by Amy Bourret
Ruby knows only this, she knows that she loves him. “I just worry.”
“I know. But don’t.” Chaz walks over to the radio, tweaks the ancient dial, trying to bring in the oldies station more clearly. He doesn’t mind her taste in music, but he can’t stand the static. Maybe because his work is anything but, he does everything he can to make the rest of his life static-free.
“I missed you,” Ruby says.
“More.” He gives up on the radio, runs his hand across the rough and warped base of the pie safe. “This poor thing is a mess.”
“So am I,” Ruby says.
Chaz folds his arms. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you. First the conference, and then two shifts back-to-back.”
“It’s okay. I understand.”
“But are you okay?” He steps over to her, pulls her into an embrace. “Look at you.” He leans back, hands on her shoulders, eyes on her belly. “Look at her. Are you eating? Taking care of both of you?”
Ruby pulls him outside the shed, down onto the cool grass, rests her head on his shoulder. The night is full-dark, the stars as sharp as the scent of pine in the air, as if she could reach up and pluck them like apples from a tree. “I’m lost without her.”
“I know.”
“I just want her back.” Ruby sits up, clutches a fistful of Chaz’s shirt. “We could do it. We could go to Mexico, with Lark and the baby. Start over—”
Chaz takes Ruby’s face in his hands. “Look at me. Enough. That’s crazy talk.”
She stretches out on the lawn. “I know. I just miss her…so much.” She tells him how she thinks about that other mother, what she went through. “This is unbearable, even knowing where she is. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I didn’t know that she’s safe.”
Chaz traces circles on her forehead, rakes his fingers through her hair. She breathes in, still surprised after all these years to find crisp, clean oxygen with not even a hint of Iowa rendering plant. His words, everything will be all right, everything will be all right, are a lullaby. And finally Ruby drifts off to sleep under the stars, with Chaz’s lap as pillow.
FORTY-EIGHT
When she opens her door, Celeste laughs, places both hands on Ruby’s belly as if she were a preacher healing the wounds of the world. Chunk stands inside the doorway, fidgeting as Ruby and Chaz enter.
Inside the house, the Monteroland clan swarms Ruby and Chaz. Even the auntsunclescousins are on the welcome committee, either as recompense for the last dinner’s debacle or in deference to Ruby’s pain. Like a square dance, they swirl and whirl around Ruby and Chaz, until Chaz has been do-si-doed to the living room with the men and Ruby has been spun off to the kitchen with the women.
The air is rich with spices; jars line the counter like toy soldiers marching toward the stove top. Cumin, coriander, saffron, ginger, cinnamon, paprika. Celeste is up to Morocco on her world gastronomical tour. Ruby missed Japan through Lithuania, yet Celeste, Ruby is sure, hasn’t missed a bit of what’s been going on.
“Don’t worry.” Aunt Tia pats Ruby on the back. “We’re not eating with our fingers.”
Ruby eyes the water pitcher; she is anxious to keep busy. Antoinette must notice, because she fills the ice bucket and motions Ruby toward the table.
“So your court date got moved up.” Antoinette reaches past chairs, dumping scoops of ice cubes into water goblets.
“Yeah, the judge had a hole in his schedule.” Ruby pours water slowly, as much to stretch out the task as to protect Celeste’s table. “If it means I see Lark sooner, if it means the trial will be over sooner…”
“If I were your lawyer…” Antoinette has talked about applying to law school since Ruby has known her.
“You should, you know,” Ruby says. “You’d be good, do good.”
“I just wish I could fix it, just this one thing, you know?”
“I wish you could, too.” The clank of ice cubes against glass sounds like wind chimes as she gives Antoinette the latest news.
John told her just yesterday that the Tinsdales are now screaming about a civil suit, suing her for damages for keeping Lark from them. Like when a wife sues her husband’s mistress for loss of conjugal rights or parents sue a hospital for wrongful life. Not that Lark shouldn’t have been born, but that she didn’t get to live the life she was supposed to have lived, that Ruby gave her the wrong life. Civil lawyer, Ruby thinks, that is definitely an oxymoron. She is in the unfortunate situation of facing both a criminal prosecutor and a civil trial lawyer who have political aspirations, John explained, and they will seek the spotlight at every turn.
Ruby’s own attorney is a jack-of-all-crimes and will represent her in both the civil and criminal proceedings at a fraction of his usual fees. “Margaret offered a lifetime of free salon services for his wife,” Ruby tells Antoinette.
“He’s probably getting the better bargain.”
First Lark was treated like property. Now the value of trying to keep Ruby out of jail is being measured in shampoos and sets. “His wife is addicted to hair spray,” Ruby says.
FORTY-NINE
Buffered between Chaz and Antoinette in the circle of faces around the table, Ruby is touched when Chunk adds to his prayer a plea to watch over her in “her trials and tribulations.” She is also relieved to see Chunk’s sister remove the wine goblet from her husband’s place setting; the farting uncle apparently has been conscripted to the wagon. He looks down at his lap when Celeste holds up the wine bottle. Ruby is not the only reluctant teetotaler at this table.
“Today’s pairing is an Australian shiraz, to complement but not compete with the Moroccan spices.” Clearly, Celeste has been watching too much of the Food Network.
By an edict from Celeste, no doubt, the meal chatter is kept far from anything to do with Lark or Ruby. Tia’s daughter is grilled about her new boyfriend until an uncle asks Chunk about the rash of residential construction in the south of the county. This topic carries them well through the plates of roasted lamb with a tomato-onion glaze, steaming couscous the color of autumn, stewed vegetables with chickpeas. Chunk has worked for the county roads department forever, from the grit and grime of pothole detail to his current position as supervisor of all the crews, and he is the resident expert on land development.
The dinner table is a storm, flooding wine and snowdrifts of food. Ruby eats slowly to avoid any chance of a repeat of her performance art at the last meal. She chews chews chews each bite of lamb so tender that neither silverware nor teeth are necessary. And at some point during the meal, she realizes that she feels almost good. The grief of losing Lark is a tight twist of second skin, like the ripples and welts from a third-degree burn. She’ll walk around with those scars forever, but she will walk around.
Finally, dessert, a honey-soaked pastry stuffed with apricots and almond paste, is passed. Every culture, it seems, has its own burrito. After she has eaten enough to look like she has eaten enough, Ruby elbows Chaz.
“Sorry, Ma,” Chaz says. “We gotta go. I want to crash a pickup game at the park basketball court. Try to bond with the street thugs.”
“The dog, he’s still not eating,” Ruby adds. “I need to check…”
Before Ruby and Chaz reach his car, Celeste hurries through the gate. She thrusts a grocery bag full of leftovers into Ruby’s arms, smooshes the bag and Ruby in another embrace. “We’ll all keep lighting candles. You, Lark, your baby girl. The dog, too. You’re all going to be all right.”
FIFTY
“What on earth?” Chaz stares down at the bucket of pink glop and the crowd of lidless brown bottles on the newspaper that is spread out on the back porch.
Ruby stirs the mixture with a wooden spoon, squeezes a few drops of red food coloring from a tiny plastic bottle. The drops splat into the bucket, swirl into the mixture, then disappear, barely deepening the shade of pink. “I bought all the single bottles at Albertsons and the Plaza market, but it still wasn’t enough.” Ruby gestures to the stack of s
mall rectangular cartons beside her. “So the Ms went back and bought up the variety packs as well.”
“We’re the food-coloring cavalry,” Margaret says from a deck chair.
Chaz squats down beside Ruby, brushes away the strands of hair that have escaped the elastic band, places a hand on her neck. “But why are you using food coloring in the first place?”
“Because I didn’t have time to pick berries.” Ruby scratches her brow with her forearm.
Chaz’s face registers a huh? as he sits down beside her. The dog lumbers over and licks Chaz’s cheek.
“The milk paint.” Ruby waves her wooden spoon toward the dismantled pieces of pie safe strewn around her—bottomless drawers, cabinet doors, shelving, and the empty husks of the base and upper half. The inside of the upper casing is painted white; the rest of the wood is bare. “I wanted to replace the original finish.”
“So you’re making paint.” Chaz picks up a box of instant milk, pours a few flakes into his hand. “From milk.”
“Yes,” Ruby says. “Hence the name milk paint.” She picks a dog hair from the mixture, flicks it onto the newspaper.
Molly laughs. “Duh, Chaz. What did you think, that the pioneers rode their horses over to Sherwin-Williams?”
Chaz shakes his head. “I don’t think I ever thought about that at all.”
“Neither had we. Of course, the pioneers used milk straight from the cow.” Margaret pauses to drink from her goblet. “Ruby has allowed herself a few modern shortcuts in her quest for authenticity.”
Ruby pulls the red-coned top off another little bottle, squeezes it over the bucket. “I have to get it red enough, then I can add some blue to tone it down. I just didn’t know it would suck up this much tint.”
“We suggested wine.” Margaret refills Molly’s glass then her own from the bottle on the table. “Berries, grapes, what’s the difference?”
Chaz picks up a roll of mesh wire, fingers the mesh. “This for the doors? I’ll cut it for you.”
“No!” Ruby grabs the screening from him, places it out of his reach. “I need to do this one by myself.” She can hear the streak of mania in her voice, can read Chaz’s wary look. He often helps her, screwing legs and armrests onto chairs, even sanding if he’s really bored.
A flash of memory sears her mind, Lark at two, shoes on the wrong feet, struggling to find the armhole of her shirt. “By myself. All by myself,” she would demand.
“Don’t be offended,” Margaret says. “She yelled at us, too.”
“Okay, then,” Chaz says. “Can I at least keep you ladies company?”
Molly gestures to the wine. “Grab a goblet. Join us for the show.”
Ruby realizes she is acting crazy, but this one, she needs to do by herself. She needs to put this warped, rotted, mouse-holed pie safe back together before she goes on trial. Somehow, she just needs to salvage this one piece.
FIFTY-ONE
The wooden bowl of popcorn rests on the ball of daughter that used to be Ruby’s lap. Clyde sits at attention beside her, his head following the movement of her hand from the bowl to her mouth, waiting to catch any pieces she drops. Popcorn and orange juice, together, what an odd craving.
Casablanca fills the TV screen in all its black-and-white glory. Ruby keeps waiting for Lark’s pure-honey voice to chime in with her favorite lines. Will they always have their Paris? she wonders. Will Lark even remember her after a few years?
When the reflection of headlights swooshes across the wall, Clyde leaps from the sofa and lands almost at the front door. Ruby, however, needs several attempts to heave herself out of the sofa sinkhole. In the process, she elbows the bowl, and popcorn showers the room like confetti shot from an air gun. She opens the door as the Ms step onto the porch.
“We were in the neighborhood.” Molly’s grin is sheepish.
Ruby looks back and forth between Margaret and Molly. “You guys making sure I haven’t crawled back under the covers?”
“Of course not.” Margaret whistles to the dog. “Hey, Clyde, let’s go for a walk.”
Clyde pauses his popcorn snarfing, looks to the door, to the floor, to Ruby. “Tough decision, buddy,” Ruby says.
The Ms’ terrier mix darts around Margaret, grabs a puff of popcorn, dashes back out the door. Clyde’s tail swats Ruby’s leg as he shoots past her in hot pursuit of the small dog, leaving behind, amid the popcorn, a swath of rug worthy of a vacuum cleaner commercial.
Margaret nods to Molly. She calls her other dog and follows Clyde and Dudley down the drive. In their wake, Ruby motions Molly inside.
“You throwing popcorn at TV shows again?”
“Ha ha,” Ruby says. “Want some tea?”
Molly answers by heading to the kitchen, grabbing two mugs out of the cabinet.
Ruby follows her, fills the kettle, puts it on the stove. She lifts down the acrylic container of tea boxes from the top of the fridge, slides it across the counter to Molly. “Well?”
“Something herbal, I think,” Molly says.
“No, why are you here?”
“Since when can we not just drop by?”
Ruby raises an eyebrow, waits for the water to boil, while Molly makes her tea selection like one of Ruby’s clients choosing polish from the rack. Ruby pours steaming water into the mugs, and she and Molly walk out to the back porch. These August days are still summer hot, but the taste of autumn is in the night air.
In a deck chair, Ruby holds her mug in two hands. “Okay. What?”
“My grandfather was a bootlegger,” Molly says. She tells Ruby how he ran liquor through half of Missouri. Ruby has heard this story before, over bottles of wine, but she tucks a chenille throw around her legs and lets Molly talk. About how her grandfather didn’t marry until he was fifty, how he and her grandmother had just one child, Molly’s mother. The grandfather was a mean old son of a bitch, but he was a smart old son of a bitch. He put half his proceeds into stocks—just after the big market crash of 1929—and buried the stock certificates in a cast-iron box in the yard. The other half he kept in cash, in an oil drum in his shed, and he supported his family through the Great Depression on periodic withdrawals from the “Bank of Jim Beam.”
Clyde leaps onto the porch before Molly gets to her point, no doubt running ahead of Margaret as usual. Molly rubs his head while he licks her chin, and through the kisses she tells Ruby her idea. “It’s a karma thing, see, to pay your legal fees with my trust fund. You’re in trouble because you did right by Lark. He never did right by anyone. His own daughter was a punching bag. To use his money, it’s just karma is all.”
Ruby leans back into her chair, puts her mug on the table. Clyde moves over to her, lays his head in her lap. This is big. This could be Ruby’s answer, at least to the financial end of her problems. Molly’s generosity, though, is just too big.
“Please. You and Lark—you’re family.” Molly talks with her hands. Freckles of paint, yellows and greens, dot her cuticles, lie under her nails, mirror the freckles that splash across her nose. “Let me do this. At least think about it.”
Margaret’s voice comes out of the shadows of the driveway. “Oh, she’ll let you, for damn sure.”
Ruby can’t help grin. Maybe Celeste’s candles are working. Because for the first time, Ruby actually does think that everything could turn out all right. Of course, that thought usually precedes her world turning to crap.
FIFTY-TWO
Ruby hasn’t been on an airplane since that day long ago, the day that marked the end of her first life and the beginning of her second. And now she’s flown twice in a month. She leans her head against the cool glass of the window and stares down at the swipe of land far below. The odd alien circles and sewing machine–straight roads are like the repeating patches and seams of that crazy quilt that she pictures as her several lives.
She squirms against the upright seat, anxious for the trial to be over, anxious for it to start. Anxious in its correct definition, definitely not as a substitut
e for eager. And eager doesn’t begin to describe how she feels about seeing Lark.
Beside her, John does a crossword puzzle. He fills in the squares, line by line, in confident blue ink. Ruby tries to absorb some of that confidence.
The pilot announces the descent into Dallas impossibly soon after the takeoff from Albuquerque, and the hemstitched land is replaced by car-clogged highways and shopping centers and houses with turquoise patches of backyard pools. House after house in tidy rows, as if they had been planted, crop dusted by Butch from her Iowa hometown.
The plane touches tarmac as smoothly as a busybody neighbor running a glove across a dusty mantel, and Ruby and John join the conga line of people and black roller suitcases and strollers down the jetway. When did people start wearing their chore clothes to travel? she wonders. She remembers a Sunday-best atmosphere on that other flight so long ago.
She herself is dressed for her appearance in court. John urged her to look young and sweet. And pregnant. The makers of maternity clothes made the sweet part easy. This stretchy lavender top and dotted skirt were on the unsweet end of the spectrum. Lark’s image lady would have barfed over all the girly pink ribbons and bows.
The idle chatter of the airport gate area distills into a steady buzz as they approach the security point, excited whispers, heads craning side to side. Maybe it’s a proposal, Ruby thinks; she read about one of those in a celebrity magazine at the salon.
As they approach the narrow exit from the secured area, microphones and cameras and people press against the glass wall. The crowd parts like Moses’ sea as she and John step into the glare of lights. Not a proposal, she realizes; this is a perp walk. And she is the perp.
“Shit,” John says under his breath. His expression is somewhere between pained and totally pissed off. “That asshole lawyer,” he mutters.
