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By Root 1580 0

as her sister, Rose, who stood watching the electric band Cinco de Mayo with their mother and, yes, Russell Carpenter, her detested father. As fortune would have it, their backs were turned to Kip and Franny. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, swaying to the distorted music. Her father had put on weight since she last laid eyes on him, while her mother looked to be diminished by half. Jimmy wore a smartly pressed khaki uniform and a Stetson and had his arm around a young woman whom she didn’t recognize. Had he gotten married? Was he in the service, after all those years of screaming, unpatriotic skirmishes with dear old Dad? Rose had grown her hair long, as had her twin brother, John, who now joined the group. Kind of a surprise given how strict Russell had always been about such life-and-death matters as personal grooming. Maybe he was slipping, losing sway over the lot of them. She’d like to think her departure had to do with this subversion, but was startled from such musings when her sister, who’d been talking animatedly with John, turned around and seemed to look directly at her.

She had to escape, right away, and without creating a scene. Still, she gazed for one clipped instant at her mother with whom Rose was now speaking excitedly, and saw how these few years had reduced her, pulled her unkindly toward the ground, wrenched down the corners of her mouth, a mouth that once had been as full and young as Mary’s own. Stung a little by guilt and overwhelmed by frantic fear, she asked Kip if he didn’t mind walking her back to the Jeep. She wasn’t feeling well, all of a sudden. He took her arm and the two of them threaded their way to the parking lot. Having noticed everything, Kip said nothing. Carl was asleep in the front seat, and within minutes they were joined by Marcos and Sarah, whose arms were full of gifts.

On the drive to Placitas, Franny sat in the back between Marcos and Kip, whose cooperative silence extended to his making no mention of Franny’s abrupt recovery. “Hey, who is Felipe de Nerí, anyway?” she asked, using all the acting skills available to her.

Nobody knew, except Carl, who said, “Just another Italian saint from a thousand years ago. Dime a dozen.”

“He should know. They were friends back then.”

Nodding toward Marcos, Sarah asked Franny, “This is the kind of man you go around with?”

“You’re his mother,” she laughed.

“That’s right, Franny. You tell her,” Carl said, mock-serious.

Franny bundled up the vision of her Gallup family as if into a little crumpled ball that she then threw, mentally, out the window, but couldn’t help wondering if any of them remembered that today was her birthday. Of course they did, she assured herself. But why care?

After a celebratory dinner that night at Rancho Pajarito, after opening her presents and blowing out the candles on a cake, she lay in bed with Marcos, her back turned to her lover. The silver necklace he’d given her felt unfamiliar against her flesh, but she was grateful and was sure she’d grow accustomed to its weight there. His callused but supple hand moved from her neck down the small of her back to rest on her hip. She whispered his name as his fingers waterfalled over onto the flat of her stomach and caressed her, nuancing themselves into her gently under the sheet, across her warming skin.

This was where she belonged, she thought. Not on the stage, not on the screen, but in this small home constituted by Marcos’s hands and arms. Yet as she listened to his deepening breath after they made love, that thought was superseded by others. Wasn’t it true that she’d fallen in love with the Montoyas as a whole, their son bridging her from her old, garbled world to one intimate, ordinary in ways she’d always dreamed a family could be? And wasn’t it also the truth that the other evening, when she and Marcos saw a flick in Santa Fe, she caught herself critiquing the actors’ gestures, voicings, timing, the interplay of music and lighting? Neither was it some grand classic of world cinema—just another love story set against impending war. But every error