After Bay had buried her grandmother, she had let go the men and women who kept up the great brick house, giving them a year’s pay on top of what Marjorie Briar had left them each in her will. Then Bay had gotten into bed in the same black pants and waistcoat she’d worn graveside. She’d stayed there, face pressed into the pillow, no light in the room but a seam between curtain panels.
She lay there, dust graying everything in the house, her stillness mourning the woman who had been both mother and father to her when her own mother and father had not stayed. Marjorie Briar, who never sent invitations to her midsummer parties and Christmas balls, because on those nights everyone in town was welcome at La Pradera. Marjorie Briar, who lured wealthy men to invest in businesses that were weeks from closing.
The curtains in the windows of that brick house had stayed drawn. Estrella and her cousins worried Bay was starving. Their mothers feared she would wither from lack of sunlight.
But the Nomeolvides grandmothers had climbed the grass slope to the brick house. They threw open the curtains, ignoring Bay’s groan against the light. They shoved her out of bed and toward the shower, dusting her room and changing the sheets in the time it took her to dress in clean clothes, shower steam curling off her skin.
They told her she would eat with them from then on, and even though Bay had inherited the land they all lived on, she obeyed. She bowed to the gravity of belonging to these women.
After a thousand meals at the Nomeolvides table, Bay Briar still came to the front door. The Nomeolvides girls crowded onto the sofa that let them see, between curtain panels, Bay waiting on the front step. For months, they had each assumed that the others only wanted the first look at Bay’s newest outfit.
Now they knew better. They flushed at the fact that she waited to be let in, like a boy picking one of them up.
Tonight, Bay wore riding boots over plain trousers, but with a satin coat that looked like a smoking jacket. Her hair was so pale that, against the burgundy lapels, it glowed.
She stood against the deepening blue of the evening, and she bowed low, saying, “The Briar family bastard, at your service.”
Pulling back up to her full height, she caught sight of the boy, and said, “Oh,” as though a few blinking moments would help her understand.
Fifteen Nomeolvides women and Bay Briar and a nameless boy ate their cazuela in the quiet of the evening and the cool air of the propped-open windows. They stirred spoons through the potato and sweet corn and green chiles.
Estrella and her cousins felt their mothers’ observations passed like the cazuela. A boy who would be a little bit handsome if he weren’t so starved and nervous sat at their dinner table, and the mothers worried that their daughters would all be pregnant from him by spring.
But when Estrella caught her cousins checking their lipstick in the backs of their spoons, she knew it wasn’t for this boy but for Bay. If they were watching the boy, it was for how Bay would react to him.
They waited to see if Bay would speak to him, which language he would thank her in when she passed the water pitcher or the salt.
To Estrella’s cousins, the boy from the sunken garden was a curiosity. Bay was an obsession.
Tía Jacinta leaned toward Estrella. “I think it’s a good thing,” she said, adding chili to her cazuela. Nothing made in this house was ever spiced enough for Tía Jacinta’s taste. “Pobrecita could use a friend.”
This time, pobrecita was Bay.
Abuela Magnolia gave a slow nod, looking toward Bay. “She’s lonely, that girl.”
Estrella tensed at how Abuela Magnolia did not lower her voice. But they were far enough down the table that neither the boy nor Bay could hear them.
Abuela Magnolia shook her head, clucking her tongue. “Sleeping alone in that house.”
“I’ll go and sleep with her,” Azalea whispered without looking up from her bowl, and both Calla and Estrella bit their napkins to keep from laughing.
“No, you won’t,” Azalea’s mother said, not looking up from slicing her knife through pieces of potatoes.
Heat twirled through Estrella’s face and forehead. She looked around, her cousins all in the same posture, faces bent to the table, shoulders a little hunched.
Their mothers had known about their crushes on Bay. Of course they had known. But now the fact that Estrella and her cousins saw their love mirrored in one another’s hearts made her worry about how much their mothers knew, if they could see into their daydreams.
After dinner, the grandmothers passed plates of coyotas, and they all cracked the sugar cookies in two, revealing the ribbon of brown sugar in the middle.
The boy looked at the soft, damp center with the wonder of having broken open an egg filled with confetti.
In the noise of the table and the breaking of sugar cookies, Estrella did not catch what her grandmother told Bay. But under the chatter of her cousins and their mothers, Estrella heard the thread of Bay’s voice.
“Stay with me,” Bay told the boy.
Not a question, or an offer. A command no less final than five grandmothers shoving the boy up the stairs.
“I live over there,” she said, glancing at the windows as though the Briar house was across a dirt road instead of up a grass-covered hill. “I have the room.”
Estrella felt the hearts of every mother and grandmother at the table fill. This was a thing Bay’s grandmother would have done, offer a place to a strange boy.
The boy did not answer Bay Briar. He lowered his head, studying the deep amber inside the coyota. Estrella felt his shame like a palm on the back of her neck, his embarrassment that a pale-haired woman had to offer him a place in her house.
But he did not say no. He did not shake his head. And for a boy who said little more than grace for the things put in front of him, this was a yes.
After dinner, the boy stood in the kitchen doorway, hands in his pockets, looking like he wanted to pace but didn’t want to get in the way. Estrella’s mother handed him a dish towel and made room for him at the counter. Drying plates and spoons seemed to calm him as much as watching the snow of Azalea’s flaked potatoes.
Bay had just brought handfuls of silverware to set the table for tomorrow’s breakfast when she stilled, her eyes fixed on the window.
“Oh no,” she said.
“What?” Dalia asked.
Bay set down the forks and the spoons.
She made a line for the front door so certain that none of the Nomeolvides girls dared to cross it. She threw the door open, and in the seconds before she pulled it shut again they saw him. A man on the grass in front of the stone house.
Reid, Bay called him. Reid, said in a way meant to make it sound like a greeting. But Estrella caught the apprehension under the name. The wavering in her voice stretched the single syllable.