Chapter 8
The stage set her down on the main street of Colinas Rojas at half past four in the afternoon and she stepped off it into the familiar smell of the town, dust and leather and the bread smell from Huerta’s that somehow carried even at this hour, two blocks and half a day from when he’d last baked.
She stood on the street with her bag in her hand and looked at it.
She knew every board on every building on this street. She’d walked it since before she could read the signs on the storefronts. The assayer’s with its new paint. The hardware with the same cracked window in the upper right pane that had been cracked since she was twelve.
The feed store, the marshal’s office, Briggs’s horse at the rail out front the same as it always was, and the church at the far end with the bell that rang off-key on Sundays because the yoke had cracked six years ago and everyone talked about fixing it but nobody did.
All of it exactly as she’d left it.
None of it feeling the way it had before.
She wasn’t sure at what point that had changed. Not all at once. The way light left a room, so gradually that by the time you noticed it you couldn’t say when it had started, only that it had, and that the room was now different from what it had been.
She picked up her bag and walked.
Two women she knew from church stopped her on the sidewalk outside the hardware. Mrs. Aldama and her daughter, both of them carrying parcels, both of them with the careful look people had started giving her two years ago and hadn’t stopped.
“Marielle,” Mrs. Aldama said. “We heard you’d gone to Austin again.”
“I’m just back.”
“Any news?”
“No.” She kept it short. If she gave Mrs. Aldama any length of thread she’d pull on it until there was no thread left. “How are you both.”
They talked for two minutes about nothing, an exchange of pleasantries that cost nothing and bought time, and then she excused herself and kept walking. She could feel them watching her to the end of the block.
People in this town had been watching her for two years. She didn’t blame them, exactly. Her father had been a known man here, a fixed point, and his absence had left a shape in the town’s understanding of itself that people kept stepping around. She was the most visible part of that shape.
She turned off the main street and walked the familiar road to the house.
The front porch looked the same except for one of the clay pots, which had died sometime in the last weeks.
The plant was still in it, brown and shrunken, not removed.
The door was closed and the windows shut against the heat, and the house had the quality of a place that was inhabited but not particularly alive.
She went around back.
Her mother was in the wooden chair on the back porch, the one she’d moved out there sometime in the spring. It had started as a place to drink her morning coffee and watch the garden and had become something else.
She was sitting with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the yard and she was looking at something only she could see, or at nothing, which was the same thing.
She was wearing what looked like the same gray dress she’d had on when Marielle left. Her hair was down and uncombed, going slightly gray at the temples in a way that had accelerated this past year.
The kitchen garden beyond the porch rail was half weeds now, the tomato stakes standing in their row with nothing growing on them, and the corner of the yard where her mother had grown herbs every summer for as long as Marielle could remember was dry dirt and dead stems.
A bottle on the floor beside the chair. Cork out. Maybe a quarter left.
“Mama,” Marielle said.
Her mother turned. And whatever else had gone slack in her in the weeks Marielle had been away, something came back into her eyes when she saw her, a quick brightness, real and unguarded, the way a lamp looked when you turned the wick up.
“You’re back,” her mother said.
“I’m back.”
Her mother began to push herself out of the chair and Marielle came up the steps quickly and put her hand on her shoulder.
“Stay. I’ll come to you.”
She crouched down beside the chair and took her mother’s hands.
Up close she could smell it clearly, the sharp underlayer beneath the stale air around her, three days at least. Her mother’s hands were dry, the knuckles prominent, and her grip when she closed her fingers around Marielle’s was still firm.
Whatever else, she was still strong in the hands.
“I was worried,” her mother said. The words were steady but cost something to make that way. “I kept thinking about the road. That long road between here and Austin.”
“Nothing happened on the road.”
“Something could have. Something can always happen on a road.” She tightened her grip slightly. “Something happened to your father on a road he knew better than any road in Texas.”
“I know, Mama.”
“You go alone and I sit here and I can’t—” She stopped. Started again. “I can’t do anything from here.”
“I know you can’t. And I’m careful.” Marielle looked at her mother’s face. The lines around her eyes had deepened since Christmas, new ones at the corners of her mouth she hadn’t had before. She was sixty-one and had always looked ten years younger and didn’t anymore. “Did you eat today?”
Her mother looked at the yard.
“Something,” she said.
“What something.”
“I don’t remember exactly.”
“Yesterday?”
A pause that answered the question.
Marielle stood up. She looked at the bottle on the floor, noted how much was gone from it, set it on the porch rail out of easy reach.
“I’m going to draw you a bath,” she said.
“You don’t need to.”
“I know I don’t need to. Stay where you are.”
She went around the side of the house to the small enclosure her father had built years ago for outdoor laundry and bathing in summer, three walls of weathered planks and a curtain on the open side, a flat stone floor that drained out toward the back of the property.
The washtub was already there, sun-warmed and dry. She wiped it out with a cloth.
She fired the small stove inside the kitchen and set the large pot on. While the water heated she pumped the second bucket cool and carried it around back and tipped it into the tub. She made several trips.
The hot water followed in two installments and she stirred the tub with her hand to even it out, and by the time she’d finished she was sweating through the back of her dress and the sun was dropping low.
“Come on,” she called.
Her mother came around the side of the house slowly, one hand on the wall to steady herself, not entirely from age.
Marielle met her at the corner and took her arm and walked her in to the enclosure.
She helped her out of the grey dress. Her mother let it happen without protest, which said more than any protest would have.
The water had cooled to about right by the time Irine got into it. She lowered herself with Marielle taking her elbow and she let out a long breath and sat back against the curve of the tub and closed her eyes.
Marielle washed her hair for her. Worked her fingers slowly through the tangles, poured warm water over to rinse, repeated it. Her mother kept her eyes closed and didn’t speak. Marielle didn’t either.
There was nothing in particular that needed saying that wouldn’t have made it worse, and the quiet of the late afternoon and the small sounds of the water seemed like enough between them.
A mockingbird went through its repertoire on the back fence. The shadows kept lengthening.
She got her mother out of the tub eventually and into a clean nightdress and wrapped a towel around her hair and walked her back into the house.
She got her mother fed and into bed by half past seven. The supper was simple, beans and the ham end she’d found in the larder with some of the soft onions, nothing memorable, but her mother ate most of it, which was the only measure that mattered tonight.
Her mother’s eyes had been closing over the last few bites and she didn’t argue about bed, which was its own kind of measure.
Marielle pulled the curtain and set water on the nightstand.
“Don’t go anywhere tonight,” her mother said, not quite asleep.
“I’m going for a short walk. I’ll be back before full dark.”
Her mother made a sound and her breathing changed and she was gone between one breath and the next.
Marielle stood in the doorway of the bedroom for a moment looking at her. Then she went out the front door.
The evening had cooled and the sky above the western hills was doing what the Texas sky did at this hour in summer, pulling through its colors extravagantly, gold into orange into a deep red along the horizon with purple above it.
The clay pots on the porch swayed, the live ones and the dead one together. The two oaks in the front yard threw their shadows east across the road.
She walked south along the road until she reached the bend east of the house, the place where her father had pointed out one evening years ago that it was the last spot you could see the house lights from going south.
She’d been maybe fifteen and they’d been walking together after supper and he’d stopped and turned and pointed at the small yellow square of the kitchen window between the oaks.
“You can see it from here but not past this bend, which makes this the last place on this road where home is visible.” She’d asked him why that mattered, and he’d said a man should know where he loses sight of home.
She stood at the bend and looked back at the house. The kitchen lamp was a small warm square in the blue evening. Her mother’s window was dark.
She stood there until the last color had drained from the sky and the stars had come out properly, and then she walked back and went inside.
***
In the morning she went down to the river.
The Rio Grande ran quiet in the early light, carrying its brown water south without urgency, the surface flat and dull under a sky that hadn’t fully decided on its color yet.