Finding Casey (3 page)

Glory had fired a few warning quills; the man put his cowboy hat back on, pulling it down on his brow. He ate quickly, tossed money on the table, and walked away without pushing his chair back in. Glory felt a tinge of annoyance at his lack of manners, but in no time his place was wiped clean and a new diner sat down. The new fellow took out a Tony Hillerman paperback and started reading.

“How's your sandwich?” she asked Juniper.

“Good, but nowhere near as good as Dad's when he broils the bacon with brown sugar.”

Such sweets on a hot day sounded nauseating to Glory, but she said, “Daddy Joe is our own top chef, isn't he?”

Juniper sipped at her iced tea. “Thank goodness for that. Otherwise we'd still be eating hot dogs and grilled cheese sandwiches.”

Glory laughed. “Hey, don't knock my culinary skills. I can still make a better cake than he can.”

“Pirate ship wedding cake, for sure,” Juniper said, referring to the day they'd met, Juniper a foster child looking for somewhere safe to spend Thanksgiving, and Glory, newly widowed, hosting a pirate-themed wedding on her ranch to pay the bills. “Think you'll ever make another one?”

“For your wedding, if you want.”

And then Juniper's lower lip was suddenly trembling. “She'll never have a wedding or a cake.” Tears puddled in her eyes and she tried to blink them away.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “I'm sorry I said that.”

Juniper swiped at her eyes. “It's all right.”

Between the creepy man and Juniper's sorrow, Glory's omelet wasn't sitting right in her stomach. “I'm full,” she said, setting her fork down. She dug in her purse for money to pay the bill. “I need to use the ladies' room. Meet me outside, okay?”

“Sure, Mom. Thanks for lunch.”

Mom
—the word still felt monumental to her—never in her life would she have expected to be called that, and whenever Juniper said it, it was like hearing it for the first time. She smoothed back Juniper's hair and kissed her forehead. “Finish your sandwich and I'll meet you outside.”

As Glory headed to the bathroom, she thought about how some memories could never be filed away. Her first husband, Dan, had been gone nearly six years now, but she could call his face to mind instantly. He would always hold the deed to half her heart.

Later, as they were about to traverse the last aisle of the market, her cell phone rang. Glory glanced at it and smiled. It was Joseph calling. “What's up?” she said when she answered.

“I have bad news.”

“Oh, no. What happened?”

“It's Dolores. She fiddled with the oven temperature and your cake is ruined.”

Dolores was the name Juniper had assigned to what she called the “house ghost”; what Glory suspected was the groaning of
elderly plumbing on its last legs. “A likely excuse,” Glory said. “Just admit that even you, the great chef, have occasional culinary mishaps. Plus you'll always be second to me in the baking department.”

He laughed. “It's my life ambition to catch up. Hey, happy birthday to the most beautiful woman in Santa Fe.”

She laughed. “You said that this morning.”

“I was worried you might have forgotten.”

“As if I ever could forget you. We're almost done here. Where are you?”

“Oh, that's top-secret information. I need to talk to my party-planner partner in crime.”

She handed the phone over to Juniper and stepped away to give them privacy. Throngs of people attended Indian Market. Glory never tired of the Plaza. The tall cottonwood trees had witnessed so much history, she wished they could talk. For hundreds of years people had been gathering here to celebrate one thing or protest another. On days like today it truly was the heart of the city, pulsating with music, overflowing with Native art, blessed with sunshine. The population was made up of so many different ethnicities that the first thing Glory did when they moved here was buy a history book on the state and spend a month reading it. When she learned that New Mexico was the only officially bilingual state in the Union, she told Joseph, “Governor Schwarzenegger should try this in California.”

A strolling all-girl mariachi band came down San Francisco Street from the direction of the cathedral. People stepped aside to let them pass, taking cell-phone pictures and videos. They were young girls, maybe fourteen years old, dressed in turquoise blouses and black skirts. Glory applauded as they passed. How could a person play a violin and walk at the same time?

Juniper was still talking to her dad. Seeing the girls in fancy dress reminded Glory of the celebration following Juniper's formal adoption. “Just a small gathering,” Joseph had said, and then invited over a hundred guests. Under duress, Juniper agreed to wear the dress Joseph's mother made for her. It was snow white, three tiers of lace, and something Juniper could have worn to her own wedding, except for the fact that Joseph wasn't going to allow Juniper to date until she was oh, say, seventy-five or so.

After the call, Juniper and Glory walked down Washington Street. By now it was beginning to feel like overload—all these booths, jewelry, religious paintings, folk art, sculpture, pierced tinwork. Her eyes blurred from so much beauty. To top it off, she could tell she'd had too much sun because she felt a little faint. How hard could it be to find a decent cooking pot that didn't cost an arm and a leg?

She'd been careful not to admire her mother-in-law's clay pot too much, because if she did, the woman would insist she take it. Even though it had been in her family forever, she'd give it to Glory just like that, she was so thrilled Joseph had found his soul mate. Glory wanted a pot of their own, new, so that Joseph could cook without the ghosts of the cooks who came before him.

While Juniper looked through the beaded earrings, Glory spotted a micaceous pot big enough to roast a turkey inside. It was the color of adobe, with smoky black patches reflecting the sun, revealing a bronze shimmer. It was fitted with a no-nonsense lid and a finger-sized loop on top, but it was so beautifully crafted it could sit on a shelf. “How much are you asking?” she said to the man standing behind the table filled with similar pots.

“Six hundred, but if you have cash I could go five-seventy-five.”

“It's lovely, thanks, but out of my price range,” Glory said, returning it.

“Mom,” Juniper said as they moved on, “that sounded like a good deal to me. How much do you want to spend?”

“No more than three hundred.”

“Seriously? They charge fifty dollars an inch. You couldn't cook an egg inside a pot that small.”

“And you know this how?”

“Hello? Anthropology major here. Aced art history last quarter, which covered contemporary Native American Indian pottery.”

“I want to keep looking,” Glory said, and soon they were down to the last half block of booths on Washington Street. The sun beat down on her head mercilessly the way it did just before the temperature was about to break. Her lunch was definitely not sitting right.

“Look!” Juniper said, holding up a black card with porcupine-quill beaded earrings attached. “I found them!”

“I knew you would,” Glory said. “Wish I could say the same for my pot.”

Juniper paid for her earrings, tucked them into her purse, and then they were in front of another booth featuring micaceous pots. It was a bad location, out in the sun, farthest from the Plaza, and she imagined the foot traffic was a lot less because of the heat. The pots for sale were set directly on an unadorned tabletop, no bright cloth beneath, no effort whatsoever to make things look nice. A girl about twenty-five with long dark hair stood behind the pots, smoking a cigarette. She kept shifting the pots this way and that, and her movements made Glory wonder if the girl was high on something. “What are your prices?” she asked.

“Two-fifty to four hundred. Buy two and I can make you an even better deal.”

Juniper picked up a tall pot that flared outward from the bottom up to an opening large enough to fit a whole chicken through. Micaceous clay was perfect for slow cooking. After hours on the stovetop, meat fell off the bone and ended up a tender, mouthwatering stew to warm your stomach on winter nights when the temperature dropped below thirty. “I like this one,” Juniper said.

Glory picked it up and felt the weight. Nice, not too heavy, but not so light she'd worry about breakage. “How much is this one?”

The girl looked down to her left for a second, the way liars and car salesmen do, and Glory nearly set it down. “Three-fifty cash.”

“I'll give you three hundred,” Juniper said, and Glory was momentarily flustered.

“Now listen, it was my plan to—”

“Mom, you have to let me do this,” Juniper interrupted. “I saved a ton of money from my summer job, Grandma Smith gave me a savings bond, and Aunt Halle and Uncle Bart send me a check every month like I'm starving in a third-world country. You and Daddy Joe pay for tuition, the dorm, and my car insurance, I think the least I can do is buy you a nice anniversary present.”

The girl was already wrapping the pot in newspaper.

“Thank you,” Glory said, feeling guilty that maybe she wasn't paying enough.

The girl took Juniper's money and opened an old-fashioned cash box. She bent down to put the extra newspaper away.

“Come on,” Juniper said. “I see two spots and the band is about to start.”

“Okay, I'm coming,” Glory said, and just as she turned to walk away, a movement in the shadows behind the girl caught her attention. Glory saw that it was the man from the restaurant. For a moment, it felt as if time had bumped out of rhythm, skipped a few beats, and Glory was overcome with the desire to rescind the sale, but Juniper held the bag and was dragging her to the cement bench that encircled the spire sculpture in the center of the Plaza. The bench was warm from the sun and felt comforting on her bones. There was enough shade from the trees to feel relief from the heat. Onstage in front of them the band broke into “El Porompompero,” one of the most famous gypsy love songs ever written.

“What did your dad want?” Glory said when there was a break in the music.

“Nice try,” Juniper answered. “You're not getting the surprise out of me. You'll find out tonight. By the way, in addition to your request for tri-tip, Daddy Joe's making me a great big vat of menudo to take back to school.”

Glory groaned. Tripe soup. Joseph and Juniper couldn't get enough of it. The name alone was bad enough. Two parts cow's stomach, it was the color of the khaki slacks she'd worn when she worked at Target. The dish took all day to simmer in chicken broth, filling the house with the most awful smell, and filmy grease that coated the surface had to be skimmed away from time to time. “Please stop talking about it.”

“Why?”

“I don't feel well. I wonder if the eggs in my omelet were bad.”

“Mom?” Juniper said, inching closer, and then Glory smelled
her daughter's bubble-gum perfume. Combined with the goat fajitas from a nearby vendor cart and the baked-sugar smell of kettle corn, just the thought of menudo was too much. She got up, raced to the nearest trash can, and in one long heave, lost her lunch. She rinsed her mouth with the bottle of water she carried everywhere and chewed some gum to get rid of the taste. Juniper appeared and put her hand on her mother's back.

“Oh, my gosh, do you think you have food poisoning?” Juniper said.

The way only a woman's mind can work, Glory began adding up clues. The intermittent nausea, dizziness that came out of nowhere, and a mental picture of the calendar that hung inside the pantry door. When was the last time she had her period? April? May? I certainly hope it's food poisoning, she thought, because what kind of birthday present is turning forty-one only to discover you're pregnant?

The clay pot simmered on the stove burner, the scent filling the kitchen and drifting out into the great room. If pressed to name the ingredients, Glory would have said barnyard animals, vinegar, and a thousand heads of garlic. She had banned menudo entirely from the house during her first trimester of pregnancy. She wouldn't even let Joseph cook it outdoors. While the nausea had lifted in her fourth month, just as the obstetrician had promised, certain smells, like tripe, made her want to gag. Who in their right mind found a cow's stomach appetizing? Not just Joseph, but also Juniper, eighteen years old and a junior at UNM Albuquerque.

Glory, preoccupied with nausea and the overwhelming fact that in a few months she'd have a baby, hadn't thought of the micaceous pot in months. All summer Juniper worked at Jackalope, the Spanish mercado on Cerrillos, with outbuildings selling furniture, rugs, pottery, and jewelry, and a prairie dog habitat at its center. There tourists could watch the endangered squirrel cousins dig their burrows, raise their babies, and tip their heads back, yipping to each other like miniature coyotes.

Glory bent to open a kitchen window. “It smells like you're boiling socks in here.”

“Sorry.” Joseph turned down the burner and gave her a kiss. “Ready for the sonogram?”

Glory smiled. “Are you kidding? I've been chained to the bathroom for months. I'm more than ready.”

Joseph covered the pot with its braided clay handle lid. He plucked his keys from the hanging rack and hollered to Juniper, who was studying in her room. “Back in an hour, arbolita,” he called, his pet name for her in Spanish, little tree.

“Find out what sex it is!” came back from her room.

Glory had agreed to the amniocentesis for health reasons, but she clung to wanting to be surprised about the baby's sex. She felt in awe of one of the last few mysteries in pregnancy. Of course, such thinking was silly, because everything about this pregnancy was already a surprise—she'd never thought it would happen to her, especially at forty-one. It was a good lesson for Juniper. See what happens when you're careless with birth control? Glory had told her. She wasn't convinced Juniper was sexually active, but whenever the topic came up, they talked about birth control and safe sex. Juniper had only recently acquired her first real boyfriend.