The Saints of Death Valley (part two)

Driving back from Death Valley Junction, Paula thought she saw a ruby aura around the shadow outline of a woman. It was hard to judge in the wavery heat — if the woman wasn’t a mirage, certainly she was on her way to becoming a ghost. Paula caught up and pulled over next to a young woman standing beside a ruby Pontiac. The traveler’s face looked as if it had just pulled a fresh batch of freckles out of the oven. She wore a bone-in pearl corset (something you don’t see every day in the desert) and her shoulders were almost as red as her hair. Conflicting religious necklaces round her neck, black cargo pants tucked into alkali-dusted combat boots.

“Watta you doin’, it’s going to one-ten today,” Paula asked, rolling down the window. 

The young woman leaned hard into the escaping air conditioning. “Depending upon the kindness of strangers,” she responded, and her bottom lip split when she smiled, giving away her physical state. She’d been out there for some time. “My car died.”

“Okay Blanche, get in.” Paula thought the girl looked like she could not be much more than 20, shouldn’t be traveling long distances alone; no one should, in the desert. “I’ll get you to a service station.”

They exchanged (real) first names and Grace handed Paula a holy card. She meant it as an act of thanks. It was a good one too — St. Catherine racked on her wheel, sparks of gold pinwheeling around her. Paula held the card like it was shit. Did she pick up an evangelist? Grace saw the look.

“Okay, I know it’s ridiculous. These cards —” she had pulled the card from a velvet bag. “I intended to leave them at Burning Man, but I left, so now I have to give them away a card at a time.”

Burning Man. That explains the outfit. It didn’t. 

Paula stepped on the gas, threw the card out the window. Catherine wheeled head-over-heels through the Nevada desert, landing at the feet of a kangaroo mouse, who jumped right over the card, and kept on going down the folded mountain pass to an ephemeral stream that would be gone with the hour.

Paula peered at what she now saw more or less as a lost child — at her loose braids, the ratty backpack she pulled from her stranded car. 

“You have a plan?” It wasn’t appropriate for her to ask, but it felt like a mother’s prerogative. Even if she wasn’t the mother. 

“Las Vegas, I guess.”

The young woman was so dusty, if not for her hair and sunburn, she had lost all her color. Something about her reminded Paula of herself; Paula had fled Salt Lake City as soon as she could. Moroni and his Mary Kay lips. She might have been imagining it, but the young woman had a sort of jump-off-a-cliff desperation to her. Las Vegas thrives on that edge — puts it on a marquee and sells it. Then keeps most of the money. 

“Death Valley’s kind of out of the way…” Paula pushed.

“I’m in need of an oasis. I heard you have one.”

True enough. “So, where’d you say you’re from…?” Paula asked.

Grace surprised herself and said, “The Carmelites.” 

And she kept on talking. She told Paula that she was not sure if she should return to college, that she was in a bit of a crisis, how Burning Man was too intense for her — life was too intense for her — and that she felt she needed to retreat and regroup. 

The more Paula heard the more she knew George wouldn’t mind, didn’t think he would mind too much when she impulsively said, “Why don’t you stay a few days at my house with me and my family.” Paula looked Grace directly in the eyes to convey safety, although at five-foot-four-inches, threatening was not one of Paula’s best attributes. She tucked her black curls behind her ears, exposing that small part of herself. “We have three kids,” she added; what could be safer? If George was unhappy about it, well, it would only be for a day or two. The child just looked like she needed refuge. 

“I have money, I can rent a motel room,” Grace said, running her tongue over the minerals crystalizing on her teeth, “but I think I’d like to. To stay with you.” She was used to the charity of others, believed in it. And Grace didn’t particularly want to be alone. 

They arrived at the Boulder house, went inside. “These are my girls, Addie and Remi,” Paula said, the sisters looking up from the TV. The older girl, Addie, was a tall copy of her mother, with her black-cat hair. Remi had braids the color of the desert. “Blue is around her somewhere.” Grace didn’t know if she meant the third kid or the dog. 

“Grace is going to stay with us for a couple days,” Paula informed her daughters. 

The girls said hi with their voices, but their eyes, taking in Grace’s corset & cargo look, said are you crazy?

Paula led Grace to the small enclosed porch George had added on to the side of the house. The wall of windows made the porch room unbearable during most days, but on a clear night it was Starship Command. Addie and Remi followed, silently.  

Grace shrugged her backpack into the corner; it settled like a hobo. 

“Addie, get the broom,” Paula said, “Remi, get some clean sheets and the nice blanket.” There was a pull-out couch that, when open, would take up most of the space. Addie swept clean the chili-pepper-red tiles and threw away her mother’s struggling herbs — parsley, sage, rosemary, and pot. (Those little hypocrites! Then later, That’s for your dad’s headaches!) She plugged in a huge fan that chopped at the heat. Addie wished her mother would put Grace in with Remi and give her this room. When Grace left, she was going to ask for it. 

Remi helped Grace make the bed. Remi was piqued by Grace’s bright hair, and the cross, the yin-yang symbol, and the dharma chakra wheel (was she a sailor?) Grace strung around her neck on silver chains. Remi had overheard Paula tell George over the phone that Grace was raised by Carmelites, which Remi could only picture as a low-calorie ice cream topping. Yes, the new girl was intriguing. 

Later, Grace called Francine. Pictured her mother on the other end of the line, her bumblebee hair. “Mom, you’ll never guess where I am.”

“Paris!”

“Ha ha. I’m in Death Valley. At an oasis. There’s a golf course.”

“Are you taking up golf?”

“Yes, I’m quite good. The Wheaties people are on their way.” 

“Oh nice, but you know, you’re not going to look so great on that orange box — what with your red hair.”

“Actually, I’m staying a couple of days with a family.” Grace knew that would send Francine’s freewheeling eyebrows a-flying. 

A family. It is hard to let a child go. 

“The Carrolls, they’re really nice,” Grace continued. “They have three kids. I want you talk to Paula, the mom.”

The mom. I’m the mom!

“I think I want to stay here for a while. I mean, I don’t know if I can stay with the Carrolls — there’s one bathroom — but in Death Valley.”

Francine tried to picture her daughter below sea level. Living with a family. What were they, the two of them? She felt a butter-knife of jealously. Made it melt. “Baby, put Paula on. If you say it’s a good place for you, I trust you.” She still did trust her, despite Grace’s actions over the summer. Mothers can be like that. 

Paula got on the line. “I found her by the side of the road and brought her home like a puppy. I’m feeding her table sweets.”

Francine’s instinct was to like her. It takes a village. But even still, she would be driving out for a visit as soon as she could schedule the days off. A family! Pfft. 

 

A few days gave way to months; no one talked of Grace moving out. Paula gave her a job in the kitchen making rosettes of many colors laid out on wax paper rows. When the sun receded from Grace’s skin, the girl looked like waxy magnolia petals, she looked as if she belonged in a canopy bed. Paula had never seen a girl more in need of a large plate of desserts. 

Grace helped Blue with his homework, no small task — For goodness’ sakes, Blue, I after E! She took Addie to her dance lessons at the Amargosa Opera House. Jumped with Remi on the heat-stretched trampoline in the back yard — star jump, swivel hips, jumping jacks. Now do it higher, Remi — fly! She was good with the kids. 

Francine did come out, more than once, and they had bar-b-ques under skies so big it was heartbreaking. Francine had never before truly seen the Milky Way. She thought it the bridge to Heaven. She could understand why Grace was lingering in the oasis, and it was easy to see that Paula and George were not the type of people to ask Grace to move on just because they only had one bathroom. Although George did say it was easier to go to the stalls at the Last Kind Word than it was to get a seat in his own house. 

 

George and Paula didn’t pay enough attention to realize that, when it came to doctrine, Remi would have preferred instruction to choice. Paula had grown up with no choice and offered her children the opposite. George need only bite into the flesh of a date to taste the body of Christ, and he was grateful. Grace was carrying around her black-shot soul, working on atonement, wondering if she might need a new religion to gain it. Remi was rummaging through the transcendental looking for a good fit. 

Remi was 13 years old and she wanted to understand the forces and the rules. Nature has no morals. It is raw and it is beautiful, and Remi knew — it is opportunistic. Anything that can kill you, will. From a killing-you-softly mosquito, to an eating-you-alive mountain lion. If the lions don’t get you, the heat — that true apex predator — will. Nature doesn’t care. Beauty is a byproduct, not a goal. Remi understood the environment. It was philosophy that puzzled. The Alfie Questions, her mother called them. Paula sang What’s it all about, Alfie? and Remi didn’t even know what that meant. Remi wanted a burning bush. She wanted divinity (not the candy!) and definitive answers. A child isn’t good with shading — just look at their artwork — if it’s not in a box of 64 colors, it doesn’t exist. Some kids only have eight. 

Remi was young enough to like the idea of Ten Commandments, she’d first read about them in her Children’s Bible. Ten seemed reasonable. She was also young enough to believe she could obey them. Remi took to hanging out with Grace and her velvet bag of holy cards. The illustrator of Remi’s saints book had used watercolors — such a soft-sell. Grace’s cards made the saints come alive — drops of vermilion blood from open wounds, girded for battle, standing for God. The lessons were black-and-white. 

Remi became an acolyte. 

Remi instigated discussions on teenage theology, starting with Remi’s curiosity of Grace’s necklaces and moving to the important things like is there a Heaven, to the really important things like who has the best outfit. “Witches, when you get right down to it,” concluded Remi, and on that one and Grace couldn’t disagree. 

Eventually Grace asked Paula if it would be okay if she moved in with Remi and gave Addie the patio room. “Remi’s with me like half the time anyway, and I think I’d make some real points with Addie.” Everyone knew Addie coveted the red-tile room. Paula was fine with it.

“Would you like the top bunk?” Grace asked Remi, indicating the bed that Addie had stripped so thoroughly. The mattress looked prison-issue with its red ticking and sagging center. 

Remi put her hand on the ladder, her pure blue eyes wide — it may as well have been the stairway to heaven, eternally denied by her older sister. And now it was hers?!

 

On a day off from the kitchen, Grace took a ride into Las Vegas with George. He needed supplies, she needed a car — the Grand Safari never recovered. On the drive, she learned all about soil with high salt content and pH scales — “I’m trying to grow this stuff with a pH of 10.5. The alkaline! And don’t get me started on what happens in 125 degrees. I once saw a burning bush — I’m talking spontaneous combustion, not Moses. But Holy Moses!” 

They had no reason to go to the Strip. They drove the periphery and Grace saw the old ranchero-style homes with flat, gravel roofs, front yards of prickly pear and saguaro — scarecrow cactus guarding nothing but yards of rock. George helped her buy a beater at Atomic Auto, and the old Toyota truck seemed disappointed when Grace drove it farther into the desert instead of towards the ocean — the truck resisted every climb like a mule. But mule was that truck’s destiny, because Grace had decided to become a her own version of a Carmelite — and it involved building a chapel. 

 

Death Valley is part of a 300-million-acre national park. The park rangers who work there are parched. The people who live there are fringed; it’s just the way it is. So when the young woman with hair the color of polished carnelian started carefully stacking rocks to create a small room sidled up against a seldom-visited gorge by Zabraski’s Point, no one cared. Or most possibly no one of authority even saw. The occasional intrepid tourist stumbled on the narrow trail, looked up and noticed the splotches of orange lichen on a gray limestone rock wall clinging to the mountain like a poorly built Pueblo cliff dwelling. Of course that tourist would follow that trail — was it a… discovery? Imagine their surprise upon finding a bone-white plastic lazy Susan fit into the stones, perfectly free to be set in motion. Just asking for it. Really it was irresistible not to twirl that turnstile. Mostly the plastic would do nothing but release a layer of orangy dust into the air. But if a person felt the urge to put something on the lazy Susan, anything at all — a small stone with a quartzite vein the nowhere color of ice, a cactus bloom sticky and wilting, a Lincoln penny — then a holy card would replace that offering, gold and all the royal colors glinting in the unforgiving sun. While this exchange was taking place, the self-proclaimed prioress of the desert, and often her aspirant too, could be heard giggling from behind the stone wall, but never, oh no never, ever seen. 

Oh, what a fine story, what a fine souvenir! A great exchange. But most times no one was at the enclave, neither tourist nor nunette. Just the whirly wind on the plastic merry-go-round. At the Unofficial Our Lady of Cake Carmelite Chapel-lite. 

 

In the Furnace Creek kitchen, Grace moved up from rosettes to cheesecake. She perfected an Apple Charlotte that made the menu. In her off hours she drove around the desert in her old mule truck looking for unusual but moveable rocks. The young men who worked under George at the golf course took an interest in the pretty young woman with the lead foot. The one with hair to her shoulders the color of the tail of a comet. Remi was watching from the truck when Jared, in his Dockers and polo shirt, his muscles and his name tag, asked Grace if she wanted to go for a golf cart ride with him on the greens after dark. Made it sound all Midnight at the Oasis, which it technically was. He shook his set of keys like a chatelaine, proof of his authority.

“What’d Jared want?” Remi asked when Grace got back in the car.

“To romance me under the stars.”

“What’d ya say?!”

“I said my boyfriend was in the Marines.”

“Good. You see that mole on his face?”

“Yep.”

“Looks like he fell asleep on a Rolo.”

Grace snorted. “Oh, you’re a rough one, Remi. I feel sorry for the boys who go after you!” What Grace did not say to Remi was that she wasn’t overly confident about sex at all. It hadn’t gone particularly well to date. She didn’t lace her corsets so tight to push up her boobs; she was binding her heart. 

Twice a week Grace drove Addie to her ballet lessons. Oh, in Death Valley a child could expect to learn to shoot a gun, track a bighorn sheep, even jump on a backyard trampoline that is succumbing to heat exhaustion. But ballet lessons? Thanks to a flat tire, a child could. 

In 1923 Pacific Coast Borax built a complex including a recreation hall. Corkhill Hall has seen church services, funerals, union leaders shaking sabers made of steely words. Even movies, and yes, dances. But never had that hall seen the likes of dancer Marta Becket. 

In 1967 Marta’s car got a flat tire, and in the time it took for the tire to be changed at the Death Valley Junction service station, Marta changed her life. She had been part of the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall, had played Carnegie. But she bought Corkhill Hall and traded New York to dance to an audience of none. So she painted the walls with a 16^th century court with royalty, bullfighters, prostitutes — her tromp l’oeil audience on the walls of her now named Amargosa Opera House. Eventually the living audiences came, if only to see the oddity. 

Then the young kids who wanted to stand on their toes came to Marta and asked to learn to twirl and twirl and twirl and jump! Addie, with her dark-dark hair was one of these kids, perhaps the best, because she understood the secret language of music, could dip into that silver stream and come out all a-sparkle.  

Remi usually came along for the ride. She and Grace watched from the farthest back seats, right below the court jester.  “God, what a hoofer,” was Remi’s take, closing her jewel-blue eyes. Remi was not interested in dance — the Hokey Pokey was still her best number. What Remi was interested in was those cards in Grace’s rose velvet bag. Remi had bigger dreams than Addie. Remi didn’t want her name on a marquee; she wanted her likeness, gold and violet-blue, on a holy card. She had decided she wanted to be a Saint. 

Saint Remi of the Desert. 

 

Paula had her head in the oven. George was somewhere under a tree. Grace fed Remi the cornflakes of religion; took her to the Date Palm Chapel on Sundays, out to the Bedouin-tent revivals of the holy-rolling Baptists where Remi learned to raise her palms up, open them to Je-sus, and Grace put gingerbread men with raisin eyes in the collection baskets. They went to the pow wows at Indian Village, 197 feet below sea level. The Timbisha called Death Valley Tumpisa — meaning rock paint — a place that used to belong only to the Red Rock Face Paint peoples. 

Up at the chapel, Grace would hoist a ladder so they could climb over the wall; the second ladder already in place on the other side so they could climb down, pulling the first ladder after them. They kept a small weather-proof box with the holy cards, their books and a few treasures and talismans that had been delivered on the lazy Susan. In the quiet of the cooler days they carved petroglyphs into the sandstone walls, the outline of their hands, stars and coyote-in-the-moon. It was their version of the paintings at the Opera House. 

Years later a tourist named Simon Ha would find the drawings, looking through a chink where the lazy Susan used to be. Simon thought the drawings were authentically old. And when he found out otherwise from an anthropology grad student out of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Simon stayed behind and carved fuck you over the drawings because he was disappointed and embarrassed when the grad student pointed out the drawing of the truck — “Looks like a Toyota.”  But Death Valley is a dry place and sooner or later those scratches, that graffiti, would be petroglyphs and Simon had deprived the drawings of one possible destiny. But neither Remi nor Grace would ever know this part of the story.

Behind the walls, in the shade of the chapel-lite, Grace read a paperback copy of Comparative Religions that she got at Moe’s on Telegraph in Berkeley where new and used books are shelved side-by-side. Used struck her as infused with earlier reader’s sparking energy. Grace had bought her yin-yang and her dharma chakra wheel necklaces at one of the ubiquitous Nepalese stores — prayer flags fringing the windows. Grace bought some of those too. Now she strung the colored flags across the back of the desert chapel. 

“Pretty,” said Remi, pushing her peanut butter braids back, “like the Mexican paper banners.” Remi was thinking of the papel picado fiesta banners she had seen in Mexican restaurants in Las Vegas. 

“These tell a story if you know how to read them.” Grace said, thinking of the stained-glass windows at Sacred Heart, the stations of the cross. Grace touched the center of the flag. “Lung Ta — Wind Horse — for speed and transformation of bad fortune to good.” 

Remi pictured a barely visible horse, a galloping soap bubble warrior-of-Buddha horse. 

Grace ran her fingers over the writing around Lung Ta, “These are mantras, 400 of ‘em, like prayers. The Tibetans believe the mantras will be blown by the slightest wind to spread compassion. They are not individual prayers but for the benefit of all.” Grace loved the image of prayers coming to her on the wind, blowing by, tangling her hair. 

“I think the Mexican flags kind of do the same thing,” said Remi. She wasn’t wrong.  

Grace was working on what she came to think of as her empty space, or her godless space. (Paula would just call it the Alfie questions.) Grace read to Remi about Buddhism — “The world, it’s not real. It’s a cosmic dance.” 

Remi pictured the Hokey Pokey. 

 “You can never give enough loving — kindness, or compassion. If you have joy in other people’s joy — how can you not be joyful!?”

Remi wondered if she could live up to that; Grace already did. 

 “Emptiness is emptiness. Sky is blue, grass is green. See reality as it is, without projections. Words are not the ultimate truth. Experiences are reality.” 

The teenager on the brink, and the young woman on a break thought about these concepts. Possibly they resonated because Death Valley is itself such an elemental place. Bare bones. There is no sugar-coating reality in the Badwater. 

“You are responsible for your own salvation,” Grace continued reading. “The goal is to end suffering. Suffering comes from desire. Decrease your desires and decrease your suffering.” Grace continued to read aloud, but inside her head words were popping: You are responsible for your own salvation. What, no need for a bishop!? 

Grace thought of Jesus, she thought of Buddha. One born from a virgin, one born from his mother’s side. She discussed this, as she did so many things on so many night calls with Francine who said, “Really, what’s wrong with a holy person coming straight out of a vagina? Straight out! Men are idiots!” 

“I like both these prophets; can I like both these prophets?” she asked her mother.

 “The more I seek the less I know,” said Francine, quoting the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who weren’t the first to say it. 

“I’m ping-ponging from god to god!” Grace said.  

“Grace, stop worrying about the peripherals. Look for the shared morals in the religions. Those are the truths.”  

Grace thought that was a good idea. She was seeking forgiveness. She wasn’t moving away from the Catholic Church. She was expanding. 

 

Grace and Remi distilled the rules that resonated with them:

Remi’s were: No killing, no stealing, no lying.

Grace added: No sex outside of morality. Remi blushed.

Remi added: Don’t be jealous of other people’s stuff.

Grace concluded: Be nice.

Easy, easy rules. They repeated it like a rosary until it looked like this: Nokillingnostealingnoyingnosexoutsideofmoralitydon’tbejealousofotherpeople’sstuffbenice.

Then Grace shortened it to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. They knew what it meant. 

 

But here’s the thing: a picture is worth 1,000 words. And Remi was deprived of color. Color in Death Valley is a migrating bird wondering where it took the wrong turn. In the desert, violet is its brightest on the face of an Anna’s hummingbird, scarlet its deepest on the silly crest and puffed belly of the vermillion flycatcher. The truest white is a great egret, looking like a dorky angel. Color is hard to come by. So despite the lessons in comparative religion, Remi remained most interested in Grace’s rose velvet bag of holy cards, shot with end-of-the-rainbow gold. 

Behind the stone wall, Grace sometimes asked Remi what she wanted to be when she grew up. Finally, one day Remi answered truthfully: “I want to be a saint,” she said.

“A saint?! Well, you’re a whirling dervish on the trampoline.” Grace assumed she was teasing. 

“Don’t say that. I’m serious. I want to be on a holy card.” There. She said it. 

Grace still thought it was a joke. “Might be easier to make it on the cover of the Rolling Stones. Take up guitar. Desert grunge.” 

Remi gave her the blue evil eye. Two of them.

“Well,” said Grace, understanding that Remi wasn’t kidding. A little afraid for her. “Saints cannot be timid,” she postured. 

“No,” agreed Remi, flinging a peanut better-colored braid off her shoulder. 

“And there is usually an ordeal, although one might think living in Death Valley is ordeal enough.” 

“Living with you ought to be ordeal enough.” 

“What kind of saint do you want to be?” Grace pulled out the cards, fanned them like a fortune teller, or a card shark.

This set Remi thinking. Certainly not Prince Igor Constantinovich of Russia. He was so handsome with the gold of his war medals and his smart uniform, but Grace knew her saints and she told Remi he was murdered by Bolsheviks in the Urals, his body now under a parking lot in Beijing. Igor was exchanged on the lazy Susan for a scruffy blue button. 

Of course Remi liked Saint Francis, looking like Cinderella with doves on his shoulders and bunnies by his sandaled, earthy toes.

Grace touched the Joan of Arc card. Barbarella came to mind. Grace wondered if there was a saint for lesbians — everyone deserves a saint! Right then Grace pinned her hopes on Joan of Arc, whom growing up, Grace believed was burned like a steak.

“Saint Therese,” Remi finally said, “I want to be like her.”

“Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus. You want to be the patron saint of florists?” 

“No, stupid. I want to follow her Little Way. You don’t need heroic acts. Small acts done with love.”

“Yeah, I don’t know about that. She got lucky. Usually it takes a painful death to make it on a holy card. Like really painful.” Grace handed Remi the Saint Philomena card. “See the two anchors (gold) and the three arrows (gold)? She vowed to be a virgin and when she refused to marry Emperor Diocletian he had her scourged, drowned with anchors, shot with arrows and finally decapitated.”

Remi rolled her eyes, disgusted.  “I knew you would make fun of me! I knew I shouldn’t have told you. Don’t you dare tell anyone else.”

“I’m going to tell people that you want to be a saint?! Good God. I tell your mother that and she’ll wash your mouth out with borax.”

 

The conversation was left, Grace hoped in immurement, behind the stone wall. But it wasn’t. In a flash-fire of self-awareness Grace realized that she, too, wanted to be saint. Her early influence with the Carmelite nuns — she still associated the hum of the bees with the low murmur of God’s voice. Catholic school with its straight-lined plaid skirts and sweet submission. What better goal in life than perfection? A child can believe in it. Probability gets confused with God. It’s pretty to think there’s a Hell. Before puberty, sainthood seemed attainable. 

But the moment Grace followed Christos out of Three Worlds Café, she reached for the cat o’ nine tails. There was a part of her that was attracted to his dark, rain-cloud soul. Perhaps she thought her white body would be a poultice. But he covered her in bruises and she tried to call them poems. And then happy Havarti Jake. Let’s get high. Let me fuck you this way. All of it leading to Twentieth Century, the idea of her now shrouded in rose angora beneath shredding eucalyptus trees. Oh sure, there were saints who started as notorious sinners — Saint Pelagia, Saint Mary of Egypt. Certainly Mary Magdalene. But Grace could think of no holy card for a woman who had an abortion. Grace discussed this heart-and-soul question with no one. 

But still… You are responsible for your own salvation.

Grace realized she had been playing patty cake with Remi, and baker’s man with Paula. Remi’s innocent declaration let her hear how ridiculous the goal was. Grace realized she didn’t really want to be a saint anymore. And if she wasn’t, it should not automatically qualify her as a citizen of sin. Could she grant herself this indulgence and allow herself to be loved by God? Did she have to sacrifice one for the other? She had spent two years in her celibate desert, discussing God with a child!

Theology could be fireflies blinkering glimpses of the Devine. Not a burning bush. She had to give this some thought.

 

A few months later, Grace went again with George into Las Vegas — You forgot the list, George! — Paula catching them just in time. Paula and Grace shared a look. The family all knew George was getting a bit forgetful. They didn’t talk about it. They just compensated. 

Grace was quiet on the ride, and George gave up on trying to start conversations and turned on an old Hank Williams CD. Seemed like the right kind of music for a person who just wanted to look out the window.

While George hunted the great wide aisles of Home Depot and waited for his lumber order, Grace took his truck over to the seedy Arts District that was trying to convince tourists that graffiti is Italian for mural. She went to Buffalo Exchange, where the smell of old lives defeated the citrus diffuser by the cash register. Grace fingered outfits that Francine would love, pieces resurrected from the Haight with suede fringe and paisley, but it was still the ‘80s that lit Grace up. Madonna remained her fashion-saint. Fingerless lace gloves and crinoline. A bustier — the whale bone may have been plastic, but there’s a garment that lives up to its name. She didn’t get to wear these outfits much since she left Berkeley, and she was beginning to feel that she had to find a place where her clothes could walk around in public and not get shot like a deer out of season. 

At the checkout counter there was a row of Mexican religious candles, the kind in cylinders of glass, holiness evinced in portraits of deep colors and glitter. Oh, how that glitter would star a dark room! Beautiful. Grace bought Remi an Our Lady of Guadalupe with her full-body halo. 

With a little more time to kill, Grace ordered nachos at the nearby Casa Don Juan. (Yep, papel picados, party on a string.) “You want a margarita with that?” asked the waitress in a full skirt of many layers and nurse’s shoes. Grace hesitated; the waitress caught the melancholy slump in Grace’s shoulders. “Let me tell you something,” the waitress laughed. “Margarita make everything better!”

Who was Grace to argue with a philosopher such as this?

George and Grace headed home. Hank Williams, who had died at the tragic age of 29, sang about setting the woods on fire, he sang about being young. George and Paula were not oblivious to those in their care, they just believed in letting kids fall off their bikes. But Grace was starting to look as if she needed a push. They had come to love Grace, who wouldn’t? George pictured the time she walked by Blue and his buddy Carson fighting over equal shares of a sugary drink they had bought out of the vending machine at the golf course. “Only virgins and posers drink that crap,” she had said as she walked through the room without even a pause, transforming the drink into the toxic sludge it already was. She had that easy way with the kids, a sort of slutty-dressed Mary Poppins, red bra strap ever at the ready. Paula and George would love to keep her. But they were well aware that she was an adult sleeping in bunk bed in a room that smelled like teen spirit. 

 

Our Lady of Guadalupe

 

A year went by. Remi turned 15. She quit going out to the Carmelite chapel. She felt like a science experiment. She started her period — a lava flow, an eruption of Mount St. Remi. Her body was turning on her. Remi wanted to shellac someone, anyone, on a constant basis, every conversation was karate. She wanted to kick. She wanted to kiss that stupid boy, Bryan. Bryan! The girl didn’t know what she wanted.

So she jumped on her trampoline. Especially at night, because airborne, she felt 12.  Remi was unaware, but she was beautiful on the tramp. Graceful, and on nights when the moon was a nick of silver, she was nothing more than a shadow, brown braids like reins come loose. She never missed her move, always made an Olympic landing. The only color in the night, the Milky Way a-shiver above her.

When winter came, the first rain drops fell and turned to little puffs of dust on the hard, parched ground. It looked like suicide. But eventually the water soaked the earth and come 

late March, flower tapestries were thrown across the shoulders and valleys of the desert, exhaling a light of many colors. Paula went back to her roots, to petit fours, exquisite squares of cake — lemon, raspberry, rosettes and violets frosting the top. Little bites of Spring. George found moss growing on a stony ledge. Moss! The ribbons of Addie’s ballet pointes crisscrossed her maypole legs. Blue borrowed Addie’s tarot cards and put them in his bike spokes — the Magician and the Fool — she couldn’t miss just two — and roared off on the quest-of-the-day. Francine came up for a week’s visit and as always happened when Francine was there, Grace had eyes for no one but her mother.

Remi jumped.  

 

Later that summer came a hot night, too hot to be a longer word than that. Remi couldn’t sleep. She got up and lit the Our Lady of Guadalupe candle. It was augmented now by one of Paula’s Thanksgiving tapers because the original candle had long ago puddled low in the glass cylinder. The thin candle rose a few inches higher than the holder, and Remi liked the look, a little hello-halo of flame. She lay in bed and watched the flicker. 

Grace wasn’t in her top bunk — she was out at the Baptist revival, shakin’ it for Je-sus. Remi hadn’t wanted to go. Too much work. She had declared herself a naturalist like her father. The fact that grape soda lupine grows three feet tall and smells like its name was proof enough of the divine for Remi. Grape soda! In the desert! It takes a God to come up with that. It sounded good, but basically it was just an excuse for being lazy. 

Remi thought she heard a buzzing sound, far off, like bees on the move. Probably the hum of the Baptists. Finally, she gave up on sleep and headed outside. The waning crescent moon seemed a sliver of ice, and 95 degrees felt cool. She went to the refuge of her trampoline. Upward bound. She could jump with her eyes closed, so sure were her bare feet. So she did.

 

Paula woke up too. She heard the high-pitched, tinny sound, opened her eyes. “You up, George?” She thought he was shaving with his electric razor. In the middle of the night? She opened her eyes. The bathroom was dark. Everything was dark. She realized the sound was coming from outside. 

George wasn’t in the bed. Shit! 

The two of them, old lovers, they didn’t much talk about George’s free-wheeling memory. What did it matter if he sometimes couldn’t remember the Latin names for the stupid palm trees. Why did that frustrate him so? She didn’t care if he came home with beer instead of butter. Who doesn’t like beer?! And if it was butter instead of beer, well she’d bake some sheepherder’s bread in the Dutch oven. What is marriage but prolonged tolerance? And it wasn’t that bad. She didn’t think his memory was that bad. 

Paula put her sneakers on and went out the front door. Shifted her ears from side to side. Where was that sound coming from? She had to pick it out in between the strands of gospel music.

 

Reverend Bernard was bringing down the house. The revival was set up in the Mission Gardens. The high arch of the white-washed adobe entrance shone as if it were the Pearly Gates. Magenta bougainvillea trailed over. Palm trees swayed, and Thank you, Jesus, for the breeze! Three women, whom the Reverend hired as much for the girth of their thighs as for their voices, were leading the gospels, Alabaster Box and You Got a Friend in Jesus. Bernard’s wife was laying out the cold fried chicken on long tables, lemonade in glass pictures sweating in the night. The stars of the Milky Way looked as if the souls of all those who went before us were peeking out from heaven. Everyone was moved to raise their hands in praise. Everyone was singing, Grace too. Top of their lungs. 

It was beautiful. Really it was.  

 

Paula made the oasis. It wasn’t hard to find George. He was the one with the chainsaw. 

 

Inside the Boulder House, Our Lady of Guadalupe’s little flame had been pushed by the small backwind of Remi’s body as she exited the room. And the little flame had taken the opportunity to grab hold of the curtains that had been just beyond its reach. Everything in this world has a mindless bent toward movement. Up, down, over, under. The flame was just a tickle on the linen, but a loose thread threw the fire a lifeline. It wasn’t quick. A thin column of smoke rose toward the ceiling and then mushroomed out. It had the color and consistency of dove-gray silk, bolts of silk rolling off the spool. A shadow color. Full of all the things it ate. It took a long time with the savory oak of the bunkbed. The house itself was solid and would stand like a Sequoia after a lightning strike. But all the things we buy now — synthetics, things with pretty sounding names — vinyl and plastic and acetate — burn like a son of a bitch. And flour. Would you believe it? Paula had made biscuits for dinner. Blue did the dishes. What a disaster. Flour in eddies, flour dusting the air. Dozens of other little things around the house, flavoring the smoke, building density. Toxicity. Not all the Boulder Houses were equipped with fire alarms.  Of course they should have been — ask the Head of Grounds — didn’t he take care of that sort of thing?

 

Reverend Bernard had provided a piano — that was a son of gun to set up. If the stars themselves could sing, surely they would sound like the tambourines. What a lovely jingle the little zills made. People were stomping. Glory, glory, glory! Grace said, glory! Could be the Lord was enjoying the concert. 

 

George was boiling with frustration, bursting with it. The names just wouldn’t come to him. Skidded right by, on the periphery of memory. 

Washingtonia filifera. Phoenix dactylifera. 

He could not manifest those words. He gave up on the hard ones and tried to find just the names for the wild flowers — the Mojave wildrose, Panamint daisies, mariposa lilies. Child’s play, just flower names.

Rosa acicularis. Calochortus. Enceliopsis covillei.

Nothing. He tried the jackalope, that desert jokester. Laughing at him now. 

Lepus antilocapra

Empty. All the names were gone, mandalas blown in the wind. Sands in an hourglass. 

 

Looking back, Remi knows she smelled the smoke before she heard the sirens. There came a tipping point, when the damp grass, the curated smell of the golf course was overcome by an out-of-place smokehouse scent. It smelled something like the whiskey her dad liked to drink. But it was the sirens that opened her eyes. Her body turned to ice, but still she jumped, an automaton of a girl. She didn’t know what to do. 

 

It’s the smoke that’s the killer, if it can’t find its vent. The fireplace chimney was closed. Only threads could escape. The windows were shut. Every room had a fan that would push, push, push the smoke around until the plastic blades melted into Dali-es sculptures. Every bedroom door was open to help the flow of the fans. The smoke followed the rivers of air. 

Blue had a summer cold, he was off on the wings of the green dragon Nyquil, that absinth tincture of childhood. He’d kept sneezing in the kitchen when Paula was baking. “Take some cold medicine at bedtime,” his mother said. He was old enough to do it for himself, and young enough to double dose on purpose. For the fun of it. 

Addie, perhaps she had the best chance, in the glass room. But there is nothing that an 17-year-old girl likes better than aerosols and polishes — she was forever forgetting to put the lid on the nail polish remover. Clothes in piles. Books, whose only natural enemies are school boards and bonfires. Addie dreamed she was dancing pirouettes across the floor, again and again and again!, until she was out of breath. 

 

Out at the oasis garden, the lighting was exquisite. Luminary stars, and so well-placed fairy lights on the crisscross paths. In this artist’s glow, George had turned Laszlo Toth, that crazy Hungarian who delivered twelve awful hammer blows to Michelangelo’s Pieta. For isn’t the oasis at Furnace Creek — with its magnificent grove of tawny-barked palms, fruit that could keep a wanderer alive in the Badwater — a masterpiece? 

George’s Husqvarna chainsaw chewed into the palm stems like a fevered beaver. By the time Paula got there, four were down, crown of fronds a-topple like vaudeville showgirls that had slipped on the banana peel. Paula was aghast. She yelled for George to stop, but he was starting on a fifth tree, and she feared that if she touched him, the rabid Husqvarna would sink its teeth into her.

 

The sirens started. What a wail, that heart-song of disaster. But the fire crew was confused. First, they got several calls that a crazy man was cutting down the 100-foot palms in the oasis, and they headed that way. They had axes of their own. But then there were conflicting calls about a fire, and they could see dark smoke. Over at the Boulder houses. They diverted to the fire.

When the sirens started, the revival folk stopped singing. Now, they could smell the smoke, see the ghost of it coming from the north. With their voices stilled, the sounds of a chainsaw grew. They heard a tree fall, a sound only lumberjacks and big game hunters seek, the womp of it. Grace took off. She had only to traverse the front of the Furnace Creek Inn to reach the oasis. 

 

Remi could see from her trampoline’s angle, the firemen who broke through the glass of Addie’s patio room, shattered the whorls and labyrinths of smoke. The smoke poured out, a fire-breathing scourge on the loose. The men in padded coats and the black boots that Remi had put coins in at the annual fund raiser pulled Addie through the window and put the coughing girl in the ambulance. Blue right behind, carried in yellow arms, but head up. Alive! 

But not Remi’s parents. They didn’t come out. Dad wouldn’t wake up if the house was on fire. That’s what her mother always said, her husband’s snoring the metronome of her nights. Paula smoked so much she would have thought the smell was just her own menopausal sweat on a hot, hot night. 

Still Remi jumped, braids akimbo. No one saw her, so entrancing was the fire, and no lights shone her way. She watched the comings and goings, the water arcs, all the neighbors. The atomic bomb worth of smoke. When it was conclusive to Remi that no one else was coming out of that house and into a speeding ambulance, she steadied herself and began a series of jumps intended to launch her as high as possible. When she reached that summit, as high as she had ever been, she realigned her body, took it out of center, and flat-lined into a horizontal slab of meat. For the first time in her life as a jumper, she landed on the metal frame. Her shoulder, her new breast, her just-below-the-surface ribs. Hip and thigh, her ankle caught and twisting. Her face. What a satisfying pain. 

 

Grace rounded the grove in time for the beginnings of the wreck of the sixth tree. The shock and the percussion. In the pale light, the palm fronds on the tree George was attacking were shaking as if they had their hands up in surrender. The mind is a swift calculator, and Grace pushed her legs past burn because it looked to her like Paula, trying to climb over the helter-skelter of the felled trees was about to get felled herself. Shouting was useless because the sound of the Husqvarna was a visceral, straight-to-the bones loudmouth. She tried anyway. Might as well spit into the wind. 

There are those who believe nature has a consciousness. That an avalanche is the mountain shrugging it shoulders, scratching an itch. House plants prefer Beethoven. Tree roots send out nutrients and information to others in their grove. George believed this, although he would never try to put it into words. Words are just a mud puddle. 

One truth is that just as the sixth Phoenix dactylifera was land ho, George changed directions. One could not say if he purposely stepped into the tree’s falling trajectory, or if already fallen fronds gathered together to magic-carpet him away from his Husqvarna. Or maybe he just slipped. It is disputable. But what is indisputable was that George was crushed, and those same earthed fronds curved up and around him, like to hide what they done did.

Paula was not so cradled by the fronds; she was caught on the edges of the falling crown, slashed and pummeled. Colleterial damage to her husband’s long-ago concussion combined with his unfortunate genes. 

Everyone was headed toward the house on fire, but Grace was with Paula and George. Without the savage voice of the Husqvarna, the oasis grove reset. The rill burbled. A wind jostled the frond crowns of the survivors, and they had plenty to say with their papery voice. Grace prayed aloud Our Father who art in heaven. George was beyond her strength to pull from the wreckage, but Paula she extracted like a precious, sweet little fleshy Halawi palm date, so worthy of all the praise. 

 

Remi woke up at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas. Morphine stilled her riptides of pain, the ocean of bruises that mottled her skin. Washes of greens, purpled edges, yellow eddies. Her nose and three ribs were broken. Her ankle badly sprained. She had a concussion. She punctured a lung and breath did not feel like her wingman. She went back under and dreamed of her mother:  

“I want you to bring a priest to me. I want you to bring me a Marlboro. You’ve got your orders now,” her mother said from her own hospital bed. So Remi knew her mother was dying.  And she knew her mother still wanted to get into the celestial kingdom — that highest level of Mormon heaven. She deserves the highest level, thought Remi, in her dream going to get the cigarettes out of a vending machine; she had no recourse for the priest.  

When Remi woke up again she knew her mother was gone. Or going. Either way, gone.  The woman in the corner was a social worker — guessing by the sensible shoes and the Peter Pan collars. Why was she biting her lips?  

Remi tried on a new word, remembering when Paula was in her Word a Day phase with the kids: orphan. Had that ever been on Paula’s list? 

A policeman came towards her, all glinty, little pieces of him — his gun, his badge, his Polaroids hanging from his pocket. The social worker (“I’m Rachel,” she said to Remi) got him to sit down in the chair next to the bed. Less threatening. Rachel sat down too. The officer pulled out his silver pen, his little flip book of paper.  

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.  Officer Carpenter, Remi read his name.   

“Losses,” Remi whispered, or maybe just said in her head.  

“Do you like your family?” Carpenter asked.

Rachel sat up, alarmed.

“Do I like them?” Remi was astounded by the question.

“Why were you jumping on the trampoline?” Carpenter switched his question.

“She isn’t Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned,” inserted Rachel, outrage blooming across her face. 

“Why didn’t you try to break a window?” Carpenter didn’t even look at Rachel. He was working up to a direct accusation, Rachel felt it. He wanted to know if the fire was started on purpose. The insurance company wanted to know too. Rachel would stop this interview, this jerk cop.

Remi’s eyes dilated. Oh my dear God, why didn’t I break the window? 

Rachel saw the girl turning to stone, knew that she could help her to understand the very human response of doing nothing in the face of extreme danger and trauma. Not many people run into a burning house. 

“Did you start the fire?” Carpenter pushed before Rachel could intervene. 

Rachel stood up, trying to interrupt, to stop Remi from saying anything at all, but Remi said, “Our Lady of Guadalupe started the fire.” 

And then both adults in the room thought she was crazy, even the social worker thought the poor girl might be crazy. 

Remi stopped looking at them; they left. She thought about when her father would read to her from the Children’s Bible, alternating between the horror stories of the Old Testament and the Jesus miracles of the New. The little lamb stories were nice, but Remi loved the idea of living inside the ribcage of a whale, locust, sliced throats of baby boys. She thought now she was the locust and the knife. 

Remi had fallen so far from grace, so far from turning into a cobalt-and-gold-leafed holy card that she gravely considered running away and turning into a portrait on the back of a milk carton. Would she never again hike with her father through a slot canyon in hopes of bees that burrow holes in sandstone cliffs? Drinking chunky date milkshakes at China Ranch with her mother her loved them so? Remi closed her eyes. 

 

Paula came into the room. Her daughter looked as if she was wearing Jacob’s coat of many colors, such was the rainbow-bruising beneath the cloth of her skin. Remi felt a presence and opened her spindrift eyes. She thought she was still asleep. “I got the cigarettes, but I couldn’t find a priest,” she said to her suddenly nonplused mother. 

Morphine is a Cheshire cat. 

It took some effort to explain that Paula was alive, and that the bandages on her arms and face, with the glossy smears of ointment, were from cuts from the palm fronds and not burns. She hadn’t been in the house! You look like a mummy, Mommy. Oh, to hear her daughter joke! To put her arms around her daughter. But then Paula had to tell Remi about her dad and pulverize Remi’s relief, her joy. “But it wasn’t your fault,” she assured, again and again.

Paula didn’t want Remi to imagine George’s crushed body. The white lie to her children was that he got a quick hit on the head. Grace backed her up, ever-and-a-day. 

 

Grief is the blind men and an elephant — something different to everyone who touches it. 

Addie missed the father who put necklaces under her pillow, puka shells and Nevada turquoise, who always wanted to watch her dance and helped her apply to Juilliard — Ballerina trained at the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley? Face like yours? You’re dancing on a street of gold! 

Blue was a bright kaleidoscope, tumbling, too young to settle. Love was a blood amethyst in his heart. He just missed his daddy. 

On each anniversary of her parents wedding, Paula put on her wedding dress while George pushed back the furniture. When Remi was old enough, it became her job to place the stylus on the record of Sonny King singing If I Didn’t Care. Paula would come out in her she-loves-me daisy dress and she and George would dance. Remi felt she could capture the love of her parents in the up-swoop of the very first note of that scratchy record, and in the step of her mother’s wedding shoes on their hardwood floor. What would they do, when the anniversary came around this year? 

Remi decided, but told no one, that her dad wasn’t gone, just now over at the Oasis, skimming ponds to watch the water patterns through the net. And she believed it. When she went looking for him, she avoided the six telltale, graying stumps, stayed higher in the grove, followed the rills of Travertine Spring. He was always just a bit ahead of her. The best time was in the afternoon when the slanting light poured gold. Sometimes Remi picked a date up off the ground, brown and shiny-skinned. She ate it, pretended it was her dad, and it wasn’t strange at all, but comforting. 

Grace missed the man who never struggled with religion or theology. Nature was God, God nature. You need look no further than a feather. Forgiveness is rain in a long summer. In a way, she felt that George had succumbed to the thing he loved. Would that we could all do that. 

Paula, well, she touched every side of that elephant. She remembered George’s water-blue eyes, how they looked at her. How she felt on their wedding night, how proud she felt to hold George’s hand. His wide shoulders, the way he shouldered the world for her. The way his body felt over hers. If she could count the saddest things on five fingers, one of them would be that for the life of her, she couldn’t specifically remember the last time they made love. 

They had left Neon City for a place where you could walk on salt. Raised their children in the dust. Paula knew it was a good life, she was grateful. She just didn’t want it to be over. 

 

Francine came up right away to help with the emotional and physical overload. She organized everything right down to buying extra Kleenex. The Carrolls moved into a near-by house, bolstered by a general potlatch to get the new household started. Not everything was destroyed, but most of what survived was smoke-infused, so the whole family smelled like pioneers for quite some time. The kitchen was bigger, with yellow-check tile countertops, and Remi and Grace got twin beds instead of bunk. The holy candle was not replaced. 

About three weeks later, those who had lived a long time at Furnace Creek got together at the suddenly appropriately named Last Kind Word Saloon for the wake. Then just the family headed out for the long drive to the St. Therese Mission on the Old Spanish Trail where George was to be interred. During the short service, Addie sang Nearer my God to Thee in a voice that covered them in petals. On the way back the family took a detour, followed the dirt road of the slot canyon to the China Ranch Date Farm for date milkshakes. Remi thought about the irony of George ending up in the Our Lady of Guadalupe mausoleum, within the St. Therese Mission. Honestly, it made her laugh.

On the first night after George’s service, Remi slept with her mother. Francine slept in the room with Grace. Near dawn, (old habits) Francine got up for a smoke, went out to catch the Panamint range flare amethyst. Returning to the bedroom, something made Francine perch on the edge of Grace’s bed. 

The heaviness on the mattress pulled Grace to semi-consciousness. She thought she saw a glowy angel at the foot of her bed. Nope, it was her mom. But still she asked, “Are there angels, do you think, Mom?” 

Francine lit up another cigarette, right in the room. “You thinking about George?” she asked. 

Grace was. “And Twentieth Century.”

“I think so,” Francine said. “But kind of just a shadow of light. Positive energy, that’s it. You can block it or receive it, it’s up to you. But mostly I think those who have died have to work on their own paths. Twentieth Century is probably a koala by now, and George’s negotiating coming back as a sequoia. Mostly we are on our own.”

The morning light coming in the window lit the dust motes gold. Francine shifted and the motes swirled. Angel dust. “Here’s what I have come to think,” said Francine. “God’s God.  That’s it. Don’t worry too much about it. All the prophets, He likes them all. No favorite. Well, except maybe Joseph Smith. Paula says that opportunist wears a baloney suit.”

“What about Ron Hubbard?
“I think Ron actually is an alien. With a brain injury so he doesn’t count. But here’s the point: God likes all the names. No favorite. Doesn’t care which path you take.”

“You told me I could only go to the Catholic Church. I wanted to eat that Baptist chicken.”

“What did I know! I was young when you were young. I know better now. Eat the chicken.” Francine’s skin, her light hair, shone alabaster. Nothing matches a desert light. Grace looked as if she might start to cry. “Okay, I’m going to tell you the Secret now,” her mother said. 

Grace leaned forward, sunburnt hair falling over her shoulders. She really wanted to pay attention to the Secret. Francine leaned toward her and said most earnestly, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

“Oh Mom, come on, are you shitting me?!” 

Francine held out her hands and there was blue light within the veins of her wrists. “You girls had it right! Be kind, have joy in other people’s joy, help the needy. Decrease your personal desires. Meditation and prayer are the best paths to God. That’s it. That’s all you have to remember. The world flows from God’s endless energy. Say your prayers.” 

Francine had been doing some studying on her own. That and dating the nicest ex-priest, Roger Ward. Oh, the theological wrestling matches those two had over pizza and beer at Tony’s in Washington Square, drinking Irish coffees at the Buena Vista.

The little magic time ended. Here-and-now returned. “Grace,” asked Francine, “Have you given any thought to going back to a school?”

“Yep. I’ve been thinking about it.”

“The scholarship is still in an account for you…” Francine watched Grace’s eyes, her shoulders, her body sizzle just a little bit as the idea ran through her. “UC Berkeley…”

“I don’t want to go back to Berkeley,” Grace interrupted. “I want to go to Dreaming of Pastry in Las Vegas” — Paula’s culinary school where Paula mastered all things marzipan. 

For one-minute Francine had envisioned her daughter returning with her to the Bay Area, only to see it shimmer and pop in the same instant. Was she sad? Yes, but — Joy in other people’s joy.

“Do you think my scholarship money would pay for that?” asked Grace.

“I do. It will.”

Two months later, Grace moved to Las Vegas. 

 

The night before Grace was to leave, she and Remi were in bed, moonlight like mercury on their spreads. Grace reached a disembodied hand across the space of their two beds. “These are for you.” She dangled the rose velvet bag, tasseled drawstring frayed, some cards still inside. Remi hadn’t looked at the cards in a few years. 

“Thank you,” said Remi, reaching over. She ran her fingers over the fabric like it was a baby blanket. Remi’s head suddenly popped up. “Are there any good ones left?” 

“You are the good one left.”

 

Addie took her sister’s hand; everyone understood. Paula flanked Remi as the truck drove away and turned to a shimmer. The goodbye was hard on everyone, but Remi felt like she was standing at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with no donkey. How to climb out of this feeling? She started to cry. But then Addie said, “You’re being over-dramatic. She’s coming home, like, every weekend. Her apartment is a shithole.” 

 

Bright lights, big city. Jimmy Reed sang it in 1961 and now Grace was living it. Well, she wasn’t such a cowpoke as to be overawed; she grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area after all. Grace knew a faux city when she saw one. But, oh, the fun! All her Madonna clothes came out of the closet. 

Maurice was long gone from Dreaming of Pastry, replaced by Célestine Chalamet in her sharp pencil skirt and no-nonsense white apron. Well, her last name means blowtorch so she had better be good with the crème brûlée. Célestine hoisted that propane canister, with its Si Fi gun pointed at Grace. “You know, Cherie, all that tulle, I could burn you like steak!” Grace loved her! 

Grace did go home to Death Valley on most weekends, and Paula poured over her assignments with her. Half the salt, I’m telling you, otherwise the dough will be too tight! Fondant? I’ll show you fondant!  

 

How long does it take to fall in love? About the time it takes to bake a cake. Everyone knows it. It starts with the tension of stirring the batter in the bowl. Then the aroma coming out of the oven, almonds and vanilla. Orange zest. Then it’s the way it feels when you push down on the center of the cooling round, the texture and the push-back. Frosting on top, buttercream and ginger. Next of course, the way the knife slides through. Seal the deal with the first bite.

That’s how Grace felt about her cooking partner, Rowan O’Conner. 

Rowan’s family sailed from Dun Laoghaire to San Francisco two generations ago and Rowan was as American as corned beef and cabbage, egg rolls, and tacos. He melted in the pot. His parents migrated to Virginia City, Nevada, same as many an Irish family before them. His old countrymen were in search of their share of the Comstock Silver Lode, and so were his parents, just with a different plan for mining it. They opened a bar. Rowan lived in a high mountain ghost town. He grew up in saloons with barmaids as babysitters, his bedtime stories were about the spirits of the Comstock. It was understood that one was likely to meet those very spirits on a street corner under a dim moon, the shadow lighting up a cheroot, or cleaning the horse dung from the heel of his boot. Or walking into his parent’s pub.

Rowan was a transplant to the high-desert. Grace to the low-desert. He grew up in a bar — Grace’s bootlegging sort-of grandfather owned one! It felt a good start of common ground. That and baking. Hot crossed buns and sugar, sugar everywhere. 

And Rowan had just a shimmer of red below his thick brown hair, didn’t he now?

When Grace and Rowan eventually got married at the oasis in Death Valley, Paula made the cake, Prinsesstårta — white sponge with raspberry cream filling, draped in almondy marzipan. Addie came home from her teaching job at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and sang Madonna’s Like a Prayer a cappella while Francine walked Grace down a twisting aisle of palms. Blue served the best prickly pear margaritas — before the service. Roger officiated with his online license from the Universal Life Church. Remi stood Maid of Honor, and cried.

Grace’s silk slip dress poured over her in a long run of heavy cream. Veil held in place by a single gardenia in her garnet hair. Her freckles were outstanding. Rowan wore a Black Watch kilt, commando. 

It was so hot a day, all the bouquet roses just went poof and sighed into perfume. 

 

Before Rowan and Grace left for their honeymoon — Paris! — Grace and Remi visited the Unofficial Our Lady of Cake Carmelite Chapel-lite. Much of the stone had fallen, but the turnstile was still there, yellowed and warped by the heat. The ladders remained, looking like bones. The women ran their fingers over the carvings on the sandstone wall, touched their past. Then let it be.

Remi was a student at UC Berkeley on an anonymously funded, full-ride scholarship. She was studying architecture, with an emphasis on the West. That girl would grow up to champion the lowly adobe, specializing in ceilings of mosaic stars set in desert midnight blue. She might become famous. 

Francine and Roger were moving to Las Vegas! 

Eventually Rowan and Grace got a concession from the National Park System to open up a dessert bar — One More Bite — on the Ranch at Death Valley. If you go there now you can try Carrageen Moss Pudding, or Irish Whiskey Truffles. Their kids — Clare, named for the Claremont Hotel that stands so stately in the Berkeley Hills, and Fox, named after his sister who died at Big Sur — sometimes work at the Bite. Or they can be found with their grandmother, Paula. Right now she is teaching them about seed banks of the world — wait until they hear about the botanists who starved to save the seeds in WWII St. Petersburg! 

But mostly Grace and Rowan’s kids are left to be raised by the desert. Just be home by the time the sun sets or you might die out there and we won’t even know where to look for ya bones. 

Death Valley looks the lonely place. But it isn’t.