While Ida worked during the week, Ellie took up the cooking and enjoyed having fresh ingredients close at hand. Everything grew here: not just oranges, lemons, and limes, but also avocados, guavas, apples, plums, and apricots. When Ida came home from working all day at the packinghouse, Ellie might serve fresh beef tongue, fried apple cakes, spring onions on toast, and guava pudding. Everyone exclaimed over the food, except for Ansel, who ate little and kept up merely a stiff cordiality. Neva ate more, and Clare, too. Since taking up with Mr. McNamara, Charlotte limited her portions (and was looking trimmer for it) but one night, after a supper of pork chops with plums, wilted dandelion greens, fried yams, and orange sherbet, Charlotte looked at her and, with what seemed like true wonder in her voice, said, “I had no idea you could cook like this.”
That very night, sitting alone with Ida in the dimming kitchen, Ellie said, “I haven’t felt this way since the Harvey House.”
Ida gave her sister a smile. “You do seem happy.”
Ellie wouldn’t have thought she could be happy if her marriage had so many holes in it. “Happiness of a kind,” she said. “I think I’m contented.”
Ida nodded.
Outside, they could see Ansel smoking under the blue-bottle tree. Ida said, “Did we do anything to get his goat?”
“It’s not you.” Except for her and Ida, the house was empty. Hurd was in his workshop welding. Charlotte had walked into town. Clare was helping Neva with a tree house. And Ansel was staring off. “He just misses Kansas,” she said. She looked at him out there. “Sometimes when he’s out there smoking I think he’ll just stand up and start walking east and never look back.”
A moment or two passed. “What would you do then?” Ida asked. Her expression was hard to read. Was she worried for her, or did she think Ansel’s leaving would be a blessing for them all?
“I don’t know,” Ellie said. “Do what I do now, I guess.” She thought about it. “In lots of ways, he’s already gone.”
On the table between them stood a blue bowl filled with lemons. She had polished and arranged them herself to look like something in a painting. She picked one up and turned it in her hands. It was one of the odd-shaped mutations, normal on one end but split at the other, so that it appeared to have a beak. “Have you ever made lemon marmalade?” she asked.
Ida said she never had. “Want to try?”
“Maybe sometime,” she said. She turned her head toward the sound of someone hammering out of doors, probably Clare. He’d promised Neva he would try to replicate their old tree house—she supposed he was pounding footholds into the side of a eucalyptus tree. She said, “There was a schoolteacher who lived with us who craved some special kind of lemon marmalade.”
“This would be the famous Miss McKenna that Neva is always talking about?”
“Infamous is more the word.”
Ida’s Geiger counter was as good as ever. “Do tell,” she said.
And so she did, up to a point. She mentioned the girl being fired for impropriety, the girl burning the school district’s coal on Saturdays so she could sit in the schoolhouse reading novels, warm and snug, and she mentioned Ansel’s having to rescue her one Saturday when a black blizzard came up. Through these descriptions she never called her Aldine; she referred to her only as “the girl.”
“So where is the girl now?” Ida asked.
“Harvey House. In Emporia, our old haunt.”
Ida was staring into her as if trying to figure Ellie out. It reminded her of how Ansel looked when he was staring at a tractor engine that wasn’t running right, and he didn’t know quite why.
“Gil is still there,” Ellie added. “He gave her the job.”
“Gil’s got a full-time lady friend now,” Ida said, “so he might leave her alone.”
Ida nodded and waited for more, but Ellie changed the subject. “The other day I was trying to look through the windows of that old hotel on Main Street. It looked like there was a restaurant there a long time ago.”
“More than one,” Ida said. “First one went great guns for a while and then the highway route changed and times got bad and it kept changing owners and getting worse and worse. You know who owns it now? James McNamara, believe it or not.” She laughed. “That man didn’t get rich by sleepwalking, I’ll tell you that. He bought it just by paying off the taxes on it, at least that’s what I heard.”
In Ellie’s opinion, the El Real Hotel was the only building besides the high school that was even half as pretty as a Harvey House. It was brick, for one thing, a pale pink shade, and stucco roses and swoops decorated the curved roofline. The windows were leaded glass ornamented along the sides with Spanish-style wrought-iron curlicues. She asked what Mr. McNamara was going to do with it now.
“We’ll find out, won’t we? If anybody asks, that’s just what he says. He told Hurd that the bricks, flooring, and fixtures were worth more than he paid for it, so he’d knock it down for salvage if it came to that.”
“It’s a beautiful building,” Ellie said, and she meant it. Something had begun unfolding inside of her when she heard who owned it. Not an idea exactly. More the kind of climate in which an idea might grow. “You don’t think he’d really knock it down, do you?”
“Oh, he might. He’ll do what it will make him money to do.”
Ellie set the lemon back in the bowl and fell silent.
“Ellie?” Ida said. Her expression was playful and coaxing. “You’ve got that scheming look . . . What are you thinking?”
She looked at Ida. “I don’t even know,” she said. Which was true. It was just a feeling, and a vague one at that. But she knew one thing. She needed money.
“Do you think there’d be any work for me at the packinghouse?” she asked.
“Oh, sweetie, that’s awful work. I did it years ago when I was still full of vim and vigor, and I could barely handle it then.”
“But can you ask?” she said. “Just to see?”
57
A Thursday, the workday done. Four days down, two to go. Ansel took them week by week. He and Clare were riding in the back of the flatbed truck with three other men, all of them tired and quiet. Clare whistled something that did not sound quite like a tune. The other three pickers were men up from Mexico. They sat with their legs stretched out before them and two of them slept. Up front, in the cab, the crew chief, Oscar de la Cueva, drove slowly with his right arm extended along the back of the seat, gazing left and right to appraise the conditions of the passing groves. Even without fruit hanging, Ansel could recognize all the trees now: Mexican and Bearss limes, Mexicola, Fuerte, and Zutano avocados, pummelos, Fuyu and Hachiya persimmons, Marsh grapefruit, papayas, strawberry and lemon guavas, macadamias, blood oranges, pomegranates, olives, almonds, satsuma mandarins—everything under the sun, was the way he thought of it. “God’s own garden,” Ellie called it, but what she really meant was, “God’s garden compared to Kansas.”
When Oscar de la Cueva stopped the truck at the end of the lane leading to Ida and Hurd’s place, Clare in one swift set of motions braced his arm to the side rail and vaulted to the ground. Ansel stepped stiffly onto the tailgate and eased himself down. Clare waved to the crew chief and yelled thanks, but Ansel didn’t bother. Of the three remaining men in the back of the truck, the two that slept seemed to keep sleeping. The third stared forward without speaking. Clare had already started up the lane toward the house.
Ansel began to walk off the stiffness in his legs. Clare stopped to throw a couple of stones at trees—his way, Ansel knew, of letting him catch up.