman smiled and nodded. “Oh, sugar, no need to be nervous. People fly every day.”
“I’m not nervous,” Stevie said. She hardly knew what she was feeling. Antsy. Elated. She fiddled with the knob on the tray table. She touched her cheek.
Back home in Sycamore, they were saying good-bye to the girl tonight, paying their respects to the mother. Stevie had already said her good-byes. She’d sat on the bed facing the mural on her wall, and she told the girl, one last time: It was an accident. They didn’t know. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. She told her, I’m taking your coat to Paris. I’m going to wear it as I walk along the Seine. She addressed the woman in the mural, the woman she now understood to be the mother: the mother standing on the canyon rim, looking into the distance, waiting for her girl to come home. To her, Stevie had said, I’m sorry I didn’t follow her. I’m sorry I didn’t call for help. I’m sorry you had to wait so long.
The plane pulled away from the terminal and bumped along the concrete to the runway.
She closed her eyes as the plane accelerated, the force pushing her into the seat. She opened them the exact moment the wheels lifted and the plane left the earth.
She looked out the square little window and watched the houses and cars and trees and swimming pools and jagged mountains grow smaller, shimmering in the heat and dust of the desert. The plane
climbed and bounced on air pockets, and her stomach dropped. She peered out and saw a cloud above them, and soon they were inside it, a gray mist that obscured her view.
She had never seen anything like it. Never. And she’d been looking her whole life. She laughed.
The woman on the aisle leaned over. She pointed out the window. “It’s real pretty, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Stevie said.
She pressed her fingers on the glass, and the colors stayed still. She could see clearly all the shining world below.
* * *
Saturdays, Esther closed the bakery at three for the rest of the weekend, and usually she beat it out of there, knowing she’d have to be back before dawn on Monday. Today, she lingered, thinking she’d make a fresh loaf of banana bread to bring to the service at Iris’s this evening. She’d already overloaded Iris’s kitchen and dining room with platters of pastries and carafes of coffee and tea, and Hugh had made pinwheels and lasagna bites. No one would be going hungry, and she needed to remember to bring plastic to-go containers. But banana bread was Maud’s favorite, and tonight—well, she might need banana bread. By god, Esther could make banana bread.
She poured the eggs and overripe mashed bananas into the creamed butter and sugar and turned on the mixer, old Spinster. She watched Spinster’s paddles whirl. Spinster was a good old gal. Esther laughed. Gal. What a word.
Someone tapped on the window, startling her. Esther sighed. Not for the first time she regretted installing a window that left the kitchen exposed to the sidewalk. She loved the light, but not so much the rubbernecking mouth breathers. She needed to put up a sign: “Beware, Menopausal Baking Season. Please Do Not Tap Glass.” She plastered a smile on her face and looked up.
Beto Navarro stood at the window, straddling his bike. Roberto. Roberto now. He smiled and waved, and she waved back. She gestured to the door and mouthed, Come in, come in, and walked around to the front.
“Hi,” he said. “Esther.”
“Hey yourself. Roberto.” She tilted her head to look up at his sharp, lean face. She again felt that snaking heat from the night in the bar. “How long have you been this tall?”
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