Estrella had worried that the boy might resist the work of her grandmothers’ hands. But he had not fought. He had not wrenched out of their hold as they took his clothes or gotten up from the kitchen table when they told him to eat.
She wondered if he could feel in their hands how many times they had done this before. Not for boys who turned up in the sunken garden, but for their daughters whose lovers had vanished. For their mothers. For one another.
For Bay Briar.
After Bay had buried her grandmother, she had let go the men and women who kept up the great brick house, giving them a year’s pay on top of what Marjorie Briar had left them each in her will. Then Bay had gotten into bed in the same black pants and waistcoat she’d worn graveside. She’d stayed there, face pressed into the pillow, no light in the room but a seam between curtain panels.
She lay there, dust graying everything in the house, her stillness mourning the woman who had been both mother and father to her when her own mother and father had not stayed. Marjorie Briar, who never sent invitations to her midsummer parties and Christmas balls, because on those nights everyone in town was welcome at La Pradera. Marjorie Briar, who lured wealthy men to invest in businesses that were weeks from closing.
The curtains in the windows of that brick house had stayed drawn. Estrella and her cousins worried Bay was starving. Their mothers feared she would wither from lack of sunlight.
But the Nomeolvides grandmothers had climbed the grass slope to the brick house. They threw open the curtains, ignoring Bay’s groan against the light. They shoved her out of bed and toward the shower, dusting her room and changing the sheets in the time it took her to dress in clean clothes, shower steam curling off her skin.
They told her she would eat with them from then on, and even though Bay had inherited the land they all lived on, she obeyed. She bowed to the gravity of belonging to these women.
After a thousand meals at the Nomeolvides table, Bay Briar still came to the front door. The Nomeolvides girls crowded onto the sofa that let them see, between curtain panels, Bay waiting on the front step. For months, they had each assumed that the others only wanted the first look at Bay’s newest outfit.
Now they knew better. They flushed at the fact that she waited to be let in, like a boy picking one of them up.
Tonight, Bay wore riding boots over plain trousers, but with a satin coat that looked like a smoking jacket. Her hair was so pale that, against the burgundy lapels, it glowed.
She stood against the deepening blue of the evening, and she bowed low, saying, “The Briar family bastard, at your service.”
Pulling back up to her full height, she caught sight of the boy, and said, “Oh,” as though a few blinking moments would help her understand.
Fifteen Nomeolvides women and Bay Briar and a nameless boy ate their cazuela in the quiet of the evening and the cool air of the propped-open windows. They stirred spoons through the potato and sweet corn and green chiles.
Estrella and her cousins felt their mothers’ observations passed like the cazuela. A boy who would be a little bit handsome if he weren’t so starved and nervous sat at their dinner table, and the mothers worried that their daughters would all be pregnant from him by spring.
But when Estrella caught her cousins checking their lipstick in the backs of their spoons, she knew it wasn’t for this boy but for Bay. If they were watching the boy, it was for how Bay would react to him.
They waited to see if Bay would speak to him, which language he would thank her in when she passed the water pitcher or the salt.
To Estrella’s cousins, the boy from the sunken garden was a curiosity. Bay was an obsession.
Tía Jacinta leaned toward Estrella. “I think it’s a good thing,” she said, adding chili to her cazuela. Nothing made in this house was ever spiced enough for Tía Jacinta’s taste. “Pobrecita could use a friend.”
This time, pobrecita was Bay.
Abuela Magnolia gave a slow nod, looking toward Bay. “She’s lonely, that girl.”
Estrella tensed at how Abuela Magnolia did not lower her voice. But they were far enough down the table that neither the boy nor Bay could hear them.
Abuela Magnolia shook her head, clucking her tongue. “Sleeping alone in that house.”
“I’ll go and sleep with her,” Azalea whispered without looking up from her bowl, and both Calla and Estrella bit their napkins to keep from laughing.
“No, you won’t,” Azalea’s mother said, not looking up from slicing her knife through pieces of potatoes.
Heat twirled through Estrella’s face and forehead. She looked around, her cousins all in the same posture, faces bent to the table, shoulders a little hunched.
Their mothers had known about their crushes on Bay. Of course they had known. But now the fact that Estrella and her cousins saw their love mirrored in one another’s hearts made her worry about how much their mothers knew, if they could see into their daydreams.
After dinner, the grandmothers passed plates of coyotas, and they all cracked the sugar cookies in two, revealing the ribbon of brown sugar in the middle.
The boy looked at the soft, damp center with the wonder of having broken open an egg filled with confetti.
In the noise of the table and the breaking of sugar cookies, Estrella did not catch what her grandmother told Bay. But under the chatter of her cousins and their mothers, Estrella heard the thread of Bay’s voice.
“Stay with me,” Bay told the boy.
Not a question, or an offer. A command no less final than five grandmothers shoving the boy up the stairs.
“I live over there,” she said, glancing at the windows as though the Briar house was across a dirt road instead of up a grass-covered hill. “I have the room.”
Estrella felt the hearts of every mother and grandmother at the table fill. This was a thing Bay’s grandmother would have done, offer a place to a strange boy.
The boy did not answer Bay Briar. He lowered his head, studying the deep amber inside the coyota. Estrella felt his shame like a palm on the back of her neck, his embarrassment that a pale-haired woman had to offer him a place in her house.
But he did not say no. He did not shake his head. And for a boy who said little more than grace for the things put in front of him, this was a yes.
After dinner, the boy stood in the kitchen doorway, hands in his pockets, looking like he wanted to pace but didn’t want to get in the way. Estrella’s mother handed him a dish towel and made room for him at the counter. Drying plates and spoons seemed to calm him as much as watching the snow of Azalea’s flaked potatoes.
Bay had just brought handfuls of silverware to set the table for tomorrow’s breakfast when she stilled, her eyes fixed on the window.
“Oh no,” she said.
“What?” Dalia asked.
Bay set down the forks and the spoons.
She made a line for the front door so certain that none of the Nomeolvides girls dared to cross it. She threw the door open, and in the seconds before she pulled it shut again they saw him. A man on the grass in front of the stone house.
Reid, Bay called him. Reid, said in a way meant to make it sound like a greeting. But Estrella caught the apprehension under the name. The wavering in her voice stretched the single syllable.
He looked a little older than Bay, closer to thirty than twenty. He wore pressed slacks, the kind Estrella thought men wore only to church, but a shirt so wrinkled he looked like he’d slept in it. He kept his hands in his pockets, not in the way the boy did, as though he did not know what to do with them. This man seemed to rest his hands in his pockets as a way of reminding anyone watching how at ease he was in the world.
He had a frame not so different than the boy’s. A few inches taller if Estrella had to guess, and almost as thin. But while the boy looked underfed, this man, Reid, looked like he had come this way. Ash and red wine stained his wrinkled shirt. Her grandmothers would have done something about that, fearing what became of young men who drank and smoked more than they bothered with proper meals.
A knot grew in Estrella’s throat, turning harder with each thread she drew between this man and Bay.
They both had that pale hair, the color of sand and shells. It held fast in the Briar family no matter how many brown-haired men and red-haired women they married. They both had eyes so light that a shift of sun could turn them from blue to gray. Fine freckles crossed the bridges of their noses like a dusting of nutmeg. Their noses had shapes so similar that, if it weren’t for the difference in their jawlines and foreheads, Estrella would wonder if he was a brother Bay had never mentioned.
Estrella and her cousins spied between curtain panels.
“Should we invite him in?” Gloria asked.
Azalea laughed. “What do you think?”
“Look at her,” Dalia said. “I don’t know who he is, but I know her, and right now she wants to push him down the steps of the sunken garden.”
They all saw it, the tightness in Bay’s neck like she was trying to swallow a tablespoon of black pepper honey that would not go down.
Bay led Reid around to the side of the house, so Estrella and her cousins could not see them.
“Then maybe that’s why we invite him in,” Calla said. “To find out who he is.”
“I have a better idea.” Gloria pulled on the end of the embroidered cloth Bay had just fluffed out for breakfast. The silverware clattered to the wooden table. “Let’s do some laundry.”
“What?” Estrella asked.
“Laundry,” Azalea echoed, the word as light as a sun-bleached sheet.
Estrella listened for the sarcasm but didn’t find it.
They followed Gloria to the laundry room, the tablecloth spilling from her arms.
The window gave them a framed view of Bay and Reid, walking the grass slope up to the Briar house. Calla sat on the windowsill, Azalea on the dryer, helping Gloria refold the tablecloth they had pretended needed a wash.
Dalia sprinkled lemon juice onto stained napkins. Estrella checked the pockets on their aprons and sweaters. Their mothers would let them spy on Bay and Reid only as long as they looked like they were doing something.
Estrella lifted the boy’s clothes from the woven basket. The smell of iron was so strong on his shirt that she touched it lightly, cringing, waiting to find it starched with dried blood.
“It’s the dirt,” Calla said.
Estrella looked up.
“It’s not blood,” Calla said. “It’s the minerals in the dirt.”
Estrella shoved her hands into the boy’s pockets, the second-nature checking that kept lipsticks and hairpins from going into the wash.
Her fingers found the rounded edges of something small. Wooden. She drew it out from his pocket.
A carved horse. Painted wings sprouted from its rounded back. The same as the ones she kept on a shelf and the one she had buried.
But this one was green. She had never seen one painted green. The ones she had left on her shelf were painted yellow, red, violet, orange, white. And the one she had buried, her favorite, had been indigo. This winged horse was as green as the trees of life in the sunken garden. Green as the dress she had worn when she found this boy.
Azalea’s eyes held the same worry as when she stood under a ceiling of Estrella’s starflowers. She fixed her stare first on Estrella and then on the green winged horse.
“What did you do?” Calla asked, shaking her head.
“Nothing,” Estrella said, her voice pitching up. It was a lie and not a lie, a word said more in reaction than because she meant to say it.
Even though they’d found it in the boy’s pocket, they all counted that horse as a thing belonging to Estrella. It was as much hers as the blue borraja clinging to her bedroom ceiling.
Her cousins fell quiet. They all watched the carved horse, as though it might beat its rounded wings and flutter from her cupped hands.
Whether all this was Estrella’s fault or not, whether it was the fault of those little horses or not, they all understood this as she understood it. That wooden horse was a small, painted sign that if they wanted to keep Bay, they had to do as Gloria said and care for this boy the land had given them.
Estrella had buried a blue wooden horse under the earth, and La Pradera had answered with this boy. A lost brother or son or lover who had turned up with a green wooden horse in his pocket.