"With what?"
"It"s kind of secret. Let me ask you something, first. Do you like Molly?"
"Yes," she said fervently. "Does she like me?"
His smile was nice, Josefina decided. "Oh, yeah. She talks about you all the time. And about your uncle."
Josefina giggled. "She likes him a lot!"
"I know. He likes her, too."
"No," Josefina said gravely. "Tiois in love."
He made that expression grown-ups always got when they thought they were so much smarter than kids. "Really," he said. "What makes you think so?"
Now she wasn"t so sure she wanted to tell him. He might just laugh at her, and she knew what she knew. "Lots of things."
"Like what?" When she didn"t answer, he sat on the edge of her bed. "It"s important, Josefina." He said her name wrong, but Anglos did that a lot. Like they were embarra.s.sed to say it right.
"Ho-se-FEEna," she said.
"Oh. Sorry." He said her name again, right this time.
"Okay, this is how I knowTio is in love. One." She held up a finger. "He kissed her. He does not kiss women, notever, even when there is a dance and they really want him to, bad. He says kissing leads to other things."
The mannodded, a little frown on his face. "I see. He"s right."
"Two." Another finger. "He sang her the song about love. I don"t know it in English, but he keeps that one for secret between us." Another finger. "He never stops looking at her when she"s there. He tries to stop, but then he"s doing it again. And there"s so much happiness when he does."
The man was smiling now. "You know what, Josefina, that"s exactly what I saw, too. And you know,my sister looks right back at him the same way." He got up and closed the door. "We have a problem, and you"re gonna help me fix it."
"What problem? They got married."
He sighed. "I know. But it was only to get a green card."
"But they-"
"My turn to talk. I know. They"re crazy in love. Loco," he said, and she smiled. "But they don"t know it, so we have to help them find out."
"How?"
"We got lucky. You see that snow? My sister can"t drive in it. Her truck got buried. So there they are, stuck."
Josefina grinned. "Ah-ha!So they probably have to kiss a little, huh?"
He laughed, and the sound was big and wide, like sunshine. Josefina liked him a lot better. "Exactly. You"re pretty smart, for only being eight."
"I"m old for my age."
"Yeah." For some reason that seemed to make him sad. "Anyway. I have a better truck than my sister, and I can drive there. You get to get out of the hospital because they"re worried about power failures, and I"m driving you up to Molly"s house."
"Really? Is my dog there?"
"Not yet. He"s still with Mr. Wiley. But listen, sugar. You and me, we"re going to trick them, so they both see that they really are in love."
Josefina grinned. "Okay!"
Molly dreamed of a rooster. A big black one with a flare of red feathers at his chest, sitting on a fence post. For some reason, Tim was there, and her brother, Josh, and they were so happy to see the rooster, boasting about it. It was a Mexican rooster, they said, and very rare.
Behind them, she saw goats and sheep, and something green waving its fronds in the fields of her land. She frowned, confused. "I haven"t planted anything. How did that happen?" she asked them, but they were already gone, and Molly was left to puzzle it out herself. The rooster crowed, and she turned to it, thinking he had the silkiest feathers she"d ever seen.
When she woke up, she half thought she"d heard the rooster, that it had been her alarm clock, and it took a long moment to realize it wasn"t a rooster at all. It was the light.
Snow light. She sat up, surprised, and pulled open the curtains. "Holy cow!" she cried, half laughing, half appalled. Leo leaped up on the windowsill, his tail switching. "You won"t be going outside today, my dear," she said to the cat. "You"d be buried."
The snow that had begun falling last night had evidently not ceased the entire night.
It fell with deceptive sweetness, giant fluffy flakes, piling up. And up. And up. There was at least three feet in low spots, much more where the wind had piled it into drifts, and it showed no sign of slowing.
Secretly pleased she loved these wild, surprise snows she tugged on heavy socks and a pair of warm sweats and bundled her bathrobe around herself and went to make a pot of coffee. Padding silently down the hall, Leo rushing ahead to his food dish, she paused by Alejandro"s half-open door to peak in. He slept, oblivious, his black hair scattered over the linens. She found herself smiling, thinking how lucky it was that fate had sent the snow today, so she could keep him a little longer. The phrase made her smile keep him. Like Josefina"s dog.Please can I keep him?
Silly. She shook her head, smiling, and went to make the coffee, moving quietly so she wouldn"t disturb him. Although he seemed to possess an almost superhuman const.i.tution, sleep was the body"s way of repairing itself, and there was still a lot of healing going on in Alejandro"s body.
As she fed Leonardo and waited for the coffee, she looked out the windows and thought about the rooster. In the bold light of morning, she had to chuckle a little at the imagery a black rooster with red chest feathers.Gee, wonder who that could be?
Certainly not Alejandro, with his black hair and red shirt. The only thing the rooster had lacked was a guitar.
Crossing her arms, she stood before the gla.s.s door and saw the land the way it had appeared in her dream: fertile, productive,alive . Alive with sunshine and growing things and animals. In comparison, the dullness of empty fields filled with cactus seemed almost criminal, and for the first time, she understood how Tim and Alejandro viewed the potential of the land.
And Josh.
Josh. Of course. He was struggling so desperately to make ends meet, the kind of grueling, day-to-day struggle that wore a man out too soon, made him bitter and small.
She"d seen the tension of it in his face often the past couple of years, and had repeatedly offered to help him give him money, pay off his mortgage, whatever was best.Pridefully , he refused everything.
But if he worked the land, it would be the labor of his own back that would bring security. As much as possible anyway. She thought of what Alejandro had said about self-sufficiency. Maybe the land would never make a fortune, as Sunshine Farms and Wiley Farms, but at the very least, it could provide chickens and eggs and food of all kinds. It could bring in some extra money to be set aside for emergencies and eventually college for the kids.
She heard a step behind her, and Alejandro emerged, his hair tousled, his torso bare.
She beamed at him. "Good morning!" she said, and without a single hesitation, she moved across the room, put her hands on his chest to brace herself and kissed him full on the mouth.
He was startled, but sleepy enough he didn"t immediately protest. His hands went to her arms, and he gave her a quizzical look. "Molly?"
"It will wait," she said, and gestured toward the view. "Look! We"re snowed in!"
He blinked at the brightness, and a hand went to his chest. "It snowed a lot!"
"And still coming down." She heard the gurgling of the coffeemaker. "Go wash up and I"ll get some coffee."
Humming under her breath, she pulled out the makings for pancakes and stirred together dry ingredients, a sense of complete rightness in her. Josh and Lynette, Tim and Alejandro, the old house in town and the puzzle of her own land all of it seemed so perfectly clear this morning that she couldn"t imagine how she"d missed seeing it before.
Alejandro came back, b.u.t.toning his red shirt. She grinned at that, and he stopped.
"What?"