“Yes, ma’am,” said Alfonso with pride. “You’ll be here so often, Lucy Luz, we’ll have to charge you rent.” He chuckled some and nudged Avel, who laughed and stepped away, examining the light fixtures and windowsills, a true handyman always.
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Avel and turned around on his boot heels, grabbing Luz by the left wrist. “Lucy Luz might have her own place someday soon.”
The men seemed to share a knowing look, and Luz frowned. “I don’t see it in the leaves.”
* * *
—
At work, David pretended nothing had happened between him and Luz. The office was in disarray. The vandals had pushed their way into the front room, rummaging through Luz’s desk, taking with them several notarized documents and signed paperwork for the Ruiz case. A grand jury investigation still hadn’t been announced. Whenever Luz thought to ask David about what had happened under the desk, she’d open her mouth to speak but could only picture white moths fluttering from her lips. Maybe it wasn’t her place. Maybe it was something she’d have to wait on David to bring up, and Luz wondered why she was always waiting on men to act.
Luz occupied her evenings and weekends with Avel, going from dance hall to dance hall, Benny’s, the Emerald Room, Teatro Oso. She watched his new band move the crowds each night. Occasionally Lizette and Alfonso would tag along, and there were times when even Maria Josie and Ethel appeared at the edge of the dance floor, fingers touching delicately at their sides. While Avel never gave Luz that warm giddy rush of her insides twisted like rain clouds, he did make her feel valued, wanted, cared for—qualities she had never received consistently from any man. In her letters to her brother, Luz announced Lizette’s wedding date and Maria Josie’s new friend, but for some reason she didn’t dare mention anything new about Avel. In her latest letter, she begged Diego to consider coming home for the wedding. He wrote back a few weeks later.
So, they really did it, huh? They saved up and found a Catholic church that would marry those two. （Can you imagine Lizette in confession?—ha!） I wish I could be there. She’ll make a beautiful bride, and Alfonso is a lucky man. But I don’t think I can come home for the wedding, Little Light. It won’t be safe for me or the rest of the family, but as more time passes, I keep hoping that I can stop moving from town to town, following the beets, or lettuce, or garlic and just come home. The fields are as endless as the landowner’s pockets. With Sirena in tow, we make extra money on weekends, when we usually find a festival or fair and I can perform. How I’ve missed the crowds, their open happy faces. I miss you and Maria Josie. I had a dream about Mama the other day, and I woke up crying. Here’s a few dollars to help with your dress for the wedding, and here’s a few more for Lizette and Alfonso.
* * *
—
In mid-May, there was a rare occurrence when everyone dear to Luz had a day without work. Maria Josie and Ethel planned a picnic near the famed Jack Wesley’s grave atop Lookout Mountain. Lizette jumped at the opportunity—for weeks she had been gathering pine cones for her wedding decorations. Alfonso and Lizette drove in the Chevy while Luz and Avel rode with Maria Josie and Ethel and her little white dog named Marcus. As the days grew longer and warmer weather greeted the mountains, snow melted and filled the creeks and rivers, increasing their size and velocity until the waters broke free of their banks, matting down grasses and expanding into mud. Luz watched the roadway as Ethel’s Standard car chugged along Coal Creek, hugging granite cliffs and rising past mountain goats and the occasional lone deer.
“Ethel,” said Avel, as they neared the peak of Lookout Mountain, “who taught ya how to drive? You’re the best woman driver I’ve ever known.”
Maria Josie snorted beside her in the passenger seat, and Ethel moved her gaze from the road ahead to the rearview mirror, making eye contact with Avel and then Luz in the backseat. “I taught myself after medical school, Avel. I figured, if I can deliver a baby, I can drive a damn automobile.”
Everyone chirped with laughter and Maria Josie scooted closer to Ethel. Luz admired the easy way they seemed to care for each other. Since they met, Maria Josie had stopped running around with her other friends and devoted every moment of her spare time to Ethel. It was almost enough to make Luz jealous. And the little dog up front on Maria Josie’s wide lap seemed to like her just as much.
“How did you become a doctor?” Luz asked, turning her face away from the window. “I’ve never known a doctor before.”
“Many years of studying, Luz. But I always wanted to mend people. It was my calling, I suppose.” She drove with perfect posture and both hands firmly along the shiny steering wheel.
“I took classes once,” said Luz. “At the Opportunity School. David sent me, but I don’t think I’m a very good student. You must be very intelligent.” She smiled and looked outside at a group of bighorn sheep with their devilish horns.
“School doesn’t make you smart, Luz,” said Ethel. “It’s just a type of training. Real intelligence—that comes from our grit, our ability to read the world around us.”
“Like reading tea leaves,” said Maria Josie, moving her arm along the front seat and turning to wink at Luz. “You have an old kind of intelligence, Little Light.”
Luz glanced modestly at her lap as Avel, beside her, reached over and cupped his hands over hers. An old kind of intelligence, she thought, repeating the words in her mind as they topped the mountain, Denver a haze below.
* * *
—
They parked the cars some ways off from the designated picnic area. Experience had taught them that they would be run off by Anglo families and park rangers if they stayed near the tables, so it was best to keep to themselves in a small meadow on the mountain’s eastern side. They hobbled with picnic supplies from the cars in a bright bursting row of family. Everyone was dressed beautifully in spring colors. Under their cowboy hats, both Alfonso and Avel wore white trousers and light-colored suspenders while Lizette stepped out of the Chevy in a gauzy yellow dress that lifted behind her in the wind. Maria Josie was striking in men’s denim, her short black hair tied with a red kerchief and Ethel in a modest floral dress in the style of farmgirls on the eastern plains. Luz, in blue, watched as her people carried wicker baskets, tin pails, bundles of tortillas wrapped in cloth to hold their long-gone warmth, and, of course, Lizette with a secret bottle of homemade hooch poking out from her armload of blankets.
They picked out a spot in a grassy expanse surrounded by wildflowers—black-eyed Susans, columbines, chicory, daisies, fire wheels—all the names that Mama had taught Luz as a little girl in both English and Spanish. All around them they were enclosed with towering ponderosa pines and blue spruce, the smells of sagebrush and pine sap riding the light mountain breeze, rushing over their skin and into their hair. The blue sky sagged with low-hanging clouds clinging to the midsections of far-off mountain peaks. Songbirds dazzled, their chirping in leveled whistles. The air felt good to breathe.
They ate fried baloney sandwiches and tortillas spread with butter and cinnamon, red apples and still-green bananas. Lizette leaned into Alfonso, using his torso and legs as a chair, stealing sips from her bottle of booze and then conspicuously passing it to either Avel or Luz. Ethel’s little dog, Marcus, sniffed about the rocks covered in hardened turquoise moss. Maria Josie told a long joke involving a broomstick in a broken coal shaft that left Luz bewildered, but she still laughed and draped herself over Avel’s shoulders. He smelled wonderfully fresh, cottony and clean, and his black hair absorbed heat from the sun, moving warmth across Luz’s face as she pressed into him. It had been a long time, maybe forever, since they could all be together without work.