“Don't listen to him, they're pussycats. Mi hijo has spent too much time staring at the sun. He is blind and crazy.”
Wearing a broad-brimmed slouch hat he purchased on a whim from the next-door haberdashery, Sean hiked the trail to the Gavin place, past the shops painted lilac and butterscotch, their wares baking in the sun, past the old and faded Spanish church, into the tattered hills, anxious with each step. He had allowed himself the illusion that they had lied to him as a child, and pictured the three of them in the hacienda: Mrs. Quinn, her daughter, and Norah. The heat radiating from the bare ground bent the air in waves, and the hounds sprinting toward him seemed at first a mirage, some trick of the harsh light and his imagination. The pair closed fast, split, and circled round him like hands on a clock, taking his measure. Sean stood perfectly still and waited.
“Boys,” a woman called, and they pricked up their ears and returned to her side. From the brush, she emerged in a white cotton dress that nearly touched the ground, one hand shielding her eyes against the sun. “Sorry, mister,” she called out. “Are you lost?”
He did not recognize her at first, forgetting that she, too, had aged, but there was no mistaking the resemblance to the person he remembered. The spiky blonde hair had grown out to its natural brown, but in every other aspect, she remained the picture in his memory. He yelled back to her. “Mary? Mary Gavin?”
The woman in white stepped toward him, the dogs flanking each side. “Do I know you?”
He took off his hat and raised his chin. “I know you. I know your mother—”
“My mother?”
“Margaret Quinn. From back home, Pennsylvania. When I was a kid, I knew your mother. And Norah. Do you remember her?”
She strained against the light and shadows to recognize his face. “I can't—”
“Sean Fallon.” He lifted his arm to shake her hand, but she was upon him in a firm embrace, surprising in its intensity.
“Norah,” she whispered in his ear. The dogs whined and nuzzled between them to separate. “Look at you, Sean, all grown up. What's it been, twenty years?”
“I came to see you—”
“Come out of this sun. I can't believe it.”
Two young children straightened their posture and lifted their gaze when she ushered him inside, pausing from their game of blocks arranged like a faraway imaginary city on the cool stone floor. Sean squatted to inspect their architectural engineering as introductions were made. “This is my boy Cole, he's six. And this Miss Josie here likes to be called Jo.” The four-year-old girl stood and clung behind her mother's protective leg. “And this here is Mr. Sean Fallon, who has come all the way from Pennsylvania to meet you guys. Wait in the parlor, won't you, and I'll get us something to drink.”
The boy quickly scanned the stranger's face, then went back to constructing a ramp for his toy cars. The girl tried climbing up to her mother's arms and hid her face from the stranger. With a sheepish grin, Sean stood and straightened the pleats of his pants, allowing her to lead him to the next room, a dark parlor, crowded with art and the exotica of her years in the West. The requisite longhorn skull beaded in a mosaic of lapis and green turquoise. Landscapes of mountains and unending sky. A framed baseball jersey, “Madrid Miners,” hung next to a painting of a holstered nude woman brandishing two revolvers. Roped around the mantel, a chain of feathers, and resting against the wall an infrared photograph of a pueblo, Indian dogs glowing white in the bare yard. On a table next to shelves crammed with books were pictures of the children and their father, he presumed, a man clearly happy in the company of his kids. There was a hand-colored photograph of a woman thin as a reed and wreathed in a corona of wild gray hair, two dogs at her side echoing the two beasts resting on the mosaic tiles fronting an adobe hearth. Next to this portrait, the familiar face of Margaret Quinn, radiant in the light, cheek to cheek with her smiling daughter under the limbs of a juniper. He was staring at their faces when Mary returned with two tall glasses.
“Your mother? Is she living with you?”