Kissing Arizona (9 page)

‘Did Lois complain to you about him?'

‘Never. She had her pride. She had her church. And he gave her the chance to be who she wanted to be, the boss-lady who told everybody else what to do.'

‘That's what turned her on, huh?'

‘Yes. Well, she was good at it, I guess we all like doing what we're good at.'

‘So you think things were basically OK between them except for their son?'

‘And if they argued for a hundred years,' Rosa Torres said, ‘they would never have agreed about Tom.'

‘OK. I know you don't
know
whether he killed her, but I'm going to ask the question in a different way: in your opinion,
could
he have done it?'

Rosa watched the ceiling fan for a few seconds. ‘I suppose it's possible.' Her hard-worked brown hands found each other and nested in her lap. ‘Killing himself afterwards, though –' she gave a couple of tiny thoughtful shakes to her head – ‘I can't imagine Frank doing that.'

‘I'm very grateful to you for coming in, Rosa,' Sarah told her when they said goodbye. ‘Will you keep my card and call me if you think of anything else? You've helped me understand a lot.'

‘Well, like it or not,' Rosa said, ‘housekeepers know where all the dirt is.'

Finally, at a few minutes before five on Tuesday afternoon, Sarah hit ‘save' and added her reports to the Cooper case file. The minute the screen faded she started the multitasking that always closed her day now, neatening her desk with one hand while she dialed her house with the other, to ask her mother if she should stop at a store for anything. Aggie drove in from Marana every weekday afternoon to be at Sarah's house in midtown when Denny got home from school, to share a snack while Denny vented the first windy blast of grade-school angst or triumph. Then Denny would start on her interminable fifth-grade homework and her grandmother would start dinner. Aggie was filling holes in Sarah's budget, too, buying school supplies and clothes. They were in league to rescue Denny, the child Sarah's drug-befuddled sister had left stranded four months ago, when her addictions claimed her.

The arrangement had some hidden costs Sarah hadn't anticipated. Normally a neatness freak, now she bit her tongue as she watched her house sliding out of her control. She told herself she always found the mixing spoons eventually and it didn't really matter how anybody stacked the dishwasher. She wasn't overdrawn at the bank today and Denny was getting through fifth grade.
Close enough, call it success.
It helped that Denny was bright and able and determined to make it work.

It also helped that Sarah's new boyfriend was steadfast and handy with a hammer. Aggie had said more than once that she thought Will Dietz ‘looked like a keeper'.

Which he certainly did if only she had space for him. But having already shoehorned Denny into her little duplex, it was all she could do to make space at the table for Will when he came to hang out for a couple of hours ahead of his night shift. Dietz's other obstacle was Denny, whose default reaction to boyfriends was that they should all be drowned in a sack. In an effort to show her that not all boyfriends were like the ones her mother had brought home, lately he was teaching her the many uses of his Dremmel tool. He had noticed, he told Sarah, that Denny liked to learn useful skills.

‘Burke's.' There he was now, answering the phone like one of the family. ‘Aggie got feeling kind of rocky about an hour ago,' he told Sarah. ‘She's been resting on your bed for a while, and as soon as she feels a little better I'm going to drive her home. She thinks she might have a touch of the flu.'

‘Bummer. What about dinner, you want me to pick up some deli?'

‘Fret not,' he said, sounding amused. ‘Denny remembered there's a big can of chili in the cupboard and we're baking some potatoes to go under it.'

‘Now there's a creative menu. You two are turning into the little kitchen crew that could.'

‘Hell on wheels with a can opener. You on your way?'

‘I am. Be there in fifteen minutes, if the traffic gods are smiling.'

They weren't smiling much in midtown Tucson at five o'clock. But Sarah knew all the side streets that kept her out of major bottlenecks, so she was two minutes ahead of her ETA, thinking about a green salad to offset the chili, when she pulled under the carport.

Denny was frowning at her math problems under the light. Dietz had thought of green salad on his own and was standing at the end of the kitchen counter, wearing her big red apron over his clean shirt as he diced a cucumber on the cutting board. His shift with the night detectives ran from ten to six. Sarah sometimes worried that the chores he took on at her house left him chronically short of sleep, but he claimed he did fine on five or six hours.

Sarah walked into her bedroom to change and found Aggie lying under a quilt, looking grey-faced and exhausted. Her try at a cheerful hello came out a gravelly croak.

‘Some bug's gone and bit you, huh?' Sarah locked her weapon and badge in the wall cupboard by the door, walked over and sat on the bed. ‘I'm so sorry. Are you feverish?' She put a hand on her mother's forehead and felt the first stirring of alarm. Aggie was clammy and cold.

‘Will says he'll drive me home. I'll leave my car here and Sam can give me a ride back tomorrow.' Aggie swung her legs over the side of the bed, but then sat still, staring dully at the floor, looking beat.

‘I wonder if you should go home,' Sarah said. ‘I'd kind of like to keep you here and feed you chicken soup.'

‘No, no. You're crowded enough. I'll be fine.' She stood up and tottered toward the bedroom door. Passing the mirror, she smoothed her hair and made a face. ‘God, I do look like death warmed over, don't I? It's not as bad as it looks, honest.'

Dietz put down the knife and watched Aggie walk out of the bedroom. ‘You feeling any better?'

‘Some,' Aggie said, not sounding any better at all. ‘Listen, though, if I have to leave my car here, maybe it ought to go in front of Sarah's . . .' The last three words came out slurred, on three deepening notes like a hand-cranked phonograph winding down . . .

Luckily, Dietz was quick. He got across the room in time to help Sarah catch her mother as she fell.

FOUR

T
he second time Victoria Nuñez set out for Tucson, she was holding hands with a thin young man named Jaime Sandoval. He was nineteen years old, with glossy black hair, a good start on a mustache and a macho swagger.

She had found him by accident, when she walked past a glass-blower's workshop and happened to glance inside. Watching the way he fetched a glowing nugget of molten glass to his uncle's blowpipe, she decided he might be the one she was looking for. He was taller than the other apprentices and more suave in his movements; he looked about ready to take his place on the pipe and start making the blue-rimmed glasses himself. His confident posture when he transferred his dangerous dollop to the blower's pipe, and the resentful way the older man watched his work, told Vicky that this apprentice was not perfectly adjusted to waiting his turn at the glass factory.

She watched while he made his next trip from furnace to pipe, making certain she was standing in his line of sight. During the short interval after he poured out the bubbling mixture, while he stood waiting to see if he was needed to catch any overflowing drops, Vicky brushed a stray hair back from her eyes with a gesture that let her sleeve fall back from her bare arm. The apprentice looked across his uncle's glowing pipe and their eyes met.

That night during her clockwise promenade around the plaza with her cousins, she saw the handsome apprentice walking counterclockwise, and smiled. As their paths converged, he smiled back. By their third circuit he had reversed course and was walking with Victoria, laughing and taunting, while the cousins trailed behind.

His name was Jaime Sandoval. He knew very little English and Vicky's Spanish verbs wandered uncertainly amongst the tenses. But they had understood most of what they needed to know about each other during their first exchange of glances, and a band was playing, so with smiling and shrugging and this glorious flirtation of the eyes, who needed a lot of talk?

Jaime knew who she was, he had heard about the ‘Americana' newly arrived from Tucson. During a couple of nights of strolling, while her mother and aunts looked on from a nearby bench, he told her how excited he was to be near her. He said she was not like the local girls.

‘You are very different,' he said, ‘
muy interesante
.' She was bolder and more direct than the girls he usually walked with. He asked her, ‘Is this how girls behave in
el norte?
' Soon he was talking about how much more
interesante
this friendship could become if they were ever alone.

What a dork, Vicky thought. But she looked up at him through her eyelashes like girls in the movies, and said, ‘Perhaps when we meet again you will tell me a little more about yourself.'

He used two circuits of their next stroll for an intensely boring recital of his family relationships and his promised future in the glass factory. ‘Unless, of course,' he added, making fun of it but not entirely disavowing the dream, ‘Hollywood calls me first.'

Vicky told him he was better looking than many of the boys she knew in Tucson who were studying for an acting career. Actually most of the boys she knew in Tucson were studying the hand signals of the gang they were trying to get into, but the story she told worked better for Jaime. On their third time around the
paseo
Jaime began to beg for her mercy – he was going mad, he said, with the pain of his longing for her. He told her she was doing great damage to his poor
corazon.

Vicky pointed out that her mother and both her aunts were nearby, and so very vigilant. But perhaps, at the darkest point in the plaza, by that biggest azalea bush . . . they ducked behind the blossoms for a couple of passionate kisses. Jaime was ready to consummate his love right there on the cold stones beside the bandshell, but Vicky pulled him back into the light before Marisol and Yolanda, deep in conversation about the cruelties of Yolanda's employer, had noticed their absence.

Their brief embraces so consumed Jaime's attention that the next morning he nearly incinerated his employer, with an awkward spill that barely missed the old man's foot. A delighted huddle of tourists enjoyed watching as Jaime's boss spat rage at this worthless
sonso
, this quivering
idiota.

By the next night's
paseo
, Jaime protested that he had suffered enough. He had declared his love, should he not be granted a little consolation? They should sit down and talk a while, Vicky said, she was very fatigued after a hard day's work. She chose a bench under a bright light in full view of their elders, where they held an intense and candid conversation, mostly whispered. Her most urgently repeated question was, ‘
Comprendes?
' She wanted to be sure he understood what to buy at the drug store. If what he really wanted was trips to heaven – his expression told her he understood that part – he must be sure to buy the right things at the drug store.

Even so, it was not an easy conversation. ‘
Que?
' he kept saying, ‘
Que necesitas?
'

She was not experienced at seduction. Her suitor was equally naive and, she realized with dismay, a little slow. Then there was the language barrier, and she had to keep smiling and shaking her head the whole time so Marisol, on a nearby bench, would think she was still flirting and protesting instead of calling the shots.

By the time Marisol began signaling time to go home, Vicky was so exhausted she jumped up at once, cried, ‘
Adios
!' and trotted to her mother's side pretending to be too shy to look back. But she was pretty sure, by then, that the glass-blower's apprentice understood that the price of the prize he sought was Vicky's brand of birth control pills. (Actually she'd never had a brand before, but she had researched the subject carefully on the Internet before she left Tucson. School librarians would have been amazed to see how well Vicky could work a computer when the information she was after was important to her.)

There was still a lot to arrange. The one small suitcase that held everything she owned was on the floor under her end of the cot. Hiding the pills, swallowing one daily without Marisol noticing, and keeping them out of the reach of her many small, marauding cousins was a constant worry. But all that, she knew, was going to seem like a walk in the park when the time came to get her mother to agree she was old enough, and knew Jaime well enough, to go on a date alone with him. The house they were living in was crowded with people and no part of it was their own. A decent argument was out of the question. And she dared not stage a rebellion until she was sure she had Jaime ready to go.

In the end the laundry came to her rescue. Keeping their few clothes clean and managing an occasional change of bedding was one of the hardest chores for the poor women of Ajijic. Dirty laundry had to be carried to the lake in baskets, soaped and rinsed on the boulders there, hauled home wet and hung up on lines in the yard. It was back-breaking labor, nearly impossible to face after a day at the pottery, groaned over as the most unwelcome task of their Sundays off. There were laundromats in the town but they rarely had coins to spare for them.

Marisol had been doing her share of the laundry since her first week in Yolanda's house. Vicky went along to help when her mother insisted, constantly honing her insults about the ‘high-tech sanitation system' in Marisol's home town. But as soon as she had her birth control pills, she began volunteering to do the family laundry by herself. Before long, she was offering to do some for Tía Yolanda too, ‘since I'm going,' she'd say, and her mother was proud when Yolanda said, ‘Victoria is growing up, no?'