“That the baby girl?” the Gringa asked. She was maybe fifty, short and slender. Her light brown hair was tied into a tight bun. It made her long forehead seem longer.
When Lopez said the baby was his daughter, the woman introduced herself and the two men. One was her brother. The other—a younger man with a shotgun in the crook of his arm—was her husband. Both men studied him. “We’re all reincarnated, and I’ve raised two reincarnated girls. I got enough left in me for one more.”
Lopez cleared his throat. “I appreciate that, ma’am.”
“You’ll let me be her mother?”
Lopez looked from her to the two men. “Can’t say.”
The Gringa changed to stilted Spanish: “No se puede decir, o usted no va a decir? Estás esperando a una muchacha para levantar su falda?”
Lopez answered coldly in English: “A daughter deserves a family.”
“A daughter deserves a father who thinks north of his navel. I’ve raised two girls.”
“This homestead can’t feed three more. There’s an abandoned cabin a mile on toward the ocean. Maybe you could join our outfit.”
The woman looked from her brother to her husband. “Maybe. We’ll take a look.”
Lopez pointed to a path. “One mile. Can’t miss it.”
She didn’t move. “Tell me, Dad, is it true you’re natural born?
He nodded.
She laughed. “Hell of a gamble, Dad, hell of a gamble just to get under a skirt.”
That evening Robert sent Collin down the path with a dinner invitation. The boy came back with a report of an empty field. Robert snorted. “You scared her off, Wolfy! We can’t have you scaring off all the ladies with delicate sensibilities.”
Lopez scowled. “She was no good.”
A week later a man and a woman appeared on the path from town. Both carried rifles. He, short and stout, stood straight and wore a grave expression under a comically floppy leather hat. A thick bush of kinky white hair spread down his back. She was taller, with dark hair pulled back into a tight braid.
Lopez called for Robert and walked out to meet the strangers. At first, he thought they might be Latinos. But closer up he looked like a Polinesio, she a Gringa. Or maybe she was Middle Eastern. He couldn’t tell.
“You the natural-born man who picked up a baby girl?” the stocky man asked.
Lopez nodded.
His grave expression split into a smile. “Did the same thing twenty-two years ago. This is my daughter, Lani. She’d like to be a mother to a baby girl.”
Lopez studied the woman. In her early twenties, she was neither slender nor solid. Her well-defined arm muscles suggested that she was no stranger to work. She nodded to him. Her eyes were quick and seemed intelligent.
The father spoke again. “Perhaps we could stay a few days. She doesn’t eat much, and I’m handy in the fields.”
Lopez looked at him. “Perhaps. Set your rifles down and meet the rest of the outfit.”
Robert was waiting, the Remington leaning against the railing beside him. In the doorway, Collin held the baby and whispered to Luis. They met the newcomers on the porch steps.
The father’s name turned out to be Joe. “Simply Joe. No other names.” They had come up from the Santa Cruz Mountains. Lopez had known that there were several Polinesio outfits in those parts. They hadn’t had a natural birth in seven years. Hence Joe’s long journey up the peninsula, across the Golden Gate, and into the redwood forests to help his daughter find a daughter of her own.
When Collin brought the baby closer, Lopez watched Lani. Her brown eyes seemed to drink in the swaddled form. But her mouth tensed. Stiffly, she folded her arms. “Would you like to hold her?” Lopez asked.
Then she was focusing on him. “Not just yet. I don’t want to get my hopes up.”
The group went into the cabin. Lani never looked at the baby, but she was aware of the infant at all times. To her, the baby was like a bright fire that she didn’t have to see to know where it was.
Four days later and a few hours past midnight, the baby woke Lopez with a sputtering cry. He picked her up, and she vomited down his sleeve. Her cloth diaper was wet with watery stool. She was warm, fussy.
Lopez felt dizzy, couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. He rocked his daughter, terrified that there was too much pain in this world for her and that she would go back to her heaven. His hands tingled, and orange spots swam across his vision.
Someone sat on the bed next to him. He was so sure that it was Lani that he jumped when Joe spoke. “First time Lani got the shits, I was so nervous I didn’t shit solid for a week either.” He laughed. “You just lay down. This baby girl isn’t leaving yet.”