The Garden of Happy Endings (43 page)

E
lsa had gone by to pick up Charlie early on Sunday. Tamsin had been asleep, and Elsa had felt a little guilty taking the dog when Alexa obviously wasn’t home, either, but he was ecstatic to see his mistress.

Now Deacon dropped them off at the church gardens. Charlie bolted joyfully straight down the center aisle while Elsa ambled behind him, lost in postcoital juiciness. She was sloshing with satisfaction, leaving behind bright red footprints of pleasure, her joints loose and easy beneath her thoroughly explored skin.

Deacon, do-dah, do-dah
. She wanted to sing his name, do somersaults, skip across the paths.

The family garden plot she shared with Tamsin had clearly been weeded and tended the day before. Elsa connected the industrial hose to the pump in the center of the field and dragged it to her garden. She watered the tomatoes and sprinkled the beans. Daydreamed in the warm morning.

“Good morning,” Joaquin said.

She startled a little at his sudden appearance. “Hey. How’s it going?”

“Fine.”

She waved the water over the patch of squash. “How’s Joseph?”

“He’s all right. He’s out of the hospital, back at home.”

“That’s good. Have we come up with any new ideas for security?”

He shook his head. “Trying. I gave a pretty fierce sermon yesterday on the responsibilities of the community.” He glanced at his watch. “A couple of neighborhood men came by yesterday afternoon to offer their help in organizing watch crews, and I’m going to meet with them in a couple of days. We’ll see if it works.”

“Good start.”

“Yeah. I wish—” He broke off, his jaw tight. “I feel responsible for Joseph. I should have stepped it up sooner than this.”

“Things begin where they begin,” she said. “It isn’t like this was a safe spot before the garden went in.”

He shrugged and changed the subject. “I saw Tamsin and she told me about Carlos showing up.”

Elsa smiled in memory. “Walking, it was the most romantic thing I ever saw. It was beautiful.”

He stood there, not moving or talking, and finally she really looked at him. “What’s up?”

“You were pretty scarce yesterday.”

Elsa raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“Did you spend the weekend with Deacon?”

She stiffened. “Don’t, Joaquin.”

“You’re my oldest friend. He killed somebody, you know that?”

“Yeah, years ago. And he’s a lot more loyal to you than you are to him, Mr. Priest.” She flung the hose aside. “What is
wrong
with you?”

“I just can’t believe you’d sleep with somebody like that. It’s immoral.”

She gave a deep belly laugh. “Oh, it was okay for us, but not for me as an adult, right?” She shook her head. “Give me a break. You’re just jealous. And I can’t help you with that.”

His cheeks flamed. “I’m not—”

“You are.” She took a step closer. “Look, it hasn’t been easy for me, either, being here like this. I’ve had a lot of unresolved stuff to deal with, too.”

“Have you?”

“Yes. Not just this, either. I’ve been thinking about you and God and the Church and where I fit.” She shook her head. “And I can talk about a lot of things with you, Joaquin, but not this. Not love and sex and all that goes with it.” She took another step toward him. “When that priest knocked me off the dais of the church that day, and you were the one who comforted me, and our romance started, it felt like God had a plan for me. I could forgive the priest for narrow-mindedness—”

“You didn’t forgive him. You left the Church.”

She raised a hand. “Let me say this.”

“Sorry.”

“Dorothy helped me overcome my anger and hurt over that, but it also felt like we—you and I—were destined to be together. So when you decided to be a priest, I was absolutely shattered.” She sighed. “You have no idea.”

He bowed his head. “I know. I’m so sorry.”

“But you see, I didn’t want to be bitter and hard and mean-spirited, so I worked really hard to get myself back together. To make peace with you and a god who could call you and leave me in a million little pieces—”

“Elsa—” He had tears in his eyes.

“Wait.” She raised a finger. “I grieved you and me, us, and all the things that we would never do or be or have. I grieved for the lost children, for the lost perfection. I found a vocation, and my place. But I also really want a family and children and all that goes with that.”

He ducked his head. “Strange twist of fate, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“That because the Church would not allow you to become a priest you will probably end up with everything—a vocation and a spouse and children.” He met her eyes, and there were tears flowing down his face. She wanted to go to him and knew she couldn’t. “It’s so ironic.”

“You don’t have to remain a priest, Joaquin. You have free will.”

“I have said vows,” he said, his jaw tight. For one more hot minute, he stared at her, his dark eyes burning into her face. Then abruptly he turned and walked away, his shoulders stiff.

She was going to have to leave Pueblo. What she had believed to be water under the bridge was flooding over that bridge now. She could not bear to lose her friend Walking, but she would have to if he couldn’t make peace with their past.

And what about Deacon? Would he want to leave? Would it even be appropriate to ask? Or would they suffer through some long-distance connection that would be doomed to trickle into nothing? It was so very new and fresh and tender. How could it possibly stand up to such weighty questions so soon?

“Argh!” she cried. “Couldn’t just let me have one good day, huh?”

She stomped over and turned off the water. She might as well go home.

That was when Charlie came to her, limping dramatically on his forefoot. “What happened, baby?” He whimpered softly and lifted his paw. Something had sliced right through three of the pads, and it was bleeding profusely. Forgetting everything, Elsa whipped off her sweater and wrapped it tightly around his wound. She dialed Tamsin. “I need you to come take me to the vet.”

C
harlie needed six stitches. Probably, she thought with a thunderous scowl, something left over from the gang boys’ trash-and-destroy mission the other night. She’d like to crack their heads together.

What was wrong with them, anyway? This was a neighborhood project. Some of their mothers and brothers and fathers and little sisters were invested.

Because the paw had to be bandaged, the vet gave Elsa a cone for Charlie’s head. When he saw it he turned baleful eyes on her.
“I won’t do it unless I have to,” she promised him. “I’ll keep him leashed, Doc, right by my side. I’ll put the cone on at night, and when he’s alone.”

On the way home, she pushed his face away from the bandages three times. “Charlie, you’ll hate it if I have to do this.”

“I’m going to drop you off so I can get to court,” Tamsin said.

“I’m still planning to come with you, sis.”

“Don’t be silly. I can handle it on my own. If you leave Charlie, he’ll have to wear the cone. Just hang out with him and I’ll be back in a couple of hours. But if you see my daughter, will you ask her to call her mother?”

I
t took much longer than Tamsin had expected to get her turn with the judge. When it finally arrived, she willed herself to stand up straight next to her court-appointed lawyer, who looked to her like a boy, barely old enough to be out of law school. But he had a commanding voice and a presence that belied his age—and he was donating his time.

As he made the argument for leniency, the judge looked bored right to the tips of her streaked hair. All Tamsin could think about was the peonies lying on the grass, with no one to appreciate their beauty, and her quilts stacked in trash bags, and the empty rooms echoing with no one in them.

She had nothing left to lose. “Your Honor, may I say something?”

Her lawyer leaned over. “Not a good idea.”

“I need to speak for myself,” she said quietly. “I’m not going to be obnoxious or anything.”

“Very well,” the judge said, “step forward.”

Tamsin clasped her hands together. “I know it was wrong to break into the house, but I just wanted my quilts, and I’m asking you to let me have them, to release them. They’re my own work and they’re all I have. My husband had nothing to do with them. It’s wrong that his actions should take away my life’s work.”

“He took a lot more than that, Mrs. Corsi, from a lot of people,” the judge said, looking over her reading glasses. “Allegedly, of course.”

Tamsin paused for a moment, thinking of the best way to phrase her reply. “I agree, it’s terrible. A lot of people have lost a lot, but so have I. I’ve lost my home, my gardens, everything I’ve worked for for the past twenty-five years. And so be it—but I want the quilts and the machine. That’s it. Taking them from me isn’t going to give anybody else anything. It will give
me
a lot. I need to be able to support myself.”

The judge said nothing for a moment. “Very well. I’ll release the quilts and dismiss the breaking and entering charges, but if you come within thirty feet of that house again, I’ll throw you in jail. Got it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Tamsin thought of the peonies—and let them go. Somebody, someday, would love them just as she did. “Thank you.”

As she left the courtroom, she felt a sense of jubilation and excitement, relief, and more than that. She felt free. As if she had moved over some invisible threshold. To what? she wondered. Her new life, maybe?

Or maybe, she thought, ducking out of the rain into her car, she had crossed a threshold to herself.

A most intriguing idea. For a moment she sat with her hands on the steering wheel, staring at the rain. She was in her mid-forties. Her daughter was grown and her husband had disappeared. She had virtually nothing of her own.

She laughed. How many people were handed such a clean slate, such a sweet chance to start over?

E
lsa found herself restless and irritable on that rainy afternoon. The encounter with Joaquin made her realize that she really needed to make some decisions.

To do that she had to either walk or cook. Since it was a rainy
afternoon and she could not leave poor Charlie alone, she decided to cook.

Not that there was much food in the house. In the crisper, she found a package of carrots and a couple of forgotten bags of sun-dried tomatoes. There were potatoes and onions, a box of chopped, frozen celery. Carrot soup, then. And bread. She looked for yeast and found there was none. She would have Tamsin bring some bread home.

She called Alexa on her cellphone and said, “Bring Carlos to dinner.”

“I’m kind of embarrassed,” Alexa said in a low voice. “How can I bring him there? It’s so … working class!”

“Alexa,” Elsa replied with exasperation. “Don’t be so shallow. I’m cooking dinner, and your mother wants to spend time with you and your beloved. He’s Spanish and he will understand that. Bring him.”

“Okay.”

She texted Tamsin and left a message asking her to bring home two loaves of some hearty bread. Keeping an eye on Charlie, who was sleeping in the dining room after the trauma of his cut foot and trip to the vet, she turned her iPod to a meditative playlist that included flutes and some medieval chant and women singing in Latin.

The first step was to scrub and peel the carrots, a big pile of them. Letting the music and the repetitive hand movements soothe her turbulent mood, she rolled her issues around the back of her mind.

Until this morning, she hadn’t realized that she could lose her deep, long friendship with Joaquin if she stayed in Pueblo. When she had returned to the States after they broke up, they’d picked up their platonic relationship by phone, and it had evolved over the years into a rich braid of support for them both, encompassing their shared childhood, their devotion to spiritual matters,
and their history as a couple. Joaquin had been witness to her life, as she had been witness to his.

Or so she had believed. She sharpened a knife and began slicing carrots into wheels, carefully and methodically. But in fact, they had not witnessed each other’s transformation into spiritual leaders. She had not, until the blessing of the fields, seen him as
priest
. He had never seen her teach a sermon or lead a class.

But the rest … the rest was real and true. She loved him deeply as a friend, as if he were a brother. Dispassionately, she remembered their love affair and the connection they had shared, but she did not want to re-create it.

Nor did he. She understood that. It was only because he had so easily managed his bodily hungers until now that the surprise of his carnal desire for Elsa had startled and unsettled him.

Far in the distance, thunder rumbled. Charlie lifted his head, but when it didn’t repeat, laid it back down again. The vet had given him a pain medication. Would it work to keep him calm during storms? She’d tried a couple of things over the years, but they only seemed to make him dopey and crazed, which was worse than terrified and sober.

Just now, he snored deeply, and his paws twitched with dream running.

The carrots finished, she pulled out a heavy pot and poured olive oil into the bottom, and let it begin to heat. She diced a big yellow onion, wincing at the strength of it, then scraped it from the cutting board into the pot. While they softened, she crushed three cloves of garlic, chopped them, and added them to the slowly heating onions. Two ribs of celery, roughly chopped, went into the pot, the leafy tops set aside. After another minute, she dropped the carrots in, too, and let all the vegetables gently warm and soften in the oil.

A part of her did not want to leave. She had loved this time
with her sister, with the gardens, with the boys and Deacon, and the daily contact with Joaquin. All of it had come together to provide her with rest and ease and love. Given a choice, she would have stayed a little longer, asked Unity to give her another couple of months, to the end of the summer at least, to give her relationship with Deacon a chance to grow, to harvest the garden, to see how the community solidified.

Do what is yours to do
.

The edict had guided her through her studies, into the ministry, into her daily work. Even here, she had taken on the soup kitchen because it had given her an outlet to directly serve the community, as the garden did.