The Secret of Everything

by O'Neal, Barbara

  The dog leaned against her ankle. “Hey, sweetie,” she said. Beneath the table, she knocked off her sandal and put a foot against his skinny ribs. Poor baby. He was shivering a little, even though it was a warm night. Her toes skidded over burrs. When her burger came, she fed him meat and cheese and a little bread, and most of her fries. He was surprisingly polite, and Tessa figured this wasn’t his first begging gig.

  She watched the man by the wall with apprehension. Rage radiated from him in red waves, heating the space around him until it was faintly uncomfortable against Tessa’s left arm. He smoked, exhaling blue clouds into the night with hard blows, his attention utterly focused on someone in the middle of the dancing, though it wasn’t clear who was the object of his fury.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Tessa could make out a few details—his hair was thick and black, long, tied back from hard cheekbones and a mouth that turned down at the corners. Fiercely handsome, like a coyote, but Tessa felt only repulsed. That radiating hatred began to make her feel faintly ill, and she was looking for the waitress when he abruptly straightened, tossed down his cigarette and ground it beneath his heel, then left, boot heels clicking on the stones of the alleyway. The eggplant softness of the gloaming swallowed him suddenly.

  “Creepy,” she said aloud. A shudder moved through the dog and into her foot. “One of the bad spirits, huh?” she said quietly to him. “You’re okay now. He’s gone.”

  “Sorry?” said a voice at her elbow.

  Startled, Tessa looked up at a different man, who had come over to her table, two beers in hand. “Um. Talking to myself.”

  “Sign of intelligence, they say.” He was a big man, with a rumbling voice. If the scary guy was a coyote, this one was an elk—tall, with muscular shoulders and thick dark hair. Not her type, but those thighs were something else. Solid. Enormous. Probably a mountain biker, she thought, bane of hiking trails the world over. Inwardly, she scowled.

  “I brought you this,” he said, offering her another Tecate with a lime wedge balanced on the top. “If it’s all right with your dog.”

  “My—? oh. Right. He’s not mine.”

  “Is that so.” His smile was very, very faint. And very, very sexy. As if the dog were a plant, he licked her foot.

  Tessa gestured toward the empty seat on the other side of the little table. “Please. Have a seat.”

  “Thanks.” He put one beer down in front of her, then wiped condensation off his fingers and held out his hand. “Vince Grasso.”

  “Tessa,” she said, but didn’t give her last name. “Are you a local?”

  “Born and raised,” he said, with slight sigh. “I left for a couple of decades, but here I am, back again. Where are you from?”

  “All over. My dad was a magician for Renaissance festivals, so we traveled.”

  He inclined his head, and his hair caught the light and shone, glossy as a pelt. “Now, that’s a new one. Did you like it?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “I liked the clothes, and the people were generally really great—smart and eccentric. But it got old, traveling around. Eventually, we settled in Santa Cruz.”

  “And now?”

  She took a sip of beer. It was a reasonable question, but she didn’t have an answer. “Now I lead tours for a small outdoor-travel company.”

  “Like bungee jumping and white-water adventures?”

  “No, not that adventurous. Mostly hiking, some rafting occasionally, and good food at the end of the day.”

  “Is there a tour here?”

  “There might be in the future. I’m exploring the possibilities.”

  He lifted his chin at her turquoise cast, resting on the table. “Is that how you broke your arm, on a tour?”

  She looked down at it. Thought of Lisa. “Yeah.”

  He took a sip of his own beer, as if waiting for her to add more. When she didn’t, he nodded. “Do you get lonely? Traveling all the time?” He held up a hand. “Sorry, that sounds like a bad line, but I meant it at face value. I’m not looking to take anybody home.”

  “That’s pretty forthright.”

  “Curse of the West, to say what you’re thinking.”

  Tessa raised her beer in a toast. “To straightforwardness.”

  He lifted his beer, too, and Tessa saw that he thought she was beautiful, and it felt good on so many, many levels.

  “So is it?” he asked. “Lonely?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s exciting. It’s like anything else—a mixed bag.” A ripple of memory—her bleeding foot, the deep water of the river—made her left eye twitch once, hard. “I’m not really sure I’m going to keep up with it, honestly.”

  A cell phone rang on his belt, and he made a face. “Sorry, I’m search and rescue. I’ve gotta answer.”

  She waved her hand. He stood up and barked hello into the phone. Tessa wanted to shoot his photo, the red light from the stage touching the edge of his jaw, his arm rivered with veins. His hands were enormous, graceful, beautiful, and she wanted to look at them more closely, shoot the fingernails, the scars, see the lines on his palms. She lifted her camera and looked through the viewfinder, captured a quick series.

  So she saw the moment he closed the phone and spied her looking at him through the camera. She zoomed in on his eyes, very brown, with the heavy black lashes of a buck. He stared directly at the camera and she clicked the shutter.

  “Do you mind?” she asked, lowering it.

  “No.” He tucked the phone into his pocket. “Unfortunately, I’ve gotta go to work.” He held out his hand. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  She reached for his hand, taking a mental snapshot of the taut, wide palm, and shook it, surprised to discover she was disappointed. “Maybe so.”

  “Are you—” He smiled regretfully. “Never mind. Enjoy your stay.” He lifted a hand and disappeared into the crowd.

  Tessa finished her beer, listening to the music. The dog slept on her foot. Yes, she thought, eyeing the nearly untouched beer the man had left behind. Sometimes hers was a lonely life.

  Eventually the dog got up, licked her hand in gratitude, and slipped out. She could see now that he was a pup, not much more than five or six months, ragged and dirty, maybe a border collie mix of some kind. From somewhere came a blessing for dogs, a prayer to St. Francis. “Bless that little dog,” she whispered. Take care, little one.

  She took her cue and headed back to the hotel. It was almost entirely dark, and as she moved through the plaza, she heard a woman weeping and weeping.

  Although she was not superstitious, she couldn’t help hurrying a little, as something rushed up the back of her neck. She was glad to get to her room and lock the door.

  100 BREAKFASTS CAFÉ MENU

  Breakfast #3

  Hearty Oatmeal: Whole-grain oats cooked just for you, the slow way, served with cream and our own thick-sliced raisin bread slathered with butter. Additions available: raisins, dates, pecans, walnuts, berries (in season only). Try it with milk and a pot of hot tea.

  HEARTY OATMEAL

  1 cup water

  ¼ cup raisins

  Dash of kosher salt

  ½ cup old-fashioned oats (never, never, never use the quick-cooking kind!)

  Cream, honey or brown sugar, and butter for serving

  2 slices of thick-sliced bread of your choice

  Put the water, raisins, and salt in a small heavyweight saucepan and bring to a strong boil. Add oats, stir, and turn heat down to medium. Cook for 4-5 minutes, stirring regularly. Remove from heat, cover, and put the bread in to toast. Serve with whole cream, butter, and honey or brown sugar.

  THREE

  Tessa awakened very early. For a long moment she hung between worlds, wondering where she was. One of the side effects of traveling for a living.

  Birds chirped somewhere. The air was light and dry. She opened one eye and saw the kiva fireplace in the corner, the elegant, worm-marked vigas in the ceiling. Oh, yes, New Mexico. />
  Wrapped in a sweater to stave off the sharp morning air, she used the coffeemaker to boil water and carried a cup of tea out to the balcony overlooking the plaza. Again that soft sweetness rushed through her—here I am!—and she sipped the sweet, milky brew until her brain woke up. It never took very long—she was very much a morning person, just like her father. Even as a teenager, she had awakened automatically by six and fallen dead asleep by ten over homework or—more likely—a novel. Healthy, wealthy, and wise, as good old Ben Franklin said.

  She fired up her laptop and read over the notes she’d compiled for the town, mulling over her plans for the day. The farmers’ market would take place in the plaza, and there were already a few early arrivals trailing into the area, carrying tents and tables. Of course she’d spend some time exploring that, shooting some photos, offering it to her boss as a possible feature of the tour.

  She also wanted to find the church, which was a little to the north of the plaza itself. It was the first thing that had been built here, erected in 1632 by Spanish missionaries. They had been slaughtered in an Indian uprising a decade later, and the Spanish left it alone for twenty years or more. The Indians used the church to house animals, mainly the merino sheep the missionaries had brought with them, and learned to weave the long, elegant wool.

  When the Spanish returned, they quelled the Indians and built the plaza around the tree—as Tessa had suspected. It couldn’t possibly be the same tree, could it? Did a cottonwood live to be almost four hundred years old? She put her notes down and admired it once again. In the early quiet, its leaves clattered lightly in a soft breeze, and the deeply patterned bark caught only the gray notes of dawn, like a rubbing with a very hard pencil.

  In sudden decision, she gulped the last of her tea, scrambled into some jeans and a T-shirt, and headed down to shoot the sunrise as it crept into the plaza.

  Just as she emerged from the hotel, the first fingers of sunlight tipped over the roofs at the eastern edge of the plaza. The light was a delicate pale butter, washing the ruddy color of the adobe to soft peach, hazing the edges of the vigas, and catching on the point of a tent going up. The very top leaves of the tree were illuminated, waking up the inhabitants in its branches. Birds whirred and whistled. A pair of squirrels ran in circles around the mountainous terrain of the roots.

  She looked at it all through the square eye of her viewfinder. It had been so long since she’d lost herself in the joy of seeing the world this way! Giddy, she shot frame after frame, each one a split second of truth. A few shopkeepers began to appear, bringing out freshly chalked signs, tables for their customers, mannequins, racks of T-shirts, and even a cigar-store Indian. Locals greeted one another, stopped to chat in a mingling of Spanish and English. For a moment she closed her eyes, letting the harmonious sound of the two mingled languages fill her. The best sound, she thought. Friendly.

  The air held the crispness of mountain-born water and autumn lurking in the shadows creeping down the mountains. She smelled, faintly, burning leaves.

  And suddenly she remembered standing in this very spot.

  The memory slammed her like a gust of wind. A pair of red cowboy boots on her feet, a woman with long blond hair, angry. Another child nearby. A brother? A sister? A hand her own size squeezed Tessa’s tightly.

  “You are so stupid!” the woman said. The children were afraid of her.

  That was it. Tessa opened her eyes and blinked once, feeling the slight disorientation of seeing things as they were in this day and time, though she couldn’t have said what was so different.

  Her stomach growled and she put the camera away in its bag, awkwardly tipping it in with her stiff left arm. She would check out The 100 Breakfasts Café this morning, get a feel for the vibe before she made arrangements to interview the owner.

  By the time Vince half-staggered, half-crawled into Vita’s, it wasn’t quite seven. He’d been up all night and smelled of soot and cave dust, and ought to go shower, but all they’d had to eat were Clif Bars and Gatorade. He needed real food. Vita’s food. Breakfast.

  The well-lit quiet smelled of freshly brewing coffee and ham. Only a small handful of customers had straggled in so early in the morning. An older couple, likely marooned in town by the gully-washer yesterday, read the newspaper and drank coffee peaceably in a booth. Derek Trueblood, who drove a wrecker for the state of New Mexico, propped his Popeye forearms on the counter and glowered at somebody in the kitchen. A pair of uniformed state patrolmen waved at Vince as he sat heavily on a stool at the counter and stripped off his jacket.

  A few stools down sat the woman from the cantina last night. It was her turquoise cast, painted with a scene of mountains and trees, that caught his eye first. She was bent over a thick sheaf of notes, her hair pulled back haphazardly in a scrunchie. The sight of her nape, delicate and vulnerable, caught him right in the midsection.

  Bizarre. He rubbed a hand over his face.

  She glanced up. “Hey. You’re the guy from last night.”

  “So I am.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Badly.” They’d been too late to save a climber who’d fallen more than a hundred feet down a ravine. “Badly,” he said again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He nodded. Last night he kept thinking there was something familiar about her, and again he tried to place what it was. Who she was. It slipped away, elusive. Maybe she was an actress or something. They’d all learned not to ask around here these days. Learned to give famous faces the space of a dinner conversation or a stroll in the plaza uninterrupted by requests for autographs or staring fans.

  No, not an actress. He remembered she was a tour guide.

  Vita herself came out of the kitchen, bearing a full pot of coffee. A sixty-something woman with the ropy physique of a marathon runner and severely cropped silver hair, she asked, “How you doing there, soldier?” Even as she spoke, she pulled a heavy ceramic mug from the stack by the machine, set it down in front of him, and poured coffee into it. She also poured him a big glass of ice water. Vince picked it up and drank deeply.

  “Bad news?”

  He nodded. Took another gulp of cold water and ordered the French toast. And scrambled eggs with chiles and potatoes. And bacon. The room seemed surreal and echoey because he was so exhausted.

  Vita brought him a glass of orange juice. “It’ll bring your blood sugar up a little bit. You’re white around the mouth, sweetheart.”

  “Thanks.” He went to the bathroom to wash his hands and face. When he came back, the woman on the other stool gave him a small smile. She was deeply tanned, with a thick tumble of streaky hair falling down her back. Too young for him, but great eyes, big and fish-shaped, like a girl in an anime film.

  Familiar, he thought again. Somebody’s granddaughter or cousin up from Albuquerque. “You in town for a while?”

  “A little while.” Her voice was low. Rich. He thought of hot chocolate laced with cream. It almost felt as if it touched him, his neck, his brow. “Listen, I can see you’re totally wiped out,” she said. “You don’t have to talk. Just eat your breakfast.” She pulled a card out of her pocket and wrote something on it. “Call me when you feel better.”

  He took the card. Tucked it in his pocket.

  A knot of mountain bikers in gear came in. Vigorous and eager, filling the room with a scent of testosterone, they made him feel in the area of twelve thousand years old. He watched them jostling one another, feeling his achy knees, his lower back. It had been more than a decade, but he still missed it. He’d made his fortune in endorsements earned through the sport, until a final wreck demolished his left knee and ended his career for good.

  “Don’t tell me,” the woman said. “You’re a mountain biker, too, aren’t you?”

  “Was.” He eyed her. Lean arms and legs, but too much chest for a serious runner or cyclist. “You don’t approve?”

  “Hiker.” She pointed a thumb back toward her chest. “We’re natural enemies, ri
ght?”

  “Don’t have to be, if everybody is willing to be thoughtful.”

  “In my experience, that usually means the hiker has to listen carefully and get the hell out of the biker’s way.”

  There was enough truth in the statement that he didn’t argue. Not today. “Is that all you’re having? Coffee?”

  She looked at the cup as if it had the answer. “It’s tea. But yes, so far.”

  “No, no, no. Not here. This place is famous for the breakfast. You have to try something.” From the small steel clip on the edge of the counter, he tugged a menu and folded it open in front of her. “Just take a peek. There’s gotta be something you’d like.” Was he flirting with her again? Like there wasn’t enough going on in his world. “I wouldn’t push it so much, but, seriously, Vita is famous. World famous.”

  Her mouth turned a tiny bit upward. “Ah! World famous.” Her fingers touched the print.

  “I’m betting you’re a pancakes kind of woman.”

  “Not so much, honestly.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a yogurt head.”

  She laughed. It made her eyes crinkle, and he realized she was older than he originally thought. “And what would be wrong with that?”

  “Eat yogurt somewhere else. Here, the beauty is in the big breakfast.” His food came, and he gestured to the steaming, fragrant mass. “Look at this. Homemade raisin bread French toast with orange. Who wouldn’t like that?”

  The woman—he could not remember her name—looked at Vita dispensing coffee, carrying plates, hustling around the kitchen, visible through the pass-out bar. “That’s Vita?”

  He nodded. “She’s had this place since the late seventies, I reckon.” He picked up his fork and gave a moment of reverence to the food, then took a bite. Let it explode. “Jesus, that’s good.”