Solomon's Oak (31 page)

“Where’s my flashlight?” Joseph asked.

“I could have drowned and you’re worried about some cheesy flashlight?”

“It’s a cop flashlight. Expensive.”

“I think it went in the lake.”

“You can buy me a new one with that hefty allowance you get.”

“What am I supposed to do?” she said. “I’m all wet!”

“There’s clean towels in the bathroom,” Joseph said.

“Go dry yourself off,” Glory said. “Be sure you leave your muddy boots outside.”

“Duh, I do know a few manners.”

“That you somehow manage to forget at school,” Glory said.

The girl ran ahead of them, pretend-screaming, both dogs racing behind her. Glory and Joseph waited until she was out of sight before they started laughing. Joseph noticed how Glory threw her head back when she was in the thick of it. Unless they had a couple of martinis under their belt, people didn’t usually let go like that. He made himself a promise to make her laugh like that once a day until he left.

“You going to let her learn all her lessons that way?” he asked.

“It did seem to work.”

“Mud’s soft, but water can be tricky. We have all these arroyos in New Mexico. Places hikers are advised to stay out of. It’s
importante
because even on the hottest day of the year rain can come out of nowhere, flooding the gully, carrying people off like that.” He snapped his fingers.

Just before he served the salad, Joseph took a pill and a half. He quickly folded a piece of sourdough bread in half and ate it. He wanted to enjoy the dinner instead of grimacing his way through it hoping that his expression passed for a smile.

“My grandfather planed these floorboards by hand,” he said as he passed vinaigrette dressing to Glory. “I’m sorry I can’t pull them up for you, but maybe Lorna knows someone who can.”

“It’s weird when you think about it,” Juniper said. She was wearing a pair of Joseph’s sweatpants and a flannel shirt. Her wet clothes hung outside on the porch rail.

“What’s weird?”

“How many feet walked here in the cabin’s lifetime.”

“You’re right,” Joseph said, as a flash of memory of himself lying in bed, lantern light flickering in the dark while his grandmother tidied up, came into his head. Afraid he’d miss something, he fought going to sleep but never won. Tonight’s meal was the last one he would cook on the propane stove. A few of the old windows might be salvageable. Without people inside, all there was to the cabin was parts.

“It must be hard to say good-bye to all this,” Glory said, looking around. She took a sip of wine.

The three of them at Joseph’s table reminded him of the sepia photos in the Woodpecker Café. That moment in time became history because a photographer had collected it. His fingers itched to get his camera, but he thought Glory would find it rude, so he didn’t. He turned off the stove and lifted the lid on the Dutch oven.

“Soup, or is it stew?” Glory said, putting down her glass. “Whichever that is, it smells wonderful.”

“Technically it is soup, but it’s a lot more than that. This is posole. My grandmother learned it from her grandmother and so on, all the way back to”—he looked at Juniper—“pre-Columbian times.”

Juniper sighed. “I thought we were having spaghetti.”

“We can have spaghetti any old time,” Glory said. “Isn’t it exciting to try something new?”

“No. I was all ready for spaghetti.”

Joseph ladled the posole into the bowls. The scent of chicken stock, pork, cilantro, and oregano filled the room. Underneath all that, the distinct scent of cumin came through. He handed the full bowls to Glory, who set them at their places. “Every family has its own recipe,” he said. “
Cacahuazintle
.”

“Gesundheit!” Juniper said.

“Juniper,” Glory said, “that’s rude.”

“That’s all right,” Joseph said. “It’s a funny-sounding word.”

“What’s it mean?” Glory asked.

“Dried white corn for making nixtamal, fresh masa. Depending on the cook, posole can be different every time. I like onions and pork in mine, radishes and sliced avocado for toppings. But you can make it meatless,
blanca posole
, or with canned hominy, although I don’t recommend it.”

There was a moment of silence, an awkwardness they each realized at the same time. Here they were eating dinner together, laughing, making inside jokes as if they were connecting to each other’s life forever, yet how little they truly knew of each other. No wonder his family went so overboard on food, Joseph thought. Good food shared with new friends created an opportunity to hear everyone’s stories.

Glory broke the silence when she lifted her wineglass. “I don’t really say grace, but how about we toast?”

“To what?” Juniper said. “My wet clothes, or this dinner not being spaghetti?”

Joseph lifted his water glass. “What else? To
amistad
. To friendship.”

BEGINNING PHOTOGRAPHY

FEBRUARY 2004

BY JUNIPER McGUIRE

All Michelangelo needed to sculpt
La Pietà
was a chisel and a rock. Supposedly, he was inspired by Dante’s
Divine Comedy
(1308–1321). Who spends thirteen years writing a poem? In that amount of time a person can go from birth to teenage, from teenage to the most fun years of your life, and from getting old to dead. I have not read the poem, but it is One of the Greatest Works of Literature, which means that it is going to be Really Hard to Understand and Probably Very Boring and something I will be Required to Read and Pass a Test On before I am released from this netherworld, this infernal region, this abyss, this damnation, this perdition, this fire-and-brimstone, Hades,
Sheol
,
Acheron
,
Gehenna
, or
Tophet
that is home school.

All I can say is thank God for Wiki for “interpretations” of what
La Pietà
stands for, because when you are in high school you can’t just think something is beautiful because it’s super realistic. Oh, no. Art and literature and music have to mean more than one thing in order to be great. One theory is that what the
Pietà
means is that
inside
the Mary part of the statue is actually a
young mother
looking down at her
baby
Jesus. This means that only smart people looking at the statue can see the truth, which is that the Jesus in her arms is a dead grown-up because he has already been crucified by John, Mark, Luke, and Pilate. Why can’t Jesus’ mother see that? Because Mary’s lost it. Her son is dead and she can only stand to see her baby the way he once was, safe in her arms, full of warm milk and sleepy. Reality—she just can’t go there.

Think about that idea for a while, and then try going back to regular life. Things you thought were pretty, such as a horse eating its alfalfa or how yellow daffodils are growing around a white farmhouse will never be just flowers. After Mary and Jesus and Michelangelo, get ready for the worst headache ever. Because from that moment forward not only will you wonder how other people see the things you see, including basic stuff like the color blue, but it will occur to you that maybe you’re the one seeing things wrong. How is that art? It’s just messed up.

If everything in the world means more than one thing, how do you ever know what is what?

And what if you don’t?

Then all the true stories could be false. The world might not be the planet we think it is. Earth could just as easily be a tennis ball being chased by some giant random dog, running ultra-slo-mo across a gassy galaxy that is really only someone else’s side yard, a part of something so big you can’t take it all in.

This is why when you go to take a photograph, the first thing you learn isn’t how the camera works. It’s about accepting that the picture you end up with will never be the picture you were trying to take. Right off you have to be okay with that or don’t bother. Like say you were taking a picture of a rose in bloom and just when you press the shutter, a bee flies into the picture. What’s your picture of then?

JTM: I see you working your brain muscles here! Good work. Keep it up and you may get through high school yet. —JCV

Chapter 9

GLORY

The morning of February 27 Glory sat in her closet with the door open, staring at her unmade bed. Tomorrow was the one-year anniversary of Dan’s death. He had slept next to her for almost twenty years, and counting the days he was in the hospital up to now, she had now slept without him for 367 days. Last night she’d had a dream about Joseph Vigil that would have made Lorna Candelaria blush. A person could chalk that up to the body crying out to have its needs met, but Glory had to admit Joseph Vigil made her feel—comfortable? He was a good sport when Dodge tried to hump his leg, just pushed the dog away and continued talking. He worried about a dusty old rug and asked for help with it. It wasn’t so much that he said surprising things, because he was a quiet man, but in his photographs he was clearly saying much more than could be spoken aloud. She had known him four months and he was leaving in two and suddenly that bothered her.

Dan had been her world. She shut her eyes and shook her head.

Out of nowhere, Edsel leapt up on her, causing empty hangers to crash and several to hit her in the head. She wanted to scream at him, but the poor dog only wanted his breakfast. Her outdoor animals had ESP as to when she woke up. Cricket began that panicked neighing she did every morning as if the dreaded day had come when that flake of hay would fail to materialize. Her last-chance dogs had learned too well that life wasn’t always fair. They waited as excitedly for breakfast as the horses, but if the food didn’t arrive, they’d let the matter go.

Juniper liked to make her own breakfast, sickly sweet cereal and gobs of real butter on dark toast. Was Glory supposed to force-feed her steel-cut oats? Quiz her on the food pyramid? Being a mother to a daughter was like boot camp. Some days, like today, even though the pangs of hunger torqued Glory’s own stomach, she could not bring herself to swallow food. Only coffee.

With her robe tied tight around her and her feet in rain boots, she fed the animals, checked on Nanny, the goat that would soon deliver, made coffee, and took a cup back to her bedroom closet. She shoved the fallen hangers aside. By now she had a comfortable pillow in here and an old quilt to wrap herself in. She sat down next to the box of Dan’s clothes and put her arm around it. In several places the cardboard was smooth from her rubbing it.

“Explain something it to me,” she said, as if Dan could somehow hear her. “You wouldn’t let so much as a bookend go out of your workshop unless it was sanded to perfection, buffed with beeswax, and had your signature on the backside. You couldn’t tolerate a dripping faucet for a minute before you got out the wrenches. So why couldn’t you take care of yourself like you did everything else? Look at what you left behind for me to do! How am I supposed to manage? I swear, if it wasn’t for the animals, I’d set fire to the place and be done with it.”

She pictured blue flames, white at the core, devouring the shingles, blowing out the sticky windows, blackening the bathtub with its rusting faucets and chipped enamel revealing crumbling cast iron. The cobbled-together fence that blew down once a week? Let it blaze. In her mind, what was left when the smoke cleared was empty land ready to launch someone else’s dream, the same as Joseph’s cabin. Except for the chapel. Oh, the beams might scorch, but oak that thick was slow to burn, and the stones used in the walls would take one look at the fire and say, “Please. Can’t you do any better than that?”

When Dan died, Glory’s plan had been to stay here until she drew her last breath. Why? She woke up every day in a lumpy, old bed. Sure, she’d made love with her husband there, shared twenty years of dreams, but now she slept with a dog that wanted his breakfast by eight
A.M.
and didn’t mind walking across her face to let her know he was hungry. Every morning she got up and walked barefoot down the hallway and what did she see? The oak tree, first thing, from her kitchen window. And what good had it done her? After a few minutes of musing that over, she made coffee and waited for Joseph to drive up in the yellow Toyota and trudged through another day. The reward? Witnessing the look on Juniper’s face when Joseph brought her something, even if it was just a library book on Ansel Adams.

But Joseph was leaving in April, and soon it would be March. Thirty-one days and he would be gone.

Lorna had assured Glory that when a year had passed, she would look at the world with new eyes. That she’d find strength in herself to go on. That she was young; another life was waiting for her out in the world. Caroline Proctor said that missing Dan would always hurt, but life didn’t give a hoot about grief. It went spooling along; that was how foster children had to look at things or they’d curl up and die. Halle thought Glory should sign up with eHarmony and find another husband. She’d left three messages this week alone, and Glory had ignored every single one of them.

Hey, Sis. How about meeting me at Macy’s? They’re having a trunk show …

Glory? Any chance I can hire you to make a cake for Bart’s secretary? She loves anything Juicy Couture. I can e-mail you a picture of her handbag.

Have you used your gym gift certificate yet? Call me back.

Before Glory lost her nerve, she telephoned Lorna.

“Feel like lunch tomorrow?” Glory asked when she picked up.

“So long as I don’t have to make it.”

“I could pick up some Chinese food. Moo shu or fried rice?”

“Either sounds good. Don’t forget the fortune cookies. Ask for extras.”

“I thought you were on that diabetes diet now.”

“A cookie or two isn’t going to kill me. In fact, get some of those almond cookies, too. For Juan. You know how he loves them.”

Glory knew that one cookie would turn into three or four cookies, and that five cookies would lead to ten. But why not eat what you love and die early? Hadn’t life proven itself fickle and sour as all get-out? One minute Lorna would be there and then the next she wouldn’t. No more taking orders from smart-mouthed kids. A chance to put her feet up for good. Glory would lose her corporeal friend, but in all other ways Lorna would be with her, just as Dan was. That feeling of him alongside. Maybe this was how life was supposed to work. People came into your life and made you fall in love with them so that when they left, you never stopped appreciating them.

“See you around noon tomorrow,” Glory said, and hung up. She wondered why she didn’t hear the noise of Juniper’s morning shower. Usually she wouldn’t get out of it until Glory knocked on the bathroom door, reminding her it took twenty minutes before the water heater filled back up and other people wanted to take showers, too. She tapped, then opened the door to Juniper’s room. The girl was sprawled across her bed, snoring, Cadillac beside her. He thumped his tail hopefully.

“Go eat your breakfast,” she said, and shooed him outdoors where his kennel was open, his dish inside.

The clock was on its side on the floor. Juniper was supposed to set her alarm for eight and to be ready for homeschooling by nine. Glory did the morning farm chores; Juniper tended to the evening feedings. Joseph promised to show Glory how to manage homeschooling before he left so that she could step into the role comfortably. Or uncomfortably. One thing was for certain: Juniper was not returning to public school.

“Hey, Juniper, get up and dressed,” Glory said, giving her shoulder a shake. “Joseph will be here any minute.”