Greenie had not thought about how much she would miss being close to her New York friends, even those with whom she had communed almost exclusively by phone. Speaking on the phone across two time zones and several ecosystems was not the same as speaking on the phone when you could walk out the door into the same stale humid air, with the same ruddy starless sky above your heads, the same sticky frost-warped streets beneath your feet. And the time difference made it tricky. She spoke more now to her single friends—to her surprise, Walter most of all—than she did to her married friends with children.
Walter was in a state of proud anxiety, readying his apartment for the arrival of a grown nephew from California. “An apprentice!” he told Greenie. “I’m going to be like some Old World mentor, like those guys who ran guilds in the Renaissance. Ergo, I am shelving pleasures of the flesh—of which I must confess there have not been many—and I am fluffing up my father-hen feathers. Nesting!” He told her that Alan had been to the restaurant a few times since she’d left. “Lugubrious personified,” he said. “And he always orders dessert. If he can’t have you, at least he can have your creations.”
“But he can have me, Walter.”
“No, my dear, I don’t believe he can.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that you refuse to see exactly what you’ve done. And it’s a good thing you’ve done, in my opinion. You’ve cut the line, you’ve chosen freedom. I may live to regret saying this, but he is not worthy of you. He is a perfectly okay guy, but he is a moper and an emotional tortoise. Well, I have said way too much.”
“Oh Walter, I know he looks that way now—”
“Honey, he will look that way till the cows come home unless something pretty heavy falls on his head and rearranges his brain.”
“Your proverbial piano, Walter?”
“The very one, my dear!”
In a strange way, Walter and Ray began to seem increasingly similar: both loud and unabashed, both taking on the role of a second father that Greenie was sure she had never implied she wanted. Alan, meanwhile, seemed to have stepped back into the shadows. She wanted to believe that his distance was a sign of respect and contemplation, but unless he could tell her so, she had no way of knowing.
So Greenie’s primary dose of face-to-face adult intelligence came at about the time when Consuelo picked up George from the kitchen. That was when Ray showed up.
The governor rose—without an alarm clock, he boasted—at dawn. According to Mary Bliss, he began each day with a call to his ranch manager, to check on his herd. Then he attended to e-mail, ate a hardboiled egg, and went for a run. He came home, took a shower, and met with his press secretary. He drank coffee and scanned the news as represented in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the New Mexican, and the Albuquerque Tribune. Then he had breakfast in the kitchen with Greenie.
He came in that morning just after Consuelo and George had left.
“Damn but that kid of yours is smart. And damn if he isn’t an insolent puppy.” Ray went straight to the household refrigerator, the one where Greenie kept what she thought of as food-in-progress. “I say, ‘Hi pardner, how ya doin’?’ and the little guy looks me straight in the eye and goes, ‘Mr. McCrae, fire does not beat fire. Water beats fire. Mom says you’re sorry, but sorry’s not always enough.’” Ray laughed loudly. “I take that on a might-as-well-be-empty stomach, I do.”
“I’m sorry,” said Greenie. “He’s asked about the fires. I’m not very good at explaining.”
“Hell, nobody’s any too good at explaining any of it now. And listen to the man: Sorry’s not always enough. As the voters may feel bound to tell me come election time. Try saying the words prescribed burn to a wall of TV cameras. Pretty damn lame as justification for burning down two hundred houses. ‘Got a light?’ I heard one reporter say to another, and you should’ve heard the yukkin’ it up that spread through the room.” He looked at the clock over the sink. “So what did we have for dinner last night? Seems about a week ago.”
This was his morning ritual: he opened the fridge and rummaged through the remnants of whatever Greenie had made for dinner the night before, laid various items on the counter, and helped himself. He loved cold soufflé, cold rice, cold potatoes, cold stew, cold soup, even cold meat in a cream sauce that had congealed. Along with two slices of whole wheat toast, he often ate these foods straight from their storage containers, washing them down with a glass of milk. Unless he had an early meeting, this was his breakfast of choice.
“Lamb chops! Ratatouille! Ooh, and…can I have whatever’s in this thingamawhosit, or is it something you’re saving for later? Smells dandy.” He held up a plastic tub filled with something brown.
“That’s leftover consommé. I used it in the sauce for the lamb. Help yourself.” Greenie winced as he spread the cold meat jelly on his toast.
Once he had composed his peculiar breakfast, Ray would take it to a corner counter, away from Greenie’s workspace. While he ate, he talked: weather, movies, Greenie’s history or even his own. Greenie went about her work, letting him steer the conversation.
That morning, he said, “So before that little guy was born—Mr. Hose Is Mightier Than the Torch—did you have a lot of sonograms, that amnio-whadyacallit?”
“I did have a lot of sonograms, yes,” said Greenie. “As a matter of fact.”
“And why was that?”
“If you want the gruesome details, they thought for a few months that part of my placenta might be detached. It was amazing—I mean, seeing him so much before he was born. It’s like we got to know George a little, spy on what he was going to be like before he was even born. So amazing.”
“Must be. And you saw his little heart beat?”
Greenie turned around to look at Ray. She never knew what he would bring up. Ray’s press secretary was pregnant; wouldn’t it be just like Ray to coax her through fears of early tests, as patronizing as he was loving. “They had just improved the technology so we could see it—or maybe hear it, I can’t remember which—at six weeks. I’d known I was pregnant for less than two. It was amazing. Terrifying.”
When he said nothing in reply, Greenie turned around again. She had finished dicing leeks and scooped them into a colander. She carried it to the sink on Ray’s side of the kitchen.
Ray set down the remnant of a lamb chop. “Greenie, you’re pro-choice. I’d bet fifty head of my cattle, including Wally, my best bull. I would.”
She laughed and turned on the tap. “You’re not getting me into this argument, Ray.”
“Oh honey, yes I am.”
“Burnt lunch would not impress your Water Boys.”
“Oh let ’em eat silage. They’re the least of my worries these days. It’s the Fire Crew got my chaps all rucked up.”
Greenie sprayed the leeks with cold water. She set the colander on the drainboard. A thin layer of sand remained in the sink; spraying again, she rinsed it down the drain.
“Okay, Miss Coolhead Duquette. Here’s what.” He held out a folded copy of that day’s New York Times. On the front page, she saw headlines about Israeli politics, national unemployment figures, and accusations aimed at her old city’s child welfare agency. Nothing about the fires in New Mexico or anything else of local interest. To the rest of the country, the fires were old and distant news.
“What’s what?” she said.
“You tell me how we are all so hot and bothered, so outraged, as well we should be, when a child suffers torture at the hands of its parents, but we defend the right to say to a kid in your belly who’s already got a thumping heart—who’s got, according to you, a personality brewing—‘Sorry, bub, you’re not wanted out here, so we’re as good as turning you out with the compost. You’ll make a fine shrub, you will.’ You’re smart, Greenie. You defend that logic. Convert me.”
“Ray, I am not getting into that trick debate of when life begins. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about women choosing their fate. I h
old the line there.”
“Well, what if these evil parents right here in this story said, ‘We are not getting into that trick debate of who’s in charge of how these kids get brought up.’ There’s no more an iron divide at the cervix than there is at the door of these folks who ought to be gutted and shot.” He slapped the paper. “And choose your fate? Who do you think you’re kidding? So what about the poor sucker who gets AIDS from one slip of the libido? Can you abort that consequence?”
“Oh Ray, that is so much not the same thing, and you know it.”
“All I’m saying is sex has risks. I’m not preaching abstinence, boy oh howdy no. I’ve been eighteen, alone with a girl in a pickup out in the desert under those carpe diem stars. Talk about a freight train! But far more unstoppable forces have consequences we can’t turn back. They do—and hey, that don’t kill us neither. I don’t even have to go religious on you here.”
Greenie looked out the window. The world it showed her could not have looked more different from the one she’d seen while working back in New York. Instead of ankles, weeds, and the tires of parked cars, she saw mountains, treetops, and sky. But the sky, for nearly a month, had been yellow, the mountains sheathed in smoke; after dark, flashes of flame might appear. When at last the fires were contained, the horizon came into focus again, but it was gray, a landscape painted with tar and ash.
How odd it felt to share a kitchen most mornings with a man whose face she had seen in the news, without caring, for years. She was no longer intimidated, but sometimes she saw him across the room and thought that he must be a hologram, a figment, that she was far lonelier than she could admit.
“Look, Ray,” she said, “I was lucky enough that I never got pregnant when I didn’t want to be pregnant. So I never made the choice I’m in favor of preserving. But I do think it’s private.”
“And child rearing’s not. Apples and kumquats, that what you say? Welfare, reverence for safety and well-being, for plain old being, begins when the cord gets cut. That’s what you say?”
Greenie put down her knife and turned fully around, leaning back against the counter. Ray was looking at her as a father might regard a child who had disappointed him, just the way Alan had looked at her the night she told him that yes, this was her decision; she knew it was right and not just for her.
“That’s not what I say,” she said quietly. “Not at all. But there are some places where what we know in our hearts just can’t be the same as what we stand up for in the world.”
“Sheep manure.”
“I’m, what, not just your cook now but your ideological guinea pig, too?”
Ray did not smile, but he winked. “Bet your eastern liberal ass.”
“Then I demand a raise,” she said.
“No, but here’s your bonus: How’d you like to come out to the ranch weekend after this one, you and that back-talking boy? Only condition: you got to bake. McNally does barbecue fine, but I would love a pie or two. We’re entertaining a buyer. George can watch my boys get the cows fit and parade ’em around like peacocks. He’ll see guys who wear Stetsons and spurs when it’s not Halloween.”
“He’d love that,” said Greenie. All at once she thought of her father, the pride he’d taken in his boats not unlike the pride Ray took in his cows: the way he’d spent nearly as many hours polishing, scrubbing, and refitting as he had spent out on the water.
Greenie knew that the fires were eating at Ray’s conscience. At night, if she turned on the news (something she’d never done in New York), there he would be—his televised self always shocking to her for an instant, as if her own life had leaped to the screen. Without fail, he looked stubborn and sure, defending the early decisions made by the National Parks Service. But his cook knew something that others might not: Ray’s appetite had dwindled. After he left the kitchen that morning, she saw that he had eaten only two chops and hadn’t touched the ratatouille.
Greenie had come to understand that there was something sacred and separate to Ray about his morning ritual. Whether or not it had anything to do with her, she felt both flattered and uneasy. He might arrive looking haggard or angry, but he never took it out on Greenie. Let the chaos and recrimination flutter frantically about, like papers thrown to a reckless wind; not even Mary Bliss was permitted to interrupt this sliver of his routine.
There were days when the smoke drifted everywhere, disparate yet durable as rumor. It would defy the closed windows and doors, leaving a fine dark grit on all the polished steel and tile surfaces of the kitchen. Except for the way it smelled, the smoke reminded Greenie of the fog in Maine: of its curious solidity, the way it could sit right up against a window screen, soft yet firm like a pillow, and its equally curious ubiquity, the way you could open a latched closet and find that it had invaded, leaving your clothes droopy and damp. But Maine was farther away than it had ever been before. When she took her clothes from the closet, they smelled of cinders, not of the sea.
SHE HAD DOUBTS, but she was not homesick. The mournfulness had come at the beginning.
Greenie and George had left very early one morning, and Alan had decided not to see them off at the airport. “Greenie, how weird would that be? I’m sorry, it’s too sad,” he’d said to her the night before, after they had made love. To George, over a sleepy breakfast, he said, “I have way too much work today, guy. There are people counting on me to be here later this morning.” He carried George on his hip out the front door. Together, they each raised an arm to flag down a cab. After lifting suitcases into the trunk, Alan reached into both of his pockets and held out four plastic dinosaurs, two in each hand. “Two herbivores,” he said, passing them from his left hand to George’s right. “And two carnivores,” he snarled, passing them to George’s left.
“Wow, Dad, velociraptor and parasaurolophus!” George exclaimed in grateful awe. “But I’m going to keep them away from these guys.” He waved the fist that held the stegosaurus and the dimetrodon, their sharp plastic limbs and tails protruding between his fingers. Alan kissed his son on the top of his head, his wife on one cheek (pointedly far from her lips). He picked up George and hugged him tight.
“We’ll call when we get there,” said Greenie, and in the cab, as they pulled away, she struggled not to cry. Already, George was staging a showdown between the two meat-eating creatures. Alan, wise in these matters as ever, had provided just the right face-saving decoy. By the time they were deep in the Holland Tunnel, Greenie felt fine, her emotions under control.
Within an hour of takeoff, George fell asleep. And then, so hard and fast it stung, the anticipation of regret and loneliness overcame her. She turned to the window and let herself cry, as quietly as she could. In four hours, she never took out her book. Suburbs with affectedly curvaceous roads and pools gave way to country highways and farms, their geometry laid out in confident trajectories so absurdly unlike life: perfect circles, perfect squares, fields rolled out like bolts of rugged cloth. For a time, the plane passed over a seemingly endless prairie of clouds, their unbroken surface like gently foaming milk. But this they also left behind, to glide above a glorious calligraphy of rivers and then, as they approached Denver, the rising mountains. The sun was so bright that Greenie could watch the plane’s raptor shadow undulate over and down the peaks, always a little ahead, leading the way like a phantom guide. Oh what have I done? thought Greenie as they hit the bumpy air before they landed.
But when she woke George, he was cheerful and refreshed, and by the time she had bought the two of them chocolate milk shakes and they had boarded a second plane, Greenie felt the certainty she had expressed to Alan the evening she told him that this was their chance, this was his chance, not just hers—if he was brave enough to take it.
“This is so rash, Greenie,” he had said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe you are doing this to our family.”
“I am doing this for our family,” she said. “It’s time for something new. This didn’t fall into my lap for nothing. It was a messa
ge, loud and clear.”
She had expected him to make a sarcastic remark about hearing voices, but he had simply continued to shake his head, looking deeply sad; and then, to her surprise, he had held her very close.
“Are you crying?” she had said, for an instant willing to take it all back, to call Mary Bliss and say she was sorry, very sorry, but she had made a mistake.
He pulled away from her. “I wish I were, Greenie. I wish I could.”
Over the next two weeks, as she packed, prepared Tina to take over in her absence, and answered all of George’s questions, Alan had been weirdly calm, even helpful. She half-expected to see him packing his things as well. “Surprise!” he would say the morning of the flight, and the three of them would fly west together, and as they did, Alan would shed his recent angst, like an astronaut leaving gravity far in his wake. But this was nothing more than a dream.
MARY BLISS HAD FOUND THEM a furnished guesthouse to rent, under a copiously weeping willow on Acequia Madre, an old, quietly elegant street where the houses and walls seemed to rise organically from the burnt red earth, where an old irrigation ditch would brim and flow whenever there was rain. The two small bedrooms opened onto a brick portale and a garden planted with herbs. When the doors and windows were open, the rooms smelled like lavender and thyme. In the living room, the fireplace nested in a corner like a beehive, and the beams supporting the roof were so massive that at first Greenie felt the instinct to duck whenever she entered the room. Two hanging Indian rugs, pale red zigzagged with brown and white, faced each other from opposite sides of the room.
“Look. Lightning’s on the walls,” said George when they arrived. “I know what that’s for: that’s our protection. So we won’t get stuck.”
“Stuck?” asked Greenie.
George frowned at her confusion. “Stuck by lightning, Mom. Ford says it’s called voodoo, from another religion, not the one about God.” He looked at the ceiling. “Are those whole trees? Is this a house made from trees? That’s crazy.”