Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [173]
While she’d dated a few men after moving out here, nothing had gotten serious. It would happen, she was sure. The whos and whens were unknown, but the right man would eventually cross her path—end of story, run the credits, lower the curtain. She couldn’t swear it might not befall her this very day.
That’s how it happened for Marcos. She knew, absolutely knew, the first she laid eyes on Ariel, what was going to develop. These things you feel in your bones, no explaining otherwise. Was she happy for him? Probably yes, definitely yes. But her pleasure or suffering regarding Marcos and his family was peripheral now, had to be. Sometimes when Sarah phoned her—funny, she was one of the few who seemed to call when Franny was actually home—and filled her in on Pajarito doings, it all seemed a million miles away. Other times, she couldn’t get enough scuttlebutt. Sarah continued to refer to her as Mary, though she went by Franny Johnson out here—a good name, like Kip once said, different from anybody else’s, distinctive. She didn’t mind Sarah calling her Mary, though. Nostalgic to hear it. Franny wondered if Sarah made the calls on the sly. Not that she was devious, didn’t have a deceitful leaf in her tree. Her purpose was without doubt admirable. Sarah considered Mary a commitment and wanted to follow her progress, was all. She’d never forget that time Sarah urged her to push forward with her aspirations, though in darker moments she questioned whether, even subconsciously, Marcos’s mother hadn’t wanted her to move on. But, well, never mind. Move on she had, and that was that.
Last time she saw him was probably the last time she would ever lay eyes on Marcos Montoya, at Kip’s memorial. More Irish wake than dirgeful funeral, since Kip himself had planned the party ahead of time. By April his condition had so deteriorated that no further medical therapy was prescribed beyond pain management. His nine lives had been used up, and no chemo could change that. Ariel had acted as his amanuensis, writing down his final thoughts. The festivities were to take place at the old adobe fieldhouse, summer solstice. There was to be champagne and caviar, music and dancing, the works. Nobody was to be excluded.
His plans were followed to the letter. The revelry lasted deep into the Nambé night. Hard to imagine she and Ariel danced together to some Frank Sinatra song on the record player they’d set up beside the icetub filled with bottles of bubbly. It was not unlike one of those jazz funerals where the band tours the streets riffing out the melody of a man’s life come to its end, a noisy triumph of redemption, drum and cymbal applauding the deeds now all done. Ariel’s baby lay in her bassinet, surrounded by doting relatives and friends. She was cute as the proverbial button, Franny thought, and slept through the raucous wake like an angel.
All the while, the man of the hour lay far from these noisy festivities. Ariel, dancing now with Delfino, had acted as sole witness to the burial. He was settled in the sandy loam alongside Agnes Montoya’s bones at Dripping Spring. Just where Delfino himself, dancing a little drunkenly with Marcos’s fiancée, would someday be laid to rest, according to his own hard-won wishes.
At midnight, the music having been silenced, Marcos set off fireworks—again Kip’s orchestration—that lit the starry black sky in a shower of sparks, then vanished in threads of light coming back to earth. And as Franny stood beside her uncle Clifford, whom she’d driven up from Gallup to attend, she wondered if anybody other than herself would ever make the connection between Delfino Montoya, his two companions, and Sergeant Carpenter. The world was ever a small