“Why don’t we just go welcome him?” Azalea asked as the light was falling that afternoon.
Calla and Gloria looked ready to throw ice water on her, to break her out of the spell of this man’s polished car and gold-banded watch.
“He’s probably used to having girls like us fixing his drinks,” Azalea said. “He won’t give it another thought.”
The pinched corner of her smile told the rest.
“So we get him drunk enough that he forgets his own name,” Estrella said.
Azalea drew up one proud shoulder. “Then maybe we go through his things.”
“Okay,” Gloria said. “But how do we get him that drunk?”
“I know how to do it,” Fel said.
Their eyes all found him. He’d been quiet, drawing so close to the edges of the room he seemed like a panel of wallpaper. Estrella hadn’t noticed he was there.
“You know how to make drinks?” Gloria asked.
He blinked, like he was pulling back from his own words, surprised he had said them.
He had said them without thinking.
This would be how Estrella would get him to tell things he either would not say or did not believe he knew. She would get him to speak without thinking.
“I know how to make a drink that’ll make a man like that get drunk quick,” he said. “But it’s not Christmas, so I don’t think we have what we need for it.”
He spoke without hesitation, but he had the slight edge of an accent that reminded Estrella of her grandmother’s. But her grandmother’s was both fuller and sharper, more certain. He seemed unused to the sound of his own voice.
“What do you need?” Dalia asked.
“Sherry,” Fel said.
“Done,” Azalea said. “We’ll steal it from Marjorie’s liquor cabinet.”
“We don’t steal from the dead,” Gloria said.
“Why not?” Azalea asked. “She’s not using it.”
Dalia cut through their arguing with a sweep of her hands. “What else do we need?”
“Oranges,” he said, wincing, like he was asking for the moon to pour out into cut crystal. “And sugar. Ice if you have it.”
Azalea’s look was tinged with pity, but brightened with her own amusement. “I think we can manage that.”
Estrella wanted to pinch Azalea so she would not laugh at him. Whether this boy had loved a Nomeolvides woman a hundred years ago or not, they had his clothes and his wonder about phones and showers to tell them this was not his time. He had come from a time when poor men could not easily get sugar or oranges. These were things boys like him knew only on holidays.
The six of them went up to the great brick house. They filled the empty kitchen. Azalea and Fel went to work on the drinks, him pouring sherry and sugar and her slicing oranges.
Azalea set curls of rind on each glass. She grabbed one and took a sip. “You can’t even taste the sherry.” She passed it to her cousins.
“That’s the idea,” Fel said, with no trace of pride.
“I like you,” Azalea said. “You’re smarter than you look. I’ve decided you can be our brother.”
Fel gave her a cringing smile.
A chill spun through the kitchen. Every time one of them declared him a brother or a cousin, or their mothers and grandmothers pronounced him a nephew or son, they remembered that they did not know what the gardens wanted.
Estrella was sure the gardens were asking them to care for him, proof that they would do anything, even look after a strange boy, in exchange for La Pradera saving Bay.
But that was only the part they knew. There would be more. The gardens never let themselves be understood this easily.
Azalea brought the drinks into a damask-curtained room. Bay and Reid sat talking on antique chaises, each upholstered with different color brocade.
Fel handed Reid a glass, and Azalea leaned down to Bay and whispered the reminder Gloria had asked her to pass on, that she should drink slowly. For a few seconds, the dark curtain of her hair shielded both her face and Bay’s.
“It’s expensive, Bay,” Reid said as the Nomeolvides girls listened from the hallway. “All those parties.”
“Those parties”—Bay struck each syllable hard—“kept this place going. They kept this town going. And they made sure the town loved us. That’s more than I can say for any other estate this family has.”
Reid let the insult fall. “I know they meant something to Marjorie. But now that she’s gone, we have to think about the books.”
How dare he.
Estrella felt the words rising in all of them.
This man couldn’t dream to be even a shadow of Marjorie Briar.
Marjorie had loved this place like it was part of her own body. She had grown up at La Pradera because the Briars had exiled her father here for crimes she never spoke of. When she grew up, they mocked her investing money into bakeries and dress shops, whispering that the businesses of women would not give her the same returns as banks or silver mines.
But later, when the Briars had spent more money than they had, when they had almost ruined themselves trying to look wealthier than any other family, they tried to sell La Pradera.
Marjorie wasn’t having it, not the sale of her childhood home. She prodded and stoked the rumors about the Nomeolvides women haunting the land, about their disappearing men, until no buyer would come near the property line. So the Briars had no choice but to let her pay the overdue taxes and declare the land hers.
Marjorie did not fear the lore of this place or the Nomeolvides women, the stories of disappearing men. These gardens were the home of her girlhood. She and the grandmothers built a steady business selling seeds and bulbs to rich men on the promise that they held a little of La Pradera’s enchantment.
“We?” Bay asked. “‘We’ have to think about the books? I haven’t seen you here for, what, ten years?”
“I came to help you,” he said. “This place could be making more money than you know what to do with.”
No.
Again, a word passed between the cousins like a breath.
No.
For months, Bay had lived with her shoulders a little rounded, made small not just by the loss of Marjorie Briar but by the understanding that she was expected to replace her. She would be the one the town looked to for those grand parties that kept the shops open. She would be the one to spin tales of what beautiful gardens wealthy men could expect if only they bought a little Nomeolvides enchantment for their own estates. She would be the one expected to remember a thousand names, the ages of children, the favorite books or colors that Marjorie recalled as easily as her own birthstone.
For months, Bay had been choking. Her flourishes had grown stiff, her smiles more nerves than charm. But with every meal in the Nomeolvides women’s stone house, with every plate of mole poblano, Bay sat up a little straighter. A thread of light in her came back. Bay was coming alive again. “You watch, mijas,” Abuela Mimosa said a week ago. “Three months, she’ll be throwing an autumn ball as good as her grandmother’s.”
And now, this man was shoving his way into this house and deciding Marjorie’s place was his.
And Bay was letting him.