by Amber Foxx
Chapter Two
Mae dropped her suitcase onto the huge, firm hotel bed and answered her phone. Caller ID showed it was her father.
“Hey, Daddy. How are you?”
“I’m good, real good.” After fourteen years in New Mexico, he still sounded like he was from North Carolina’s Blue Ridge, as did Mae after that many years in the slower-drawling east. “How’s my baby girl?”
His twenty-seven-year-old baby smiled at the endearment. “Ready to be there already. I’m more than halfway.”
“Think you could handle a little change of plans?” She heard him walking, heard a door open and close, and then the sound quality changed. He must have stepped outside. “Had a little rainstorm, got a double rainbow on the mountains.” A few steps. “The sky sure is pretty here. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I will soon. What kind of change?” He couldn’t be letting her down, could he? She had only recently got back in touch with him. Her mother had made an unspeakable secret of the reason for the divorce that had cut Mae off from him for half her life, and it had turned out to be something Mae could easily accept—her father was gay. They had talked and e-mailed a lot since finding each other again, but she had only seen him the one time he came out to visit. She hadn’t even met his partner yet. “I’m still okay for school aren’t I?”
“Of course you are, baby. It’s nothing that big. We need some help.”
Relieved, she asked, “What can I help with?”
“Our Santa Fe house. We started renting it out when I got the job down here. Furnished, with a big studio, good for artists spending some time there. It’s usually worked out well. But we had a lady in there the past few months that we’re kicking out.”
“What’d she do?”
“First I have to explain that the house comes with a cat, Sweetiepie. We found her hanging around the garden, and when we tried to take her to move down here, she was so scared of the car we left her there for our tenant to love. It’s worked out nice for years—makes the house special that she comes with it. So the lease says no dogs. She can’t be harassed by some dog.”
“Did this lady have a dog?”
“And she smoked. Niall smokes, but not in the house. It’s says no smoking in the lease, too. Rental agent went over it with her, figured we had a good tenant, and we hadn’t been up.” His footsteps slowed. “Didn’t know how bad it was ’til we got a call. Our tenant travels a lot, seems, and had somebody stop in to feed Pie. Least she took the dog with her.” A long pause. “The mess from the dog sounds like it’s pretty bad. The cat sitter said it made her sick. Dirty kitchen, too, she said—really bad.”
“That’s awful. But Daddy, you can’t want me to ...”
“I hate to ask you this, but we’ve got someone who wants to take it for a few months, visiting artist from Montana, and this place—it’s gonna take a week or more to get it clean. I’m running a softball camp for young’uns, and Niall’s got a gallery opening here—we can’t do it. It’s three hours to Santa Fe from T or C.” Truth or Consequences was usually shortened to T or C. “We can’t keep going back and forth. The windows are gonna have to be left open a lot, and Pie’s all shook up and needs some TLC, so we need someone we trust to live in it and get it clean.”
Mae tried to make room for the work in her mind. She had a few weeks before college classes started, but had hoped to use the time to find a job and spend some time with Marty and Niall. “And that’s me?”
“We’d pay you what we’d pay the cleaning service, and a little something for meals out while you’re getting it cleaned. You probably won’t be able to eat in it for a while. We don’t want some cleaning service person staying the night. There’s some valuable art in the house. And Pie is special. She needs someone to take care of her.”
“So I’d go straight there?”
“Not quite. I’m heading up tomorrow and I’ll meet you there. But you’ll meet Niall in T or C first to get into your place there. Don’t unpack much. Just meet my partner finally, and head on up.”
“My place?” She thought she’d be staying with him while she looked for a place to rent.
“Our other rental property. Gotta warn you it’s not fancy, but the price is right, for family.”
“So I get the key, but I don’t move in yet ... I go up to Santa Fe and clean.”
“That a no or a maybe?”
“It’s a yes. I’m sorry. I’m happy to help you out.”
“That’s wonderful. I’ll tell Niall. He’s been having a fit about it.” A pause, the sound of footsteps crunching on gravel, then silence. “And he’s a little nervous about meeting you without me there. Don’t mind him. You’ll love him when you get to know him.”
*****
Descending from the desert mountains toward the long blue-green curves of the Rio Grande, Mae drove to the center of the small city and followed her father’s directions to her new home. The house was pea green, a former trailer in ranch-house drag, up the street from a pastel purple house, in a mixed neighborhood of elegant adobes and run-down trailers a few blocks from the river. Seeing a green VW Beetle in the carport, Mae parked on the street. A large, hairy-barked tree guarded the driveway, and another loomed over the tiny front porch. Bizarre curly pods like a cross between rotini pasta and some sort of larvae rained down from the trees, and the ground beneath them was also littered with their thorns, one of which stuck through the sole of Mae’s flip-flop and poked her foot as she walked to the house. She leaned on the railing while extricating the thorn.
From a glaring corrugated metal outbuilding beyond the carport came a pale man who took skinny to its final destination. He had dark hair threaded with gray, wore thick-lensed glasses, and his posture curved into a kind of vigilant, head-forward slouch that made him look like a bird of prey poised for flight. Mae could see he must have been handsome when he was younger, before years of tobacco and dry air took the shine off him.
“Hey.” She smiled and walked toward him. “I’m Mae. It’s good to meet you.”
Niall, hands in the pockets of old, baggy jeans, nodded, passing her on his way to the house. No handshake, not even a word. Nervous? More like rude. She stopped, another thorn piercing her shoe, and sat on the front steps to pull it out.
“What kind of crazy tree is that?”
“Mesquite.” Niall patted the shaggy bark, and a largish brown lizard scrambled down the tree. “Thorns are bad. You might not wear those shoes. And you can’t wear shoes in this house, I just redid the floors.” He sounded as if she should be impressed and grateful. “Bamboo.”
Mae didn’t know how to take Niall. He was from Maine, and maybe people up North were rude like that. Marty’s sunny temperament had to explain how they had stayed together fourteen years.
“The last tenants were pigs. Hope it’s not that bad in Santa Fe.” Niall unlocked the front door after forcing the glass storm door to open—it seemed to stick a little. “I hope you’re a good housekeeper.”
“I am.” Mae and Niall shed their shoes on a mat inside the door. The bamboo floors were silky and gleaming, in a room decorated with pointy-legged fifties furniture and a few of what Mae guessed were Niall’s sculptures, masks and animals made from rusty recycled machine scraps, broken tools, and old horseshoes.
“It’s wonderful,” Mae said. “I’m gonna live with some of your work?”
“For now. Might sell it, though—the art, not the house. You’ve got the house ’til you graduate.”
“Thank you.” She felt relief, not only that she had somewhere to live, but that it came fully furnished with Niall’s odd taste, making it so unlike her past home there wasn’t a memory to haunt her. “What else should I know about it, besides not wearing shoes?”
Niall walked into the slate-floored kitchen, which featured a yellow fifties dinette set. “Don’t lift the west side curtains ’til October. Floor gets so hot it hurts your feet. You got all your dishes.” He opened and closed a few cabinets, sh
owing her what was in them. “There’s cleaning equipment in here and in the shed. No dishwasher.” Dishwashah. “Your washing machine’s in the shed, and it shakes like a son of a bitch, but so far it hasn’t walked out the door. Clothes line—no dryer. Your clothes dry in a couple of hours, even three layers thick.” He looked her over. “And you’ll need long sleeves, a hat, and SPF 50 to hang ’em out, or you’ll look like that lizard.”
Was he being funny? Mae tried to take it as advice with humor, not making fun of how white she was, and thanked him.
Niall continued the tour, identifying rooms with a few unnecessary words. “Guest room.” It had a flabby-looking futon. “Bath.” It was tiny. “Bedroom.” It had more fifties furniture, and a queen bed. Mae felt it. The mattress was firm.
Niall grinned. His first smile. “Planning something?”
“Sleep.”
“So you say.” He gave her a mischievous wink. “There are more men than women in New Mexico. And it’s not because we’re all gay.” He opened the door beside the bed, and took her out to the back steps. Shoeless, they didn’t go down into the yard. The light was blinding after the darkness induced by thermal curtains in the interior. “Same key for both doors, and the hot spring is out here.”
“I have a hot spring?”
“Yeah. You won’t want the spring much at this hour, but it’s nice at night. Get out under the stars in your birthday suit and soak.”
Mae studied the backyard’s tall red fence. There were gaps. “I think I’ll wear a suit.”
“You’ll loosen up after a while. Meet some of the locals. Just keep the parties quiet. Those kids across the fence,” he indicated where the red fence met with a stretch of corrugated aluminum, with improbably tall, small-headed sunflowers peering over it, “are like monks.”
This was good news. “I don’t give parties.”
“You will. Your father was stiff like that, too, when we first moved here.”
“I’m not stiff. I just don’t party and fool around, that’s all.”
“Stiff. You need a good soak in the spring.” Niall explained the switch and pump that would let the water from the deep spring emerge into a big metal tub in the yard. He gave her a crooked smile. “You’ll get hooked on it. Be soaking with a glass of wine and a new boyfriend before you know it.”
The yard was pale brown dirt spotted with odd small flowers and a few cacti near the shed. Ants ran across the red paving stones that led from the bedroom to the spring. A lizard scurried from one piece of shade to another. Mae felt a strange affinity for this plain, dry little space.
This was her home now. All alone, her own place, as much her own private personal space as she’d ever had in her life. A place where she would live by herself for years, happily solitary except for visits from her stepdaughters. She longed to be alone in it tonight, as excited as if she were the new bride in a romance novel moving in with her husband—moving in with herself. “No, no boyfriend needed. I’m psyched to be here all by myself.”
They stepped back inside, and Niall locked the back door. “We’ve still never talked about the rent,” Mae said as they walked toward the front.
Niall stopped and placed the keys into her hand. “Free.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’ll get work, I can pay—”
“Free. Your mother wouldn’t even take child support when she found out Marty was gay. Nothing. Wouldn’t let you know where he was. He never got a chance, from when you were thirteen until now, to do a damn thing for you, and he wanted to. This is from us, from both of us.” Niall walked down the hall to the front door and stopped, one hand on the handle. “But don’t you frickin’ dare think of me as your other father.”
Mae couldn’t help it—she hugged him. “Thank you, Papa Niall.”
Niall pulled away with a growl that might have been a laugh. “Let me show you where all the tools are, in case you need to fix something. Then you’d better head for Santa Fe.”
Santa Fe. She’d fallen in love with her new house, and she had to go clean another one.
“I’m supposed to take you to lunch.” Niall locked the house, but not the shed. He pulled cigarettes and a lighter from his shirt pocket and lit up. “And being a Martin I suppose you want to walk.”
“If it’s not too far for you.”
“Think I’m an old man? Just because I breathe poisons and don’t exercise? Three blocks.” Niall started down the driveway and Mae followed. She restrained the swinging, vigorous stride that she normally took. Niall walked at a snail’s pace, smoking. It was hard to picture her athletic father with him. “I heard some things about you,” Niall said. “You might get a kick out of this place.”
“Why’s that?
“The food’s healthy, and the owner’s psychic.” He spat out a crumb of tobacco. “Or some of the fools that come to New Mexico as spiritual tourists think so.”
Was Niall a skeptic about psychics and spirituality? “Daddy told you I’m—What’d he say?”
“That ‘health nut’ runs in his side of the family and psychic runs in your mother’s.” Niall gestured at a mauve-walled spa across the street. “This town is perfect for you on both counts. Santa Fe, too. T or C was a healing center way back when it was Apache lands, with all the hot springs. Still is. Good healers, and quacks, and plenty of suckers for both.”
“You don’t think I’m a quack, do you?”
“No idea. Just met you. But I think Muffie Blanchette is. Can’t stand the woman.” They paused at the main thoroughfare, Broadway. Approaching drivers stopped for them and waved. Niall waved back, and he and Mae crossed. “But the food is good, and I normally hate anything healthy or vegetarian. I have to give her credit on the décor, too. I can enjoy the place as long as she doesn’t come around with her hocus-pocus. The one time Marty and I ate here, she kept her distance from us, but I could hear her yammering at the other people. Eat this, don’t eat that, your aura needs this, your soul needs that. Bullshit.”
The exterior of the building they approached was stucco, painted a startling pink, and with the inner recesses of the deep windows painted turquoise except for one, which was a dull gray. The door, all three colors, opened into a room like a restaurant in a 1940s movie, with dark wooden chairs, white tablecloths, and candles on each table. Off from this main dining area, a smaller room had curtained nooks, low tables, and cushions, some set up like bunk beds so the privacy of the diners was enhanced by the cushions’ elevation. Another room off to the side had small round tables of crayon-bright colors and art from 19th-century children’s books, as well as large papier-mâché sculptures of brightly striped tigers and zebras and a freakishly glowing blue donkey.
“Look at this.” Niall tapped a sign that stood in a metal frame on a stand near the hostess’s station.
Notice to Patrons: Bryan Barnes, a senior in Art and Theater at College of the Rio Grande, is filming his senior project here at Dada Café, a documentary on the restaurant as the theater of life. If you would prefer not to be part of the film please let your host or hostess know. If you are willing to be in it, please sign the consent form. Thank you for being a patron of the arts as well as of Dada Café.
The smiling henna-haired young hostess lisped around her gold tongue-stud as she offered a clipboard to Mae. “Will you be signing the release?”
“I don’t know if I’m a patron of the arts or not, but I reckon I don’t mind if somebody takes my picture.” Mae signed the form. Niall signed as well, grumbling, and they followed the hostess through the elegant room and into the bright one, where she seated them close to the donkey.
“Bryan will be your server. And Muffie will be around to read your aura and make some suggestions.”
Mae asked, “Bryan, the guy that’s doing the film, is our waiter?”
“Yes. He got the idea from working here. I don’t know if you know what Dada is.” Niall started to speak, but the hostess went on. “It was an art movement based on startling you with nonsense,
breaking up your preconceptions. Part of Dada in theater was the idea that the audience is as much a part of the show as the actors.” She deposited two menus on the striped-and-dotted table. “But we don’t serve Dada food, like fried roses or onion ice cream. Enjoy.”
As the hostess left, a broad-hipped, large-busted, middle-aged woman strode in from the other room. She wore a tunic-style blouse with flowing sleeves and matching wide-legged pants in an extraordinary fabric, a walking work of art featuring sunsets against deep blue. Her thick blonde hair swung in a crisp pageboy, her eyes were skillfully made up behind wire-rimmed glasses, and her full lips, framed with a web of tiny lines, wore pink lipstick matching a shade in her sunset clothing.
“Here she goes,” Niall muttered. “That’s Muffie.”
The blonde woman stopped at the nearest table, regarded the patrons seated there, and then placed her hands on the couple’s heads and closed her eyes. “Less brown. More yellow.” Less brown what? More yellow ... vegetables? Mae was confused, but the recipients of the reading didn’t seem to be. Muffie intoned, “There’s a residue ... the memories of chickens ...” Her voice had a raspy quality, pitched surprisingly low. She withdrew her hands. “Am I right?”
“Maybe,” the man said, looking at his companion, who twisted her mouth and frowned. “Yeah, maybe.”
Muffie looked at their menus, pointed out certain items, and nodded seriously. “Do not eat okra and cheese together. It will make a toxic sludge in your intestines that will clog your lower chakras. Take some lemon juice in the morning and filter it first. Remember, I’m always right.” She moved on to Mae’s table.
“Welcome, welcome.” She homed in on Mae, and Niall rose, quietly announcing his intention to go have a bee-ah at the bah. Muffie ignored him, hovering over Mae. “First time here?”
Mae wished the psychic act she’d witnessed was Dada, but based on what Niall had said, it was meant to be taken as real. Muffie looked like she was acting, though. Close up, Mae could see that Muffie’s face was smoothed to a flawless finish by foundation. Her elaborate eye make-up matched the blue of her outfit, and her cheeks, like her lips, echoed the rosy colors in her clothes. The effect was striking but unexpectedly artificial in someone whose restaurant emphasized healthy and natural. “Yes ma’am.”
