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CHAPTER 1
The first time they are together is at Father Bill's table, a Wednesday or a Thursday. No one remembers exactly — a sweltering August night. Father Bill at the head, Josefina seated stiffly to his left, then Luz, head down and hands in her lap so she won't stare. Across from Luz there is Zoe, the creamy skin, the yellow-brown eyes, and other things Luz is dying to look at — like that hand. Next to Zoe, Father Bill put Walt, overdressed in his usual blue oxford, amazed that the woman he has been musing on for days has turned up beside him.
The room is plain, nearly empty of furnishings, the not-quite-steady table with a frayed white cloth, six mismatched hard-back chairs and no cushions, and the tall west-facing windows through which the light of High Desert sunset now pours. If only they would look out, the San Jacinto Mountains are turning silky pink just beyond them, but instead they are admiring his food.
Father Bill will say he had no idea what would come of this night. That it is simple gratitude that made him ask Zoe to join him for a meal. What else does he have to give to a stranger (a Samaritan, truly), but his passion for food, his talent to feed? Now he thanks them all for coming and then starts the blessings, first them, then the focaccia, the rosemary chicken, the eggplant parmesan, the broccoli with lemon zest, the frozen cannolis, and two flavors of ice cream that Luz will scoop out for dessert. He thanks his late mother in heaven for the recipes, thanks the fourth ward of the city of Newark, New Jersey, where he was raised, Italians in row houses, the air thick with garlic and sauce. Thanks his uncle Gerard whose three-meat gravy he was wise enough not to make in such heat, and the province of Calabria, his ancestral home, where even now the men who walk the high cobbled streets have his thick black hair, his narrow-set gray eyes, and munificent, unbalanced tables.
"We are here, Lord, not just to nourish our bodies but to nourish one another."
And then he pours the wine. They follow him as he lifts his glass.
"To Zoe Luedke, hero of the day. The one who rescued me from sunstroke."
Everyone must drink. Luz takes a sip of her orange juice, careful not to dribble, and crunches the ice in her teeth. Josefina thinks of dousing Father Bill with the chilled Chardonnay, which she knows she should not, in her condition, swallow but will just to spite him because she has heard too much already about this Sewey. And now here she is seated across from her daughter — what does he know of her — a woman who picks up men in wild shirts on the freeway: a woman who from unearned beauty is no doubt used to too much attention. Look how she flaunts that face — no makeup, such easy smiles. But too tall, too pale, the fine hair that does not hold its color, and the unpronounceable name. Sewey — and in the same breath as hero. He is crazy. He is a forty-five-year-old teenager, already half-mad with love.
"And these are my girls. Josefina and Luz Reyes." He says their names properly at least.
"Hose-a-fina and Loose," repeats Zoe, as if she has never heard Spanish.
"Pretty good," says Father Bill, turning to them, "don't you agree?"
Josefina barely nods. She has that look he hates. She could shut down like a tainted clam and spoil the whole meal. Luz feasts her eyes on the stranger, gold in her hair, gold in the brown of her wide, shining eyes. Zoe, she says to herself. A gold ocean appears in Luz's mind.
At last now they can eat.
They pass the platters, which are heavy, the same blue misplaced windmill design as the chipped plates that are filling up fast. Luz gets two chicken legs, a large square of eggplant, even the broccoli. She digs right in. She never waits. Josefina watches as if her daughter's eating is a sport and she's the coach, Walt thinks, amused, Keep going! Good job, mamita! It is always like this. The child eats; the mother watches. Luz has arrived on first base. Josefina can relax.
Walt helps Zoe to chicken. He is so nervous beside her (the long bare arms, that lovely white neck, and the vulnerable collar bones — his undoing in a woman — such creamy skin), he must focus to hold the heaping platter steady while she reaches, twice, once for a breast, then for a thigh. "There's so much!" she says. "And I'm starved." A sudden rush of joy courses through Walt; her voice affects him like music — so many risings and fallings in so few words. What will he do if she says more than three at a time? "That's good!" booms Walt, "This is the place to be hungry." When she offers to serve him the steaming eggplant, it nearly slides from the spoon onto his perfect blue shirt. They laugh, apologize to each other. On one side of the table the tension breaks.
"So what's the word on your car?" Father Bill asks. Zoe has driven to the rectory in Platz's garage loaner, a hulking Dodge Dart.
Zoe swallows her chicken. It is wonderful — so tender (he bastes it every quarter hour in brown butter). "A cracked radiator. Unfixable. Platz says it could take a week before he finds a replacement. A '78 Nova, it's a hard thing to find."
A week, thinks Walt, perhaps even longer.
"What a pity. And mine was only minor, all that steam and just a hose," Father Bill says.
Josefina nudges Luz, who smiles.
"Did someone say something funny?" asks Father Bill.
"No-va," says Luz and gives Zoe the force of her penetrating eyes and a mouth full of eggplant. Josefina wipes the mouth. Luz squirms and continues, "You know Spanish? No va. Does not go."
Zoe slaps her forehead. "Now they tell me!" The minute she does it she realizes she has made a mistake and quickly puts the hand in her lap. Josefina feels sick to her stomach. She turns her head to Father Bill; her thick black hair conceals half her face, her features already obscured by the swelling that makes her look like she has just been roused from a bad sleep. She whispers to Father Bill in Spanish. Father Bill whispers back in kind.
Now they have seen it, Zoe should tell the story of her missing fingertip, which always puts people at ease, but to tell it she will have to speak of her husband and to strangers. She returns to her food, hoping nothing more will be made of the finger, but the table has gone silent.
"Something wrong?" Walt asks.
They are waiting for her to explain.
"An accident at my shop. The most common injury there is for woodworkers." Zoe holds up her hand — missing fingertip and all — for them to see again.
"Does it hurt?" asks Luz.
"Not at all."
Josefina puts her own intact hand on Luz's arm, "Co-may, mamita."
It had happened three years before after an impromptu picnic. The first time she and Michael had made love. Cold Spring in autumn. Golden oaks and scarlet maples spilling their colors into the blue of Long Lake, air tinged with frost. "I knew it would be like this," Michael says, enfolding Zoe in a blanket. "Like what?" she whispered. "Like home." Lovemaking to scramble the senses. Wine at lunch, forbidden in the wood trade. She'd sliced her finger clean through at the joint on a Grizzly Saw. When he raced to her, the table saw running, eight feet of walnut spun out at the kickback. Michael tore off his shirt, wrapped the finger, retrieved the tip, drove to the hospital berating himself. "Don't fall for me. I'm bad news." Too late, Zoe thought. And then said so. Both of them laughing, giddy with shock and relief. And so it began. Hermit-girl and the man she had loved since high school. After years of aloneness she was finally home.
"Zoe is a carpenter, Luz. She has a red toolbox," Father Bill explains.
"A cabinetmaker, kitchen cabinets mostly. My shop is very far away. In a place called Cold Spring."
"You know how to use tools?" Luz asks.
"I do."
"Comay," Josefina insists.
"No, because maybe she can give Walt his window!"
"That is not your business. How many times must I say you do not worry for the world!"
"Let's not start on my window. Not tonight, please!" Walt laughs. His smile is genial. The sun creases are white around his deep-set blue eyes, something worn and expectant about his face. At forty-five, his skin has freckled (too many hours on the tennis court — in the old life). Zoe softens and forgives him for the way he kept her the night she drove the grubby Dart through his car wash. Walt standing in the exit lane wanting to talk, she inside the car in tears, wanting only to leave.
"That window is just waiting for someone to trip over," Father Bill says, picking up his wine glass.
"No one's fallen yet, Father. It's still in one piece."
"You've been lucky."
"It's behind the couch now."
"Is that progress?"
Father Bill laughs at his own little joke and finishes his wine. Even Josefina seems amused. Walt deserves this, he knows. His window, again. These days everything he does takes him long to decide. The design of his wash, one year to come up with, the window he has bought but can't figure where to put, the coupon books he has for months debated if he should offer, these are decisions that do not make themselves. So they laugh at him, the people of Infidelity — who have not much to laugh at, truth be told. Walt is used to it. On the days he's feeling thin-skinned he avoids the diner crowd, or if he can't he ignores their remarks, does not take the bait when it's been tossed. He knows his window was a mistake. He should have returned it right away. A single-glazed horizontal slider bought on sale at Home Depot, all wrong for this hot climate. What was he thinking? He was thinking it would give him a view.
"Well," says Zoe, "I've installed windows."
"I'll keep it in mind. But I'm sure you don't want to work on your vacation. You're at the campgrounds?"
"Yep. Still there."
"And you're a crag rat — a climber?"
She could tell Walt she had come for the sights, for the desert, for the climbing at the campgrounds, which is what she told her customers in Cold Spring, even the ones who knew better. It is fifteen dollars a week at the Joshua Tree Campgrounds and somewhere in the vicinity her husband may be waiting, not for her, but still he may be near.
"Not yet," she says and hopes they're too polite to question her further.
"What size is the window?"
"Four by six."
"It would only take a day to install."
"Thanks. I'll think about it."
They go back to eating in silence, Zoe relieved. She has managed to deflect the conversation away from her life and onto Walt's window, which has brought a little levity to the table at least, and who knows — maybe a job. There is no radiator on order at the Infidelity Garage because Zoe is strapped. Four breakdowns of the Nova on her crazy trip west and bills piling up in the Cold Spring post office. Old house. New shop. Expensive equipment. They had taken on too much. Way too fast.
Father Bill urges a little more food on his guests. Who can refuse such tastes even if the body must be stretched to receive them? And besides, it is cooler, have they noticed? They have all ceased to sweat. He opens the second wine with a flourish and a pop. From under Father Bill's wide-flung casements, the cool desert air wafts in like a reasonable neighbor come over to offer relief.
Luz takes a drink of orange juice, looks straight across at Zoe, then pushes back her chair and stands up.
"What's wrong, mamita?" Josefina asks as Luz begins to walk. "Come back. Sit down and finish." Luz does not obey, walking to Zoe, bending close now to whisper, so softly that Zoe must ask her to say it again when she's through. After Luz has whispered for the second time in Zoe's shiny ear, she stays with her hand on that strong, bare white arm.
"You heard it?"
"Yes."
Luz can return to her seat.
At the place where Luz touched her, Zoe feels something rise under her skin and spawn out through her blood, like the bubbles of a thousand silver fish rushing to the surface of a lake. Now she feels it in her shoulder then straight down her spine. Luz is already back to her chair, but Zoe is being run through with lightness, she sees it, how can she? A silver sensation like a stalled AC current is stuck at the base of her neck. She is tipping, falling backward. It is Walt who grabs her chair just in time.
Now Zoe has risen to her feet, quite surprised to find herself upright. Immediately Walt stands up too — "Shall we clear?" — and reaches across for her plate.
Josefina has gone pale. She takes Luz's face in her hands. "Did you say something crazy? What did you tell that woman that no one else could hear?"
"Josefina!" Father Bill says sharply and asks Zoe and Walt to sit down.
"It must be the wine," Zoe says, sorry she has caused such a fuss when already the sensation has passed.
"Or the heat," Walt adds.
Once she is seated, Zoe feels downright foolish.
"Your little girl asked me again to help Walt with his window."
"Because they always laugh at him," Luz says, training those dark eyes at her mother.
"Oh, honey," says Walt.
Now Josefina looks contrite. "Come here, mamita." She pulls Luz onto her lap.
"There, you see? It was harmless." Father Bill puts his hand on the top of Luz's head and holds it long enough for a blessing. "How about it, Walt, shall we clear?"
Luz burrows into her mother's soft breast like an infant. Josefina kisses her forehead, her cheeks; she is kissing Luz's hands. It is too much for Zoe, who averts her eyes.
As the men leave the dining room with the platters and plates, Zoe looks out the window at the darkening mountain, breathes deeply, inhaling the cool rush of sweet night air. It is her own fault she nearly passed out, Zoe thinks. It is Michael's. Or it is the breakdown-plagued trip west. Maybe even the climate, the heat, the dry air. Her dizzy spell had nothing to do with the touch of a child whose mother adores her, who is right now allowing those kisses.
"You like ice cream?" Josefina asks in heavily accented English.
"I do," Zoe says.
"Prepare to wait for it, then." And she laughs, a big careless laugh that is startling. "Because with my daughter serving we will have to be extremely patient."
It is the first time all evening that Josefina has spoken directly to Zoe.
"I have been told I am patient to a fault," Zoe says.
"To a fault? What does it mean?"
"I can be too patient."
"No one can be too patient."
Ah, yes, yes they can. Zoe waited two weeks after Michael left before accepting he had actually gone. She stands at her workbench for hours, days, wrecking her schedule while she waits for the grain of the wood to reveal itself before she will make the first cut. This evening, she will be happy to wait a few minutes for a child to serve ice cream.
Josefina murmurs to Luz, runs her hands down her daughter's thick braid, then leans forward, puts her elbow on the table, and rests her head in her hand. After a few seconds she closes her eyes.
Zoe listens to the men's voices in the kitchen, the clattering of plates and cutlery. A few months ago it would be Michael and Zoe in their kitchen cleaning up, cabinets half-stripped, flooring ripped up, guests for dinner anyway. Now the Cold Spring house bought with such hope is deserted, the unfinished rooms, their shop in the back, empty of life. The slate-gray Hudson moves along without them in the unseen distance.
Outside it is growing dark, the High Desert night sky taking on a blackness whose depth Zoe does not recognize. So many stars it makes her giddy. For three nights she has lost herself watching the desert sky expand under darkness. At night it seems wider even than in the piercing blue day, when it is already so vast she has to stop looking or she's afraid she'll dissolve. How different the sky is in this part of the world, Zoe thinks, as if up to now she has been given only a glimpse of all that is actually there. In a little while she will be unroofed and under it again: the noisy Sheep Meadow campsite, her collapsing two-person tent.
When Walt returns, he does not seem surprised to find Josefina asleep at the table and carefully sets the dessert bowls, a glass of water, and the ice cream scoop before Luz, who looks up and smiles but remains on the lap of her mother. When he returns to his seat, he bends quite close to Zoe, so close she can smell him, clean, the undertone of alcohol on his breath, musk, a familiar cologne. A wash of surprised desire runs through her.
"How are you doing?" Walt asks in a hushed voice, so as not to disturb Josefina.
"Much better, thanks."
"I'd like to explain about the other night."
"Oh," says Zoe. "Really, it's not necessary."
Luz climbs carefully off of her sleeping mother's lap, takes her seat, and watches Zoe reach for her wine glass with that hand. It is a big hand and white. The skin over the missing fingertip perfectly smooth.
From the outside Walt's car wash had looked a little sad, a white forlorn barn dropped down in the desert. A hundred yards off sat Walt in his office (or so she had thought), a small stucco box built so close to the freeway you could walk out the door, follow the path to the sidewalk, and be hit by the wind and the heat from the onrushing cars.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Our Lady of Infidelity"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Jackie Parker.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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