Lucy burst out in a laugh. “Okay, okay. It’s a business trip, but you never know.”
“Maybe you could come stay longer next time?”
“I promise,” Lucy said.
Claire fantasized about cool, white foods — milk shakes and ice cream, creamy French Brie cheese with water crackers. “Can someone make me a grilled cheese?”
But neither girl heard her as they sat on the tile floor, leaning back against the wall.
“Donald seems taken with you,” Lucy said.
“Oh, Don. That’s nothing. I just magicked him.”
“Why don’t you teach me how to magic a man,” Lucy said, laughing but serious. Claire understood with a pang that her baby girl was lonely.
“That’s easy,” Minna said. “Problem is, it doesn’t get you what you want. In fact, it almost guarantees the opposite.”
“I want lunch,” Claire said, and both girls laughed.
“She hasn’t kept anything down in two days,” Lucy said. “And now she has the munchies.”
“Let’s go cook you something.”
They sat in the kitchen watching Minna cook.
“I’m so hungry,” Claire wailed. “Hurry.”
Lucy reached up to the cabinet above the refrigerator and pulled down a chocolate bar. Claire had forgotten all about that hiding place when the kids were small. When Josh had discovered it, he used a chair to reach it, then stole the whole supply and ate it in the orchard so he wouldn’t have to share with his sisters.
“I didn’t know chocolate was still stashed up there. Please, my dear baby girl, bring that here.”
* * *
Lucy packed to leave. She hugged them both good-bye. Minna had become indispensable, and not the paintings on the walls of her room, nor the nights spent out with Don, dissuaded them from the belief that they had come across someone true and genuine, to be treasured and held on to.
Claire didn’t know what the words on Minna’s walls meant, didn’t understand if her relationship with Don was about love or money, didn’t have a clear idea of her past, but Minna fed her, sometimes bite by bite, when needed. Although she did not love Claire, had not known her long enough except for a superficial affection, was not her daughter, Claire received more understanding at Minna’s hands than she dared ask for from her own children, more kindness than she could ever have hoped for from a stranger, perhaps more than she deserved. If that disinterested tenderness was not some kind of love, she didn’t know by what other name to call it.
Chapter 12
For Claire the time after the girls’ second leaving held a kind of perfection. The awkwardness of new acquaintance past, Minna and she settled into a companionship that was in ways as satisfying as her early days on the farm. All the songs and poems of the world focus exclusively on carnal love, which in many ways is the frailest and most fickle of bonds. Maternal love, familial caring, friendship, are all less overwhelming to the senses, but capable of greater steadiness due to that reticence. But the two relationships had an obvious difference: Forster and she had created an ever-widening circle of people — family, friends, workers, children — while Minna’s and her new world was ever contracting.
* * *
After a few weeks of cheerfulness, Minna promptly sank into one of her dark moods. If Claire had called them blue earlier, now they verged on soul-crushing, funereal black. More dissatisfied with things than ever before, she was lethargic to the point of immobility most of the day, but when Claire asked her what was wrong, she waved her off: “Some of us have to struggle in this life, che.”
“Tell me what it is.”
Minna scowled.
“If not me, can you talk with your family?” Claire prodded.
“The answers aren’t comforting. They use money like bait, see, to get me to do what they want.”
“And what is that?”
“They are disappointed that I didn’t marry the man they had picked out. But he left me.”
“I knew it.” Claire slapped her hands together.
Minna looked at her oddly but did not elaborate. “You think I’m one of those characters in my great-grand-maman’s books. I’m disinherited. That’s why I was working at the coffee shop when I met Lucy.”
* * *
In this brooding mood that continued for days, Minna accused Paz of stealing one of her gold bracelets from her room. Things had been moved around and were out of place. “I warned her to stay out of my room,” Minna said. Claire confessed that Lucy had gone into the room to retrieve her belongings. Perhaps she had moved things.
“Well, she didn’t steal my bracelet, did she?”
“No.”
Paz, confronted, broke down in tears.
“Tell her to empty her purse,” Minna said, her order a tyrant’s.
“Are you sure it’s missing?”
“It’s in her purse,” Minna said.
Claire paused, at an impasse. She knew that if she stood up against Minna, a price would be paid in moodiness and bad temper. “No, I won’t ask,” Claire said. “I know it’s not there. I trust her.”
“She stole from me!”
Paz snatched the purse before Claire could stop her, dumped the contents on the kitchen table. Of course it was filled with only the most innocuous of things, no jewelry to be found.
Claire nodded. Paz quit anyway.
Claire begged her to reconsider, but she refused to listen, waving Claire’s words away as she gathered her belongings. “I can’t stand working here.” As she walked out the door, she whispered, “Be careful. She is a mujer malvada.” Claire felt a sinking guilt but could think of nothing to remedy the situation. Soon Octavio, Forster, and Mrs. Girbaldi would hear of this, and then there would be an even bigger outcry.
Claire went to Octavio to explain, but he refused to discuss it. “I was not happy her working with Minna. It’s time for the next generation to be off the ranch.” He did not wait for a response.
* * *
After Paz was gone, Claire brooded in silence for a few days, angry, and complained about having to call around to find a new cleaning woman.
“Nonsense. We don’t need someone getting you sick. I’ll clean. I could use the extra cash.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Claire said, but it was too late. She knew that no matter whom she hired, Minna would be on the warpath with that woman.
Now Minna scrubbed toilets, mopped floors, talked to Claire less and less. Each time she passed her it was with a heavy sigh. When Mrs. Girbaldi came over with a home-baked pie, the two women sat in the living room while Minna vacuumed the room, pushing the hose under their feet, the sound making conversation impossible.
Mrs. Girbaldi watched and nodded to Claire. “Good job,” she mouthed.
But Claire worried. Minna worked with a kind of fury that made Claire edgy. Minna knelt on all fours and rubbed lemon oil into the wood floor so hard the wood groaned under her pressure. When she finished, her hands were raw.
Late at night, Claire heard Minna on the phone, speaking in what she now recognized was French Creole. She never seemed in a better mood afterward. Neither of them mentioned these calls.
When Claire asked her to play cards, she frowned. “Are you going to pay me for my time?”
“I didn’t hire you to clean. It makes me feel guilty. I don’t even care how the house looks.”
Those were the magic words, and the old Minna returned, walking with Claire in the orchards, lolling endless hours over coffee in the morning. The tension in the house was released as if a storm had blown over.
Minna didn’t refuse the extra pay for the work that she now no longer performed, and Claire didn’t want to upset the delicate peace by bringing up money. It was hard to explain even to herself how she came to accept the changes in their relationship. Perhaps it was just habit, the slow, creeping acceptance of the formerly intolerable. She was not an unintelligent woman, nor was she weak, but she supposed if she was honest, she would admit circumstances had revealed in her a hungering for transformation. Minna seemed integral to this.