Mourning Gloria Page 5

  “Well, it could be worse,” Hark said in a resigned tone. “It could be another guy. Where Ruby’s concerned, I’ll take what I can get.”

  We sat there for a few companionable minutes, indulging in our feelings of mutual neglect. Then Ruby brought Grace over and put her on Hark’s lap, and Caitlin came over and asked me if she could stay overnight.

  “Have Amy and Kate invited you,” I asked in my sternest momtone, “or have you invited yourself?”

  Amy was using a pair of tongs to turn foil-wrapped ears of sweet corn on the grill. Over her shoulder, she said, “We invited her. Say yes, China. You know how Caitie loves to read stories to Grace. They’re working on The Velveteen Rabbit.”

  Amy is a younger edition of her mother, tall, slender, freckled. When I first met her, she looked and dressed like a punk rocker, but now that she’s a mom, the wild child seems to be settling down.

  “Say yes, China,” Kate commanded, putting a platter of hamburgers and hot dogs on the table. “We love to have her.”

  Kate Rodriguez owns an accounting service and does the taxes for many local firms, including Ruby’s and mine. She is tall and sturdily built, with a quiet dark-haired beauty passed down to her by generations of Mexican ancestors. She and Amy make a striking couple.

  “Pretty please, Aunt China?” Caitie wheedled, leaning on the arm of my chair. “Kate says they’ll bring me home in the morning.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But no solo babysitting until she’s at least thirteen,” I reminded Kate, in case they were planning to go out later. Caitlin may think she’s old and wise enough to cope with baby emergencies, but I don’t.

  “Boo-hoo,” Caitie pouted.

  “Your mom makes the rules,” Amy said to Caitlin. “But when you’re thirteen, you’re hired.” She took Grace from the long-suffering Hark. “Come on, cutie. Time for a change.”

  “You said it,” Hark muttered, peering down at his lap.

  A light, cheerful voice interrupted my response. “Hi, everybody! Sorry I’m late. I stayed at the farm to help Donna feed the livestock—and pick a few strawberries.”

  I turned to see Jessica Nelson, the summer intern at the Enterprise. She’s in her early twenties, a lively young woman with boy-cut blond hair and freckles across an upturned nose. Cute and sassy, she has an easygoing manner and a soft Southern voice that’s at odds with the watchful, intent expression in her brown eyes. On the surface, she’s just another young journalism student learning a profession, but I have the feeling that there’s a great deal more to her than that. Maybe it’s because I sometimes see myself in her—myself when I was her age, unwilling to take no for an answer and eager to get on with the pressing business of becoming the best and brightest lawyer the world had ever seen.

  “Hey, Jessica,” Amy said. “You brought the strawberries for the shortcake?”

  “Ta-da!” Jessica said, pulling the cover off a plastic container and holding it out. “Fresh out of the field. And I’ve brought real whipped cream! None of that squirt-out-of-a-can stuff.”

  “Milked the cow, too, did you?” Hark inquired dryly, and Jessica stuck her tongue out at him.

  He grinned. “Just checking. Some folks carry this locavore business to extremes, y’know. Figured maybe you were one of those.”

  Kate picked up a fork and rapped a glass. “Time to fill plates, everybody. Food’s getting cold.”

  Caitlin came over and took my hand excitedly, tugging me out of my chair. “Come on, Aunt China, I’m starving. Let’s eat!”

  We gathered around the picnic table, helped ourselves to good food, ate and talked, and talked and ate some more. The corn (picked the day before, bought at this morning’s market) was delicious, slathered with herbed butter, wrapped in foil, and grilled. The hamburgers and hot dogs and toasted buns were summertime perfect. The potato salad was just the way your grandmother always made it, and Jessica’s fresh-picked strawberries, heaped on homemade shortcakes and topped with real whipped cream, tasted as good as they looked. After that, none of us could eat another bite.

  Hark and I took over at that point, and the two of us and Caitlin managed the kitchen cleanup—only fair, since the others had done the cooking. When we finished, we all sat around for a while, talking idly, until Ruby announced that she and Hark were going dancing at the Long Shot Saloon (which was why she was wearing her twirly dance skirt and cowgirl boots). I looked at my watch and discovered that it was after nine. I gave Caitie a hug, said my thanks and good-byes, and followed Hark and Ruby to our cars.

  Ruby paused beside Hark’s old green Subaru. “Want to go out to the Long Shot with us?” She grinned. “I’m sure you can find a cowboy or two to dance with.”

  “No cowboys for me,” I said, without regret. “I’m a married woman, remember? Anyway, I was up before dawn and out in the garden, not to mention working the market all morning and the shop the rest of the day. I’m heading for home, a bath, and bed. Have to feed the dog, too.” Caitie and I had gone straight to Amy’s after we stopped at the bank. Howard Cosell’s supper was going to be several hours late. I hoped he wouldn’t mind.

  “Don’t say we didn’t ask,” Ruby replied. “What time are you picking me up tomorrow evening?”

  “Is six okay?” I asked. “The meeting starts at six thirty.”

  “Sure. See you at six.” She waved good-bye and I got into my Toyota, turned the key in the ignition, and started for home, thinking that Howard was going to get his late dinner in less than twenty minutes.

  As things turned out, however, he was going to have to wait a couple of hours longer.

  Chapter Three

  Jessica Nelson

  Jessica stayed for a half hour after China and Ruby and Mr. Hibler left, drinking another glass of wine and enjoying the pleasant company of Amy and Kate. Then she said good night and drove home through the warm, starlit evening. Since January, she had been living in an older house on Santa Fe, a residential street in the hilly area north of campus, not far from the river. She’d be alone tonight, because Amanda, her current roommate, had gone camping with her boyfriend, which was just fine with Jessie. In fact, she had been looking forward to going home to an empty house, happily aware that it was hers for the entire week and that she could do whatever she pleased—invite people over, have a party, whatever. She probably wouldn’t, though. She had a few friends, but she was basically a loner. When she had time to spend at home, she’d rather be by herself.

  But the bottom-line truth was that Jessie didn’t think of any place as home. She and her twin sister Ginger had been Army brats. Their mom and dad had dragged them from one military post to another, until they used to joke that home was just a pillow on a bed, a closet for their clothes, and a shelf for their stuffed animals. Which had been okay, as long as she had Ginger, as long as they were a family.

  But then the unthinkable had happened. Ginger and their mother and father had died when their Georgia house burned ten years before. Jessie had escaped because she was on an overnight school trip, and when she got home, everything and everyone she loved was gone. She had mourned inconsolably, writing interminable entries in her journal, crying over photographs of herself and Ginger and Mom and Dad in happy times.

  But the happy times were all gone, vanished like the smoke from the killing fire. After a year, Jessie stopped writing in her journal, put the pictures away, and forced herself not to cry. It had been hard to stop grieving, but it had actually been a relief, she realized afterward. You couldn’t mourn forever, or blame yourself for being alive while all the people you loved were dead. You had to put the bad stuff behind you and get on with your life; that’s all there was to it. So she had tried. Unfortunately, all the willpower in the world couldn’t put an end to the fiery nightmares that woke her nearly every night, drenched in sweat and shaking with fear—the fear of being burned alive.

  After the funeral, Jess had gone to live with her grandmother—her mother’s mother—in a small town outside of Monroe, Louisiana
, where she had spent her last year of high school. That place was no longer home: Gram had died the previous summer and Jessie had sold the house to finance graduate school. There’d been no real homes in her college years, either, for she had moved from dorm to apartment and from one apartment to another, and finally to this house, which she rather liked because it was at the end of a dead-end street and had a large backyard where she and Amanda had planted a vegetable garden, although she was the one who took care of it. Unfortunately, there was Butch, who lived next door. She sighed. She might have to leave here, too, if the situation didn’t improve.

  But Jessie really did love Pecan Springs, had loved it from the moment she had arrived as a CTSU freshman. She was naturally athletic, thin and agile, with an abundance of physical energy, and she had enthusiastically flung herself into all the outdoor activities she could find time for—tubing on the Pecan River, sailing on Lake Travis, swimming at Barton Springs in Austin, hiking in the Hill Country. And since she was hungry for what she thought of as real culture, she indulged herself in everything the eclectic university community had to offer—plays, music, ballet, foreign films. She even went to most of the football and basketball games (that first year, anyway), since sports were a huge part of the campus culture.

  Turned out that she’d been hungry for real men, too—that is, for males who were older and more experienced than the local boys in that small Louisiana town. So she indulged herself in them, as well. Not promiscuously, of course, but with her usual intensity, her usual insatiable appetite for new adventures. And not for love or even for sex, either, although sex (in which Jessie indulged enthusiastically) was a bonus. She had gotten involved with a basketball player, and after that, with a graduate student from Nigeria, then with a Mexican national who worked at Mistletoe Creek Farm, and most recently, with a faculty member who had told her that he and his wife were separated and planning a divorce and that he was free.

  But it turned out that the separation was only temporary and divorce wasn’t in the picture and the guy wasn’t as free as he’d said he was. Anyway, things got uncomfortable when somebody told his wife that her husband was sleeping with one of his graduate students and she threatened to leave him. The good thing about it was that his wife didn’t know who the graduate student was—at least, Jessie didn’t think so. She had broken off the relationship anyway. She didn’t consider herself a terribly moral person, but she was no home-wrecker.

  Unfortunately, the guy couldn’t seem to get the message. She still had to see him at school and in a few other places, and he still called her, wanting them to get together “just to say good-bye.” That was out of the question, of course. As far as Jessie was concerned, when a relationship had to end, a clean, sharp break was the only way to do it. So she was moving on (the story of her life). In fact, she was thinking that maybe it was time to take a vow of chastity, at least for a while, and forget about guys. She could focus on her internship at the newspaper. She could pour herself into her work there, instead of being distracted by a relationship that could only cause her grief.

  And Jessie loved to pour herself into things. She was an intense sort of person, very Type A, and when she got excited about something, she really got excited. Working in a newspaper definitely suited her, although Pecan Springs wasn’t very big and the Enterprise was a kind of slowmotion place. So far, her most significant assignment had been covering the recent city council meeting, the one where the council unloaded on the chief of police for overspending the overtime pay budget. She was on the lookout for a real story, where she could practice the investigative journalism skills she was supposed to be developing. And she’d have to start looking for a job before long. She needed a story that would separate her from the rest of the competition, make her stand out. Make editors look twice at her work, let them know that she was worth hiring.

  Jessie parked her car in the drive, unlocked the back door, and went into the quiet kitchen, savoring the silence. No loud TV, no blaring music, no Amanda sprawled bulkily on the sofa or entertaining the (also bulky) boyfriend in her bedroom, their frenetic activity punctuated by the rhythmic banging of the bed against the wall. The silence was something to celebrate. Jessie went to the fridge, found the full bottle of cold Chablis she had left there (no Amanda to help herself), and poured a glass of wine to take out into the backyard, where she sat in the swing, looked up at the starry sky, and listened to the summer serenade of friendly crickets and cicadas.

  But not for long. She had been enjoying herself for only a few moments when she smelled Butch’s cigarette and heard the chink of his beer can hitting the fence on the other side of the straggly hedge. Her insides clenched and she felt the skin on her shoulders prickling with irritation and (she had to be honest here) apprehension. It was their creepy next-door neighbor, sitting on his back porch steps, not five yards away. Who rode a Harley as loud as a freight train and worked in a warehouse and always seemed to be holding a muttered conversation with himself. Whose weird friends dropped in at all hours of the night—or maybe they weren’t friends at all, but customers, like he was dealing, maybe. And who leered at Jessie through the hedge and had actually spied on her through her bedroom window, which was just across the driveway from his bedroom window, until she threatened him with the police if he ever did it again.

  But then she forgot to close her blinds one evening and he did it again. Steaming, Jessie was picking up the phone to call the police and file a complaint when Amanda asked her not to. The problem was that Butch’s mother (who lived in San Antonio) owned both houses, the place Butch lived in and the one Jessica and Amanda were renting. Their lease had expired in May and they were on a month-to-month and Amanda was afraid that if they complained to the police about Butch’s peeping, his mother would throw them out. (Of course, that was easy for Amanda to say. Butch wasn’t peeping at her, either because her bedroom was on the opposite side of the house, or because she was fifty pounds overweight. Or maybe because her boyfriend was even bigger than Butch.

  Jessie (by now almost as angry at Amanda as she was at Butch) had pointed out that sometimes window peeping escalated into stalking and other nasty stuff, and if anything, Butch’s mother ought to be glad that his problem was caught before it got him into serious trouble. Still, she had to admit that Amanda had a point about the month-to-month, and in the interests of good relations with her roommate and their landlady, she had reluctantly given in.

  But last week, she had caught Butch peeping again, watching her through the hedge as she lay in her bikini on a beach towel on the grass. And tonight, she could hear him muttering to himself and smell that infernal cigarette. He wasn’t doing anything she could legitimately complain about, at least not at the moment. He was . . . well, he was just being Butch. He was there, damn it.

  Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. The wind stirred, lifting the leaves, and the night sounds no longer seemed quite so comfortable and friendly. Jessie picked up her empty wineglass and went back inside, thinking angrily that life was too short for this kind of crap—for guys like Butch, watching her every move. She still had some of the money from the sale of Gram’s place. It wasn’t much, but enough for a couple of months’ rent in advance, and there was her share of the rent she and Amanda had paid in advance here, which she was supposed to get back when she moved out. And this time, she would find a place by herself, even if it cost more money. She had outgrown Amanda, definitely. Time for a clean break there.

  But that would have to wait until tomorrow, or next week, or maybe even longer than that. Tonight, right this minute, Jessie was unsettlingly aware that Butch knew that Amanda was gone. She was all alone in the last house on a dead-end street, with a nutcase for a neighbor.

  She shivered. Then, one after another, she went to each window, checked the lock, and drew the blind.

  Chapter Four

  Alcoholic beverages are a favorite means of altering moods. Take gin, for example. The word is an English abbreviation of genever,
the Dutch word for juniper, for the predominant flavor of this popular alcoholic drink is derived from juniper berries (Junipers communis). In Holland in the 1580s, British troops fighting in the Dutch War of Independence found a juniper-flavored spirit. They drank as much as they could to give themselves what they appreciatively called “Dutch courage.” Soon, gin was being consumed everywhere, at any time. For textile mill workers in northern France, for instance, a slug of gin in coffee (a “bistouille”) was a popular breakfast drink.

  In addition to the predominant juniper, gin may be flavored with citrus (lemon, lime, grapefruit, and bitter orange peel), as well as anise, angelica root and seed, orris root, licorice root, cinnamon, cubeb, savory, dragon eye, saffron, baobab, frankincense, coriander, nutmeg, and cassia bark.

  China Bayles

  “Mood-Altering Plants”

  Pecan Springs Enterprise

  McQuaid and the kids and I live twelve miles west of town, just off Limekiln Road. If you make the drive in daylight, there’s plenty of entertaining scenery: hillsides pocked with clumps of yellow-blooming prickly pear cactus and white prickly poppy; rocky ridges clad with dark green juniper and lacy mesquite; high limestone bluffs; clear, shallow creeks. White-tailed deer graze with cattle; roadrunners dart after lizards among the rocks; buzzards perch on the tops of trees and utility poles, waiting for the next roadkill.

  At night, though, unless there’s a bright moon, you can’t see a thing beyond the headlights of your vehicle. Along some stretches, rocky embankments fall steeply away into the blackness; along others, the trees close in like shadowy rows of sentinels. The road dips down, rises up, and twists and turns unexpectedly, like a snake slithering through a rock-strewn meadow. It’s treacherous when there’s ice on the road, and the low-water crossings can be deadly during rainstorms. (Turn around, don’t drown means just what it says.) In any season, the best way to stay out of trouble is to drive slow and be alert.