Isabel's Daughter

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  “I can’t believe running into you like this. I’ve been trying to find you, but all I had was a phone number that’s disconnected. Where did you go?”

  “I moved.”

  “But you’re still in town?”

  “Yes. I feel like an idiot, but I can’t remember my phone number. I’ll call the shop and give it to you.”

  “Right. If I’m not there, just ask Annette to be sure to put it on my desk in back. She’s minding things for a few days.”

  “How’s Liza?”

  Sudden tears brim in her huge dark eyes. “Gone,” she says. Barely a whisper.

  “Oh, Cookie. I’m so sorry. When?”

  “Last Saturday afternoon.”

  “Oh, shit.” My face gets all hot and blotchy, practically glowing with shame. “I’m sorry, I really am. I meant to come—oh goddamnit all anyway.” I stand there, frozen in place, and all I can think of is, why didn’t I know? I should have known.

  Cookie is murmuring quietly. “I miss her incredibly, but she was in pain. At the end, it simply overwhelmed all the drugs. I guess I could have taken her to the hospital, but she didn’t want that. She wanted to be at home—oh, that’s the other thing I wanted to tell you. When I was cleaning out her bedroom, I came across a—some things that belonged to Isabel. I thought perhaps you’d like them.”

  “Yes, I do. I’ll come by…I’m just…sorry. I feel so…”

  She squeezes my arm. “She was very fond of you, you know.”

  I can’t bear to hear myself say I’m sorry one more time. Or anything else stupid and totally inadequate, so I just nod my head.

  “I’ll see you soon, then.” She turns to go back to her table. “Do call me before you come, so I remember to bring Isabel’s things.”

  Thanksgiving Day is gray, the air cold and thin. I wake up early from habit and then, remembering Paul’s not here, drift back to sleep, burrowed into the down comforter, thinking about his departure last night. The way he stood in hall, almost reluctant, hand hesitating at the doorknob, eyes lingering on my face. From the street we could hear Tom Hemmings shout, “For Chrissakes, DeGraf, get your ass in gear. Traffic’s already a bitch.”

  Paul’s brief, apologetic smile faded as he closed the door.

  When I wake up again it’s nearly ten o’clock, and I lie still, looking up through the skylight, as if the weather might be the source of the vague but persistent unease that settles over me lately when I first open my eyes.

  Is it about Paul? The few simple tasks I do for him couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be considered a full-time job, and yet, for all intents and purposes, I’ve stopped looking for work. I tell myself it’s the wrong season. That I’ll get going on the job hunt in the spring. Meanwhile, I’m simply living here, rent free, doing a little food shopping, a little cooking, reading the long mornings away, listening to him reminisce about Isabel.

  He’s in the habit of coming into the kitchen sometimes in late afternoon, before it’s time to get serious about dinner, but I’m usually in there either browsing cookbooks or doing some prep work—roasting peppers, chopping onions or tomatoes, snapping beans, scrubbing vegetables, shelling pecans—the kinds of things I’ve always enjoyed doing alone, things that don’t require conscious attention.

  He’ll sidle in casually, sometimes with a glass of wine, park himself on a stool, say something like, “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” or “What culinary magic are you performing tonight?” Stuff nobody else I’ve ever known could get away with saying. It would sound completely hokey.

  We’ll chat for a few minutes, sometimes about a book I’m reading or he’ll tell me about some new artist he’s discovered, but somehow he always manages to maneuver the conversation around to her. He talks about her like she’s still alive, maybe just living in another town for a while. Like she might call some night and say she’s coming back to Santa Fe tomorrow.

  I can picture his face, the way he smiles kind of understated, but even so it would be with what novelists always refer to as “delight.” I can hear him saying to her, “Isabel, the most amazing thing has happened. You’ll never guess who’s sitting in my kitchen right now.”

  It’s during these afternoons that he imparts the gospel of Isabel to me. The night they met—which I’ve now heard at least three times, but which he never seems to tire of recounting. The day they went down to Madrid and discovered Querencia. The time he found one of her early watercolors and had it put into a beautiful gold frame and hung it at Pinnacle, and she was so embarrassed she didn’t speak to him for three days. Their trip to New York for Christmas when he got the flu.

  But I think my favorite story is the lead up to their first date. How he found out where she worked from one of her friends and called her at The Good Earth to ask her to have dinner.

  “She said no the first time.” He gave me a solemn look. “And the second time. And the third. I started calling or going by the shop every day—”

  I laughed. “I think that’s called harassment.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “It was nothing of the kind. I bought something every time I went to the store. I was always respectful, and I never stayed long. Just long enough to ask her to have dinner and to get turned down.” He laughed quietly with me. “I think Liza Gardner got heartily sick of me.”

  The knife in my hand slipped, nicking my left thumb.

  “Oh, you’ve cut yourself.”

  He started to get up, but I waved him off. “It’s nothing.” I flicked the tiny bead of blood with my tongue. It was warm and salty, and my skin tasted of onion.

  “Would you like some alcohol and a Band-Aid?”

  “Right.” I bit off the word. “That would taste great in the chicken.”

  He frowned.

  “I’m…sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking about Liza.”

  It wasn’t exactly a lie. Although I wasn’t thinking about her dying. I was hearing her voice, twisted tight with pain. He killed her, didn’t he? That one who loved her.

  His eyes are nearly black, but clear somehow. You feel like you could see all the way to the bottom. Nothing to hide.

  I smiled a little. “So how long did it take?”

  “Three weeks, four days, eleven hours, fifteen minutes.”

  I stared at him, speechless. Finally, I said, “Don’t bullshit me.”

  “It was three weeks and four days later at eleven fifteen in the morning when she finally agreed to have dinner with me.” He settled himself on the stool again and took a sip of wine. “I spent the rest of the week getting the house ready. Planning the menu with the chef. Checking the weather forecasts to decide if we should be inside or on the patio. Choosing the wine, hiring a guitarist, buying flowers—”

  “Jesus H. Christ. Do you have to orchestrate everything?”

  “It’s the only way to ensure that you get what you want,” he said, and moved on quickly. “The best part was that night. I sent a limo to pick her up and bring her to my house—I was living up off Artist Road then—and about thirty minutes later the limo came back without her. The driver was beside himself. He said that Isabel asked him to give me a message. The message was, ‘You tell Mr. DeGraf that if he wants to take me out to dinner, he can come and pick me up himself.’”

  In spite of myself I felt the smallest tingle of elation. Like she would hold her hand up and I would give her a high five and say you go, girl!

  “So did you?”

  “I did. And I felt about seventeen years old, calling on a girl for the first time.”

  I smirked at him. “So that just proves that even if you orchestrate everything, you don’t necessarily get what you want.”

  The smile he returned was wistful. “She was always proving that.”

  It’s a weird day, all closed and quiet. The rest of the world seems divided into two camps, the ones who are going to somebody’s house to celebrate Thanksgiving, and the somebodys who are hosting the event. While I sit at the polished black granite co
unter eating my oatmeal in silence except for the dull chink of spoon against bowl, I imagine women clustered in warm, noisy kitchens, laughing and gossiping and tasting, arguing about seasonings or whether to add roasted green chiles to the stuffing. The men would be gathered around the TV watching the football games that have probably already started back east, or soccer matches on satellite, telling dirty jokes, shouting when somebody fumbles, and punching each other in the arm the way guys do. And the children. Laughing, fighting, stealing food when no one is looking.

  At least that’s how I imagine it. About noon the clouds start to break up. I shake off my mood, put on my apron and get ready to make my own Thanksgiving dinner. Posole. Or what Pete Dimon used to call “hog and hominy.”

  There are as many versions of posole as there are of barbecue, and the merits of each are hotly debated, but mine is the one I watched Esperanza make while I stood on the rickety chair by the stove at Carson. Basically it’s just a green chile stew with pork and hominy. Esperanza didn’t serve it with all the little garnishes—avocado and lime wedges and radishes—like Bettina does. She just served it plain with big, thin, soft flour tortillas, and that’s how I like it best. So that’s what I’m thankful for today.

  Friday morning the sky is gray and heavy, and a raw wind out of the north pushes my little truck around on the road. It’s not cold enough for snow, but it looks like we might finally get some rain.

  Alonzo’s do-it-yourself blue hybrid pickup truck with the water tank bolted behind the cab is parked in front of the cabin. He and Maria have been coming here for almost three weeks, and the roof is done, but I still can’t get him to quote me a price, and I haven’t been able to get a hold of Bettina. It makes me a little nervous.

  “So how’s Maria doing on the inside?”

  “She finish soon.” It’s what he says every time I ask.

  Maria convinced me that the whole interior of the cabin should be replastered, now that the roof’s watertight, and she’s mixing the plaster with local sand from the creek bed. It gives the walls a wonderful warm gold blush. I also ended up springing for three new windows because Alonzo said the ones I didn’t do this year would have to be done next year, and if we have a wet winter they might leak and ruin my new rosy plaster.

  Progress is complicated because of the way they operate. They have several jobs going all the time, and they move back and forth from one to the other every few days. It’s almost like finishing anyone’s job too far ahead of the others would somehow be impolite.

  Of course, just because it’s my day to have work done doesn’t mean the supplies they need will be available. The first time we were supposed to put the new windows in, the windows didn’t arrive at the lumberyard.

  When I suggested to Alonzo that he should have gone to another job, he regarded me with amused benevolence. “Ah, but it is your day. I cannot work other job on your day.” So he passed the time wandering around the cabin, rechecking the roof, remeasuring the windows, examining the interior to see if anything else needed attention.

  When I came back that afternoon, he informed me that the pump that brought water to the sink needed to be replaced.

  “Great,” I said. “Let’s do that this afternoon.”

  He shook his shaggy head. “I order for you the pump.”

  “How long will it take to get?”

  He rubbed one hand over the black and gray stubble on his jaw. “Two days. Maybe three.”

  I nodded. “Okay. So we can get it in by Thursday?”

  “No, señorita,” he explained with a patient air. “Thursday is not your day.”

  This morning, he’s just strapping on his tool belt when I walk up.

  “Ah, buenos días, señorita.” He touches his fingers to the brim of his hat, where several corks bob at the end of short strings. My best guess would be that it keeps the flies away from his face. Although today is too cold even for the flies.

  “What will you do today?” I ask him.

  “I fix estones,” he says.

  “What stones?”

  “Behind estove. There is bad mortar. I fix.”

  He crosses his muscular arms across his chest, and regards me with interest. “Bettina say you maybe have a garden? You want I clear the land?”

  I sigh. “Maybe. Let’s see how the rest of this goes.”

  There aren’t many cars in the Rio Bravo’s gravel parking lot. I don’t see Bettina’s old brown Nova, but maybe she came with Miguel. I park next to the building and walk around back. The rain-smelling wind whips my jacket open, and I hug it around me.

  The kitchen is warm and steamy. It smells of chiles roasting, sopaipillas frying. Miguel and Raoul, Felicia’s brother, are working with the radio going full blast, so they don’t hear me come in.

  “Miguel!” I shout over the brassy music.

  He waves at me.

  “Dónde está Bettina?”

  “No se.” His usual jovial smile is missing.

  “She will come when? Cuándo?”

  “No se.” He keeps working, eyes down at the masa dough he’s mixing.

  “Miguel, is she sick? Is she all right?”

  He stops and looks directly at me. I can tell he’s trying to put the right English words together to make this pesky gringa understand.

  “She es no here.”

  “Sí.” I nod. “Dónde está?”

  He chews his thoughts for a few minutes. “She go with the cowboy.”

  My mouth falls open. “Ed Farrell?”

  He just nods and goes back to his dough. I want to know when she left, when she’s coming back. Is this just a jaunt for the holiday or something more serious? But I can’t make him understand the questions, and I probably wouldn’t understand his answers. Besides, he’s obviously not happy about this turn of events.

  “Miguel, can I have some soup?” When he looks up, I point at the huge pot bubbling on the stove.

  “Sí. Por supuesto.”

  I ladle Miguel’s black bean soup into the biggest bowl I can find, add a dollop of sour cream, a sprinkling of cilantro and chopped jalapeños, grab a couple of tortillas with my other hand, and shoulder through the swinging door to the café.

  Only a few tables are occupied. Everyone’s probably at home eating leftover turkey. Felicia looks up from the cash register, smiles at me as I seat myself at my usual post in the far corner. Some gringo has left part of their Albuquerque newspaper on the chair, so I prop it up and flip through it looking for Rick’s byline, but I don’t find anything.

  The barrage of ads for Christmas has already started. Christmas. The first time in eight years I won’t be with Rita. Cassie never celebrated it—we celebrated the winter solstice on my birthday—so when I first moved in with Rita, I wasn’t prepared for her over-the-top American Christmas. She always decorated the apartment to within an inch of its life, stenciling snowflakes on all the windows, draping ribbons and greens everywhere. We never had a big tree because they were too expensive, but the little misshapen ones that we got for cheap in the last week before the holiday never had a naked branch to their name. Rita had been collecting ornaments for a long time.

  The first year I said I didn’t want to swap presents, but she said it was part of the deal. If I didn’t want to get her anything, that was fine with her—or so she said—but she was going to get me whatever she felt like getting me. Her gift-giving philosophy was “More Is Better.” There were several years when the stacks of presents took up more space than our scrawny little tree.

  Of course, I was forced to reciprocate, and eventually I had to admit it was kind of fun to open everything Christmas morning while we drank hot chocolate and nibbled muffins. There was usually one nice gift—a new scarf or a blouse or a pair of gloves—and then the rest were homemade presents or joke gifts. Like the license plate frame for my truck that said “Always late, but worth the wait.”

  Now as I sit staring at pictures of CD players and laptop computers tied with bows and proffered by p
retty girls wearing Santa Claus hats, I understand why suicide rates spike during the holidays.

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  I know his voice. I could pick it out of a roomful of others like the single gold thread in a tapestry. To hear it in the quiet of the nearly empty café shocks me.

  Will Cameron is standing next to the table, holding his hat, not smiling but looking considerably more subdued than the last time I saw him. His hair’s a little longer, creeping down over the collar of his plaid wool shirt, and it’s imprinted with that perpetual line that all real cowboys have—that little indentation just above the ears where their hat sits. I remember how it feels under my fingers, and the thought calls fire up into my face.

  “Sure.”

  He sits down in the other chair across from me, and I have a sudden shiver of déjà vu.

  Mami’s. The lukewarm coffee in thick white mugs, the two of us stringing words together in ways I’ve never done before or since, only a vague awareness of the rest of the world, dark and cold pressing against the window. Now we both seem unable to say anything.

  “There’s too much,” he says, reading my mind. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  He tosses his hat on the table next to us. “Having lunch. What about you?”

  I look down at my half empty bowl of soup. “I just came to see Bettina, but she’s not here.”

  “I kind of went off last time…” His face is ruddy from cold and awkwardness. “I didn’t get around to asking you what you’ve been doing.”

  Before I can say anything Felicia comes to the table.

  “I’ll have some of that soup, please ma’am.” He nods at my bowl. “And some corn tortillas and some iced tea.” I ask for more water. When she’s gone, he says, “Tell me.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  I pause to give him an opening to say we can do it another time, that he’s got to be somewhere, that he understands if there’s somewhere I need to be. But I know he’s not going to say any of those things, and he doesn’t.