Steps to the Altar

by Earlene Fowler

  “Remember, alcohol kills brain cells.”

  “Ha, health advice from a woman who eats banana Moonpies for breakfast and calls them a serving of fruit.”

  “Untrue!” I slapped his hand. “For lunch maybe . . .”

  He grabbed my hand and squeezed it gently. “Don’t strike me too hard, sweetcakes. I might wake up and find out like Dorothy that this is all a dream.”

  I lay my other hand on top of his, tears itching the back of my eyes. “It’s not, Emory. I promise.”

  After a few minutes up in Elvia’s office receiving my instructions about our last bridesmaid dress fitting this Friday, I headed down the street to Angelina’s Attic.

  Once there, I threw myself on the mercy of the salesclerk, who knew Elvia’s taste intimately since my friend kept a running tab at the store and we settled on a café-au-lait silk and satin peignoir set that cost me a hundred twenty bucks. That done and safely away from the girly, rose-scented store, I headed out to the mall, where at a Gottschalk’s Department Store I picked up more smelly, girl-type prizes for the shower. After a quick trip to the feed store to pick up dog food and get my weekly ration of Barney jokes about my truck from the old guys behind the counter, I started toward home. When I drove past the police department, I spotted Gabe’s sky blue ’68 Corvette still in its space. I parked in a visitor’s spot next to a new dark green Porsche and my twenty-year-old stepson, Sam’s, primer gray Chevy Malibu. Gabe and Sam had been slowly restoring the car and just as slowly working on their loving, though often volatile, relationship.

  The front desk clerk, Kaneesha, a young African-American woman with tiny, perfect cornrows, was just starting to lock the lobby door when I walked up.

  “Is El Patrón back in his office?” I asked her.

  She nodded and smiled. “Sam is ahead of you by five minutes.” Her dark eyes took on a luminous glow I’d grown used to seeing when Sam’s name was spoken. Gabe’s only child was an extremely attractive young man with a pleasing, cheerful personality who was adept at the kind of respectful flirting that could have only come from being raised by a loving but feminist mother. He and I had an easy relationship that was not fraught with the emotional mine fields of blood relatives. We shared a love for maple bars, Little Rascals movies, Dodger baseball, and his enigmatic father. The order of those loves was often subject to change.

  As I walked down the corridor toward Gabe’s office, I met Sam coming the opposite way.

  “Hey, Sam,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Hey,” he said, giving me a quick nod. His dark coppery-olive skin was a few shades deeper than Gabe’s, but other than that and his black-brown eyes, he was a twenty-year-old version of his father. Gabe’s slate blue eyes were a product of his Anglo Kansas mother, where as Sam’s mother, Gabe’s first wife, Lydia, was full-blooded Mexican-American. Though Sam looked like his father, there couldn’t be two more opposite personalities on this earth. My husband was an intense, hardworking, follow-the-rules, straight-arrow sort of man. A credit to his Midwestern roots. Sam was the quintessential California suburb–raised child of divorced parents who, to the frustration of his father, could talk coconuts out of a tree. People adored Sam and they respected Gabe. And those two still couldn’t see how they envied the other’s position. The only things these two men had in common were a love for surfing, old cars, and each other.

  But right now, Sam’s normally genial face was void of his heart-dropping smile.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, stopping for a moment. “What are you and your dad fighting about now?”

  “Nothing,” he said, his baritone voice low and strained. “Yet.”

  “Oh, Sam, did you tell him you wanted to switch majors?” He’d been contemplating a change from agriculture, which Gabe had only just grown comfortable with, to culinary arts. His latest career plans were to become a chef, something he’d confided in me and no one else.

  “No,” he said, not elaborating.

  That instantly made me suspicious. Sam had never had trouble whining and complaining to me about his father.

  “I need to phone my mom,” he said, brushing past me without another word of explanation. “See you later, Benni.”

  I started to call after him, then decided that perhaps it would be better if he vented to Lydia rather than me. She was, after all, his mother. And though her job as a criminal defense attorney in a prestigious firm in Santa Barbara and her striking beauty were still things that left me feeling a tad inferior, I respected and liked her, to a degree. We’d formed a tentative if a bit awkward relationship last year when Sam had gone through some hard times.

  Who knew what was going on in my usually easygoing stepson’s mind? He was a man. Who ever knew what went on in their minds?

  Gabe’s office door was closed and his assistant, Maggie, already gone for the day so I sat down behind her desk and dialed his extension.

  “Chief Ortiz,” his voice answered.

  “I have a complaint to lodge with the police department. My husband is spending way too much time at work and not enough time getting naked with me.”

  His laugh could be heard through the thick oak door. “Sweetheart, where are you?”

  “At Maggie’s desk. Will your meeting take long? Let’s ditch moving tonight and I’ll treat you to kung pao chicken at Ling’s if you can wrap it up in the next five minutes. I’ll even let you peek at my fortune cookie.”

  “That is an offer no sane and healthy man would turn down. Get in here. It’s not a business meeting. Del’s an old LAPD friend I’ve been wanting you to meet. One of my ex-partners, as a matter of fact.”

  “Great, then he can join us for dinner and I’ll ransack his memories for stories of your dastardly deeds during your twenty years in L.A. I’ve always wanted to know more about that time of your life.” His years as an undercover narcotics officer were something he rarely talked about, much like his time in Vietnam. Sometimes it felt like there was a whole portion of this man that I didn’t know.

  “Just for the record, I deny everything,” he said, still laughing. He sounded relaxed and happy, something that had grown increasingly rare in the last few months. The town of San Celina had grown substantially in the last year or so with the influx of retirees from both Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, not to mention the rise in enrollment at the college and the statewide rise in gang violence. His department had been strained to the point of breaking and he’d felt the stress of that pulling in the last few months.

  When I opened the door, he had already moved around his desk to greet me. “Benni, this is Del. One of the best cops I’ve ever had the pleasure working with.”

  The tall blond woman stood up and held out her hand. “Del Hernandez. It’s so nice to finally meet. Gabe has told me so much about you.”

  I think I successfully hid my surprise. At least, I think I managed to close my mouth after about five seconds.

  “Benni Harper,” I answered, shaking her hand and thinking, Wish I could say the same.

  4

  BENNI

  HER HANDSHAKE WAS dry and firm, self-assured, but not pushy.

  She had honey blond hair pulled back with a hammered copper clip, milk chocolate eyes, and brown skin a shade or two lighter than Gabe’s. She was not particularly pretty, but more the type of woman who’d be described as handsome. But there was something else about her, a seductive aura that she gave off that told me that men would flutter around her like drunken moths.

  She was dressed in a conservative navy blazer, red blouse, dark blue jeans, and was at least five-ten, with an inseam that had to be thirty-eight inches. I mean, this woman could mount a eighteen-hand horse without a block.

  I ran my damp palms down the sides of my own short legs and instantly hated her.

  She gave me a shy, hesitant smile and I felt a stab of guilt for my quick judgment. I didn’t even know this woman, for cryin’ out loud. So Gabe had failed to mention that he’d once had a female partner. So
what? He’d had a lot of partners during his twenty years in the LAPD. Well, not a lot, but some. The fact that he didn’t tell me that one of them was female was just a sign of his liberated sensibilities. A cop is a cop. Sex didn’t matter.

  Yeah, right, Benni.

  “You ladies up for some dinner?” he said, reaching for his coat behind the door. “Benni said she’d treat us to Chinese at Ling’s. You still crazy over sweet and sour pork, Lupe?”

  “Absolutamente, Gilberto,” she said with a perfect Spanish accent.

  “Gilberto?” I said, confused. “Lupe?”

  “Our undercover names,” he said, pulling at his cuffs. They exchanged an amused look that made me feel as if I weren’t in the room.

  “Oh,” I said. Undercover names? I didn’t like the sound of that. I shifted my leather backpack to my other shoulder, feeling a bit lost as to what to say or do. I had seen Gabe with one of his ex-partners, Aaron Davidson, San Celina’s former chief of police, who’d died a year or so ago of liver cancer. Rachel, Aaron’s wife, and I used to tease them about the similarities of their partner relationship with that of a marriage. A cop’s partner was someone he literally trusted with his life so it followed that the relationship would have an intimacy not seen in most other friendships or even some marriages.

  Was it the same when the partner was a woman? As we walked out to our respective cars, Sam’s agitated expression came back to me. Did he know something about Gabe and Del’s relationship that caused that anger? As much as I wanted to call and ask him, I admonished myself to stay calm and just observe. For once, I wasn’t going to jump in and make a fool of myself without knowing all the facts.

  The new Porsche parked next to my purple truck ended up belonging to Del. What a surprise.

  “Cute truck,” she said, nodding at my Ranger. “Guess you can find that real easy in a mall parking lot.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Yin and yang,” Gabe said with a smug smile. His comment grated on my nerves like knuckles across a brick wall. Forget being an understanding, liberated woman, I was going to jump his bones the minute we were alone and demand to know why he’d told his female ex-partner about me and failed to tell me about her.

  “I’ll go on over and get us a table,” I said stiffly.

  “Great,” he said, not picking up on my irritation. “I’ll give Del directions.”

  I slowly pulled out of the parking lot and watched them through my rearview mirror. There was nothing in their body language that suggested that they’d been anything but partners in the most innocent definition of the word. His hands pointed and explained, telling her directions to Ling’s out by the Amtrak station. She listened attentively, asked a question, then nodded. He put a hand on her shoulder in the same way I’d seen him do hundreds of times with male police officers.

  I let out a deep breath and, while I drove to the restaurant, gave myself a lecture about seeing things that weren’t there. Only six months ago I’d gone through this same situation with his ex-wife, Lydia. Though she had been flirting with the idea of her and Gabe resuming some kind of relationship, he eventually realized, with a little help from my protective and very verbal cousin Emory, that he had hurt my feelings by paying too much attention to her while trying to assuage an ego that had been damaged when she left him years before. He’d apologized, I’d accepted his apology, and we’d moved on. After all, neither of us had come into this middle-aged second marriage without baggage, though there was no doubt he lugged around a few more suitcases than me. I believed in grace and forgiveness so I was trying to keep all my judgmental stones in my pockets. We’d have dinner with his old partner tonight. I’d suffer through their numerous “Remember the time . . .” and “Whatever happened to . . .” stories and I’d go home, make love with my husband, and be thankful we ended up together.

  At Ling’s the evening progressed as I’d predicted with story after story about the trials and tribulations for working for the LAPD. The restaurant was busy for a Wednesday night, and being a favorite of many police officers, they stopped by our table to greet Gabe as they waited for their take-out. Del was warmly welcomed into the law enforcement fraternity by virtue of her credentials. I picked at my kung pao chicken in silence wishing I’d gone straight home. When you’re not a cop, you can only listen to so many “And then the dirtbag said . . .” stories before wanting to scream or die of boredom. I was interested in Gabe’s job, when he chose to talk to me about the cases they were working on or ones he’d worked on in the past, but “war stories” that often took on an “us against them” sameness grew wearisome after a while. Kind of like me telling Gabe about a particularly complicated calving and going into graphic detail about twisted umbilical cords, breech births, and torn uteruses.

  When it hit seven-thirty and we’d been there two hours, I leaned over to Gabe and whispered, “I’m going on home. I’ve got a million things to do.”

  “Okay, sweetheart,” he said, kissing me on the forehead. “I’ll be along shortly.”

  I nodded at the three detectives sitting at our table drinking Chinese beer and said to Del, “Nice meeting you. Have a good trip.” It had been mentioned during the evening that she was driving up the coast to Seattle, where her two brothers lived.

  “Likewise,” she said, standing up.

  At home I fed Scout, giving him an extra portion for being so patient. After my shower and one last quick call to check on Elvia and her emotional state, which was in a calm holding pattern tonight, I crawled into bed and waited for Gabe. I dozed over the novel I was rereading—Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. Its complicated two-layer story line never failed to amaze me, the interweaving of the past and the present as the man in the story researched the secret in his grandmother’s past while dealing with his own marriage problems and mortality, trying to discover his own angle of repose.

  My bedside phone rang.

  “On horseback,” Dove said. “Up on Sweetheart Hill.” The hill behind our ranch had a two-hundred-year-old oak tree with a knot hole in the shape of a heart. At one point, when Jack and I were engaged, we’d discussed getting married up there where all of the Ramsey and Harper ranch land could be seen. It was a good hour-and-a-half horseback ride from the ranch house, though, and not an easy one, so the logistics convinced us to abandon the idea.

  “How will your friends get up there?” I asked, laying my book across my knees. Then I cursed myself. Dang, there goes my plan to stay noncommittal. Still, Sweetheart Hill? It was a stretch considering the age of most of her guests.

  She contemplated that for a moment. “Helicopters?”

  “Two at a time? With how many friends you have, we’d be transporting them for ten hours.”

  “Well, fine, what do you think I should do?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe . . . here’s a radical thought . . . your church?”

  “A lot of help you are, missy.” She hung up with a loud click. I laid the phone back in the cradle, glad it was her in a tizzy and not me. How nice to be the one settled and happy for a change.

  Gabe came in about an hour later, startling me awake.

  “Did you have a good time?” I asked, my voice groggy. My book slipped down onto the floor next to our pine four-poster bed. It hit the wooden floor with a loud clump.

  He shrugged out of his gray suit jacket and unbuttoned his cuffs, his face thoughtful. “It was good to see Del again. Shortly after you left, so did everyone else, and she and I were able to talk privately.”

  I sat up in bed, instantly awake. “About what?”

  He shook his head and finished undressing, hanging his pants and jacket up in the closet and tossing the rest of his clothes, like the neat ex-Marine he was, into the wicker hamper. “Things aren’t going so good for her right now. She’s taking some personal time off from the department.”

  “Why?”

  “Her dad died about a month ago. Heart attack. They were close.”

  I wrapped my arms around my raise
d knees, feeling ashamed that I’d not been more congenial during dinner. “That’s too bad. Did you know him?”

  Gabe nodded, deep lines forming next to his mouth. “He was on the job when it happened. Desk sergeant. Good man.”

  “How old was he?”

  He walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. “Around your dad’s age, late fifties.” He stuck his head through the doorway.

  “How old is she?”

  “Same as you. Thirty-six,” Gabe said and then his voice disappeared into the shower’s running water. When he emerged fifteen minutes later, I was standing in the doorway. The steam from his hot shower slowly floated across the small bathroom and dampened my bare legs.

  “What’s Del stand for?” I asked, watching him dry the slick, black hair on his chest.

  He grinned. “Delilah. But don’t ever call her that. She hates her name. It was her Indiana grandma’s and she’s never forgiven her mother for giving it to her.”

  “I can relate.” My given name, Albenia, was not my preferred title either. “So, how’s her mother doing?”

  “Her mother died when she was ten. Her dad raised her and her two brothers alone. Heck of a guy, Rudy. Real family man.”

  It dawned on me. “That was the funeral you went to last month.”

  He’d spent the night in Los Angeles and had come home quiet and pensive for a few days afterward. I hadn’t pressed him about details, having learned that this very private husband of mine would reveal them to me when he felt ready.

  He nodded. “Rudy Hernandez. He was one of my instructors when I joined the LAPD. I remember Del when she was just a skinny fifteen-year-old girl. Always wanted to be a cop just like her dad. She’s a lieutenant now. We worked undercover narcotics together for two years.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling a twinge of apprehension, but forcing it back. For pity’s sake, I told myself, the woman had just lost her father. It was natural she’d drop by and see Gabe on her way up north. Old friends are often the most comforting when you’re grieving. It was not any different from me going to Elvia when I had a problem.