Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (28 page)

Monday came. Soon after John left for the train station, Rosa watched through the kitchen window as the Jorgensens’ Model T pulled up to the barn and came to a halt. Lars emerged with the customary paper sack in his hand and called out a greeting to Ana and Maria, who played with their dolls on a quilt beneath the orange trees. Lars tousled Ana’s hair, tickled Maria beneath her chin, gave them the sack of dried apricots, and chatted with them for a bit before heading for the adobe. Rosa quickly left the window so she could meet him at the front door.

“Rosa,” he greeted her simply, taking off his hat and studying her face as if he were looking for new injuries as well as clues to the workings of her mind.

“Come in. Please.” She opened the door wider, breathless from anxiety. “I’ll get your mail.”

“There’s no rush. How’s Pedro?”

“Much better, thank you. He’s napping at the moment.” Blinking away tears, she retrieved the Jorgensens’ bundle from those lined up against the wall and handed it to him. Instead of taking it from her, he placed his hands over hers so they both held it together.

“What have you decided?” he asked, his solemn gaze locked on hers.

“What happened last week can never happen again,” she said in a rush.

He uttered a short, dry laugh as he took the bundle and tucked it under one arm. “Rosa, if I had known you had no intention of leaving your husband, it wouldn’t have happened last week either.”

“I can’t leave him.”

“Do you love him?”

She couldn’t bear to say the words aloud, the admission that she had failed utterly in everything she had resolved to do when she married John and chose him to be her child’s father. “He’s my husband. The church forbids divorce.”

“Because it’s better for a woman to stay married to a man who hits her.”

“I have nowhere to go. No way to provide for the children.”

“Come live with me,” he urged. “I’ll take care of you and the children. We’ll fix up the cabin and make it a proper home.”

She laughed, helpless. Lars barely had enough to provide for himself, and he wouldn’t have even that small portion except for the generosity of his brother. “I can’t tear the children away from the only home they’ve ever known, and I can’t live in sin with you.”

“Then you and the children can have the cabin,” he shot back, exasperated, “and I’ll stay in the farmhouse with my family, same as now. The point is you can’t stay here. Every week that I come by, I see that a little more of the Rosa I fell in love with has died. You’re Catholic but Jesus wouldn’t want you to be a martyr.”

His tone made her bristle. “You don’t know anything about my faith or what the Lord would or wouldn’t want me to be. He would tell me to go forth and sin no more, and that is what I’m going to do.”

Lars watched her for a long moment in silence. “I see you’ve made up your mind.”

“I have, and I ask you to help me. Don’t ever tempt me again. Please.” Not with kisses, not with the promise of compassion and affection, not by offering her an escape from the purgatory she had created for herself. Enduring the life she had
chosen, the life she had inflicted upon herself, and Lars, and John, and the children, was the only way she could atone for all the wrong she had done, including what she had done the week before in a moment of weakness that must never come again.

“I won’t.” The undercurrent of anger and frustration in Lars’s voice was unmistakable. “I’ll never again ask you to do anything you’re not prepared to do, unless I think your life is in immediate danger. And then you’d better believe I’m not going to stand by and let John kill you.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“I’m not so sure.” Lars frowned and shifted the mail bundle to his other arm. “I hope he proves me wrong. I’m going to keep coming here week after week, every Monday like clockwork, to see if you’re okay. You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to, but know that I will be here.”

“Of course I’ll talk to you,” she said, pained. He was her only friend. How could she not?

“Then I’ll see you next week.” He nodded good-bye and left. As her eyes filled with tears, she heard him call his farewells to the girls, start up the car, and drive away.

He kept his promise, showing up every Monday without fail through the Christmas holidays and into the New Year. At first their conversations were stilted, polite, perfunctory, but gradually their old affection and fondness and the habits of their long, shared history wore down the wall she had hastily built between them. They chatted fondly over cups of coffee at her kitchen table; he brought apricots for the children and city directories from places he traveled to on ranch business for her. If she sometimes felt a sad yearning for him or let her thoughts wander to what might have been, she admonished herself for entertaining such dangerous, careless ideas and put them aside.

She had wanted desperately to forget that illicit, fleeting moment in Lars’s embrace, to put it behind her, to be a good and faithful wife from that day forward.

She had yet to discover how utterly impossible that would prove to be.

In the cabin later that evening after putting the children to bed, Rosa showed Lars the newspaper Mrs. Phillips had given her. She gnawed the inside of her lower lip as she watched him read, his expression growing stormier with every line. “John’s still locked up,” Lars said quietly when he finished. He folded the paper and tossed it onto the sofa.

“On racketeering charges,” Rosa pointed out, bending to pick up the paper, determined to keep it out of the children’s sight. “And for how long?”

Lars took her by the shoulders and fixed her with a steady gaze. “If he’s found guilty, he could be locked up for years,” he said, with reassuring certainty. “And if some other technicality crops up and he’s released on account of it, he still has no idea where we are. He doesn’t even know where to begin to look. You’ll only make yourself sick from worry if you keep on like this.”

Rosa knew he was right, but she could not completely banish her fears.

As the weeks passed, Mrs. Phillips saved several newspaper clippings for Rosa, but none mentioned John, so she assumed he remained in prison awaiting trial. She was struck by the realization that John had almost certainly never returned to the adobe after his arrest. He would not know that she had taken the strongbox with the deed to the farm and all their other important papers when she fled. She imagined her kitchen under
a layer of dust and wondered if a generous neighbor had come by to harvest the rye fields and feed the livestock in John’s absence. Perhaps her brother had. It pained her to think that Carlos needlessly mourned his nieces and nephew, and maybe even his estranged sister. She wished she could send word to him that they were safe, but the risk of discovery was too great.

Rosa and Lars and the children fell into the familiar, comfortable rhythm of farm life, school, and weekly visits to the doctor. Nils and Rose had become essential members of the household, although Rosa noticed that Dante and Giuditta, perhaps unconsciously, kept some tasks within the family. No one but themselves and their three eldest children ever entered the winery unescorted, and Dante carried the only key to the tall double doors, which were always locked, in his pocket. Every Thursday, Dante and Dominic—and Vince too when school wasn’t in session—set out early in the morning to make deliveries and returned just in time for a late supper. Although Lars offered to accompany them, they assured him they were so used to working together that they could manage fine on their own. “At least let me help you load the truck,” Lars said, determined to prove his worth to his new employers. Dante replied that if anyone had to stumble out of bed an hour before sunrise and shoulder heavy loads, it ought to be Dominic and Vince, who had all the stamina of youth and none of the responsibilities of parenthood, and therefore could manage on fewer hours of sleep. “I guess when Mabel has her baby, I’ll offer again,” Lars told Rosa privately, and she suspected they would gladly accept his help at that time.

On other occasions, at the end of the day when the supper dishes were washed and put away and Rosa and Lars sat on the back steps watching the children climb the walnut trees or play on the banks of the creek, Lars expressed other doubts. “It
doesn’t add up,” he would say, shaking his head. Wine grape sales had been poor that year, as carloads of fresh, plump, ripe fruit, in perfect condition when the train departed the station in Santa Rosa, arrived at the markets in New York utterly worthless, having spoiled at their destination when repeated delays prevented them from being unloaded—or so the brokers insisted, dubious claims the Cacchiones had no way to verify. Tourists occasionally stopped by, wanting to buy lunch or fresh eggs or walnuts or prunes, and Giuditta always sold them what they wanted, but fewer travelers had passed by as Christmas approached, and Rosa couldn’t imagine Giuditta earned very much from their modest purchases. “I can’t figure it out,” Lars said, brow furrowed in puzzlement. “At this rate, they should have gone bankrupt years ago.”

Paradoxically, Lars’s doubts offered Rosa a glimmer of hope. Perhaps the Cacchiones had misjudged their financial circumstances. Perhaps they were not as close to bankruptcy as they believed. Years before, when Rosa had first begun working as the bookkeeper for the Grand Union Hotel, she had found an error in Mrs. Diegel’s receipts that had spared her from overpaying her creditors several hundred dollars. If Rosa went over the Cacchiones’ ledgers with the same painstaking scrutiny, she might discover a hidden windfall in their accounts.

But Giuditta graciously refused her offer. Rosa persisted, promising that she would keep whatever she discovered in the strictest confidence. She wouldn’t alter a single line of the vineyard’s accounts, but would instead make her notes lightly in pencil in the margins so that Giuditta or Dante could look over them before she made any changes to the original records. Still Giuditta refused, pleasantly but with a decided firmness that made it clear she did not want Rosa’s help.

Rosa pretended that she understood, but the rebuff stung. Either Giuditta didn’t believe Rosa was up to the task, or she didn’t trust her. Either way, it didn’t bode well for Rosa’s future with Cacchione Vineyards—not that Rosa expected to stay forever, or to move up in the company as Mrs. Diegel had always promised her she could at the Grand Union Hotel. Perhaps the Cacchiones were interested only in Lars’s knowledge of apricot cultivation and had found work for Rosa as a diversion. Perhaps they didn’t really need either Rosa or Lars, but had kept them on out of obligation to Dr. Reynolds, who had saved their lives during the influenza epidemic.

Lars thought she worried unnecessarily. “All this means is that the Cacchiones don’t want you to see their books.”

“Why not?” Rosa asked. “Why wouldn’t they? I’m honest, and I could help them.”

Lars admitted he couldn’t think of a reasonable explanation except that he and Rosa were mere employees, and new employees at that, and the Cacchiones ran a family business with family secrets. In time, Giuditta might trust Rosa enough to accept her help with the books, just as Dante might allow Lars to help with the weekly grape deliveries.

A few days before Christmas, the two eldest Cacchione brothers rose even earlier than usual to load the truck for what was expected to be one of the largest deliveries of the year. The truck was long gone by the time Rosa and Lars walked to the residence to begin their workday. Rosa spotted tire tracks in the yard, which had been softened into mud from the previous night’s rain showers, and the narrow traces of the carts the brothers had used to haul the bushels of grapes from the old wine cellar, which Rosa had heard the Cacchiones mention but had never seen for herself. Out of sight of the house and yard, it lay an eighth of a mile beyond
the newer, modern winery and was accessible only by a narrow, overgrown footpath. Although Dante’s father and grandfather had once stored all the wine the vineyard produced in the old cellar, Dante used it only to keep surplus grapes chilled until they could be sold.

That day, Dante, Dominic, and Vince had not returned from their rounds by the time Rosa and Lars went home at the end of the day. That was not unusual, so Rosa thought nothing of it as she prepared supper for Lars and the children and took care of her housekeeping chores before putting the children to bed and climbing wearily beneath the covers herself.

She had been asleep for an hour, perhaps two, when a pounding on the door woke her. She leapt from bed, snatched up her robe, and fled into the front room, her heart racing, her imagination darting wildly. Lars reached the door first, and when she joined him she discovered not the police or gangsters or her husband on the doorstep, but Dante.

“The truck broke down a mile up the road,” he said grimly. “We need your help unloading it. We could use both of you, if you can leave the children alone.”

“Give me five minutes to dress,” Lars said.

“I’ll come too,” Rosa said, stopping by the kitchen to scrawl a note for Marta before hurrying off to the bedroom to change. Within minutes she, Lars, and Dante were in the car rumbling over the rough path from the cabin to the road, where Dante gunned the engine and sent the car hurtling forward into the night. As they jolted along, Rosa reached for Lars’s hand, and when his eyes met hers, she knew he too wondered what needed to be unloaded with such haste at that hour of the night—empty fruit crates? It made no sense.

Before long, they spotted the Cacchione Vineyards delivery
truck pulled over by the side of the road. The front was jacked up on the driver’s side and a punctured tire lay on the ground nearby. Giuditta was already there with the wagon, holding the horses’ reins as Dominic and Vince heaved something into the back. As they approached, Rosa realized that they carried small wine barrels and jugs, apparently empty but still a bulky, cumbersome load.

Without sparing time for explanations, Dante parked the car and joined his sons, transferring empty wine barrels and jugs from the back of the truck into the wagon. Lars and Rosa fell into place beside them, and when the wagon was full, Giuditta chirruped to the horses and rode off toward home. Everyone else stayed behind to fill the back of the car with the few casks that remained, and just before they squeezed into the seats and sped off after Giuditta, Vince snatched a worn tapestry bag from the cab of the truck and locked the doors.