* * *
I wondered if that could be the Regina Baca I used to work with, the Regina Baca who seemed to be related, in some way, to almost every family in northern New Mexico. Well, I’d call her and find out. I had to drive back up on the mesa to get cell phone reception, and even then it was spotty. I had Regina Baca’s number from the last time she called me when she was in Denver, visiting yet another nephew. I hoped the number still worked, because it would save me from having to go down the scores of Bacas listed in the phone book.
“Ola, Lily! You scumbag! ¿Que pasa?” she answered with a grin in her voice. Yes, it was Regina Baca with caller ID.
“Hey, Regina! Hey, yeah, I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d call you.”
“In the neighborhood? Are you kidding, mija? Where are you, Santa Fe?”
“No, actually, farther north. Where are you? Want to have lunch? I’d love to see you.”
“I’m still in Cuyamungue, you dumbshit. But hey, you know me, never turn down a chance to eat, right? Ee, douchebag! How long has it been?” she asked. Only Regina Baca could sound so affectionate with her insults.
“Too long. Why don’t I come pick you up, or meet you somewhere?”
“Not much in Cuyamungue!” she laughed. “Why don’t we have lonche at Leona’s by the Santuario? One of my aunts cooks there, right? No, tell you what, let’s go to the Rancho; they’ll give us muy grande plates. They know me—I used work there, remember, Lily?”
“Yeah, I remember. When do you want to meet?”
“I have to go pick up my cousin, right? I’m babysitting, but I can bring her with me. I’ll see you around one, one thirty.”
Rancho de Chimayó was a family-owned restaurant in Chimayó, up the road from the Santuario, and if I was going to make it on time I needed to start south again. On the drive there I thought about how I’d met Regina Baca.
We’d both worked at Stedmans, a PR firm in Santa Fe, “in the back” as the snooty, much higher-paid, all-Anglo ad reps called our design and production area. Chloë Austin was our terrible boss who embarrassed subordinates with sarcastic remarks, and I felt that she singled me out for her daily one-up-man-ship-gotcha sneers. She’d also set me up for blame for a large order she messed up, so the company busted me down to a difficult split-shift in the warehouse. Because my financial existence was precarious, and I wasn’t in good mental shape, either, debilitating fear of losing my job rendered me mute in frustration, and my silence left me wide open to her abuse. Chloë Austin was all the bullies in my life rolled up into one, and I had had a lot of self-hatred for not standing up for myself.
Regina Baca, on the other hand, seemed to have no trouble holding her ground when I couldn’t, but got fed up first and quit. I made a final mistake of filing an H.R. complaint about Chloë Austin as a last resort, and she made my life resemble the 6th Ring of Dante’s Divine Inferno before I was forced to quit. It had just been a bad job for Regina; it had been a disillusioning and humiliating one for me, and another straw in a burgeoning New Mexican haystack of what I saw as complete failures. By then alcohol had grabbed me like a best friend, and the two of us skipped merrily over the cliff together. Well, not so merrily, but that is another story. While I treasured my relationship with Regina Baca, I’d just as soon forget about our jobs at Stedmans, and the rummy coward I had been.
Turning east on NM 309, I drove through the tunnel of cottonwoods and willows along the river before Nambé, so lush and green in contrast to the desolate landscape of muted browns, grays, tans, and chalky white that surrounded it. Regina Baca had grown up close by in La Puebla. She’d dropped out of high school and had kids at eighteen; left an abusive husband, and then faced a life of struggle to support herself and kids. When I worked with her, she was just finishing an associate degree that she earned at night school. Her ex had firebombed her trailer; luckily he’d been too coked up to know no one was in it. A lot of her family was familiar with the inside of the state pen. A tough life, but not one unheard of in New Mexico—it was not an easy place to live. I admired her just-get-on-with-it attitude, lack of self-pity, and sense of humor. From what Regina Baca had told me about her family, she had relatives in every corner of the northern counties, and I was about to find out if Tomás Baca was one of them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN