Next she found Aunt Ellie’s old English riding boots, which evoked a memory of her aunt on a horse, jumping fences with a smile on her face. The boots were thick with dust and needed a good saddle soaping, but they were gorgeous, and Margaret and her aunt wore the same size. A mouse or two had gotten to them, she discovered when she turned the left boot upside down and out fell the telltale dryer lint and dried grass that made up a nest.
It started to rain, and Margaret sat and watched it hit the windows, thinking of her aunt working in the garden, a grin on her face, chattering to her plants, Nash the cat rubbing up against her. Why couldn’t she have lived her last years in peace, without the Alzheimer’s? It didn’t seem fair at all that the disease had robbed her of everything. Maybe a person would be better off dying in her sleep. Should Margaret get a DNR order on herself? How did those things work, exactly? How did a person know when to let go?
The rain that had started five minutes ago stopped. There was no evidence of wind, but the single-pane window in the casita began rattling. “Go towards the light, Dolores,” Margaret muttered. It struck her—what would Peter make of the resident ghost? She’d been remarkably quiet for a couple of days, no doubt bothering Glory and Joe. But when she saw an opportunity to “noodge,” as Glory’s mother termed it, she took it. What did it mean? That Margaret should spend ten thousand dollars on replacing windows? Was Margaret messing about in Dolores’s territory? Were there more artifacts to uncover, like the retablo devotional painting Glory and Joe had unearthed when they built their addition?
Minutes ticked by, and Margaret kept at it, removing the few things she wanted to keep. In addition to the book and letters she’d found, there was a perfect Lalique vase shaped like a trumpet flower and some turquoise jewelry marked “mine #8.” It was “dead pawn,” which meant the pieces had been pawned but never redeemed. The turquoise was that stunning sky blue you found in really old pieces. In a shiny black box with French words written on it—pour la femme qui sait ce que les hommes apprécient—she found a pair of unworn seamed black stockings, so old that they were popular again. By lunchtime, Echo had given up her watch for Peter and come out to the casita. She nudged Margaret in the knee, which meant Walk me.
“All right,” Margaret said. She gathered up the letters, the boots, and a book on Chagall. She took care going up the back steps, and once indoors, she washed her hands and face, taped a Band-Aid over the paper cut she’d forgotten about, and strapped on Echo’s harness. The dog was in the throes of what Peter referred to as “chopper tail,” wagging so hard that it kind of broke Margaret’s heart. By now Echo probably thought seeing Peter was a dream. It was a good time to walk—the lunch hour for most people. After two in the afternoon, the traffic would pick up, and as people left work for the day, it would only get worse.
“Just a short one today,” she warned Echo as she opened the front door. Before they could take a single step, she saw her Land Cruiser pulling into the carport. The driver’s-side door opened and Peter emerged. Then came an old black truck with one of those split-screen windshields from the 1930s or 1940s—very Santa Fe. A pretty blond girl Margaret didn’t recognize got out, and it wasn’t until the passenger-side door of the truck opened that she realized this was no neighborhood entrepreneur selling firewood or asking for work. Either she was hallucinating or the man walking toward her carrying an armful of peach-colored roses was Owen Garrett. Her hand went instinctively to her pocket, touching the book. Echo jerked the lead from her hand, rushing toward Peter, and Margaret tried to stabilize herself by placing her right foot forward, forgetting the loose brick on the middle step. She fell, breaking the fall with her left hand.
The next thing she knew, three human faces and one dog’s peered in closely. Too closely: It was making her claustrophobic.
“Mom, are you okay?” Peter babbled. “Should I call an ambulance?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she responded. “I’m perfectly fine. Physically. Though I’m worried I’m hallucinating.” She looked directly at Owen. “Where did you come from?”
“Help her up,” Owen said in a voice she’d recognize anywhere, taking hold of her right hand. “Better get some ice on that wrist.”
Margaret stared in wonder, her lips parted a little. The blond girl brought her a small plastic bag filled with ice for her arm, but honestly, Margaret felt no pain as she sat on the ground. She had heard Owen’s voice, so it wasn’t a vision—it was real. She focused on him as he smiled down at her, his craggy face just as she’d known it ten years ago, although there was an addition to his scar in the form of a black eye. She reached out to touch it but was distracted by the scent of the roses in his arms, which was overwhelming and dreamlike—she couldn’t take in air quickly enough.
“Help me inside,” she told Owen.
While she leaned on him, he led her to the old Rawnsley sofa she’d found in a consignment shop and reupholstered herself in a San Miguel Pendleton blanket. She’d lugged it from Blue Dog to Eldorado, and now to Santa Fe proper. Ten years ago, she and Owen had sat on this very piece of furniture, talking and kissing, and now Margaret had to pat herself to make sure she was in one piece, that all this was real.
“You,” she said, pointing at Peter, who stood in the doorway with the dog. “Take Echo for her walk.”
“Leave Hope here,” Owen said. “He didn’t do too well yesterday.”
“And when you get back,” Margaret said, “clean up the backyard—I put some boxes out there while I was cleaning the casita.”
“You sure you’re okay, ma’am?” said the blond girl, her hands on the doorjamb while chilly air blew in.
“I’m fine. Could I have a glass of water?” Margaret asked her, and without speaking, the girl bolted to the kitchen.
After Margaret drank half a glass, she looked up at the girl. “Are you Sara Kay?”
The girl nodded. “I go by Skye now. It’s nice to meet you. My dad has told me about your art, and your time in Blue Dog.”
Margaret smiled. “Please call me Margaret.”
“Sure thing, Miss Margaret. I think I’ll tag along with Peter if that’s all right.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Margaret asked, and the look Skye and Peter exchanged told a story all right.
“Come on,” Peter grumbled.
Margaret turned to Owen and poked a finger into his chest. “You disappear for ten years,” she said, her voice wobbling, “suddenly materialize, and what? You expect me to be happy to see you? I’m furious.”
“I thought you might be. I missed you every single day.”
“Don’t you sweet-talk me. I am immune to compliments. Where were you? Why didn’t you write?”
“I meant to. I just didn’t know what to say. I have a hard time with words. The right ones, anyway.”
Peter and Skye headed out, shutting the door behind them so quietly that Margaret was surprised. She turned to Owen. “I hope they stay gone for at least an hour, because I have a lot of questions for you.”
“Fire away,” Owen said, embracing her and smiling as if they had all the time in the world.
Such assumptions! Her pride hadn’t been injured; it had been maimed. Words died in her mouth. He kissed her on the forehead, both cheeks, and placed his hand on the small of her back, murmuring, “Maggie, Maggie . . .” Ten years’ worth of tears began coursing down her cheeks.
“I was released a week ago,” he told her, still holding her close. “I had to help my daughter and find employment—you were next on my list. I’d planned to start asking around in Blue Dog, but here you are.”
He’d been in prison, all this time. Her chest filled up with sorrow, imagining the years, how slowly time must have passed. But on the heels of sorrow came anger. “You are a complete jackass,” she said. “Do you know I thought you were dead?”
“Sometimes it felt that way, being in prison.”
“What happened? Did that man you hit in that fight die? Did they charge you with murder?”
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“Easy, Margaret. He lived. He talked to the judge and said the minimum sentence for aggravated assault was all he wanted, because he said he was guilty of starting it.” Owen touched his lips to her neck. Probably someone younger than Margaret would have made him wait, held him at bay until all her questions were answered. She knew he expected her to vent. But as a fifty-year-old woman with MS, she now knew time was a commodity, and there was so little of it. She kissed him back.
So much had changed in ten years, including desire. She didn’t need a sloppy tongue kiss. The trembling pressure of their lips together was more than enough to say what each of them meant: I loved you then, I love you now, we can do this forever. She broke away and touched his face, felt the swelling around his eye tenderly.
“Did you learn nothing in prison about avoiding fights?”
“I didn’t lay a hand on the other guy,” he said.
“Somehow I doubt that. Who did this to you, and why?”
Owen laughed and shook his head. “Let’s just say you raised quite a fighter.”
“Peter? Are you kidding me?”
“I am not. He didn’t give me quite the warm reception you have. It’s just a hunch, but he was already looking for someone to hit, I think, and I just happened to be handy.”
Margaret sighed. “He’s going through a really hard time. Divorce,” she explained. “But that’s no excuse. It’s like my son has a doctorate in anger, not a master’s in comparative literature.” She ran her fingers through Owen’s beard, which was grayer than she remembered, but then so was her hair. “It’s exactly the way I remember it,” she said, “so soft.” She leaned into his body, smelling hay underneath the roses. “Where did you run into Peter?”
“At my new place of employment. Reach for the Sky. You’re looking at the new barn manager.”
Margaret gasped. “The Vigils live next door to me. Joe and Glory. Are you serious?”
He laughed. “Yes. Next door, you say? I think I’ve met her—silver-haired woman, rez dog named Curly, tiny greyhound?”
“That’s Glory.”
“Where I’m staying, in my ex’s casita on Canyon Road, one of your paintings is hanging on the wall. Took my breath away when I saw the Starr farmhouse. My daughter says it was a sign.”
“Your daughter is brilliant,” Margaret said, running her hand over the sleeve of his flannel shirt.
When Owen pressed his hand to the small of her back, the sensory memories of their past came pounding back. This touch was a signal, the prelude to making love.
She started to say, “Wait—,” but Owen interrupted her.
“Right now, let’s be selfish, Maggie. Don’t we deserve that?”
Under his hands, she felt as if her skin were softening. Light and love coursed wetly through her veins, making her dizzy with desire. How strange to feel that wanting again. The ten years they’d spent apart disappeared. Owen sighed, her breath grew ragged, and she felt she could not get close enough. “Bedroom,” she said, but he shushed her, already pulling her there as if he knew the way all along.
Hope followed.
Skye and Peter walked carefully along Canyon Road, stepping up onto narrow curbs when cars came by, stopping to look into gallery windows. “Echo, huh?” she said. “Where’d her name come from?”
“If you know your Greek mythology, you’ll remember Echo was a nymph. She abetted Zeus in his extramarital pursuits, until Zeus’s wife, Hera, found out. Hera decided to punish Echo by taking away her voice, by only allowing her to repeat what was said to her. Or am I telling you something you already knew?”
Skye matched his smug little grin. “Oh, pardon the hell out of me for not being your intellectual equal in matters that make no difference,” she said. “What are you? A professional student?”
“Close,” Peter said. He stopped to untwist the leash from his leg. Echo kept turning around to look at Skye, as if to say, Where did you come from? Her ears were pricked forward the same way Hope’s were when they were driving to Albuquerque. Apparently both dogs thrived on adventure. “As a matter of fact, I am a college professor.”
“What do you teach? Fairy tales?”
“It’s called comparative literature. Folktales, fairy tales, urban legends, and magical realism.”
“Really? Sounds like bedtime stories to me.”
“Is being snarky in your DNA or are you just bitter?”
“Bitter? What do I have to be bitter about? I’m just your everyday happy and sunny twenty-three-year-old just out of rehab and trying to find her missing daughter.”
Peter whistled. They started walking again. “Please disregard my comment.” He gestured with his free hand, nearly hitting a tree branch. “I guess I’m just annoyed at your father showing up, and I’m transferring that irritation to you.”
More college words, Skye thought. “Your mom didn’t look too annoyed.”
“Duh. I noticed.”
“Plus, you were the one who started the fight.”
Peter sighed. “I named my first dog after a nymph because I was a geek who had few friends in high school. This Echo,” he said, pointing to the dog, “is not the original, by the way, but one of her pups. I named her Echo also because it made sense, as if she was an Echo of her mother. And she kind of is. Very sweet-tempered and affectionate. By the way, your father’s mangy dog, Hope?”
“What about him?”
“He’s Echo’s dad. Fortunately for me, she takes after her mother, not her dad.”
“You are the touchiest bastard I’ve ever met,” Skye said, running her hand along an adobe wall with exposed brick, rounded and worn by the elements.
“Have you ever considered that maybe you bring out that quality in people?”
“All I did was speak my mind.”
“You certainly do that,” he said, and laughed. “Often.”
Neither one of them said another word until they came to the crest of Canyon Road. On the other side of the street, El Farol was no doubt setting up tables for the dinner crowd. Skye was beyond hunger now, and she was itching for a drink. She wondered if the servers would mind if they brought Echo indoors, just long enough to order a Coke, because maybe if she poured an icy Coke down her throat, it would squelch the desire for alcohol.
But no, the truth was the taste of Coke made her crave rum. “I have an idea,” she told Peter. “How about we head back to my place, give the old fogeys some time to get their freak on, then get something to eat?”
“God, could you think of a more disgusting way to phrase that?” he said.
“Oh, pardon me. I had no idea you were so uptight. Let me put it delicately, then,” she said. “Let us allow our respective parental units to make splendiferous, meaningful, tidy love in private, so we don’t have to listen to their cries of passion.”
Peter said, “I seriously doubt my mother would allow your father, after ten years, to—didn’t you see how angry she was? She’s probably slapping the shit out of him as we speak.”
“Now there’s a fairy tale,” Skye said, and laughed. “They’re lovebirds, like on my cowboy boots.” She lifted one to show him.
Peter said, “I noticed your gaudy footwear at the stables. They don’t look very practical.”
“Where is it written that everything has to be practical?”
“I hope my mom is all right. She could’ve broken her wrist.”
“So take her to the ER for an X-ray.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of calling her neurologist.”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Skye said, remembering Gracie’s wrist in the tiny pink cast. “If it’s broken, it’ll heal in six weeks or so.”
“My mother, in case you haven’t noticed, is a painter.”
Skye looked at him. Could he be any more annoying? “Dude, I’m not blind.”
They had walked by the river, made a lap around the Plaza, stopped to listen to music, bought coffee at Starbucks, and walked by the Palace of the Governor’s,
before walking back toward Canyon Road. Two hours had passed by the time they made the turn for home, Skye looked in the shops that would soon be closing for the day, drawing out the walk long enough to give Owen and Margaret some alone time. Just the sight of the Railyard made Skye purse her lips and recall the feeling of going headfirst into the Mercedes’s windshield. A whoosh as the airbag inflated and the gasp she made when it punched into her stomach, because her seat belt wasn’t fastened. The smack of her forehead against the glass as it shattered, like thousands of snowflakes that refused to fall. Her nerve endings had shut down because of the shock, but she didn’t pass out because Gracie was in the backseat. Her mother-radar had kept her vigilant. “Gracie,” she had said, “honey, you all right? Talk to Mama . . . Gracie, answer me! . . . Gracie!” She couldn’t get out of the car fast enough and had torn her shirt on the twisted metal. She listened hard for the little peeping voice and couldn’t hear it over the screech of sirens. Finally, a whimper: “My arm hurts, Mama.” That broken bone had been all her fault. Oh, God, just the idea of it made her sick to her stomach.
Skye and Peter passed the Chalk Farm gallery, one of her favorite Santa Fe places because it was dog-friendly, filled with plants, a fish pond, and a waterfall, and it wasn’t your run-of-the-mill artsy art gallery.
“You ever been in here?” she asked. “It’s a cool place. Not like the la-ti-da galleries.”
“I live in D.C.”
“Near the White House?”
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