The Wilder Sisters (43 page)

“One slight snag,” the woman explained. “The El Paso to Mexico flight doesn’t leave until tomorrow morning.”

Which would mean she’d miss only day one of the meeting, the drinking-and-schmoozing party, announcements of agenda, nothing vital. “So find me a four-star hotel near the airport in El Paso,” Lily said. “It sounds doable.”

“I can get you a nice suite at the Hilton. What I can’t guarantee is the flight.”

“Why not?”

The travel agent sighed. “You’re talking Thanksgiving Eve, Lily. The most traveled day of the year. The flight’s overbooked as it is.”

“Can you get me a rental car?” Lily asked. “You’re going to drive from LA to Acapulco?”

“In this rain? Of course not. I want a one-way from LA to John Wayne.”

She reserved the car, and Lily, having decided to packed the day in, rolled her luggage happily to the Avis counter.
I ran into dead ends everywhere I turned
, she’d explain to Eric.
The rain was so bad I didn’t
dare
fly in it
. A transplant to this precipitation-terrified state, her boss would understand.

“Nobody takes off the last two weeks of the fiscal year,” he said, when she broached the subject of her December work schedule. “Especially somebody who misses an important conference.”

“Don’t try to make me feel guilty, Eric. We both know the only reason you only made it to Acapulco is because you left a week early so you could work on your tan. Besides, I met my yearly quota in October,” she said from her living room couch, among the purple throw pillows and what remained of the
Los Angeles Times
that Buddy hadn’t reduced to packing strips and strewn all over the car- pet—symptoms of postkennel syndrome, which could last for a maddening length of time.

“When you were on
leave
, I might add.”

She sighed into the receiver. “What difference does that make? My orders roll over like the dolphins at Sea World. Have I ever let you down? Reach into your memory banks for a moment and recall all those times I bailed your butt out, like flying to Denver when Ty blew it big time with Doctor Klein? Or how about wasting a whole day on the set of
ER
with
actors
just so our company name could appear in the credits? Seems like you have selective amnesia when it comes to my company loyalty.”

He did pause, she had to grant him that much. During the brief silence, Lily imagined that Eric had undergone a heart transplant, and now he was going to tell her he was not only giving her a raise but a fat bonus as well.

“It would make me look bad if you weren’t out there earning extra money for us.”

“It’s the holidays, Eric. No one’s working but elves.”

“Very funny, Wilder. You almost made me smile. No time off in the month of December unless you want to take off the rest of your career as well,” he said, and hung up the phone.

Fine, whatever. She’d kiss doctors’ stethoscopes, do whatever the munch-brain told her to, but she was filing this defeat away for later, ammunition for some larger battle. His attitude was just so much middle management posturing. From now until New Year’s Eve, Lily intended to behave like Santa with a platinum AmEx card. Then in January, let Eric go into a Prozac overdose regarding her expense account. A Shep Hallford adage Lily had often heard her during her growing-up years came to mind:
You mess with the bull, you get the horn
.

Lily opened her collection of pricey gourmet catalogues. In a matter of minutes she’d earmarked the pages, consulted her list, and sat there on her couch, dialing 800 number after 800 number. Nice wine for each surgeon, yes, at forty-five dollars a bottle, that wasn’t too shabby. Imported cigars for the smoker crowd, and Perugina chocolates for those who didn’t drink or smoke. Certainly, the overnight shipping rate would be fine with her. She arranged to have lunch catered to the radiology department at Cedars, and marked the date on her calendar so she could put in an appearance. She knew her surgeons. They didn’t want sales pitches and order sheets shoved in their

faces in December, they wanted a year-end party. Lily’s pet theory was that while the rest of the world was goofing off in high school, smoking pot, listening to the Eagles, trying to score in bed, their classmates destined to be doctors were busy studying. When college rolled around, and keg parties and driving all night to Palm Springs for spring break was the rage, premed students remained bolted to their desks. After graduation, when the partyers began making a living, fun was properly relegated to weekends; doctors, worn out from a decade and a half of shoulder to the wheel, suddenly realized what they’d missed out on, and from that point on, whenever pos- sible, jumbo-size party hats and confetti showers were de rigueur. Adolescence could be postponed, but no one escaped it. Some people even got permanently stuck there, like Philip Flynn.

Lily remembered quite clearly the afternoon she had seen him coming out of the Taos Inn, and it wasn’t because he’d been having lunch at Doc Martin’s, either. On his arm was a dark-haired woman, too tall and thin to be her sister. At the time Lily didn’t know who she was, only what she was doing, which was wrecking her sister’s marriage. She had called out to her brother-in-law, forcing him to speak to her. The woman looked away guiltily, then made the excuse that she needed to powder her nose. Lily waited for Philip’s explan- ation, praying it would make sense. “Please don’t tell your sister,” he’d begged. “It was a stupid mistake, a one-time thing. Promise me, Lily.”

Whether she felt beholden to him because he’d helped her get started in sales and showed her how to fine-tune her pitches, or be- cause at the time she and Rose weren’t speaking, it didn’t matter. Philip was right, the news would have ripped Rose apart. Lily had kept her word but Philip hadn’t. Two weeks later he’d been killed in the car wreck in that same part of Taos. Lily’s trips home had ac- complished a great deal: horseback riding, the rekindling of her love affair with Tres, the subsequent pain of him not calling, which she wasn’t quite ready to give up as a hopeless situation, and one other tidbit since the shopping day in Santa Fe. Lily now had a name to go along with the face of that tall brunette: Leah Donavan.

She didn’t know who to feel sorrier for, her sister or the vet. Lily couldn’t think of a thing to be gained by telling either one what she knew. This gloomy reverie served to remind her that once again, during the holiday season, she was partnerless. Lily always breathed a sigh

of relief when the last New Year’s Eve horn sounded, but just around the corner in February, Valentine’s Day waited—a smarmy, leering, obese cherub armed with painful arrows.

She chewed on her thumbnail until the French polish flaked off onto her tongue. A one-day-old manicure, ruined. At fourteen bucks plus tip, that amounted to nearly two bills per digit. Before her Buddy Guy sprawled with his legs arched out in front of and behind him on the rug, asleep, in a position Lily referred to as the “Viking long dog.” His lips were in a full shamus.

Lily clicked the television on to the channel that concentrated on Southern California news. The deeply tanned weatherman gesticu- lated madly at a map of the United States so grossly out of proportion so that California appeared twice the size of Texas. A slew of green swirls moved across the state, representing rain. Yes, it was raining. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to note that. Now that there was finally some weather to report, he was trying to look like a meteorologist, a term that always made Lily wonder why he wasn’t out in the middle of the desert, lying flat on his back looking up at the sky waiting to get hit by falling objects. She loved this channel. The an- chor people reminded her of the paper dolls Rose used to cut out of Mami’
s
women’s magazine,
McCall’s
.

It wasn’t that Lily minded the showers, she rather liked them. However, that day after day of downpour sometimes triggered her headaches, and migraine on top of dismal holiday mood was nothing to be encouraged. She fetched herself a Diet Coke in hopes that a jolt of caffeine would stave off the slight throb in her temple. As she stood in the middle of her tiny kitchen looking around at the white enamel cupboards, the fake granite countertops, the gleaming lino- leum she paid a housecleaning service to keep that way (paid them a fortune, due to Buddy’s distrustful nature and their willingness to work around it), it struck her that hers was forever a single per- son’s kitchen. The only family that could inhabit her condo and not bump into one another all day long would be a tribe of Lilliputians. The
Lilli
half of the word made her smile. Since it was too rainy to go riding, and shopping the crowded malls was out of the question, she went back to the couch to flop and watch more television, pulling the afghan up to her chin.

On screen a river of brown mud flowed through a seniors-only mobile-home park down at the beach. Massive old Cadillacs and Ford

LTDs stood in water up to their door handles. The car size Lily un- derstood. Driving the California freeway system was taking one’s life in one’s hands. A bigger car might feel like a tank amid all those subcompacts designed to get sixty miles to the gallon. Firemen pi- loted inflatable boats around in the mock river that was once a road, rescuing people. Lily squinted to see if she recognized any of the firemen. It occurred to her that if sewage overflows due to flooding threatened the trailer park, her yard might be in trouble, too.

Already her terra cotta flowerpots were overflowing. The tiny redwood deck was an inch under water. Her lawn, small enough to cut with a weed whacker, was where the real problem lay. Buddy Guy’s droppings were swelling up with rain, melting into the grass, creating an
E. coli
extravaganza. She wondered who picked up dog poop at Rancho Costa Plente. It didn’t seem like she ever saw anyone do it, but probably Shep did. Horse manure, dog manure; what was the difference? Poor old Shep. She wanted him to live forever, but from cases she’d seen on her job she understood he was making the right decision, letting himself wind down naturally rather than doing a bunch of pointless chemo and having his last earthly act consist of vomiting. She knew Rose would disagree:
If you can pray
, she’d say,
there’s always hope
. As if cancer trembled in the face of religion. Next door, her neighbors had strung their Christmas lights across the back fence that graced the top of the steeply terraced hillside. When Lily drove up Santiago Canyon Road, she could see blinking lights from a mile away. Mindless of the rain, they flashed continu- ally at a maniacal speed, redgreenwhitegoldblue. Her neighbors were fond of leaving the porch light on all night as well—a halogen monster so bright that from her living room Lily could read by it. She could have pulled the drapes shut had Buddy not recently done a number on them, leaving a ragged gap big enough for the lights to shine through. No, if Lily wanted darkness—and her throbbing head seemed to be pleading for it—she’d have to go upstairs, lie facedown, and put a pillow over her head. Oh, maybe this was just a sinus headache. She challenged herself to watch the lights for awhile, which seemed to blink at exactly the speed that made her blood vessels wonder:
Hasn’t it been a long time since we’ve had ourselves a king-hell migraine? Let’s consider it
. Her pills were in the

zipper pocket of her purse.

But wait. On the TV now, more firemen. Dressed in their smart

black uniforms with the yellow raincoats, asking for toy donations for needy children. Once a year people went soft-hearted, opened their wallets, all because of a date on the calender. How did they stave off guilt attacks the rest of the year?
Merry Christmas, baby. But only on this one day. After that, you’re on your own
.

From out of nowhere, a sob rose up and caught in her throat. “Tres Quintero,” she said out loud, rousing Buddy enough so that he opened one suspicious brown eye, “You broke my heart. Damn. I had totally forgotten I had one.”

He hadn’t called, hadn’t written, hadn’t even hinted that she could loan him some frequent flyer miles for a free ticket (she was up to 150,000 on United alone).
You think men can’t get along without you, Lily? News flash, here’s one guy who can
. All the time some doctor or another invited her to dinner. But fatal flaws—the one who had breath that could stop a war, the one who liked to ride horses but was cute only if you liked redheads, which Lily did not—prevented her from accepting. The only doctor who remotely appealed to her sat in his one-room cabin content without her. She flung a throw pillow at Buddy, who snapped at it, missed, cast her a baleful glance, and slunk into the downstairs bathroom to sleep.

Next to her on the couch the cordless phone began to trill. For a half-second, she let herself imagine it might be Tres. “Hello?”

“Little Bit,” her father said when she picked up, “you’re harder to get through to than a mule. Who you been jawing with on the phone? Some new boyfriend?”

She had turned off Call Forwarding to order the surgeon’s Christmas presents. “Just work stuff, Pop.” She sniffled.

“You don’t sound so good.”

“I’m the same as I ever was. Is it snowing there?”

“Nope, but a few weeks back we got a foot and half. It’s butt-cold, however, and rain’s predicted. Likely that
El Niño
I keep hearing about. Floods and famine ought to be along any minute, thank you, California.”

“Hey, you know what? I’m pretty sick of hearing everything blamed on California.
El Niño
didn’t start here. Take a look at the ocean down near the equator if you want to view
El Niño’s
birthplace. Incidentally, we’ve got rain like you wouldn’t believe. Up until a few years ago everybody called that ‘
el
weather.’ Tell me some good news.”

Her father laughed. “Well, I’m standing at my desk, looking out the

front window. The horses are all bunched up in the center of the arena, backs to one another. Even though I know they do it to keep warm, when they stand that way, I can’t help thinking they look like the petals of some giant old sunflower.”

Lily pictured the animals in her mind’s eye and knew exactly what he meant. “How’s Rose’s mare doing?”