Kansas Troubles (2 page)

“Ostriches.”

His eyebrows went up in question.

“It’s the latest thing that Uncle Arnie wants Daddy to invest in. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. They even have a category now at the Houston Livestock Show for ostriches and emus.”

“Eyelashes,” he prompted.

“Keep your spurs on. According to Arnie, no part of these birds is wasted. You can sell the meat and the feathers, then make the skins into boots or sofas. Their toenails are ground up and sold to jewelers as an abrasive, and even the eyelashes are used for paintbrush bristles or ornamental design.”

He rinsed off his face, his smooth brown back flexing attractively. I seriously considered his offer to join me in the shower. “Sounds disgusting,” he said. “What do they decorate?”

“You got me.” I stepped out of the shower and grabbed one of the fluffy, sand-colored bath towels a couple of his patrol officers had given us as wedding presents. “But you can bet dollars to doughnuts that Daddy will turn in his cattle brand and raise birds when you start eating red meat again.”

“Anything’s possible.” He reached for my towel. “Let me help dry your back.”

“Not a chance, Chief Ortiz,” I said, wrapping the towel around me. “We’ve only got an hour and a half before our plane leaves, and your help always slows things down.” I pointed toward the bedroom. “Get dressed.”

Sitting on the bed, he pulled on his favorite pair of faded Levi’s and a moss-green polo shirt. I grimaced when he stuck his bare feet into scuffed leather Topsiders.

“One of these days, I’m taking those shoes to the dump,” I warned.

“You do and maybe you and Arnie’s wife can get a two-for-one deal with her divorce lawyer,” he said with a serene smile. He shook his head and grinned. “I like Arnie. He can always make me laugh.”

My Uncle Arnie can be a fun guy, but as Daddy likes to say, he’s never been in any danger of drowning in his own sweat. Thirty years ago, when my mother was dying, Arnie and my gramma Dove moved from Arkansas to San Celina, on California’s Central Coast, to live with my father and me. I was almost six years old, and my grieving father could barely care for his expanding cattle herd, much less an active, growing little girl. Arnie was thirteen at the time, so he’s always been more like a brother to me than an uncle. His wife recently threw him out of the house, and he’d already worn out his welcome at the ranches of his three other brothers and two sisters, which were spread across the western United States. We were his last resort.

I slipped on a pair of wheat-colored Wranglers, boots, and a sleeveless denim shirt. Early July weather here on the Central Coast was the best in the country—sunny, breezy days flowing into cool, clear nights—but I’d been warned that summers in Gabe’s hometown of Derby, Kansas, seven miles south of Wichita, were sometimes so hot and muggy that conversions in the local churches went up thirty percent whenever a minister presented a sermon on the physical existence of Hell. But, Gabe warned, wait five minutes, and the weather will change. Apparently Kansas weather was similar to what people were saying about our marriage—unexpected and bound to be stormy.

“Well,” I continued, “I can’t imagine him and Dove and Daddy driving all the way to Kansas without some big blowup. This ostrich thing has Daddy about ready to chomp a bit in two. They should have flown, but Daddy can’t get Dove on an airplane to save his life.”

“They’ll be fine,” Gabe said. He tucked his black leather shaving kit into the matching suitcase opened on the rumpled Irish Chain quilt covering our pine four-poster bed, the only piece of furniture we owned in common at this point. I compared his neatly packed suitcase with the haphazard muddle of clothes I’d thrown into my J.C. Penney canvas bag. Even our style of luggage was as different as night and day. With me being widowed only a year, Gabe divorced for seven, and knowing each other barely three months before getting married, family and friends were literally placing bets on how long our marriage would survive. I couldn’t blame them. I would be the first person to say it didn’t make sense. But then, when did being in love ever have anything to do with sense?

“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “It’s a long way to Kansas. A lot of desolate places to leave a dead body.”

He wrapped his arms around me in a warm hug. “Quit worrying about them. We’re on vacation. A vacation we both need.”

I couln’t argue with that. My position as curator of the Josiah Sinclair Folk Art Museum and Artists’ Co-op might not involve as many life-and-death decisions as his chief of police job, but it certainly caused me more than enough stress. Keeping the shoestring budget pumped with donations and maintaining a semblance of peace among the forty often temperamental artists were jobs I wouldn’t miss for the next two weeks. But there were at least a hundred places other than the Sunflower State on my wish list of belated honeymoon destinations. Not that I have anything against the state itself, mind you. I mean, who can totally dislike a state whose official song is “Home on the Range”? And
The Wizard of Oz
has always been one of my favorite movies, though like most people, I’m always a bit disappointed when Dorothy opts to return to black-and-white Kansas rather than stay in Technicolor Oz. And I’m sure the state that produced both William Inge and Superman has many wonderful cultural and recreational sights. It just happened to also contain one cultural sight I was not looking forward to. Namely, Gabe’s family. Specifically, his twin sisters and his mother.

Though I’d seen pictures of them, talked to them over the phone, and heard quite a few stories in the last few months, they still didn’t seem real to me. Nor did the life Gabe lived in Kansas until he was sixteen years old, which was when his father died, causing Gabe’s life to totally change. After a few delinquent escapades that almost landed him in jail, his mother sent him to Southern California to live with one of his dad’s brothers in Santa Ana. Even with the photos and the stories, I couldn’t really picture this man, whose whispered Spanish words could melt me into soft wax, driving a tractor on his Grandfather Smith’s wheat farm, any more than I could imagine him crawling through the soggy jungles of Vietnam or working undercover in the barrios of East L.A. The only context in which I’d ever seen Gabe was in his all-business Chief of Police (or as I like to call it, his Sergeant Friday) personality or his easygoing at-home demeanor. Sometimes it almost seemed as if he appeared from nowhere, sans history, and plopped down in San Celina just for my benefit. It was different from anything I’d ever experienced, being intimate with someone I barely knew. Life with my first husband, Jack, who had known me since I was fifteen and was raised on a ranch as I was, hadn’t prepared me for the disparate backgrounds and complex emotional baggage people bring into middle-age relationships.

“They’re going to love you,” Gabe said, dropping a kiss on top of my head and picking up his suitcase.

“I hope you’re right,” I muttered as he walked out. I picked up the photo album we’d looked through the night before. The last formal portrait of his mother, Kathryn Smith Ortiz, was taken two years ago when she retired from forty-one years of schoolteaching. She was tall and broad-shouldered like Gabe and wore a prim, pleated-front grayish dress with pearl buttons and a gauzy lace collar. Under a cloud of lavender-tinged white curls, the somber eyes she’d passed down to her son reprimanded the photographer, probably for his bad posture. Being talkative as a kid and, to quote Dove, born with a mouth as sassy as a squirrel’s, I sent up a quick thanks that she hadn’t been
my
fifth-grade teacher.

His twin sisters, fraternal not identical, were six years younger than his forty-three years, and two years older than my thirty-five. Rebecca Ortiz Kolanowski and Angela Ortiz. Becky and Angel. In their latest Christmas card photo, Becky with her husband and children appeared the quintessential Middle American family. Her golden-brown hair, ivory skin, and almost-indigo eyes revealed more of her mother’s Pennsylvania-Dutch background than her father’s Hispanic one. She was pretty in a fresh, milk-commercial kind of way. Her two tow-headed daughters appeared to be about eight and twelve. Her husband, Stan Kolanowski, sported a crew cut so blond it appeared almost transparent, and looked like the safe, dependable insurance broker he was.

Angel was the image of her nickname, though Gabe said she’d done everything she could to live it down. One telling snapshot placed her next to a sparkling river, a girlish fist playfully threatening the photographer. Sunshine backlit her blond-streaked brown hair and dark almond-shaped eyes challenged the camera with a reckless, earthy expression that had probably caused more than one barroom brawl.

Gabe appeared in the doorway. “All packed?”

I zipped up my bag. “Yep. You know, it’s weird having a new family. Worrying like a teenager over what I’m wearing, what stupid things I’ll probably say, whether they’ll like me or not.” It hadn’t occurred to me until after our whirlwind marriage that this man came with family already attached. I hadn’t even met Sam, his eighteen-year-old son yet. Shortly after we were married in late February, Sam dropped out of UC Santa Barbara, withdrew all his savings, and took off with a friend for Hawaii, searching for the perfect wave. Gabe just about burst a blood vessel after getting Sam’s postcard from Kaunakakai. That uneasy meeting still lurked on the horizon.

“If I can do it, you can do it,” he said, with what I felt was not a great deal of sympathy.

“Thanks loads.” I didn’t voice the apprehension I felt about Dove meeting my new, apparently steel-spined mother-in-law. I would have preferred to face the Kansas clan on my own, but Dove insisted that unlike
some
people, she was going to meet Gabe’s family even if she had to hitchhike. That was a direct barb at my dad, who had not traveled further than seventy-five miles from the ranch since I was a teenager. Dove had been nagging him to take a vacation for years, and she’d finally seen her opportunity. And she wasn’t kidding about hitchhiking. As she so picturesquely put it, she’d trust a snaggletoothed redneck in a flatbed Ford before she’d bet her life on a dope-sniffing yuppie flying one of those steel coffins. Leaving the ranch in the care of his trusted foreman, Daddy and Dove and Arnie were driving to Kansas in Daddy’s new Ford pickup, stopping along the way to assuage Dove’s wanderlust by visiting some of America’s finer tourist attractions. They would meet us in Derby in two weeks for the Saturday afternoon wedding reception Becky and Angel had planned.

An hour later Gabe and I were standing at the ticket counter of the tiny San Celina airport, checking our bags for the American Eagle connection to Los Angeles International Airport.

“Have a good flight, Ms. Harper, Mr. Ortiz,” the clerk said cheerfully.

Gabe growled deep in his throat and picked up my leather backpack.

“Are you going to do that every time someone says my name?” I asked, walking toward our assigned gate.

“Do what?”

“Make that noise in your throat. Sounds a lot like a big old bull choking on a hunk of cud.”

He made the noise again and kept walking. He had taken my decision to keep the Harper name, and not become an official Ortiz, as an insult on three levels—as a man, as a traditional Latino man, and as a conservative Midwestern man. I sort of guessed it was one of those man things. But I was determined to keep my identity. Changing your name at nineteen when your vision is blinded by stars and an overload of hormones is one thing. Though at thirty-five I still had the hormone overload, I didn’t
want
a new name, not even a hyphenated one. I loved Gabe and didn’t want to put any more obstacles on the rocky road of our marriage, but something in me wouldn’t give in on this no matter how much grumbling and pouting he did.

By the time we reached LAX, I’d teased him out of his irritable mood. “Tell me about your friends again,” I said when our flight to Kansas was over the Mojave Desert. I unwrapped the snack sandwich that came with a container of yogurt, a cellophane-wrapped brownie, and an apple.

Pressing his head against the narrow plane seat, Gabe’s face relaxed with memory. “We were inseparable from kindergarten to the summer I turned sixteen and went to California. We had some wild times, those guys and me.”

“Just how wild?” I took a tentative bite of my dry sandwich, then abandoned it for the brownie.

“As wild as four teenage guys can get with an old’56 Chevy and three dollars worth of gas. We spent most of our time kicking up gravel outside of town, racing whoever could get their dad’s new car.”

Shoving my brownie aside, I dug through the side pocket of my backpack and pulled out the last picture Gabe and his three friends had taken together, seven years ago, right after Gabe was divorced. They were leaning against an old barn somewhere. Gabe, wearing a Dodger baseball cap and a white T-shirt, didn’t look a lot different from the way he did now. He smiled at the camera, but his eyes seemed sad.

“I’ll never keep them all straight,” I said.

He pointed to a skinny, bearded man with a protruding Adam’s apple and large plastic eyeglasses. “Lawrence Markley. He’s part owner of a country-western nightclub called Prairie City Nights in Wichita. Does pretty well from what I hear. His wife’s name is Janet. I think she works in some kind of craft store in Derby.”

“Any kids?”

“A daughter. Grown up by now. Hard to believe.”

I pointed to the extraordinarily handsome man with dark blond hair punching Lawrence’s shoulder.

“Rob Harlow. He works in Derby at one of his dad’s feed stores. Jake Harlow owns a chain of them all over Kansas. Harlow’s Feed and Grain. When we were in high school, his dad would leave Rob in charge of the store while he went down the street to the cafe, and Rob would talk one of us into taking care of the customers while he made out with girls behind the hay bales. They just couldn’t leave him alone.”

“I can see why.” Rob’s grin was polished, his wavy hair stylishly cut—clipped short on the sides, longer in front. His face had lean, clean-cut features, a perfect cleft chin, eyes the unbelievable green of a 7-Up bottle. He was tanned a flawless Marlboro cowboy shade of brown.