The Wilder Sisters (56 page)

Lily helped Rose unload the trailer. “I hope you’re spending the weekend,” she said. “My butt’s got blisters, and I need a break. I hope your job’s going terrible and I can talk you into quitting to be- come my assistant.”

“Sorry, Lily. I still love it. You’re going to have to hire someone else. How about Tres?” Rose asked, reaching down to pet Buddy Guy, who

never strayed far from her sister’s side. “I imagine the days would pass more quickly if he rode alongside you.”

Lily smiled wickedly. “The other night Pop comes out to the bunkhouse and hammers on the door. ‘You two don’t keep it down; that mare is likely to slip her foal,’ he says. I’m on the bed laughing, and Tres is pacing the floor, practically hysterical over how he’s going to fix this; no more fun for me that night. I told him Pop was only kidding, but I guess it’s a guy thing. Anyway, he won’t work for me now that he’s got that clinic job in Albuquerque counseling teenagers. He swears he was born to do that kind of thing, and the reason he gets along so great with me is that teenagers and I have the same level of maturity. Smart-ass. I don’t care. On the weekends he’s mine, all mine. And he’s not half bad with the horses, so things’re going okay.”

A part of Rose couldn’t help but feel a pinprick of envy. “Think you’ll move in together?”

“Jeez, Rose, no. Not for a long time, if ever. I like taking things slow for a change.”

“I wouldn’t call spending all weekend in bed taking it slow.” Lily smiled. “Hey, I don’t know which math book you studied,

but in mine two days out of seven constitutes taking it slow. Seri- ously, you know what I mean. We’re taking it slow in the
other
stuff. His daughter might come out for the summer. Makes me nervous even to think of it. I guess whatever happens is meant to be.”

Rose wondered if that phrase would ever stop echoing in her life. “Is Doctor Cute still your most reliable customer?”

Rose brushed the dirt from her hands. Austin had turned out to be a forever thing, it just hadn’t turned out to be the kind of forever she envisioned. “He’s not here. Before he left he’d put on some weight. I guess I should start making low-fat dishes for the specials if he comes back. That’s what he always orders. It was strange how he came in every night but never talked to me. I miss it.”

“Seems to me you both said what you had to say at Christmas. Rose, I don’t know when I’ve ever been more proud of you. Floralee will be talking about this holiday season for years to come.”

“Maybe,” Rose allowed. “Floralee will take her high points wherever she can find them.”

“And Benito?”

She closed the trailer door and bolted it. “Just friends.”

“Good. I think that’s for the best. You’re not ready for anything more complicated than that.”

“Hey,” Rose said, pulling a letter from her pocket. “Look what I got from Amanda a couple of days ago. The first letter she ever wrote me other than to tell me she was running away from home.”

“Let me see.”

Rose smoothed the paper. “‘Dear Mom. Caleb quit the band in Boulder on account of this girl he met named Heather he’s decided he’s in love with, the freak. I might come home for the summer. Here’s a money order for twenty bucks on account of what I bor- rowed without asking you first. Love, Amanda. P.S. If you see Aunt Lily tell her I get what she meant at Shep’s funeral.’”

Rose folded the letter into the envelope. “Do you have any idea what she means by that?”

Lily shrugged. “You know kids, it could be anything. Probably something I said about hair conditioner. Where’s Second Chance?” “Wherever there’s a dirt track and challenging speed bumps and

cute girls, I imagine.”

Dr. Zeissel called the sisters over and gave them instructions for Winky’s diet. “We’re in the countdown, ladies,” she said. “A few short months now. Are you getting excited?”

Mami came walking over from her greyhounds to catch the last of the conversation. “The new foal can’t come soon enough for me,” she said. “A baby around here is just what we need to put the smiles back on everyone’s faces. What a long winter this has been.”

“I’m actually looking forward to sleeping next to the birthing stall,” Lily said. “It’ll be like camping.”

Rose felt a little pang of jealousy. If she didn’t have the restaurant job, she could stay here as long as she wanted, and she could sleep in the stall.

“Probably she won’t deliver while I’m there,” Lily said. “She’ll wait until I’m in the shower or loving on Tres so she can interrupt me.”

Mami got a faraway look in her eyes. “Shep always knew when a mare would drop her foal, didn’t he?”

Rose nodded. “He had a sixth sense.”

“Well,” Lily said, “I may only have five, but I work the sons of bitches overtime.”

By the last week in May, Rose was so anxious about her horse that she started dropping things at the restaurant. The weather was fickle, business wouldn’t pick up until school let out, and even secondhand crockery cost money to replace, so Ruben and Benito told her to take off. “We’ll say extra prayers for the mare to deliver early if that’s what it takes to get your attention back on food, Rose. Just go.”

The old Rose would have argued and continued working, but this time she just said thanks. Benito handed her an oversized envelope along with her paycheck.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“
Abrelo
,” he said, and looked away while she lifted the flap.

At first Rose thought it was a photograph of her mother, taken twenty years ago, but Mami had never worn her hair like that, cut to fall against her shoulders, layered in curls. Rose put a hand to her throat as she recognized the Navajo rug in the background, the day of Shep’s service, the expression on her own face made as vulnerable as she felt seeing it this moment, because she had been staring at Austin Donavan.

“Oh, Benito,” she said, unable to stop looking at the portrait, seeing something different in it every time she looked. Mami was right; his work was painterly, dimensional in a way that mere photographs were not. “This is magical. You’re so good. Can I pay you something for this?”

“You could let me photograph you again,” he said. “Someday I’d like to shoot your mother, too, and that sister of yours.”

Rose laughed. “There are plenty of days I’d like to shoot them myself.” She gave him a hug, and she could feel his desire for her to be more to him than a model, his employee, more than the friend she had quickly become, still there, very much alive. The moment her heart was her own, she knew he’d act on the impulse. She felt bad about not being able to return his ardor, but she would not lie to such a decent human being, and she would never again get ro- mantically involved with someone she worked alongside. “I’ll have this framed by a professional. Then I think I’ll hang it on Mami’s wall of fame. In a very special place, so everyone who comes to the house will see it.
Gracias
, Benito.”

He said, “
De nada
,” and then he opened the door so she could scoop up Joanie and Chachi, their traveling basket, and head north to El Rancho Costa Plente.

It rained all day, and Rose had a feeling that this would be the night the mare would deliver. Just a steady, light drizzle that was good for what grew in the earth, but it made mud season seem like never- ending shoe-sucking hell. For two nights now, Lily and Rose had slept rolled up in sleeping bags just outside Winky’s stall, passing the time whispering to each other, trying not to make too much noise, but so itchy with anticipation they couldn’t settle down. Dr. Zeissel said to page her the minute Winky started in with the typical behaviors, the general restlessness, lying down and looking at her hindquarters, those signs that were just ordinary enough that it made the girls scrutinize the mare’s every movement, see things that weren’t really there, grow cross with one another and argue. From dusk to nine
P.M.
, the mare picked up mouthfuls of hay, chewed uninterestedly, let the bulk of the food drop, and paced her bed of shavings, which Lily zealously changed on a daily basis. After nine, she stood there dozing. Ten o’clock came and went, and around midnight Rose fell asleep. When Lily woke her at three, she pointed to all the uneaten hay. “That’s not like her,” she insisted. “Winky is a regular Hoover.”

“She’s stuffed as full as a sausage,” Rose said. “Maybe she just isn’t hungry. I didn’t eat the entire week before I had Amanda.”

“How can you remember what it was like when you had your babies?” Lily asked. “That was over twenty years ago.”

“You never forget,” Rose answered. “The pain isn’t so real to me anymore, but the sensation of them sliding out of me, and the first time I held them in my arms, all slippery and new? Feels like it only happened yesterday.”

Lily doubled up her pillow and rested her chin on it. “Amanda cried like she was pissed off beyond words.”

“Yes, she did. We should have taken a hint.”

“How come Philip wasn’t there when she was born? Was he working?”

Rose smiled a sad smile. Maybe he was, maybe not. “You were there, Lily. You’ll never know how much it meant to me, holding your hand, hearing you tell me I could do it.”

“You’re so freaking sentimental,” Lily said, and threw a handful of shavings at her. Rose sneezed robustly, twice.

“There go my girls,” Pop said, from where he stood in the tack-

room doorway. “Sneezing like the horses they are. Settle down. You two are going to fret that mare into another week of hanging on to her foal.”

Lily patted her sleeping bag. “Come sit with us, Pop.”

He held out a thermos. “I’m simply delivering the cocoa your mother kindly fixed for you. Then I’m going back to bed. I’m too old to wait up for babies. Good Lord, it’ll be light in a few hours. Get some rest.”

“Stay just a minute,” Rose begged. “Lately I’m so busy we hardly get to talk.”

“Okay,” he said. “But only for a minute.”

From the bunkhouse Lily fetched the Bicycle deck, and they dealt out cards under the glow of flashlights, aiming to cream each other at hearts. After three hands, Pop shot the moon, won, and then tucked the cards back into the box. “I wish Shepherd could have lived long enough to see this foal born,” he said. “I think he felt he’d let you girls down by not hanging on until spring.”

“That’s nonsense,” Lily said. “He’s here. I can feel him. Sometimes when I’m in the bunkhouse, it feels as if he’s sitting right there at the table, frustrated that I haven’t picked up my clothes. He kept the place so neat.”

Their father looked away, and Rose could tell he was close to tears. She reached out and took hold of his rough hand. That hand had fought in Korea, lovingly touched her mother, spanked her only a few times that she could remember, and patted her shoulder when things were so bad that words didn’t make a difference. She gave it a kiss and squeezed it.

“Look,” Lily whispered, and pointed at the mare, who was lying down, nipping at her rear end, where something that looked a whole lot like a hoof was protruding from Winky’s rear end. Lily picked up the cell phone, speed-dialed Dr. Zeissel’s exchange, and punched in the telephone number so she’d know it was time to come out. “I told you it was time,” she said. “I knew it, I just knew it.”

All three of them sat still, watching the gush of birthwaters, the first exploratory poke inside the emerging amniotic sac, the unmis- takable blunt baby face pushing from the muscular uterus toward their world. Rose felt her skin chill to gooseflesh, her nipples harden, and deep in her own pelvis, the faint echo of something she’d once known herself.

The baby was three-quarters out now, encased in the translucent amniotic sac. “So long as we move real quiet,” Pop said, “I think it’s safe to get up.”

Winky’s bound tail arced stiffly away from her body. Certain horsepeople believed in pulling the foal, especially with thorough- breds, but Chance Wilder believed in letting nature take its course, and he had taught his daughters to embrace the same tenets. Rose could tell it was killing Lily to wait, but her sister stood by the stall door and chewed her nails.

When the mare stood up, gravity tore the sac, forcing the foal to take its first breath. All three moved into the stall. As the colt moved to free himself, the last few pulses of blood traveled the umbilical cord, and it, too, snapped, and then Winky stared at her firstborn as if asking,
Where did you come from
? They stood with their backs against the railing and let mother and son get acquainted, smiling and crying because the whole ordeal had taken eleven months and change, and in eleven months so much had happened to their lives that this was a wonderful cherry to top such a difficult year.

Rose heard the sound of the vet’s truck. “I’ll go,” she said.

But it wasn’t Dr. Zeissel getting out of the driver’s side, it was Austin, looking sleepy but determined. “Sorry,” he said when he saw Rose’s stunned expression. It was the first word he’d spoken to her since New Year’s Eve. “Tracie got hung up in Pojoaque with a bad case of colic, and I was on call. Winky doing okay?”

“It’s a colt. Everything looks fine so far. How was Iowa?” “Educational.” Austin gathered up his paraphernalia and headed

into the barn as if he’d never been banned from it. “Well, I’d better go earn my call-out fee.”

“Do you want some coffee?” Rose asked.

He gave her a half smile. “If you made it, I won’t turn it down.”

Rose and Lily sat on the porch watching the sun come up. Austin and Pop were still in the barn. After seeing to the mare, the two men got to talking, Pop handed the vet a hammer, and they walked the perimeter of the arena, mending fence along the way. Only part of it was literal, it seemed, because the longer the talking went on, the more they were laughing. Rose wondered what they found so amusing. At Pop’s request, Austin took a look at the rest of the ranch horses. Now he

stood in the arena demonstrating how well chiropractic adjustment worked, using Max as an example. Max was more than happy to assist.

Rose watched as the lanky vet laced his arms around her old gelding’s neck. It was too far from the porch to see the way he shut his eyes, the bond that both man and horse leaned into, but the image was burned indelibly into her memory. Austin had gotten the same look on his face that one time he had leaned into her body, seeking another kind of bond. It made her shudder to remember how that felt, to acknowledge just at this moment how much she missed it. “I’m starving,” she said to Lily, getting up from her chair. “Are those chips still around here somewhere?”