The grove was an orange grove-Valencias, in fact-one of the last still owned by the SunBlesst Company, once operated under the hard scrutiny of my father, Theodore Francis Monroe.
What made the grove important to Isabella and me was a Sunday evening six Septembers ago, after a day I had spent making the ranch rounds on horseback with my father-checking the irrigation, the fruit sugar levels, the poacher and pest damage.
It had been a typical day for me and my father: polite, given mostly to the exchange of professional complaints, which for him always meant the shrinking acreage of SunBlesst Ranch. The day was, on my part at least, less than fully felt. I loved him, but there was a cynicism in my father that he cultivated as carefully as he did his citrus crop, a hardness that left him somehow both unlikable and untouchable. He had tried to pass along those things to me, as if they were gifts, and I accepted them-especially when I was with him. I always felt stronger when I left him, though a little smaller, too. But like most men who protect themselves with toughness, my father revealed his tenderness inadvertently, unbeknownst to himself. There were three things I never saw him handle with anything but deference and care: my mother, Suzanne; the oranges on his trees; and the men-mostly Mexicans-who worked for him. Looking back at him now, I will say that he was, and still is, the most fiercely paternal man I've known, paternal in the atavistic sense of protecting his mate, guarding his cave, commanding his pack of underlings, and treating outsiders with extreme suspicion- particularly males, especially, of course, those most like himself. I will say, too, that despite my efforts to rise above him in the way that all sons try to better their fathers, his imprint is upon me with all its faults and blessings. I am truly my father's son. It was that fact, more than anything, that left me mystified by Amber Mae Wilson's peremptory employment of my "pollen" and my subsequent dismissal, and that left me blindly, numbly, stupidly infuriated by the way that Grace had been removed from my life before ever really becoming a part of it. My father, needless to say, had been horrified by everything about Amber Mae, except for her astonishing beauty. They came to hate each other.
Toward evening, my father and I shook hands outside the ranch house and I left. My mother sent me off with a boxful of food-Russell the bachelor, even at thirty-four still spoiled by his mom. But rather than heading home, I drove down one of the dirt roads that ran along the crest of a hill, wound along the edge of an emerald green grove, then ended in a place that had always been my favorite piece of ground in the entire SunBless Ranch. This corner of the grove was originally where the laborer: would gather for lunch and, on Friday evenings, dinner. At first- years ago, my father said-there had been just a table that the workers had made of old upturned cable spools. The chair: were orange crates borrowed from the packing house. But a: time went on and-I found out later-with my father's help, a few trees had been relocated, a large palapa had been built, eight long picnic tables were set up around a square of raked and packed earth, and an impressive ceramic fountain featuring a creature-laden St. Francis of Assisi was placed near the road at the entrance of the "cantina." My father had T'd off of an irrigation pipe to divert enough water to keep the fountain full and flowing.
As a boy, I had spent many hours there, some with the laborers, some on the weekends, when I could be alone to sit in the shade, listen to the water spill around St. Francis's sandaled feet, and look out at the green continent of citrus to the south or to the dry, tormented hillsides to the west. I danced with my first girl there, on the packed ground between the tables, on a Friday night some thirty years ago. I got drunk for the first time in my life there at that "cantina," the same night as my first dance, I believe. When my heart was broken in the fourth grade by a girl named Cathy, I'd spent weekends for two whole months in the shade of the palapa, writing her letters that I never mailed, feeling profoundly sorry for myself. You can leave me, I remember thinking, but I'll always have this. Boo-hoo.
Of course, this corner of the grove had changed by the time I arrived that Sunday evening in September, after spending the day with my father. The shrinking SunBlesst Ranch meant fewer workers, and fewer workers meant less life. No one worked Sundays anymore.
I'd parked and walked toward the now-tilting, algae-stained fountain and looked at the aging palapa.
And to my surprise, someone sat at one of the tables in the shade, looking back.
What struck me first was the whiteness of her blouse against the green background of trees behind her. The rest of her seemed to blend with those trees, as if she were a part of them and they had allowed her to stray just far enough to use the table, as if they could snatch her back at any second. As I walked closer, she came into relief: a young woman, her hair pinned up in a haphazard knot, an open book lying on the table in front of her, regarding me with calm, very dark brown eyes.
"Sorry to bother you," I said.
"No bother at all, unless you've got some planned."
"Just a visit to one of my favorite places on earth."
"Mine, too. Sundays are the best."
I took my eyes off her, looked quickly around the "cantina," then at her again. She wore simple silver hoops in her ears, which shone subtly against her black hair and toffee-colored skin.
"What are you reading?" I asked, strictly as an excuse to keep looking at her.
"Wallace Stevens." She picked up the book, looked at me, then down at the page. I noted her ringless left hand with a thrillingly inappropriate satisfaction. She read:
Slowly the ivy on the stones
Becomes the stones. Women become
The cities, children become the fields
And men in waves become the sea.
'"The Man with the Blue Guitar,"' I said. I'd never been so thankful to have known a poem in my whole life, and probably never will be again.
She smiled for the first time, a small smile with something pleased in it. "I'm reading it with John Rowe out at the university."
"I read it with Bob Peters. Same school. That was a long time ago."
She set down the book. "Do you work here?"
"My father is the manager."
"Mine's one of the supers-Joe Sandoval."
"I've met him. Russell Monroe," I said.
"Isabella Sandoval."
Then a silence pried its way between us, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. She smiled at me again, then reached down to the bench and hauled up a rather large canvas to bag. Out came two beers.
"I'd offer you a bite to eat, but all I brought was this,” she said.
"I'd offer you a drink, but all I have is about twenty pound of food. I'll get some, okay? It's right there in the car. My mother made it. It's always real good."
She suddenly pulled a serious face, then nodded. By the time I came back with Mom's generous box of provisions, Isabella Sandoval was laughing directly and undisguisedly at me.
In that moment, I saw myself as she did: a big thirty four-year-old dope carrying around a picnic box packed by his loving mother, offering to share it with a pretty girl he'd met two minutes ago. I laughed at myself with her-red in the face, she told me later-and it came out strongly, that laughter, up from a place I kept hidden from my father's cynicism and from my own dull convictions about what it meant to be a man.
I fell in love with Isabella's laugh then, and a few hours later, I had begun to fall in love with the rest of her. I, quite literally, could not take my eyes off of her. It was the purest, widest, most simple emotion I had ever felt, and I've never experienced anything close to it since. I believed then that it was enough to last a lifetime. But all that seemed-as we drove there from the hospital six years later-much, much more than a lifetime ago.