Joanna laughed in spite of herself. “Oh, all right,” she said. “I suppose I do like it. Praline cake is one of those things that grows on you . . . in more ways than one.”
Juanita Grijalva sat at her wobbly Formica-topped kitchen table wearing only a bra and slip, waiting Lucy, her brother’s wife, to finish ironing her best dress. The starched cotton was so well worn it had taken on a satiny sheen. Juanita knew the dress was getting old. She could tell that from the gradually changing texture of the aging material, but glaucoma kept her from being able to see it.
Thee navy-blue dress—brand-new then and with all the stickers still pinned to the sleeve—had been a final, extravagant gift from the lady whose house Juanita had cleaned and whose washing and ironing she had done for twenty years before failing vision had forced her to stop working altogether. If Juanita had worked as a maid in the hotel or as a cook in the county hospital, she might have had a pension and some retirement income instead of just a blue dress. But it was too late to worry about that now.
Juanita had lain awake in her bed all night long, worrying about the coming interview. She had finally fallen asleep just before dawn when her brother’s rooster next door started his early-morning serenade. Now, as noon approached and with it time for Frank Montoya to come pick her up, Juanita found herself so weary that she could barely stay awake. Her sightless eyes burned. Her shoulders ached from the heavy weight of her sagging breasts. To relieve the burden, she heaved them up and rested them on the edge of the table,
“Who’s coming for you?” Lucy asked.
“Maria Montoya’s son. Frank. He used to be city marshal over in Willcox, but he works for the Sheriff’s Department now. He told me last night that he’d drive me up to Bisbee to see that new woman sheriff.”
Lucy plucked the dress off the ironing boar then held it up, examining the garment critic under the light of the room’s single ceiling fix Finding a crease over one pocket, she put the dr back on the board.
Lucy was quiet for some time, seemingly concentrating on eradicating the stubborn crease in Juanita’s dress. She and her husband, Reuben, had long since decided that their no-good nephew, Jorge, was a lost cause. He drank too much—at least he always used to. For years he had bounced from job to job, frittering away whatever money he made. Not only that; anyone his age who would mess around with a girl as young as Serena Duffy had been wasn’t worth the trouble.
Finally, Lucy set the steaming iron back down on the cloth-covered board. “I don’t know why you bother about him,” she said. “It’s not going to do any good.”
“I bother because I have to,” Juanita replied reproachfully, staring with unblinking and unseeing eyes in the direction of her sister-in-law’s voice. “Because Jorge’s my son. If I don’t stick up for him, who will?”
Nobody, Lucy thought, but she didn’t say it. She had already said far too much.
“Besides,” Juanita added a moment later, if Jorge to goes to prison, I’ll never see Ceci and Pablo again.”
Lucy nodded. “I suppose that’s true,” she said.
Lucy Gomez understood about grandchildren. She loved her own to distraction and spoiled them as much as she was able. Living next door, she saw had how it grieved Juanita when her daughter-in-law took Ceci and Pablo and moved to Phoenix. But then there had still been the possibility of seeing hem occasionally. With Jorge accused of Serena’s murder, things were much worse than that now.
Lucy plucked the carefully ironed but threadbare dress off the ironing board and handed it to Juanita. “You’re right,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “I feel sorry for the kids. They’re the only reason I’m here.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Eva Lou Brady shooed her daughter-in-law out of the kitchen at High Lonesome Ranch. “Get out of here, Joanna,” she ordered. “Either go load your things into the car or sit down and take it easy, but get out from under hand and foot. I’ve certainly spent enough time in’ this kitchen to know how to put a Sunday dinner, together.”
No doubt Eva Lou Brady knew Joanna’s kitchen, backward and forward. Joanna and Andy had lived’ in the house on High Lonesome Ranch for years now, but there were still times when Joanna felt: like an outsider—as though the kitchen continued to belong to her mother-in-law rather than to the new generation of owners. It was the house where she and Jim Bob had raised their son, Andrew.
A country girl born and bred, Eva Lou had loved the cozy Sears Craftsman bungalow, but the whole time she had lived there, she had harbored the secret dream of one day living in town. When Andy and Joanna were ready to start looking for a place of their own, Eva Lou was the one who had broached the radical idea of selling the ranch to the younger couple so she and Jim Bob could move into Bisbee proper.
Right that minute, though, with her face red and with a steaming pot on every burner of the stove, Eva Lou Brady was clearly in her element and back on her home turf.
Joanna lingered in the doorway for a moment, watching her mother-in-law’s efficient movements. Eva Lou cooked without ever wasting a single motion. She never seemed hurried or rushed. Her skillful gestures and businesslike approach to meal preparation always left Joanna feeling like an inept home ec washout.
“At least I could set the table,” Joanna offered lamely.
“Jenny will help with that, won’t you?” Eva Lou asked, pausing with the rolling pin poised over the biscuit dough and raising a flour-dusted eyebrow in Jenny’s direction.
“How many places?” Jenny asked.
“Seven,” Eva Lou answered. “Grandma Lathrop phoned after church to say that she’s coming, too.”
“That’s a switch,” Joanna said. “If she changed her mind about coming to dinner, maybe she’ll change her mind about Phoenix as well.”
Eva Lou shook her head. “I doubt it. I asked her again, but she said no—that she’s meeting someone here in Bisbee over the weekend, but she wouldn’t say who.” Eva Lou shot Joanna an inquiring glance. “You don’t suppose Eleanor Lathrop has a boyfriend after all these years, do you?”
“Boyfriend?” Joanna echoed. “My mother? You’ve got to be kidding. Whatever makes you say that?”
Eva Lou shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Eleanor hasn’t been at all herself the last few weeks. She’s been acting funny—funnier than usual, I mean. It’s like she’s carrying around some secret that she can barely keep from spilling.”
“Spilling secrets is my mother’s specialty,” Joanna said shortly. “I don’t think she’s ever kept one in her life, certainly not anybody else’s. And a boyfriend? No way. It couldn’t be.”
“Your mother’s an attractive woman,” Eva Lou returned. “And stranger things than that have happened, you know.”
Joanna considered for a moment, then shook her head. “I agree,” she said, “It would be strange, all right.”
With that, banished from the kitchen, Joanne did as she’d been told. She retreated to her bedroom for one last check of her luggage to make sure she had packed everything she would need. When it came time to open the closet door, she hesitated, knowing that the sight of it would leave her with a quick clutch of emptiness in her stomach that had nothing at all to do with hunger.
At her mother’s insistence, Joanna had finally found the strength to take Andy’s clothing to a church-run used-clothing bank down in Naco, Sonora. Although half of the closet was now totally empty, Joanna’s clothing was still jammed together at end of a clothes rod while the other end held nothing but a few discarded hangers. Two months had passed, but Joanna could not yet bring herself to hang her own clothes on the other side of that invisible line that divided her part of the closet from that she still thought of as Andy’s. The time for claiming and rearranging the whole closet would come eventually—at least, she hoped it would—but for now, she still wasn’t ready.