“Do you have a good winter coat?” Norma Galvez asked me. “It snows up there. You’d just as well stay here.”
In their eyes my life should have been simple, purely a matter of love and the right wardrobe. It was as if I had fifty mothers.
In the last hour before I left I had to go through Emelina’s kitchen to retrieve a pair of jeans from the laundry room. John Tucker was folding laundry. He told me Emelina was lying down upstairs with a bad headache.
“You got a baseball game today?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry I won’t be around to see you win.”
He smiled. In a year I’d watched him grow into his elbows and lose the better part of his shyness. His voice was beginning to crack. “Mom’s really going to miss you. She’ll be a witch for the next month. She’ll make us clean out the chicken pens and stuff.”
“It’s all my fault,” I said, grabbing a runaway corner of a sheet and helping him fold it. “You guys can send me hate mail in Telluride.”
He laughed. “Okay.”
“If it gets too bad you can run away from home. Come up and see me. We’ll go skiing.”
He hoisted his laundry basket and headed for the stairs.
When I came back out through the kitchen Viola was there at the table, lying in wait like a predator.
“Sit down,” she said. “Save your shoes.”
I was lunch meat. I sat down.
“Boy oh boy, kiddo,” she said.
“What does that mean? That I should stay here?”
“Sure you should.”
“Well,” I said.
“But nobody ever could tell you a darn thing.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“I been wanting to tell you something.”
“I know Emelina’s pissed off at me.”
She snorted. “If you don’t know that already you’re not going to hear it from me.”
“Oh.” I thought about what else she might have to reveal to me. “I know about my mother,” I said. “I know she came from here, that she was a cousin or something to Doña Althea. And that she and Doc Homer ran off.”
Viola smiled a little. “Son of a gun. He told you?”
“More or less.”
She adjusted the coil of hair on the back of her head, reclaiming its territory with the planting of a few long bobby pins. “Well, that’s not what I was wanting to tell you.”
We sat looking at each other for a good while. Her T-shirt said I WAS DEEP DISHED AT MAMA LENARDA’S. I had no idea where it might have come from.
“I’m not supposed to tell you,” she added.
“Says who?”
“Says me. Doc Homer would shoot me if he found out.”
“I don’t think there’s much danger, Viola.”
“Well, but it’s the principles.”
Now I was curious. “So, did you sit me down here to tell me something or not?”
She hesitated, shifting her weight forward onto her elbows on the table. “I was looking after you girls the day your mama died.”
“You kept us at home?”
She nodded. “I was supposed to.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I thought you had the right to say bye to your mama, like anybody else. To tell her, ‘Vaya con Dios.’ Anybody else had no business up there, they just went to watch the show, but you had business and you was not allowed to go. Hallie was just born, she didn’t know anything anyway so I left her with Uda Dell.”
“And you took me up to the field to see the helicopter come down.”
Viola leaned back in her chair. “I’m not saying I did, and I’m not saying I didn’t.”
“What are you saying?”
“Just that you had a right. That’s all. Now, skedaddle. Que le vaya bien.”
The Greyhound was mostly empty, a dry gourd rolling across the desert, occasionally spilling out a seed or two in an inhospitable outpost: Bowie, Willcox, Benson. It was 110 degrees down there, not something people would travel through unless they were desperate to be elsewhere.
As things had turned out, Grace was not going to dry up. The women of the Stitch and Bitch had won back the river. A vice-president of the Black Mountain Mining Company called a press conference in Phoenix to announce that after seventy years of productive and congenial relations with the people of Gracela Canyon, the mine operation there was closing up shop. It was a matter of the leaching operation’s being no longer profitable, he said. The dam would be deconstructed. Naturally, if any harm had been incurred, all necessary reparations would be made to the people of Grace. He made no mention of the historic registry petition that had been filed one week earlier. So mountains could be moved. Now I knew.
When my bus paused in Willcox a woman climbed aboard and chose to sit by me, rather than take her chances on something worse that might come along, I guess. She wore an ample white jogging suit and had an odd, metallic hair color. I spent the next fifty miles in fear of a conversation I wasn’t in the mood for, but she just kept scowling at a gardening magazine.
Then suddenly she held out her magazine as if it had offended her. “That kills me, how people can grow four o’clocks like that,” she said, whacking the page with the back of her plump hand.
I glanced over at the unbelievable floral displays in her magazine. I could relate to her frustration. You just knew they trucked in those flowers from a climate-controlled greenhouse somewhere and arranged them on the lawn, right before snapping the photo.
“I’m Alice Kimball,” the woman explained. “I get the worst slugs.”
Alice. Would my mother be wearing tepid jogging suits now, if her organs had not failed her? I tried to smile. “Where do you get them?”
“In my four o’clocks. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, I can’t grow a four o’clock to save my life. The leaves get so full of holes they just look pitiful. And they get in the lawn, too. My husband says he hears them out there eating up his grass. What can you do?”
“I’m not the right person to ask,” I said. “My sister could sure tell you, though. She got a degree in Integrated Pest Management. She used to answer the Garden Hotline in Tucson, 626-BUGS.”
Mrs. Kimball brightened as if I’d offered her a peppermint. “I’ve called that before. They have the nicest little girl on that line, she’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“That was my sister you talked to. Hallie Noline.” I was amazed by the coincidence, but then again probably half of Tucson had turned to Hallie for advice. And half of Nicaragua. “That was part of her job,” I said. “She did that for six years.”
Mrs. Kimball looked around at the neighboring seats as if Hallie might turn up for consultation. “Well, do you mean she’s quit? I just thought the world of her.”
“Yep, she quit. She left the country.”
“Left the country?”
“She went to Nicaragua.” Everybody in this country should know her name, I thought. During the Iran hostage crisis they had a special symbol on the newscasts: a blindfolded man, and the number of days. A schoolchild glancing up from a comic book would know that this story was about them. But a nation gloats on the hostility of its enemies, whereas Hallie had proved the malevolence of some men we supplied with machine guns. Hallie was a skeleton in the civic closet.
Some people knew. I’d gotten a card from a nun in Minneapolis who had known Hallie. She was one of several thousand people who had gone down to Nicaragua for just a week or two, she said. They helped pick coffee, or if they had training they did other helpful things. The idea was just to be there in the danger zone, so that if the U.S. should attack, it would have to attack some of its own citizens. This nun, Sister Sabina Martin, had helped give vaccinations. She met Hallie at the clinic in Chinandega the day Hallie brought in a child who’d drunk paraquat from a Coke bottle. Sister Martin and Hallie sat with the child the whole day, and she said that although I might not think it possible, she felt she’d come to know Hallie well during that time. In some circumstances, she said, an afternoon can be a whole life.