What's Mine and Yours(50)
“Give me a few days, pepita. I’ll get you the money.”
“Thank you, Pa. I’ll see you at the hospital.”
“Oh no,” Robbie said. “I’m not going. I can’t see her that way. But you should go. She needs her daughters. She’s always loved you all more than me.”
It was a strange thing for him to say, as if he would have preferred if Lacey May had loved them less. She didn’t want to deal with Robbie’s self-pity tonight. She had to sober up and drive to Cerritos, put her things in storage. She had to figure out how many nights she could charge at a hotel before she’d have to sleep in her car.
“Just hurry up and get me the money, Pa. I’ll go and be with Mama for you.”
“And your sisters.”
“As long as they need me, I’ll be there.”
The music in the bar switched from rancheras to cumbia, and Margarita heard strangers chanting her father’s name again, calling him back to the dance floor. Robbie shouted at them to leave him alone, and he seemed to maneuver himself to a quieter corner of the club.
“I am so happy,” he said, although it sounded as if he was crying. “I may have lost you all, but you didn’t lose each other. No matter what happened, the family survived. It’s a blessing. Amen.”
9
September 2018
The Piedmont, North Carolina
The day camp became an even greater refuge for Diane after her sister arrived. She would leave before dawn while Noelle was still asleep, a pot of coffee brewed for her, a plate of biscuits left steaming on the counter. She’d drive west to the camp, where she and Alma unlocked the gate, knocked cobwebs and dew off the banner strung up by wire. It read PAWS & FRIENDS, pictured colored balloons and cartoon dogs galloping across a field. The camp was nearly two acres, divided into a play area for the big, boisterous dogs, and another for small dogs or timid ones who would rather sniff grass and lick their paws than romp around. Each side had a kiddie pool for splashing, a plastic slide, tubes for crawling, and ropes for tug-of-war.
It was calm in the early morning while Alma and Diane cleaned up the office, a wooden shed they had converted with shelves and a phone line. One of the dogs, a docile basset hound with drooping ears and amber eyes, had been sick overnight, and Alma went to the kennels to check on him. Diane stayed behind to talk to Cora, one of her favorite workers, who gave her the report on how the hound had fared.
Cora was ten years younger than Diane, fresh out of high school, a girl with creamy lean legs she seemed to bare no matter the weather. She wore athletic shorts in summer, wool skirts in winter. She scarcely wore a bra, which Diane liked to take as some sign that teenage girls today were more liberated than she had ever been.
Cora started loading the van to get ready for pickups, and her varsity volleyball T-shirt rode up, exposing the curve of her waist, the green rivers of her veins. Diane didn’t mean to ogle her—it was just that Cora had blossomed into a woman somehow, and she was no longer the plucky intern who wasn’t afraid to fish a rogue stone out of a Labrador’s mouth, to pinch together the legs of a Havanese resisting being lowered into a bath. She’d stopped needing to dash out early to study for tests, to miss weekends for away games. And her bralessness had become more noticeable, the shape of her nipples visible through the thin cotton of her Tshirts. It made Diane feel old and full of a lust she knew would never drive her to do anything but lurch for Alma in the night, or circle her own nipples with her thumbs in the shower, Cora’s face flashing in her mind before she pushed it away and replaced it with someone more suitable—an actress, older, a woman Diane would never meet, whom she’d never have the nerve to talk to, even if she did. She liked that actress who did the boxing movie once, a Latina with big arms, brown eyes. She liked, too, that actress from the vampire show, although she was too skinny, too blond. But Diane had read somewhere that she was queer, and that had changed everything. They were all beginning to be younger than she was. She was at that tipping age, when the girls singing on the radio and acting in her favorite sitcoms were all younger than she was. She was twenty-seven.
When Cora hauled out, Diane turned to Alma and told her what she’d been thinking. They were drinking their coffees in the last minutes of calm before they opened. At seven thirty, they would let the boarded dogs into the yard, lift the shades, and any customers already waiting in the parking lot would come pouring in.
“It’s normal to think the way you’re thinking,” Alma said. “Death makes everybody horny.”
“It’s probably my mother. I think I’m fine, but then my mind keeps turning to fucking.”
“Too bad I can’t help you with that.”
“We talked about this,” Diane said. “My sister.”
Alma’s face betrayed nothing, and she went on drinking her coffee. In the fluorescent light of the office, Diane could count her freckles. A well-meaning customer had once told Alma she was a lovely girl, but that she looked strange, like a beautiful alien. It was her features with her auburn hair, how she was light skinned but clearly not white. Down here, people didn’t know to read her as Puerto Rican; she simply seemed mixed in a way they weren’t used to. But she had been familiar to Diane from the first day she’d seen her at the orientation for the veterinary school they’d both dropped out of to open Paws & Friends. Diane wasn’t sure whether she believed in other lives, beyond this one, but if they were real, she wouldn’t be surprised if she and Alma had known each other in them all.