Monday, Monday: A Novel (39 page)

When the steer was roped and on the ground, Nicholas asked, “What are they putting on that cow’s head?”

“Chalk mark,” Clay told him.

The stands erupted into applause. “That’s a thirty-seven point nineteen!” the announcer shouted. “Headed, heeled, and caught! That’ll do! That’ll do!”

An elderly man with a large belt buckle tapped Emmett on the shoulder, and they talked of a colt with a leg ailment that Emmett had cared for. When the man was gone, Emmett invited Nicholas to participate in the boot scramble. “It’s a kids’ event coming up,” he explained. “Clay’s going to be in it. You can come down with him if you want to.”

“Can I, Mom?”

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Emmett said.

When they’d been gone for a minute, Madeline got up to follow them down.

“Where are you going?” Andy asked. “We can see better from up here.”

“I want to go check on him.”

“He’s right there with the other kids.” Andy pointed. “He’s fine. You won’t be able to see as well from down there.”

“I’d just rather be there.” She made her way down to where Emmett stood at the rail, jammed between other parents and onlookers.

“Hi there,” he said when Madeline squeezed in beside him. “I was hoping you’d come down.”

They watched the jostling kids bunched like motherless calves in the arena. Nicholas and Clay were hopping around on one boot each, waiting to start the scramble, having tossed their other boots into the pile mounding up in the center.

“Your husband seems like a nice guy,” Emmett said. He was crowded close; she could feel the heat of his body.

“We’re not getting along right now,” she told him. “He fooled around with someone a few nights ago. I have no idea why I’m telling you this. Maybe because I just drank two beers in the car.”

Emmett patted her shoulder, his hand resting there for a moment, and she wondered if Andy noticed this from where he sat in the stands. She didn’t care if he did.

They watched the arena. “So what’s going to happen?” she asked.

He gave her an overlong glance, his gaze resting on her mouth and then traveling down a little. “I can’t say I know.”

“I mean in the boot scramble.”

“Oh, that.” He smiled and turned to look at the boys. “They’ll run out there and scramble around for their boots.”

47

SORTING STONES

Spread before Carlotta on the hardwood floor of her childhood bedroom was a collection of tin cans filled with gemstones. She plucked the stones from the tins, pairing those of similar size to make into earrings, searching out compatible colors for necklaces. The icy feel of the gems in her fingers was soothing and familiar. She wore an embroidered Mexican dress, once bright red but now faded and threadbare from having been used as a cover-up for her swimsuit on dive boats. Stacked throughout the room were boxes of merchandise for the shop and suitcases from the trailer home where she had lived with Martin. Rock hunting tools lay piled in a corner—work gloves, hammer and chisel and shims, a bucket of dusty agates shaped like biscuits, their surfaces sparkling with quartz and clusters of black that looked like lumps of caviar. There was a cool and earthy smell of polished stones and a faint scent of perfumed candles.

For fifteen years she had cut and polished and strung together all these beautiful shiny pieces of earth. She wasn’t sure what she would do with her life if she closed the shop. She loved the sparkling objects and smell of incense and the decorative peacock feathers. She could make more profit by selling over the Internet, but probably not enough, and certainly not enough if her dream of raising a child were to come true. And she didn’t really want to spend her days wrapping merchandise in bubble packing and shipping it off to customers she had never met.

She should re-envision her life completely and start fresh. This would require a lot of planning, and she wasn’t sure how to take the first step. There were so many things she would need to do. She would close the shop and get a job—which might require a move. And then she would have to find a doctor who would guide her through the process of having a child on her own. She didn’t suppose there were many of those in Alpine. Also—and this weighed heavily on her mind—she was thirty-six years old. She did not have so much time.

Hearing a sound at the door, she looked up and saw her mother and father standing there together. “Can we come in?”

“Of course.”

Her mother moved a pile of clothes to sit in the chair. She put her hands on her knees. Her father sat on a wooden chest at the foot of the bed.

“Shelly told us you would like to find your biological parents,” Delia said.

“She wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”

“I know she wasn’t, love. There’s a reason she did.”

“I can’t imagine what reason. I didn’t want…”

“Shelly is your biological mother,” Delia said. “And Wyatt is your biological father.”

For a second, Carlotta had no emotional reaction at all. She had the vague sense that something was not true. It occurred to her, fleetingly, that this was a trick of some kind to keep her from looking for those other parents. Perhaps those parents were cruel and destructive, perhaps jailed for some heinous crime, and her mother and father and Shelly and Wyatt had made up this story to protect her from the truth.

Except this was not the kind of thing they would do. Her parents had never lied to her.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. Either she had been lied to her whole life, or she was being lied to now.

“Should we start at the beginning?” her mother asked her very gently, very quietly and solicitously. “And tell you everything?”

Carlotta looked at her father. He cleared his throat. “It’s true, angel.”

“Listen with an open heart,” her mother said softly. “It was hard for me, too, in the beginning, to accept these things that I’m about to tell you. You have to remember we wouldn’t have you if none of this had ever happened. I don’t want you to blame Wyatt and Shelly. Does this make any sense to you?” Delia’s hands were shaking.

Carlotta whispered, “Yes,” but it did not. She tried to listen closely as her mother spoke, but the halting sentences washed over her. The affair Shelly and Wyatt had was very, very sad, and nearly destroyed them both, her mother said. “They loved each other very much. Their lives were bound together by what happened that day on the mall, in ways only two people who share that experience can possibly understand. And I know they loved each other. And when Shelly found out she was pregnant, they stopped seeing each other. They never saw each other again until last night.”

Carlotta pictured Shelly and Wyatt there in the driveway last night, talking to each other as if none of this had happened—as if the only relevant thing at the moment was that Wyatt had caught the dog. “It’s extraordinary,” she whispered, looking at her parents, her fingers plucking at the little pool of turquoise pebbles she had left in her lap, as if the familiar feel of such tiny trinkets could restore a whole lifetime that suddenly seemed to have gone missing. “I don’t know what to say … or think. I feel like it’s wonderful, in some terrible way.”

“She didn’t want to give you up for adoption,” Delia went on. “But she was young and couldn’t support herself or give you what she thought would be a happy childhood, and her parents advised her that this would be the best thing for you. I’m not sure that she would have given you up if it weren’t to us. She was broken up that day in the hospital when we came to get you. When we saw her in the lobby … you can’t imagine…” Jack reached over and put his hand on his wife’s knee.

Carlotta remembered the day she had gone to the hospital in Beeville, how she had walked into the plain little lobby in the small, flat town, and had not even gone to the desk to ask any questions, having not been ready for answers.

And now the answers had come to her, right here in her own bedroom: She had known her biological parents all her life. This was astounding. They were not the fantasy parents she had imagined; they did not live in obscure, far-off places and walk around in indistinct bodies and wonder, or not wonder, what had ever become of her. Those fantasy people were as lost to her now as the unformed baby buried beside the creek, their features never seen. And her biological parents were people she already knew. She admired them both. They each had a daughter who had worn her hand-me-down clothes. Shelly was her closest confidante. Wyatt’s talent was breathtaking. He painted pictures of stones so realistic Carlotta could tell exactly what those stones would feel like in her hands.

“I’ve never seen anyone suffer like Shelly suffered that day in Beeville,” her mother was saying. “If you could know the way she cried. She thought she was losing you forever. And later, when she wanted to be part of your life, your dad and I thought it couldn’t be wrong, since obviously she loved you so much.”

“So you worked it out together?”

“I guess we’ve worked it out together for thirty-six years. Shelly wanted it to work out, more than anything else in the world.”

“But did you want it, too?”

A look of sadness came over Delia’s face, but was instantly gone. “I felt she would only add good things to your life, and I think she has.”

“But what about your life, Mom? I can see this was hard for you. And I think I confided in her too often. Did you feel like I was turning to her too much? I never would have done that if I’d known.”

“It would have been too selfish for me to care about that,” Delia said. “If you could have seen her, and how she cried when she thought she had lost you, then you would know why I couldn’t hold it against her that she loved you. And I’m happy with how it’s turned out.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. I’m just…” She faltered then.

“What, Mom?’

The tears came spilling out. “Yes, I envied her some. Because you had so much in common with her. And I always thought … I always thought that if you found out … if you asked … and we told you”—she shook her head as if to shake her feelings off—“then you might love her even more. But if you don’t go on loving her like you always have, then I haven’t done my job as your mother.”

“Oh Mom, Mom…” Carlotta got up, dropping the stones from her lap, and threw her arms around Delia. She squeezed herself into the chair with her mother and held her close. “I shouldn’t have gone to Shelly. I should have come to you! And to you, Dad! It was just because I didn’t want to hurt you! I feel … so confused about her now. And you say if my feelings about her change, then somehow you’ve failed as a mother! You’re the best mother I could have had! I can’t believe she would put you through this. She gave me up, and then wanted to have me back. I can’t sort it all out.”

“You don’t have to sort it out now, except to know she only wanted the best for you,” Jack said.

“But I have to know what to say to her. And … what am I going to say to Wyatt?”

“If you don’t want to talk to them right now … tonight … tomorrow, that’s all right. They just wanted to be here in case you do.”

“Are they downstairs?”

“Shelly is. She’s in the kitchen. And Wyatt’s out in the cabin. But honey, they realize you might not want to talk.”

Carlotta felt as if she had been dropped into a different life. Nothing was as it should be. The people she had planned to look for were already here, as if she had found them and brought them home and now they were already part of the family, all in a few minutes. “And to think I sometimes worried that my biological mother might not want to meet me.”

She didn’t know what to do next. She felt she should prepare herself to talk to Shelly and Wyatt. She should change her clothes … do something … at least think something through. “I’ll come down in a minute,” she promised. “I just need a minute alone. I need to think about what to say.”

When her parents had left the room, the strangest thought came to Carlotta: She owed her life to a sniper. All those years ago, someone had gone up in the tower of the University of Texas and for some unknowable reason had started shooting people. And now here Carlotta was. If Wyatt and her father hadn’t rushed onto the plaza to help Shelly, she herself wouldn’t exist.

What was she supposed to feel for Wyatt and Shelly now, other than what she had felt for them all her life? How strange to live with a mystery and then to have it resolved and have nothing about the resolution change anything. There were times in the past when she had felt like an imposter or amnesiac here in Alpine—as if she was meant to be living somewhere entirely different, with different parents, and only by fortune had ended up here with Jack and Delia. And now it appeared she had always belonged here; that this was the way it was meant to be, and these were the people—all of them—who were meant to be in her life. There was nobody on the outside she was supposed to bring in. They were all here, and always had been.

She understood everything her parents had just told her, and yet, as she thought about it, she partly resented her parents, too. Collectively with Shelly and Wyatt, they had misled her. She felt conspired against and duped, having worried over questions any one of these four people whom she had trusted could have answered.

Still, Wyatt and Shelly had never abandoned her. No one had ever given her up for good. Her whole life, she had imagined her mother handing her over to Jack and Delia and disappearing somewhere. And now, as it turned out, no one had disappeared. She didn’t know whether she was relieved or angry—and if she was angry, whom she was angry with.

She took off her faded dress and put on jeans and a clean blouse. Placing the sorted rocks into small plastic bags, she dropped the rest of them into the cans, hearing the little clinking, plunking sounds—agate and lapis, spiderwebbed turquoise, and blue angelite. As she pressed the lids back on, she had the sorrowful feeling that she had lost Jack and Delia as parents instead of finding Shelly and Wyatt. As if she were suddenly orphaned.

Pulling open the shutters, she looked at the night sky over the curved road that led down to the cabin. She had always loved the darkness from this window. She loved the crystal stars. But the moon had troubled her, and she recalled how as a child she had wondered about its far side—the side she couldn’t see. It had reminded her of all the unseen places on earth her parents might be. It had been like a luminous stone, a shiny Mexican jelly opal, taunting her with its distance, filling her with sadness and pointless wishing for something she couldn’t have, or something she didn’t know.