The Garden of Happy Endings (18 page)

Homesickness swamped Elsa. That sea of faces, turned expectantly in her direction, waiting as she rose to take the lectern each Sunday. Her ritual was to breathe in Spirit in the instant before she stood, letting go of what
she
wanted and trying to become a conduit for light and hope and help. For whatever they needed.

“Hey, are you all right?” Joaquin’s voice broke her vision.

She straightened. “I was thinking about Sunday mornings, just before you stand up to begin speaking. All the faces.”

“Mmmm.” He leaned on the opposite counter, arms crossed over his black shirt, mirroring her posture. “What brought that to mind?”

Elsa shrugged, recognizing that she didn’t want to tell him about the email.
Interesting
. He was her prime confidant, and had been for years. “I guess I just miss it a little.”

“A lot.”

She nodded. “Yes. A lot.”

“Will you go back, Elsa?”

“I have no idea.” She struggled with the tangle of emotions. “I don’t know if I don’t believe or if I’m just mad or—” She broke
off. “I kinda feel like I’m mooning around now, like there’s some action I should take, but I don’t know what it is.”

“And I suppose it’s foolish to suggest that prayer might help?”

“No, of course not.” She scowled at him. “I think about it all the time, but when I get ready to do it, something blocks me.”

“You really are angry.” His dark eyes rested quietly on her face, without judgment. “I keep feeling like there’s more to this than the murder.”

“Of course there is,” she said. “It was walking all that way to Santiago only to lose the life I wanted. It’s that bastard Father Michael dismissing my passion for the priesthood and making me feel like a worm. It’s God favoring men so much.”

Two hectic patches of color burned on his cheekbones. “What did you do the other times?”

She shook her head. “No.” She waved a hand, pushing away the anxiety the conversation raised. “I have work to do this morning. I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Okay.” He gave her the beneficent priest version of his smile, which was low key and meant to be kindly. “God is patient.”

She waved that away, too. “Have you eaten?”

“I was waiting for you. Oatmeal?”

“Very good.” She poured them each a cup of coffee and they wandered down the hall toward the rectory kitchen, which was friendlier than the vastness of the church kitchen. Charlie thumped his tail at her and she gave him a perfunctory pat.

Joaquin said, “I’ve been up for hours, thinking about those gang boys. There was another confrontation between two rival gangs yesterday. I’m concerned.”

“About the garden?” She took a saucepan out of the cupboard as Joaquin pulled out a glass measuring cup and filled it with water.

“Maybe we’re going to need security. Fencing. Something.” He handed the water to her and she poured it into the pan.

“Security sends the wrong message.” From a salt shaker on the stove she poured a tiny pile into the center of her palm, dumped it into the water, and turned on the stove. As she pulled out the metal measuring cups, Joaquin found the oatmeal, and set it on the counter, by her elbow. She said, “I think you’re letting that encounter get under your skin too much.”

He spread cloth place mats on the table. “And I don’t think you’re taking it seriously enough.”

“There’s always a rough element in a poor neighborhood.” She took spoons from the drawer and handed them to him. “One of the reasons you wanted to start the garden in the first place is to create a setting for grace.”

“Yes.” He paused. “Grace will not be compromised if there is a security detail.”

“You know better than that, Joaquin.” The water started to boil and she stirred in the oats. “People don’t like to feel they’re being watched. That won’t heal things.”

He turned away to retrieve a carton of milk, and poured some into a small metal pitcher. Placing it carefully at the exact center between the two settings, he said quietly, “I feel uneasy.”

“Walking,” she replied in a firm voice, “look at me.”

He obliged. Elsa touched her neck. “I’m okay. Nothing happened.”

“He cut your throat.”

“Yes. But you can’t let that stop this project. You know it’s the right thing to do. It will bring food and beauty and life into the neighborhood, and especially into the lives of the people who live in that apartment complex.”

As a boy, his eyes had been much too large for his face, with the shiny liquidity of a lake. Time had whittled his cheekbones and jaw and given proportion to the size of those eyes, but they were still grave and thoughtful, almost unreadable. She waited. Behind her the oatmeal bubbled.

At last, he nodded. “You’re right. I know you are.”

“Maybe we can brainstorm things to help address the gangs themselves, those boys.”

He sighed. “It’s a big problem. I don’t know the answer.”

“Let’s just think about it.”

“I will. Do me a favor, will you?” He pulled a chain from his pocket, and on it was a saint’s medal. “Wear this.”

She recognized it, a St. Christopher medal his mother had given him as a child. He’d worn it through his nearly fatal bout with the measles and often through high school. She held it in her palm for a moment, then remembered the oatmeal and turned around to take it off the burner. Joaquin put the bowls beside her. “Just wear it,” he said. “It’s no big deal. It’ll make me feel better, that’s all.”

The medal was warm from his body, and she rubbed a thumb over the worn shape of the saint, then kissed it and pulled it over her head, letting it drop below her shirt. “Done.”

He smiled. “Thank you.”

“Let’s eat, worrywart.”

T
amsin awoke with a soft feeling of well-being. Last night, she’d spent an hour talking online to her friends in the quilting world. They had no idea that anything in her life had changed—that part of her didn’t matter to them. On the quilting boards, she was admired and liked for the work she did with fabric, for the insights she could offer others, for her good color sense and talents. It eased her heart.

When she finished, she’d taken out the fabrics she purchased at Goodwill and spent a couple of hours spreading them on the dining room table, humming along with her iPod. A quilt was brewing, though she didn’t see its shape yet. The organza spoke to her, and the magenta satin. Intriguing. What story would they tell?

The peacefulness she felt upon waking lasted until she heard the noises outside. Voices calling out to one another, static and
electrical sounds from the equipment, a motor running. The journalists had returned. She groaned and covered her head with a pillow, then flung back the covers and marched into the kitchen. They were
not
going to rule her life. She would have a shower, make some coffee, and march right over to the church to honor her commitment to Elsa. They could all come right into the soup kitchen with her if they wanted.

But she couldn’t stop fretting as she braided her hair and put on the gym clothes so it wouldn’t matter if they got dirty. Why had they come back? Had something else happened? She was torn between turning on the news and clinging to the peace she’d felt upon awakening.

Her body was tired of being on high alert. Just for today, she would be an ordinary person, her sister’s helper in the soup kitchen.

She was grateful for her enormous sunglasses, and a baseball hat she took from a hook in the back room. Even so, as she stepped off the front porch, the reporters surged toward her. “Tamsin, where’s your husband? Where’s Scott? What are you going to do?”

The questions pinged against her ribs, each one like a tiny arrow. The answer to all of them was “I don’t know.” She missed her husband, or at least the man she had imagined him to be. She missed her house and studio and the easy cadence of her days.

Head up, she kept walking, and they left her alone, more or less. Somebody followed behind in a little car, parking across the street when she got to the church.

Tamsin went over and knocked on the car window. “We have a soup kitchen going today. We can always use extra hands if you feel like pitching in.”

“Is this a publicity stunt, a way to get sympathy?”

“No,” Tamsin said, and left it at that.

The long church kitchen smelled of yeast when she entered.
There were already six or seven volunteers in place, washing dishes, talking, chopping. Others were setting up chairs and tables in the adjacent fellowship hall. Elsa was nowhere in sight, so Tamsin pulled off the cap and glasses and approached the first person in the row, who chopped carrots on a big white cutting board. “Hi, I’m Elsa’s sister. What can I do?”

“Over here, honey,” called a black woman with a high voice. She was plump and freckled, with a short reddish Afro. “You’re helping me with the dishes for now. Elsa wants you to serve later, if that’s all right.”

“Sure.”

“I’m Alberta,” the woman said. “You can start with these pans, if you would.”

“Tamsin,” she said, and tugged up her sleeves.

“Hey!” said a girl with tattoos circling her arms and growing across her chest. She had black hair and blue eyes and was extraordinarily pretty. “Are you that lady I’ve been seeing on TV? Your husband is the guy who disappeared with all that money, right?”

Tamsin was not given to blushing, but judging strictly by the burn, her ears must be the color of cherries. She glanced at the girl. “Yes.”

“He’s gone completely, huh? You don’t know where at all?”

Tamsin shook her head, focused on scrubbing the bottom of a deep pot.

“That must suck. You must—”

The woman with the Afro said, “Crystal, hush. It’s none of your business. You want people asking you all kinda questions about your ankle bracelet?”

“I don’t care. I’ll tell you. I was the getaway driver when my boyfriend tried to rob a bank.” She stirred the soup she was tending. “That’s how stupid I was. Men make women do some stupid shit sometimes.”

“Language, Crystal,” Elsa said, coming into the room. She carried a bag of apples. “And no man can make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

“Sorry!”

Behind Elsa came Father Jack, carrying more bags of supplies. He smiled at the volunteers, showing off those wolfishly white teeth, his slightly scarred skin adding to the appeal. “Good morning, ladies,” he said. “What’s on the menu this morning?” He poked his nose in the pots, lifted a lid. “How are you, Crystal?”

“I’m good, Father. And my baby boy is growing like a weed, you should see him!”

“Bring him to church when you come.”

She rolled her eyes, cheerfully.

Tamsin wanted his attention, too, she realized as he stopped and talked to each of them. The old woman painstakingly peeling potatoes with her gnarled hands got a quiet joke about angels, and he asked after her cat. Finally he stopped between Alberta and Tamsin. “Come see me later, will you, Tamsin? Let’s talk a little.”

She nodded, weirdly relieved. Father was safe, a calm port, who would be able to guide her if she listened. As he listened.

“Thank you.”

A
n hour later, she was manning the soup pots as people filed into the room. Tamsin had expected the ragged men with their dirty fingernails, and had braced herself in case they might smell. She wasn’t her sister, with a heart ready to embrace all the lost and lonely people in the world. Some of them scared her, like the gang boys she saw at Safeway, smoking cigarettes. Homeless men on street corners begging for change. Crazy old women with shopping carts.

But this morning, it was different. It was safe in the church, for one thing, making it easy for Tamsin to say “Good morning” over and over, and ladle up the soup, feeling something like kindness
or honor fill her chest. The men met her eyes, one after the other, almost in challenge—
Do you see me?
It was hard at first, to meet those slightly hostile eyes, blue and brown and hazel and black. Some just stared at her with hostility when she spoke, saying “Good morning” and “How are you?” and “Would you like soup?”

Others spoke in return. “This is my favorite,” said one.

“You’re new,” said another, frankly appraising her. “You get in trouble or you here because you want to be?”

She laughed and pointed to Elsa, passing out bread. “My sister made me.”

“Mmm. Elsa’s good people. Good for her.” He held out his bowl and his thumbnails were black, as if they’d been hit by a hammer. It gave her a pang of worry—what had he done? “Good for you, too. Do you like us?”

“So far, so good.”

“I want a different spoon, please,” said another. “This is a baby spoon. I’m a man.”

There were others, too, who she had not expected. The teens, filled with bravado, coming in knots of two and three. A young girl with her hair chopped raggedly, a boy with shoulders hunched in an Army jacket, another boy with ashy dark skin who barely spoke. Runaways? she wondered. Crackheads? She wished for combs, for warm showers, for beds for them.

And then there were the families. Elsa said they were busy the last week of the month, always, because people on public assistance had run out of food and money and wouldn’t get any more until the first. Tamsin had imagined that would mean a lot more men, but of course it didn’t. There were painfully young mothers with toddlers, and tiny family units, mom and dad and little kid, washed and humble, waiting for bowls of soup. A three-year-old boy with a cowlick in his blond hair showed her his shoes—two left boots. “I just got these at the basement!” he chortled.

“Amazing,” Tamsin said, but she wanted to cry, too. His quiet mother gave her a sidelong glance.

She recognized one of the boys who had been at the church for the cleaning of the fields, a mixed-race boy with his skinny blond mother. “Hey there,” she said. “Calvin, right?”

He peered up at her. “Hey! You’re the lady who was supposed to bring back doughnuts!” He held out his bowl. “How come you didn’t?”

“It was kind of a bad day for me. Sorry about that.” She ladled soup carefully into his bowl.

He waited for a second ladle, his eyes canny beyond his years. He knew, and she knew, that she wasn’t supposed to give it to him. She did. He grinned.