“No. In Grace?”
“Yep. Not the pecans, those belong to my cousins, but Tía Sonia’s leaving me the peach orchard. The fruit trees were always my job, keeping the birds and squirrels off the fruit.”
“How do you do that?”
“Well, the main way is by killing them.”
I laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“I don’t know.” I stared out the windshield. In the distance, Ship Rock floated like a ghost vessel on the snowy plain. “So you now have a dying orchard to call your own. Your Aunt Sonia’s moved back to Santa Rosalia, right?”
“Right. But the orchard’s not mine till I have kids.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“No, it makes sense. When you have a family, you need trees.” He paused, carefully, it seemed to me, and redirected the conversation. “What job did you grow up on?”
I thought this over. “Maybe I haven’t had it yet.”
He smiled. “You went to medical school, right? And almost finished. That can’t be too easy.”
“When it stopped being easy, I quit.”
“What were you doing in Tucson, then, before you came to Grace?”
“You don’t want to know. Cashier in a 7-Eleven.”
“Shoot. And I thought you were too good to go out with a locomotive engineer. What about before that?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, I did medical research at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.”
“Damn! Really?”
“Yep. I was living up there two years ago when I first found out Doc Homer was sick.”
“And before that?”
I rolled my head back and looked at the roof of the car. “You really don’t want to know.”
“You were President of the United States.”
“Guess again.”
“You hotwired Porsches.”
I laughed. “The biggest thing I ever stole was a frozen lobster, for my boyfriend’s birthday. I was working in frozen foods and I think I actually wanted to get fired. Doesn’t that sound stupid?”
“Yes, it sounds stupid. So that came before Mayo Clinic?”
“That, and a bunch of different odd little things. A few piddly research jobs in between. Believe me, I never put everything on the same résumé.”
“And what’s the one you never mention? The one you’re trying not to tell me about.”
“For a few years in there I lived overseas.”
“No kidding. Did you fly? Shoot, I’d love to go someplace in an airplane.”
“Flying’s okay,” I said. In truth, flying terrified me. It’s the one thing I knew I had in common with my mother, who’d flat-out refused, there at the end. In my own life I handled it by means of steadfast denial. I’d flown over the Atlantic Ocean twice without even checking to see if there really was a flotation device under my seat; flotation seemed beside the point. Oh, I flew like a bird.
“So, okay, what were you doing overseas?”
I glanced at him. “I was my boyfriend Carlo’s girlfriend. On the island of Crete.”
He seemed amused. “What, you mean you cleaned house and made cookies?”
“Kind of. Sometimes I’d help out in the clinic. One time I set the broken leg of a sheep. But mostly I was a housewife.”
“So you’d, what, go shopping in a bikini?”
I laughed. “It really was not that kind of island. You know where it is, right? In between Greece and Egypt. The women wear black wool dresses and crucifixes the size of a hood ornament. Getting the picture?”
He nodded.
“The main baby present for a boy is a silver knife, which they present in this ceremony where the godparents list all the enemies of the family going back to around Adam and Eve.”
“You liked it that much, huh?”
I took my coat off. It was finally warming up. “Well, it was interesting. It was someplace to go. It was like going to another century, actually. But I felt like a complete outsider.” I closed my eyes, fighting an old ache.
“How do you mean?”
“I’m pretty good at languages but I never could get the hang of fitting in. Not anywhere, but especially not there.”
“Why do you think you don’t fit in? Give me an example.”
It was plain that I’d always been an oddity in Grace, so he must have meant how was I an oddity in Crete. “Well, my first day there I marched into the bakery and asked for a psoli. The word for a loaf of bread is psomi. A psoli is a penis.”
Loyd laughed. “Anybody could make a mistake like that.”
“Not more than once, I promise you.”
“Well, you were foreign. People expect you to say a few dumb things.”
“Oh, every day I did something wrong. They had complicated rules about who could talk to who and what you could say and who said it first. Like, there were all these things you were supposed to do to avoid the Evil Eye.”
“How do you do that?” he asked. Loyd was full of curiosity.
“You wear this little amulet that looks like a blue eyeball. But the main thing is, you never ever mention anything you’re proud of. It’s this horrible social error to give somebody a compliment, because you’re attracting the attention of the Evil Eye. So you say everything backward. When two mothers pass each other on the road carrying their babies, one says to the other, ‘Ugly baby!’ And the other one says, ‘Yours also!’”
Loyd laughed a wonderful, loud laugh that made me think of Fenton Lee, in high school. Who’d died in the train wreck.
“I swear to God it’s true.”
“I believe you. It’s just funny how people are. People in Grace do that too, in a way. You give them a compliment and they’ll say, ‘Oh, no, that’s just something I’ve had a long time.’ We’re all scared to be too happy about what we’ve got, for fear somebody’ll notice and take it away.” He reached over and stroked the underside of my arm, from the elbow up. “Like you, Codi. You’re exactly like that. Scared to claim anything you love.”
“Am I?” I was willing to believe whatever he said. Talking with Loyd was like talking to myself, only more honest. Emelina was always asking me what it was like to live overseas, and I knew she would love the penis story, but I’d never told her much about Crete. I was afraid of her seeing me as more of an outsider in Grace than I already was. But Loyd didn’t make those judgments. I could have told Loyd I’d lived on Neptune, and he’d say, “Uh-huh? What was it like, was it cold?”
In the Jemez Mountains we drove up the slope of what looked like a huge old volcano. A fluted core of granite jutted from its mouth, and twisted black ridges of old lava flows ran like varicose veins down its sides. The snow was deep and the road icy. We crept along, then stopped. Loyd got out of the truck and started down the bank toward a frozen creek that cut between the road and the steep mountainside.
“Are you nuts?” I inquired.
“Come on.” He waved energetically.
“Why should I follow you down there?” I demanded, following as fast as I could.
“It’s a surprise.”
It was near sunset, near or below freezing, and Loyd wasn’t even wearing his jacket. I slipped several times behind him and then we both slid flat-out down the hill on our backs. We were sledding, not on snow but on an exposed hillside of bizarre, rounded gravel. I picked up a handful in my mitten and tossed it in the air. It was porous and weightless like Styrofoam popcorn. “What is this stuff?” I asked, but Loyd was already crossing a log over the frozen creek. I scrambled behind him up the forested slope on the other side. I picked my way between rocks, grabbing roots and tree trunks to pull myself up. Halfway up I had to stop, hugging a pine trunk and panting. The cold air cut my lungs, and I blinked hard against the sensation that the water in my eyes might freeze over.
“It’s the altitude,” I whined. Loyd grabbed my hand and pulled me gently uphill. Suddenly we were following the course of an odd unfrozen stream with lush plants thriving alongside it, their leaves glossy green against the snow. I’d never seen anything like this in nature, only in the sort of paintings that show improbable and dreamlike things. Loyd, who had gotten ahead of me again, was now taking off his shirt. I wondered if perhaps I was, after all, in one of my strange dreams, and whether I would soon be looking under the foliage beside the stream for my lost baby.