“Both,” Gloria said.
“Give it two days,” Dalia whispered, with a flick of her eyes toward Reid. “Bay’ll be sleeping with us to avoid him.”
EIGHT
The man looked through Fel as though he were branches. As though he were leaves and the sun found the cracks in him.
The man called the Nomeolvides women, even the older ones, girls. To this man, Fel was probably boy. That would be his name. Boy. The man might not bother to call Fel anything else. If Fel bringing the man orange and sugared sherry in a heavy glass did not seal it, then the brown of his face and forearms would.
Fel could not remember where he had learned to make the thing Azalea had watched him pour into glasses. The sugar and ice, the orange and sherry. It was a trick, a way to get a rich man drunk. A thing someone had taught him.
Sherry tasted sharp and strange, but the bite of alcohol, that was familiar. Fel remembered a few spoons of red wine swirled in water, to make it safe to drink. He remembered the dark color tinting the water. He remembered holding the glass in hands smaller than his but the same brown. His own hands, but younger.
He was sure of this memory, but he could not find the edges of it. It was a sense so distant, so faint and worn that light came through it. It faded like a scrap of paper disintegrating, and then there was nothing but these gardens, and the brick house where he’d sliced oranges, and this stone house where the women told him he would stay.
It was Estrella’s room he had slept in the night before. It was her clothes in the dresser he did not look inside. Her fingerprints on the brass lamp he did not turn on, and the window he neither opened further nor closed. He had not known it was her room, but his fingers prickled with the sense that he should not touch anything.
He knew now that it was hers, when she told him he would sleep there again.
“You don’t have to do that,” Fel told her, but she had already disappeared down the hall.
He tried telling her mother and then her grandmother that he could sleep anywhere. He could sleep on the woven rugs that softened their floors. He could sleep on the worn sofa downstairs. He could sleep outside, he told them, the feeling coming to him that he had done it many times before.
But the women laughed at him.
“I’ve seen those girls watch a lightning storm for a whole night,” Estrella’s mother said. “If there’s not a door to stop them, they’ll stare at you so hard you won’t sleep.”
He didn’t know why he’d be worth staring at. The youngest one, Calla, studied him like he was something she meant to name and classify. Azalea had seemed wary of him until she saw he knew how to mix a drink, and now her wariness seemed to have passed to the oldest, Gloria. Dalia seemed not to notice bumping into him as they dried dishes, and this made him feel like she really did think of him as a brother, some relative who had always been here.
But Estrella. Estrella looked at him like he was something more than the awkward figure he saw in the mirror. That reflection, wearing borrowed clothes, seemed both odd and familiar in its oddness. But she watched him like he contained some kind of hope too fragile to name.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he found Estrella. “I don’t want to turn you out of your own room.”
She shrugged one shoulder, an identical gesture he’d seen on her cousins. That shrug almost made him sure it didn’t bother her.
“Don’t be sorry for her,” Dalia said, passing in the hall with her arms full of clothes. “I’m the one sharing a bed with her, and she drools in her sleep.”
Fel tried not to laugh.
“Hey,” Estrella said, following after her cousin. “I do not.”
“Estrella,” Fel said.
She turned around.
He let a question rise through him, one he hadn’t been steady enough to ask until now. “Where am I?”
NINE
The sun fell below the trees. The shadows deepened, leaving just enough light for Estrella to lead Fel through the gardens.
They passed the Briar house. When Estrella was little, that long front of brick gables and dormer windows had seemed like a storybook castle. In the courtyard of blossoming trees, the grandmothers’ magnolias and lilacs ringed a wide stone fountain, filling the air with the smell of sugar and wet petals.
Wooden lattices and rose trellises screened the beds of hyacinths, irises, and lilies. Tía Hortensia’s hydrangea bushes grew clouds of blue and violet blossoms.
Behind the trellises, Estrella caught her mother’s shadow. Through the crosshatch, she watched her mother setting palms to the wood. Her thin fingers gripped the lattices, and rose vines climbed the frame. Brambles twirled up toward the arbored ceiling. Leaves spread, finding the sun. Buds opened into tea roses so pale pink and peach they were almost white, and into wide blooms the yellow of candle flames or the deep red of black pearl peppers. They came in the soft tints of a shell’s inner curves, and in colors as deep as ink and indigo.
Through the rose lattices, her mother watched her with something between observance and disapproval. Estrella wondered if she was already falling short of the task of showing this boy the gardens.
Estrella stood up straight as they passed through the checkered shadows of the trellises.
“It’s called La Pradera,” she told Fel.
“The Meadow?” he asked. She saw the thread of confusion slipping into his wonder.
“The Briars named it, not us,” she said.
There was a kind of false modesty to the rich Estrella still didn’t understand. An estate thick with gardens was called a meadow. Women in cream silk tipped a hand toward their dresses and said they’d just thrown something on. Even Marjorie had called her midsummer balls little parties.
“My family’s been here for a hundred years,” Estrella said. “Before that it was just rocks. Nothing grew but brush and wild grass.”
Fel walked with her alongside a low garden bed. Fireflies lit the flowers, drawn by the damp air and the mild scent of azaleas and dahlias. During the hottest summer months, Estrella and her cousins slept in the afternoons and woke at dusk, gardening by the lightning bugs’ glow.
The sunken garden opened in front of them. When the Nomeolvides women first came here with flowers waiting in their hands, it had been nothing but a jagged ravine.