Mothers and Other Liars (4 page)

This restaurant down off Guadalupe is one Ruby usually avoids. A favorite of hotel concierges, it teems with tourists, though she can’t understand why anyone would come to Santa Fe, green chili capital of the universe, to eat Italian. The cavernous glass-and-tile space is crowded and loud, especially on a Saturday evening. But Chaz decided they needed something different, festive, so here they are.

Lark points to Ruby’s water glass. “The book says you have to drink lots of milk.”

Ruby only recently told Lark about the baby, after she commented on Ruby’s blossoming bustline. Ever since, Lark has been reading pregnancy manuals in between Harry Potters. Now she makes a big production of slurping her Coke—Coke that Ruby can no longer drink. Ruby knows Lark is trying to get a rise out of her. She is tired from the flea market. She is hungry from the wait for their table. She is nine.

Ruby is not very good company right now, either. Chaz asks, “Would you like an appetizer?” and she thinks,
What should I do?
Chaz says, “How was the flea market?” and she thinks,
Antoinette didn’t buy my anniversary-of-Nana’s-death story one bit.

The plate of antipasto is vibrant against the white tablecloth, like a Santa Fe garden in June. When she first moved here, she had to get used to the unending sea of brown, brown hills Dalmatian-dotted with scrubby piñon bushes, brown roads, brown adobe buildings. Yet Ruby soon appreciated the subtle gradations of brown, and found her craving for color sated in little slashes—lilac bushes heavy with blooms like grapes in a vineyard, windows blue-trimmed to keep evil spirits away.

As she thinks about going to jail, more than hard-core inmates or lack of privacy, the thought of gray walls, gray floors, gray food makes her feel as if her blood is puddling at her ankles. Ruby could face years in prison. A lifetime without Lark. And she doesn’t even want to think about what will happen to the baby inside her.

Ruby breaks off a chunk of bread, dabs it in olive oil. Her daughter picks at a salad, which Lark insisted she wanted even though she rarely eats greens. While Chaz makes conversation. He’s trying to be sweet, really, the nice dinner, paying special attention to Lark.

Catching his eye, Ruby smiles an “I love you.” He squeezes her thigh, his eyes answering, “I love you more.”

Chaz doesn’t talk much about his work, especially not in front of Lark, and tonight is no exception. But, like the dishes at the kitchen window across the restaurant, he has plenty of topics all lined up. Sports. Sports is always a good one. Lark is a sports fan. He talks baseball stats, he talks football preseason. Lark just moves lettuce around on her plate, and Ruby bites into another piece of bread, a less painful way of biting her tongue.

The waitress takes away the antipasto and Lark’s uneaten salad before serving the main course. As she sets a plate in front of Chaz, her arm seems to go out of its way to brush his sleeve. She is pretty, the waitress, young, thin. Reminding Ruby that
she
is not so young, or so pretty, and very soon will be bigger than the table. Chaz smiles up at the girl, one of his Chaz specials, and the waitress’s face flushes. Reminding Ruby that her boyfriend is handsome and gets hit on regularly in this man-starved town. He’s a consummate flirt, harmless, Ruby trusts. And at least for now, he’s her flirt.

Ruby chokes down her chicken parmigiana. Chaz tried to cajole her into ordering the fish special, said that omega-3 is good for the baby, that she needed the protein, until Ruby cut him off with a look that could fell redwood. Then she switched from pasta to the chicken, a boneless breast to throw him a bone. At least the restaurant, despite the chef’s special, doesn’t smell fishy. She hasn’t had any weird cravings yet, but strong odors send her running to the john these days.

Chaz and Lark, she notices, each have their own technique with their spaghetti; Chaz is a cutter, Lark a spinner. Yet they both end up slurping noodles in the end. Ruby thinks there must be something profound in that one, that no matter what, everyone has to slurp noodles in the end. But she is much too tired for profound right now.

Chaz leans back in his chair, looks from Ruby to Lark to Ruby. “Let’s just run away.”

The clatter of Ruby’s fork against her plate echoes across the restaurant. Her mind-reading boyfriend has just voiced the thought that has been screaming in her head all day. “You would…could you really?”

“Sure.” Chaz grasps Ruby’s hand. “You, me, one imp, and an imp-to-be. Las Vegas, baby.”

“The real Las Vegas,” Lark says.

Chaz nods. “The real one. And after, we can do it all over again proper, with Father Paul and my folks.”

“Two weddings!” Lark squeals.

Ruby’s rib cage collapses against her gut. Chaz is joking about eloping, not talking about forever running away. A couple of thin gold bands won’t solve her mess.

Chaz looks down at Ruby’s belly. “They’re going to figure it out eventually.”

“I can just stay away,” Ruby says.

“Right.” Chaz chuckles. “As if that won’t raise questions when you don’t show up tomorrow. Or the next, say, twenty Sunday dinners?”

Chaz’s family is tight-knit, Catholic, Hispanic. Four generations of mamas have ruled that roost from the same casita on a narrow lane off Canyon Road. They are everything Ruby isn’t, yet they have embraced her, and Lark, in their elbow-to-elbow, something’s-always-cooking family. But they don’t know about the baby.

Ruby wonders how embracing the Monteros will be when they find out she’s pregnant. Not to mention her other little bombshell.

Early Sunday morning, Ruby steals into Lark’s room, whispers to Clyde to keep her daughter safe. Then she slips out of the house. The sun hasn’t yet burned away the haze of dawn as she walks down the hill, and the air still holds on to the coolness of night.

The doors are open at the little Episcopal church. Ruby pads down the red-carpeted center aisle and slides into a pew. The few times she and Lark have attended this church, Ruby felt an unfamiliar comfort in the repeated ritual, as if, like the mountains, the ritual gave her something to which she could cling. And she desperately wants to find some of that comfort today.

Growing up, Ruby and her grandparents attended the Congregational church in their Iowa town. Ruby remembers Nana running off with boiled chickens to prepare funeral casseroles in the church basement, or disappearing Tuesday mornings to the ladies’ auxiliary. Her grandfather and Nana each had their own Bibles. On summer evenings, they sat on the wicker porch chairs reading them side by side.

Then after her grandfather died, Nana sort of lost interest in the church. She didn’t seem mad at God; she still prayed and quoted to Ruby from her Bible all the time. Ruby figured she just couldn’t bother to put on her Sunday best anymore.

Ruby didn’t mind. She believes in God all right, but she’s not sure she believes in organized religion. Over the years, she and Lark have visited many of the churches in town. They have gone with the Ms each December to the Our Lady of Guadalupe church for its namesake saint’s festival, arriving before dawn to a chain of farolitos and a candlelit sanctuary. They have never missed attending a Christmas or Easter service
somewhere
. They have even attended a Jewish Seder. She wanted to expose Lark to as much as possible, then let her decide her own beliefs, rather than cram any one denomination down her throat. Especially when Ruby herself has felt closer to God on the mountaintops than she ever has in a pew.

But here, today, she finds herself craving all the organization she can get. As she bows her head, she’s not even sure what to pray for. Yet she can’t help feel, or hope anyway, that maybe God will hear what ever prayer that surfaces a little better in this quiet, sacred place.

She is still trying to formulate the words of a prayer when a black-robed pastor stops beside the pew. “Can I help?” His tone is soothing.

“I don’t know,” Ruby whispers.

The pastor sits down beside Ruby, folds his hands in his lap. The heavy silver cross he wears on a chain around his neck gleams red, like an omen, from the sunlight that ripples through the eastern stained-glass window. This man is not the elderly rector Ruby has seen here before; he is young, not more than Ruby’s age. His patient demeanor is disarming.

“What if someone has done something that they didn’t think was so wrong at the time, but turns out to have been very wrong to other people? What would God say to that?”

“We Episcopalians don’t undertake confession as the Catholics do. Here, your confession, and your forgiveness, is between you and the Lord.” The pastor pauses, rubs the cross at his chest, as if it were a rosary, as if maybe he wasn’t sure those mackerel snappers, as her grandfather used to call the Catholics in their town, didn’t have the right idea after all. “Just remember that the Lord always forgives. Always.”

One of Ruby’s fifth-grade classmates used to tell playground stories about catechism, which the Catholic children attended every Wednesday night for a whole year. Ruby thought it sounded like a pretty good deal: once a week you sit in a booth and tell a priest your transgressions. If you haven’t done anything bad that week, or maybe if you don’t want to say what you did do, you just say something minor, like that you had bad thoughts about your parents. And voilà!, you were absolved of everything, clean as the day you were born, all for a few Hail Marys and a lecture from a screen-shrouded priest.

The pastor stands, places a hand on Ruby’s shoulder. She tries to channel his goodness, his grace, from his fingers, through her shirt, and into her skin. “I’m here, if you want to talk.”

After he leaves, Ruby stares into the middle distance. It clings to her like the odor of mothballs on wool, the scent of unconfessed sin. Will everyone else smell it on her, too?

At the Monteros’ front door, Ruby drapes her arm across Lark’s back and closes her eyes. She is trying hard enough to keep her head above water without wading into this emotional pool.
You can do it
, she thinks.
Just act normal.
Then the door swings open, and she and Lark are swept into the swirling waters of Monteroland.

“Come in, come in.” Chaz’s mother, Celeste, smells of oregano and affection. She places her hands on Lark’s cheeks, kisses her forehead. Ruby flinches just a bit when Celeste hugs her. She’s wearing a loose sundress, but she worries that Celeste will notice her expanding bustline and thickening waist.

When Chaz steps into the hall from the living room, his is a photo-negative of Celeste’s greeting, a big smack on the lips for Ruby, and for Lark a hug that lifts the kid off her feet. “Can you handle spaghetti two meals in a row?”

Lark cocks her head. “As if you really need to ask.”

Chaz pulls Lark into the living room, where the men are yelling at the television and elbowing and high-fiving each other. Lark squeezes into a spot on the sofa between Chaz’s father and an uncle, her “What’s the score?” barely audible over the macho roar.

Chaz’s father, after whom Chaz is named, has been saddled with the nickname Chunk since he was a skinny little boy. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, he has long since grown into the moniker. He is shorter than Chaz and his sisters—their height comes from Celeste’s side—as wide as he is tall. He has always been uneasy if not unfriendly around Ruby, but he’s taken a shine to Lark. As he ruffles Lark’s hair, says something that makes her laugh, Ruby follows Celeste to the kitchen.

From this heart of the house, Celeste is cooking her way around the globe alphabetically. This week they are in Italy; last week, Hungary. Ruby takes a seat on a stool at the counter and lets the voices and aromas wash over her. Chunk’s great-grandparents built the original house. Its bones, and grace, have been well preserved through several updates. The history, the legacy, are layers of the thick adobe walls.

The older women jostle each other as they dance between stove top and oven and counter, putting finishing touches on the meal, pulling bright colored platters and bowls from the pine cabinets. Across the room, the younger generation, Antoinette and her cousins, set the long farm table with Fiestaware the colors of the New Mexico heavens: sunset red, sunrise yellow, big sky blue.

They all talk at once, voices in a perpetual game of rock, paper, scissors, Antoinette’s new job at the court house, a cousin’s new boyfriend, an aunt’s old pains. Sunday dinner at the Monteros’ is as much a ritual as morning Mass.

“Off your tush.” Aunt Tia pokes Ruby, points to the refrigerator. “Get the salad on the table.” Despite her redundant name—Tia is Spanish for “aunt”—she is Ruby’s favorite of Chaz’s aunts. Tia and two others are Celeste’s sisters; one is Chunk’s sister.

“Grab the water pitcher while you’re there,” Antoinette calls. Her own sister, Linda, holds the bucket of ice.

Ruby is grateful that they assign her these tasks, making her a part of the family rather than treating her like company. As she pours water in each heavy blue goblet, she tries once again to imagine growing up in this house, surrounded by abundance and mess and boisterous relatives, so different from the quiet space she and her grandmother inhabited.

All conversation halts as, in a grand crescendo, Celeste dumps a mound of pasta into the biggest bowl, steam rising like a choir of angels. In the time it takes Ruby to refill the water pitcher and return to the table, the TV is muted, children’s washed hands are inspected, and the throngs crowd around the table for grace.

Antoinette grabs one of Ruby’s hands in her slender fingers; the other is clasped in the farting uncle’s dry, meaty palm. Lark is across the table, between Chaz and Linda, the baby of the family and the only one of the three siblings who is married. Ruby likes her fine, but her suburban life down in Albuquerque is very different from Ruby’s or Antoinette’s.

Chunk says grace, adding an entreaty for God to watch over the Dallas Cowboys as they train this summer. The amens are whispered, mumbled, spoken, then punctuated with the traditional Montero squeeze. Antoinette holds Ruby’s hand a moment longer, gives it an extra squeeze, making Ruby feel all the guiltier for lying to her.

The dinner table looks like a crowded bazaar, platters circling, arms reaching, Chianti flowing. Ruby watches in awe as the prodigious amount of food disappears from the table. Even the mountain of pasta, which in most universes would be bottomless, is chiseled down to the platter in Monteroland.

Throughout the meal, Ruby thinks she’s faking it just fine. No one seems to notice that she doesn’t touch her wine, and for the first time in days, she is actually hungry, lustily munching warm, buttery garlic bread, shoveling in the rigatoni drenched in better-than-any-restaurant Bolognese sauce.

Then from across the table, a snippet of conversation wafts toward her. Lark and Chaz. Discussing soccer.

“When the community league starts up next spring,” Chaz says, “how ’bout I help out with coaching your team.”

“That would be awe-some, Chaz.”

Ruby feels the color drain from her face.
Next spring
. There might not
be
a next spring. Her stomach flails. Ruby covers her mouth with her hand, pushes back from the table, overturning her chair. She runs to the bathroom, falling to her knees at the toilet just in time.

Chaz opens the door as she stands at the sink, mopping the sweat from her forehead with Celeste’s guest towel of the month, cheery yellow with an embroidered beach umbrella.

“Well, that was one way to make the announcement,” Chaz says. “Maybe a bit dramatic, but hey…”

Ruby stares at him a moment, not comprehending his words. And then it hits her. “Oh, God. Oh, no.” The hot color floods back to her face. She buries her head against Chaz’s chest. “Oh, no.”

And he doesn’t even know the real reason she puked.