Rio Grande Wedding Part 25

From the phone in the bedroom, Molly called Lynette, needing to touch base with some kind of normality. "Hey, girl," she said lightly when Lynette answered.

"Molly! I'm so glad you called right now. I can talk for a little since Josh went to the grocery store for me."

Molly's heart plummeted. "I guess that means he's still very angry with me."

"Oh, don't worry, honey. You know how he is. He sees the world in black and white." She giggled. "You fell to the dark side."

Molly chuckled.

"Oh, that sounded bad, didn't it?" Lynette fussed. "I didn't mean it that way, like dark person. I meant like Darth Vader."

"I knew what you meant." She frowned. "You don't have to be politically correct with me, Lynette."

"I know. Or I mean, I think I do." She sighed. "Never mind. Josh is mad right now, but he'll miss you and decide maybe he can overlook your sins."

Sins. Molly wondered if that was Lynette's feeling, too. "Well, he'll have to, because we got married today."

"You did? How-"

"How did I do it when Josh managed to turn all the judges against it? I went to JonahMicklenburg ." The thought of the ceremony, so warm and colorful for all that it had been staged, warmed the hollow places in her. "It was beautiful. I wish you could have been there."

"Moll, are you sure about this? He's very cute, and I liked how nice he was with my kids, but really what can he offer you?"

"He makes me laugh, Lynette, and he knows all kinds of things I don't know. He can teach me to speak Spanish, and maybe I'll plant my fields, finally. It was what Tim wanted."

"Well, I hope you aren't setting yourself up for heartbreak. I hate to think he's just using you to get a green card."

Molly's temper snapped. "Honestly, Lynette, you act like I'm fifteen, thinking about sleeping with the local bad boy." She shook her head. "Alejandro's not like that. He has ... honor."

"Mmm." The word was skeptical.

Stung, Molly simply said, "You'll see."

"I hope so, Molly. I want you to be happy." Urgently she said, "Josh is home.I gotta go."

Molly hung up, frowning.I want you to be happy , Lynette said. But if that were true, wouldn't she be rejoicing? Wouldn't she have stood up for Molly instead of repeating all Josh's words?

Vaguely disturbed, she moved to the bureau and began taking out the things that had belonged to Tim. Some of them would fit Alejandro, and she stacked them in a chair for him to try on, leaving the drawers empty for him to store things as he wished. It was a necessary step she didn't think for one minute that they'd escape without an official inquiry, and it was best to be ready. His things should be in her bedroom.

But the work was for her hands, so her mind could mull over the disturbing new thoughts that had surfaced today. She thought about her brother, so intent on making her do what he considered in her best interest that he'd get her in trouble rather than let her choose her own way.

She scowled, the stirrings making her very uncomfortable. She'd lived in this town her entirelife, and her parents had been here for ten years before that. Except for the brief time she'd spent at nursing school, she'd lived right here for almost thirty years. InVallejos, she was safe, secure. She knew everyone and they all knew her.

And until now, she'd lived an exemplary life by town standards. Even in her grief, when she'd wanted to scream and cry and become so hysterical someone had to carry her away, she'd behaved with calm dignity, burying her pain where none could see it or be upset by it.

Her heart beat a little too fast. Didn't she want their good opinion? Didn't she want to belong to her community?

Of course. But something else had surfaced when she found Alejandro, bleeding and distraught, on her land that day. She had acted from no prompting but her own. How many times in her life had that really happened? How often had she listened only to herself?

She sank onto the bed. While she loved nursing, she had been nudged into it by her mother's friends, who had wanted Molly to follow in her mother's footsteps. She'd mounted a token protest about art school, but the point was made that Molly, alone in the world, needed to be practical.

Which was true.Where would she he now if she'd studied art inColoradoinstead of nursing inAlbuquerque?

And then there was Tim. He had been her high-school beau. They had met in eighth grade and started going together the following year. She'd loved him, but in college, had hoped to date others. The request had wounded him so much that she'd backed off. And wasn't she glad now? She had not wasted their very short time together.

The traitorous thoughts, let free for the first time, suddenly spilled out in a rush, and she thought of a hundred tiny choices she'd wanted to make for herself, but had allowed someone else to talk her out of.

Usually Tim.

Holding one of his s.h.i.+rts in her hands, she remembered the three-story Victorian house in town that she'd hoped to buy instead of this land. The house of her heart.

It stood a few blocks from the house in town where she'd grown up. For years, Molly had walked past it on her way to school or the market; she'd spun stories of it; she'd drawn it many times, in many weathers. Locals said it was haunted by the ghost of a wronged woman. When it had come on the market just before she and Tim got married, she'd gone to him full of excitement, knowing he had the skills to put the house to rights, that they could have a huge brood of children to fill it.

He'd agreed to go look at the place, but while Molly ran from room to room, imagining wallpaper and the pleasure of refinis.h.i.+ng the old cherry-wood paneling, he'd muttered and scowled all the way through. He didn't hate it, he said. He just didn't love it.

And then he took her to this house, to this land.

To her credit, she'd not given up easily on that one. She'd wanted that house with her whole heart no, more than that, she felt as though it belonged toher, that it was meant to be her house. She'd argued that Tim could still have his farm and land for the same price of this hundred acres and the house, they could have had the Victorian and an equally rich, but slightly smaller, plot of land just outside of town.

But she lost. And three years later, when the house had been condemned for the wiring, Molly had wept bitterly.

It still stood, barely. Neglected and haunted and lonely, waiting for her. She still drew it sometimes. When Tim died, leaving a large insurance settlement, she'd almost taken a portion of the money to the real estate broker and asked to buy it. But that time, Lynette had talked her out of it pointing out that Molly had enough on her plate without adding a white elephant like an abandoned Victorian.

And now the pattern was repeating itself. She'd made a choice to help a man in need,

and she'd done it from her heart, because it felt like the right thing to do. By acting, she'd also saved a little girl, who might have died out there in those fields waiting for her deported uncle to come back to her. She'd taken a drastic step this afternoon, it was true. Maybe some would even say it was wrong.

But Molly, for once in her life, was acting on her gut instincts, and this time, by d.a.m.n, she wasn't going to let the pressure of the group make her back down.

This time, she would fight to the very end for what she believed.

After a couple of hours spent reading, Molly came into the kitchen, where Alejandro sat, sketching something on a big tablet of paper. He was left-handed, which she had not noticed till now.

He looked up, pus.h.i.+ng hair from his face. "Ah. There you are. Feeling better?"

Molly nodded. "You?"

"Yes. This makes me feel better, always. Come see."

"What is it?" Molly stood to one side, looking over his shoulder. "It looks like a map."

"In a way." He turned it for her, and the view made sense. "It is an idea of things to do for your land, so it will give back to you, very easily, with hardly any work from you."

Unsettled, Molly sank into a chair at the head of the table and accepted the sketch.

"I'm not sure I really want to do anything, really. I like the land the way it is."

He dismissed that with one hand. "You want to keep some sage and cactus, you could have some. No problem." Clearly caught in his own vision, he gave her another sketch, this one ill.u.s.trating a fenced area with a chicken coop. A rooster sat on a fence post.

"You're very good," she said in surprise. The lines were strong, clear, clean, drawn with a kind of power that seemed to always elude Molly. In comparison, her paintings were very timid indeed. "Have you done this work professionally?"

"A long time ago they taught me art."