by Susan Wilson
Ruby sees that she’s got a reply from Joe Benini. He’s not encouraging.
“Heading to Presque Isle tomorrow (Friday) will only be there two days, then heading back through Vermont and points south.”
Timing sucks. She won’t be able to catch them in Maine before they head to Vermont, and she may not even catch them there. By that time, the agricultural fairs will pretty much be done with.
The email ends: “Not to worry. Maybe next year, Ruby. Say hi to Sabine for me, Joe.”
If it’s a disappointing message, it also has the effect of releasing Ruby from an obligation. Enough with the distraction of carnivals. There is a growing sense of closing in on her quest and that bears far more weight than her compulsive desire to keep moving. For the first time in her life, Ruby doesn’t balk at staying put. For the first time it feels like the right thing to do. That this is the right place to be.
As if reading her mind, the Hitchhiker runs up to Ruby and drops her forepaws on her lap. “Yes. Stay. Happy.” Her tongue is lolling and her woolly bear caterpillar eyebrows bounce up and down her dark forehead. Her tail beats so hard Ruby can feel the breeze on her ankles.
“Yes, we’ll stay. For now.” Ruby kisses the dog on the head. “For now.”
36
By Saturday morning, Ruby has spent most of her time composing the query letter she hopes will encourage perfect strangers with shared DNA into pointing her toward the answers she craves. She’s run it by Sabine and by Doug, and both have offered, from their own particular perspectives, edits and suggestions. Sabine’s from being tied to this quest by blood, and Doug by virtue of his profession. A message laden with delicacy and provoking of curiosity is hopefully what she has crafted.
My dear genetic cousin. My name is Ruby Heartwood, but I was christened Mary Jones. Christened in a Canadian convent and orphanage, Sacred Heart near Ottawa. As with so many who have questions about ancestors, I too have come to Family History Labs to see if I might locate my ancestors. However, I am most interested in locating my nearest relatives, not the more distant. Your green tree suggests that we share xxx amount of ancestry …
Ruby will plug in the exact amount for each cousin she contacts.
… I am hoping that you might be willing to share your family tree with me as I have no starting point. Should you have family stories, rumors, anything that might shed some light on my origins, and be willing to share it …
This is where she’s gotten stuck. Doug suggests starting with the family tree and leaving the quest out of it. Sabine thinks she should just ask bluntly for family scandals. No one suggests that she mention her peculiar gift of fortune-telling. Giving the letter one more quick scan, Ruby closes it out, still not quite satisfied.
She’s wangled a spot at the Makers Faire and is running a little late. This morning she’s going to press the animal communication skill a little harder with a view to getting a few house calls during the week. She’s got a new placard for her sandwich board with “animal communicator” at the top of the list. Polly mentioned that Carrie Farr has been talking up Ruby’s talents to her horse community, so maybe something will pop up. She unabashedly charges more for equine readings than canine. A couple of those this week and she’ll be able to relax.
Boy gets a little stressed as Ruby packs up the van. He leans against her, putting himself between her and the van. “It’s okay, Boy. We’re just going to the park.”
“Forever?”
“No. Till after lunch. Then we’ll come back.”
“What’s a lunch?”
“Eating for humans. Not for dogs. You get dinner.”
If she thought conversation with the Hitchhiker was frustrating, conversation with Boy is worse. He is still skeptical of her promise that Bull will come home. She knows why; even she’s not entirely sure she’s speaking the truth when she makes that promise. The infection is stubborn. Despite his size, Bull is not robust, years of smoking and Mountain Dew have exacted a toll. The dog picks up on that as if he’s the psychic. She gives the Labrador a full-body hug. “Hop in. I don’t want to leave you home by yourself.” She thought it might be better to let him be in his own house but has changed her mind. He might feel abandoned and she can’t put him through that.
Reluctantly, the dog gets into the van, stretches out on the bench seat. The Hitchhiker joins him, as if offering her own version of a full-body hug. Then rolls over and playfully nips at his chin, his paws, until he pushes her off the seat. Ruby thinks that this van is beginning to smell like dog. And not in a good way.
The Farmers’ Market is in full harvest mode, luscious vegetables, fruits, and baked goods fill the boxes displayed on each table. The coffee guy is enjoying a long line of customers on this slightly cooler Saturday. After a few slow weeks during the dog days of August, the event has ramped up; it is September, the kids are back in school, and fall is in the air. Ruby can tell from the crafts now on offer, that vendors are already looking forward to Christmas sales. Are those ornaments on a fake tree? Shop early, shop local. On her way by the knitters consortium, she can’t help but pick out a pom-pom hat for Molly and a pair of mittens for Tom but then blanches at the price for the handmade items. A little embarrassed, she has the vendor set them aside with a promise to come by after the Faire to pay for them, hoping that she will be able to afford them after a successful day. If not, she really shouldn’t be buying Christmas gifts anyway and she’ll explain herself to the woman. Or barter a reading for the hat.
The day has gone better than she had hoped for and Ruby lays another twenty into her cigar box, squishing the lid down against the growing stack. She’s on a roll. This is one of those rare days when she doesn’t have to make much up, just dress up the images and impressions and inspirations she’s receiving in the language of her trade. Back in the very old days, Ruby used to use a fake Bohemian accent, mostly because she was so young, no one would believe a girl like her could possibly interpret the signs accurately. Once Sabine hit middle school, she persuaded Ruby to drop it. “It’s, like, so embarrassing. People think I’m from Transylvania.” Heaven forfend that she embarrass her daughter. Ruby smiles at the memory.
Another customer comes up to the table. Tea leaves this time. Ruby has just enough hot water in the thermos to do one more reading. She’s replaced her smashed teapot with a cheap little ceramic pot she found in the thrift store for two dollars. It is so plain that she almost didn’t spot it on the shelf among the oversized souvenir mugs adorned with witty slogans or resort names. Plain as can be, off-white, holding only a pint of water. Surprisingly, it has poured out some nice fortunes today.
By the end of the day Ruby can pay for the knitted hat and mittens and put some away to pay Bull back for his kindness. She’s got three house calls to read dogs, one barn call to see about a mini donkey’s behavior problem, and a birthday party all arranged. It has been a very good day. If it wasn’t for Boy, Ruby might consider a night at the Dew Drop, which makes her think of the listing she saw in the window of Robert W. Atkins Real Estate office. Impulsively, she turns the Westfalia toward the motel. Sure enough, there is a real estate sign poked into the ground at the edge of the circular garden. Just looking at it makes Ruby think that Ravi has lost heart and that is very sad to her. He’s given up. Was this his American dream? Where will he go now? Should she have stayed more often?
Ruby spots Ravi coming out of the office, dressed, as always, in his crisp white shirt, black pants. He sees her van and waves her into the circle. “Hello, Ruby. Will you be staying with us tonight?”
“Oh, I can’t. I’m, uh, dog-sitting for Bull Harrison. He’s in the hospital.” She assumes Ravi, like most of the town, knows who Bull is, even if he’s not personally acquainted with him. Bull is, after all, a fixture.
“I am so sorry to hear that. Wish him well for me when you see him.” Ravi stands away from the side of the van to let her move off.
“I was just passing by.” She doesn’t really need to explain her random
arrival, but she does. “I saw your For Sale sign. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh. That. Well.” Ravi’s smile is a little sheepish, a little less pretty than usual. “The owner is selling. He’s been selling the place for fifty years.”
“I thought you were the owner.”
“Oh, no. I am the latest in a long line of South Asian desk clerks.”
“But you treat the place like your own.”
“I will take that as a compliment. I do take pride in my work.”
“Would you want it to be your own?” Even as she asks this question, she sees that Ravi’s aura has changed from its everyday pleasantness to a shade of blue that she associates with ambition.
“Perhaps. I’d want to make some big improvements, of course. A new pool, for one. Create suites instead of single rooms, efficiencies with kitchens. Attract families. Maybe even put in mini-golf or a rock-climbing wall.”
Ruby is charmed by Ravi’s ideas. She can’t imagine what it would take to accomplish, what kind of capital. This is not her area of expertise, but fortune-telling is. She reaches out and takes Ravi’s left hand. Turns it over. Runs her finger along his life line and the four little branches off of it. “I see success for you down the road. But you have to take the first step.”
“My grandmother back in Sri Lanka is a fortune-teller. She has said the same thing.” He grins at Ruby, gently takes his hand back and pats the side of the van. “Nice to see you. Give my regards to Bull.”
* * *
It has been a busy day, meeting lots of people, not much time to nap. Boy doesn’t rest, not really. He’s not playing much either, which is disappointing for me as I have come to depend on his being on the other end of my tug toys. I keep telling him that his person will be back, because my person has said so, but he is what the people call a skeptic. He has trust issues. I know he scented out the disease that took his man away, and that he can’t get that scent out of his nose, but I do believe that things will be okay. I love the word okay. It is deployed only when things are good. Along with good girl. I must tell Ruby that she needs to tell Boy that he is a good boy. She forgets sometimes. She is distracted too. She doesn’t smell of disease, thankfully, but she does emit a curious scent of disquiet. She sits and studies her box things and then pulls out that really interesting pack of objects that smell so delightfully of a myriad of hands touching. People who have just eaten popcorn and people who are freshly exercised. Walkers and strollers and baby holders. Young women in heat and young men in rut. Ruby has to push me away when I get a little too close and the objects scatter all over the floor. I pounce, but she shoos me away, gathers the objects and puts them back in their little wooden box.
* * *
Ruby gathers the scattered tarot cards, taps them into alignment and puts them back into their little wooden box. It had been a pointless exercise; they had revealed nothing more than what she already knew, had given no direction or guidance. She had wanted them to point the way to sending those email missives to unknown cousins, giving her a sense of authority, of a predetermined success. More specifically, she had wanted one green tree to be designated the best choice. But of course, cards can’t do that. A flip of the coin is a better technique for such indecision. There are three potential contacts. Each one is a second cousin, meaning that she and they share a set of great grandparents. Any first cousins haven’t shown up. That would be too easy. No hint that one of these strangers is actually closer in relation than another. A sister perhaps. Maybe something will appear in the next wave of Family History Lab results. They add information as more people climb onboard the DNA railroad.
Well, she could do an eenie-meenie-miney-mo thing, but instead Ruby decides that she’ll feed the dogs and eat the other half of her lunchtime sandwich. As they climb out of the van to go into Bull’s kitchen, a car pulls into the yard. Boy immediately does his hiding in the bushes thing that he has taken to doing since Bull disappeared. As a young man gets out of his vehicle, the dog bursts out from the hedges and fairly knocks the guy over with his exuberance. His tail is whipping back and forth and suddenly the big dog is in the guy’s arms. Ruby knows instantly that this must be Bull’s son Cooper.
“I hope that you’ve got good news.”
“Pretty good. First of all, thank you for getting him to the hospital. Secondly, yes, Bull is doing much better. He’ll be in for a few more days, but they’ve got the infection under control. And, thank God, it wasn’t hepatitis after all.”
“That is good news. Boy will be overjoyed to see him.”
“Well, that’s why I’m here. Bull’s doing better, but I think that if he can see the dog, he’ll really improve. He’s down, you know.”
“Being sick is hard work. It’s depressing.”
“I’m going to pull a little fast one on the medical community and bring Boy to see him. Don’t you think he’d make a great emotional support dog?”
“I think that’s exactly what he is.” Ruby can hear the dog’s thoughts even as she stands three feet from him. Cooper carries Bull’s scent on him, and the dog is crazed to figure out what it means. “He just needs a vest.”
“I just want you to know that I don’t hold with faking therapy dogs and the like, but in this case, I think that it’s the truth.”
Cooper seems like a nice young man; seems like he cares for his father. But Ruby also gets the sense that this is a reborn relationship. That it hasn’t always been so. She shakes the impression off. What is important is what is happening right now. “They need each other.”
Man and dog are gone in ten minutes. Cooper will keep Boy with him until his father comes home. All of a sudden, Ruby is free to go.
Well, given her appointments coming up in the next week, not so free to go far, but certainly free to not be living in her van in Bull’s yard. She grabs her leftover turkey sandwich, locks Bull’s back door, and she and the Hitchhiker head out of Harmony Farms to spend the night with Doug.
Doug sets a glass of wine in front of Ruby, just to the side of her open laptop. When she’d called him, Doug had made her promise that she would show him the latest iteration of her query letter after a shared meal of leftovers. His, yesterday’s chicken tacos, hers, the turkey sandwich from lunch. She’d had one of his tacos, and he’d had half of her half sandwich. All in all, enough for both of them and a dropped piece of turkey for the dog.
“You’ve got no reason not to send this to all of them. What’s the worse that happens? No response? Just do it.”
And so she does. Pressing the send key to launch the three missives into the unknown. It is an anticlimactic act. If this was a movie, there would be an appropriate sound track with French horns bleating. “Do you suppose they all know each other?”
“Could be. Although I can’t tell you who my second cousins are. My mother’s cousins’ kids. Well, maybe one. Okay, two. Most of them grew up in the same neck of the woods.” Doug grins. “It is legal for second cousins to marry, right?”
Ruby twangs out the Deliverance banjo motif.
Her feet are very cold, and Ruby realizes that she’s standing in snow. The Hitchhiker is dragging her by the leash through dirty snow piled up on streets. The dog seems in a great hurry to get somewhere. She hears, but doesn’t see, Doug, who is telling her that they have tickets to a play and that they are going to be late. Another voice speaks to Ruby. An older woman with permed hair, threaded with gray. This woman gives Ruby a gentle hug. “Hi, Auntie,” Ruby says. She’s never had an aunt before, so she is delighted when this dream aunt offers her a cup of coffee saying, “You need to visit your mother.” The coffee spills down Ruby’s front but doesn’t burn. It melts a gap in the snow, and the Hitchhiker laps at it. “Where do I find her?”
Doug wakes her up when he rearranges the tossed bedclothes over them, tucks the blanket around her bare feet.
Like the rest of her mother dreams, this one is vivid hours into the day. The dream aunt is so real that Ruby assumes she is a composite of women she
already knows. She wishes that Doug hadn’t woken her, that her aunt had given her the answer to that question: Where do I find her?
“I’m no Freudian,” Doug says. “I don’t interpret dreams, but I think that all this one was is a result of your sending that message to potential relatives. It’s so much in the forefront of your thinking that naturally your id is going to rejigger it to sort it out for your ego.”
“Id? Ego? You forget I only had an eighth-grade education.”
“You’re one of the smartest women I know, Ruby Heartwood. You can’t throw me that line. You forget I’ve seen the contents of your Kindle.”
For some reason that makes Ruby blush a little. She’s an autodidact and she’s proud of that fact. From the time Sabine was little, Ruby worked hard to never be in a position where her daughter would be embarrassed by her lack of education. Her weird profession, that’s a given as an embarrassment, but not a lack of education. She may not have a college degree, but she does have a G.E.D. Every high school lesson that Sabine brought home, Ruby studied as well in the guise of helping her daughter with her homework. If Sabine had ever cottoned onto what Ruby was doing, she had the grace—or perhaps the maturity—not to mention it.
It is late Sunday afternoon when Ruby cautiously opens up her laptop. They’ve had a lovely quiet day, a nice walk, a casual lunch. She won’t stay tonight. Doug has work in the morning and she has her first appointment at eight-thirty to read a mischievous puppy. She doesn’t want to risk getting stuck in commuter traffic. It’s getting dark earlier these days, so she’ll head back to Harmony Farms after she checks to see if the chum she’s tossed out onto the sea of family research has been bit. Expecting nothing, she is completely surprised to see a message in her Family History Lab inbox. She feels Doug’s big hand on her shoulder. “I’ll be in the backyard with the dog.”
