As prayers go, it could have been a lot better. Selena grimaced. Hopefully the squash god wouldn’t judge her too harshly.
“And ... uh ... thank you,” she said.People like to be thanked. Spirits too, probably.“It’s kind of you to look after the plants.”
She went back inside. Copper sniffed briefly at the cornmeal, wrinkled her nose, and followed.
In the morning it was gone, which might have meant something, or nothing at all.
Chapter 9
Days piled on top of days, and still she didn’t call Walter to be rescued. Some days she ate eggs for all three meals, and some days she brought home most of a pan of Lupé’s cooking. Selena wasn’t sure how the woman’s café operated, since surely there weren’t enough customers in Quartz Creek to keep it profitable.
“Oh, it’s not,” Grandma Billy said, when she asked. “She makes all her money during the two, three months of tourist season. The rest of the time she runs it like a cross between a soup kitchen and a personal vendetta.”
Selena felt bad taking so much charity, but no one else even seemed to notice. And Grandma Billy did teach her how to make a “genuine heritage wild-crafted sachet,” which was basically a handful of twigs and some scented leaves from various shrubs in the desert, wrapped up with twine.
“How can you tell them apart?” Selena asked. “They all look the same to me.”
Grandma Billy considered this, her gnarled hands still tying off knots in the twine. “Dunno,” she said finally. “It’s like telling apart people, I guess. You might not recognize someone after the first time, but the third or fourth or tenth time, you know who they are. It’s the same with plants. You just have to get good at looking at them.”
Selena suspected that she wouldn’t be around long enough to get good at looking, but she had stopped saying it. Connor paid five dollarseach for the genuine wild-crafted bundles, and that was enough to buy beans and rice and another bag of dog food without dipping into the credit, and that was another week that she didn’t have to call Walter.
And then there was a day when Grandma Billy was feeling under the weather and called Jackrabbit Hole House—on the landline! an actual landline!—to ask Selena if she’d come water the chickens. Selena had come out and Grandma Billy had assured her that it was nothing, just a headache, and no, she didn’t need to call anyone. Selena watered the chickens—the bantam rooster eyed her with deep suspicion, and Merv the peacock strutted along the wall, sounding his barbaric yawp over the landscape—then went back home, called the operator, and managed to navigate a phone tree to get the number for Our Lady of the Palo Verdes.
“Should I worry?” she asked Father Aguirre.
“Probably not yet,” he said. “If she’s not up and around tomorrow, call me and I’ll make a pastoral visit.” He paused, and even through the crackle of the line, she could hear the warmth. “Thank you. This is exactly what I meant when I asked you to keep an eye on her.”
Grandma Billy was her old self the next day, and allowed as how the glare made her headaches a lot worse, but the thought that she was being useful warmed Selena for a good deal longer.
The garden grew surprisingly quickly. Once or twice, Selena caught a glimpse of something shy and green at the end of the garden, and a shimmer of heat haze. Whether it was a spirit or a hallucination, the hard facts were that the plants grew much faster down at that end.Which is more proof than my mother ever had from her god.
Indeed, the only discordant note came at night. Selena found herself dreaming of dark rooms lit by fire, and someone whose face she couldn’t see shouting at her, demanding answers she didn’t have. Copper was the only witness to how often she woke, tangled in the sheets, crying, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!I don’t know!”
It wasn’t restful, but at least it only happened once a night. “And it’s not as if I have to look very hard for the symbolism there, do I?” Selenatold Copper. “My therapist would have a field day.” Copper thumped her tail twice and then immediately began to snore.
Selena’s third week in the desert was just starting, the day the roadrunner came to the house.
She had stepped out onto the front porch after breakfast when she saw a blur of motion along the wall. Her first thought was that one of Grandma Billy’s chickens had gotten out.
Her second was that whatever that bird was, it wasn’t a chicken.
All Selena knew about roadrunners came from cartoons, and if she’d ever thought about them at all, it was that they looked sort of like ostriches and made meeping noises.
This did not look like a cartoon. It looked like a small dinosaur, one of the agile ones that hunted in packs. The long, snake-killing beak was as pointed as a javelin, and it had golden-brown eyes that glittered in the sunlight. There was a patch of brilliant blue streaked behind its eyes, like paint.
Snake-Eater,she thought, and swallowed hard.
The roadrunnermovedall of a sudden, blindingly fast, scurrying a few feet up the path, then froze again, more like a lizard than a bird. That was what the roadrunner made her think of, something reptilian.
It moved again. It was probably only ten feet away now.
It’s not that big,she told herself. It probably didn’t even come up to her knee. It was skinny, not bulky. It couldn’t possibly be dangerous to a human.
Selena told herself that three or four times, very firmly, and tried not to imagine it jumping for her face, that powerful beak going for her eyes.
The roadrunner stomped one foot and raised its crest, feathers spiking like the fur on Copper’s back when she was angry.
Speaking of Copper—
