Dove in the Window Read online

  I scooted around the table and hugged her. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. You are the queen of best friends. He’ll behave himself, I promise.” I hope was what I was actually thinking. “Are you coming to the barbecue on Friday afternoon?”

  Every year since I can remember, my dad, the oldest of the six Ramsey kids, and his mother, my gramma Dove, have hosted a barbecue at the Ramsey Ranch the day after Thanksgiving for all our friends and family. It coincided with our four-day, no-holds-barred-kick-em-in-the-nuts-when-they‘ re-down poker tournament and semiannual calf roundup. California’s Central Coast, having the mildest weather around, didn’t have to adhere to the traditional spring roundup common in colder states, and besides, Daddy always liked to get a head start on castrating our calves before they grew too big. To keep his young ranch hands happy, though, he always saved some for the spring so we could have an old-fashioned roundup complete with roping and riding and Rocky Mountain Oysters. But every November, my uncles and aunts left their ranches and came from all over the West to participate in this Thanksgiving ritual of food, cards, and cattle. For four days the ranch looked like a cross between a scout camp, small-town rodeo, and a two-star RV park. I didn’t attend last year because I couldn’t endure the family crowd after losing my husband, Jack, the February before in an auto accident. But it had been almost two years since Jack was killed, and this year I was attending with Gabriel Ortiz, my new husband, a complex and wonderful gift that God, with more than a little amusement, I imagine, dropped into my life when I least expected it.

  Elvia pushed me away, straightening her cinnamon-colored Armani knit suit. “Don’t try to make up to me. And, yes, the whole Aragon clan will be there. We haven’t missed one in twenty-eight years, have we?” She patted her black hair, arranged this morning in an elegant French twist. “Just keep Emory away from me. I’ll agree to a short dinner on the day of my choosing. That’s it. I don’t want him pawing all over me at the barbecue.” She pointed at the scones. “I’ve got things to do. Wrap mine up to go.”

  “Yes, ma‘am,” I said, pulling a plastic bag from the drawer. “I promise to keep him occupied. You might be surprised, though. He’s quite a personable man now.” I held out the wrapped scones, giving her a wide smile.

  “He’s from Arkansas,” she said with a disdainful sniff. She grabbed the bag and stuck it in her briefcase. “Tell Dove happy Thanksgiving for me. See you Friday. Mama’s bringing tamales.”

  “Bless her,” Gabe said with a sigh.

  She scowled at him. “You know, I actually thought you might be able to control her.”

  “Better people than me have tried and failed,” he said, unperturbed.

  “Boy,” I said, pouring myself another cup of coffee after she left. “That was close. I thought she was going to leave me flapping in the breeze.”

  “She should have,” he said, reaching into the Stern’s Bakery bag and pulling out a cranberry scone. “It really was presumptuous of you.”

  “So you’ve told me a few hundred times. But it worked. A female general I saw interviewed on television one time said it’s easier sometimes to ask forgiveness than permission ... or something like that.”

  “That could be your motto,” he said, his voice not a little ironic.

  “Ah, take your scones and go to work, Chief Ortiz,” I said, kissing him good-bye. “Before crime overtakes the fair streets of San Celina.”

  After he left, I pulled on my boots and grabbed my worn sheepskin jacket. San Celina had been going through an early cold snap, unusual for the Central Coast, and the days had not gotten much above sixty degrees. When I called and informed my Aunt Kate of that fact, she just laughed. She and my Uncle Rex live in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where sixty degrees in winter is short-sleeve, get-out-your-barbecue kind of weather. They, as well as the rest of my gramma Dove’s kids, were due at the ranch tonight. But I had a million things to do before then and only about eight hours to get them done.

  I climbed into my old red Harper’s Herefords Chevy pickup that I’d finally reclaimed from Gabe’s son, Sam, since he had, with the help of his father, bought a 1965 Chevy Malibu. Now that Sam was living at my dad’s ranch rather than with us and had a new job at Elvia’s bookstore, he and Gabe managed to go for as long as two or three days without sniping at each other. With Sam’s plans to attend Cal Poly in the spring, it appeared my stepson was going to be a permanent fixture in my life, for a while anyway. As is not uncommon with nineteen-year-olds, he got along fine with everyone except his parents, and he and I had become friends in the way that two people who share a common passion do. We were both intensely committed to figuring out that person who was his father and my husband, and we loved Gabe deeply, though it was often easier for me to admit it.

  This was going to be a busy week and a half for Gabe and me. As curator of our local folk art museum, the Josiah Sinclair Folk Art Museum and Artists Co-op, I was smack-dab in the middle of the San Celina Heritage Days celebration. The co-op had aligned with the women in the Fine Arts Guild to run concurrently a women’s western art show. We’d been given a grant from the city as well as from our local NOW chapter and were committed to educating the public about the contributions that women had made and were continuing to make in the western art field. The official start of Heritage Days and the art show was the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend and culminated with a parade, fiesta, and western dance a week from Saturday.

  The museum was presenting a special exhibit on loan from a sister folk art museum in Eugene, Oregon, of nineteenth-century pioneer quilts, most women’s only means of artistic expression during the long trek across the West. Our smaller, upstairs gallery spotlighted some of our co-op’s own western artists and an antique cloth doll exhibit. Though the exhibits were finished, there were always last minute details that needed to be ironed out before an opening, and as usual our artists would be selling their wares at the Thursday night farmer’s market as well as at the fiesta on Saturday. That meant I had to make sure that everyone knew their booth assignments and that the booths and canopies were in good shape and that all the artists were at peace. Well, as much at peace as forty very different, and often temperamental, artists could be. My job was, I had discovered after long, lazy Sunday-morning-in-bed talks with Gabe, very similar to his. We both spent a good deal of our time trying to keep divergent groups of people happy. There were days when I wholeheartedly missed full-time ranch life. Cattle were at least fairly predictable, possessing only a limited number of tricks up their bovine sleeves. Humans were an entirely different creature to figure out and never ceased to amaze me with their creative ways of driving each other crazy. And now that I was the police chief’s wife, there was a whole other aspect to my life I’d never anticipated. One that included cocktail parties, charity balls, endless social chitchat, and the wearing of fancy clothes. None of those things had ever been on my list of favorite activities, but I was trying my best to at least not be a liability to Gabe’s career, having long abandoned the idea that I’d be an asset.

  The museum was already bustling with activity when I pulled into the parking lot. The old two-story Sinclair Hacienda, donated by our local patroness of the arts, Constance Sinclair, had become as familiar to me now as the old truck I was driving and almost as well loved. If someone had told me three years ago that at thirty-five I’d be living in town, running a folk art museum while trying to juggle a marriage to San Celina’s chief of police, I’d have informed them the state mental hospital was thirty miles up the road and that maybe they’d better check in for a little testing. But here I was, and though at odd moments when my late husband Jack’s smiling face popped into my mind and sadness froze a section of my heart, I was amazed and grateful at where I’d ended up.

  “Four more days,” a young potter named Julio commented. We passed each other on the ivy-covered arbored walkway between the museum and the old adobe stables that now comprised the co-op’s studios and my cramped but comfortable office. Pale November
sunlight dappled his wavy black hair.

  “We’ll be ready,” I answered with a smile. Exhibits didn’t tie my stomach into knots the way they did my first few months as curator, though a jittery edge of pre-event anticipation still lingered. I was ready for the crowds this time and looking forward to the week-long celebration of our county’s heritage and the Mission Santa Celine’s two-hundred-twentieth anniversary.

  Spread across my desk was today’s San Celina Tribune, placed there as it was every morning by my sixty-eight-year-old assistant D-Daddy Boudreaux—the only person who’d managed to keep the part-time job longer than a few months. On the front page was a story about the most controversial subject since a local well-known grower of marijuana ran for mayor two years ago.

  San Celina or Santa Celine? Is Historical Correctness More Important than the Homeless?

  Apparently a group of people affiliated with the Historical Society had decided that our town’s name, the improperly monikered San Celina, should be returned to the proper Santa Celine to match the mission’s and honor the French saint the mission was named after. Most people in the town, myself included, never gave much thought about why the names didn’t match, figuring it was one of those government snafus that just happened. Research conducted by a local historian revealed that back in the early 1900s the town was renamed by a Texas millionaire who wanted to honor his hometown of Celina, Texas. Seeing as he owned most of downtown and all the city council, that change was accomplished without much argument. Obviously nobody involved was adept at proper masculine/feminine grammar in the Spanish language. But the Texan was long dead and his relatives scattered, so one faction of the Historical Society was determined to set things right. Local Latino groups also strongly supported the change back to grammatical and historical correctness. On the opposite side was a socially conscious group that didn’t believe in spending money that could be better used to help finance and run the new homeless shelter or fix potholes in the streets. The measure hadn’t garnered enough signatures to be included on the ballot in early November, so a new assault was obviously being launched for a special election.

  I was finishing the article when the door to my office flew open.

  “Look at these,” Shelby Johnson said, shoving a stack of black-and-white photographs in front of me. “I’m so stoked I could dance on your desk. They’re going to get published in a major magazine, I just know it. Especially after the photos I’ll take at the barbecue this weekend.” She nervously pulled on the long dark braid draped over her shoulder and flashed a smile that probably cost her parents what some of our county’s migrant workers made in two years. “What do you think?”

  I picked up the eight-by-ten of me bottle feeding an orphan calf while another calf poked its head through the slats of the stall to stare at us hungrily. To be honest, she’d managed to capture an expression of vulnerability on my face that slightly embarrassed me. It felt as if she had uncovered a part of me I usually kept hidden. Which was why she was such a talented photographer. A senior at Cal Poly, she’d spent countless days these last few months at the ranch recording her images of me—a typical western ranch woman, if there is such an animal. In essence, I was her senior project.

  Born and bred in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago, Shelby grew up in love with the romantic cowgirl images of Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, and Dale Evans. As soon as she graduated from high school, she applied to colleges all over the West and finally settled on Cal Poly because of San Celina’s western flavor as well as the university’s excellent photography department. She had confided in me during our days at the ranch that her parents, both successful heart surgeons, were disappointed in her choice of career and university.

  “But I’m their only daughter, so I get away with murder,” she’d said, her brown eyes sparkling with mischief. She had three older brothers, all studying to be doctors. “I’m the family’s greatest unspoken disappointment,” she told me cheerfully. “That’s okay because they need something to complain about. My brothers are all so perfect.” Then she’d lift her expensive Leica camera and snap another picture of me. In time, I became so accustomed to her camera, I didn’t react with my customary frozen smile.

  “Getting your subject to forget you’re there is a very important part of being a photographer,” she’d told me once. “I think it’s where most photographers fail, and their photographs look stiff and rehearsed.”

  “I look like crap in most of yours,” I’d complained.

  “No, you don’t,” she replied. “You look just like what you are, a ranch woman who loves her animals and her land.”

  I spread the eight-by-ten prints across my desk. They were good, I had to admit. Really good. She was having her first show in a gallery downtown this week, sharing the featured artist status with another of our local artists, Greer Shannon, whose family had owned ranch land here in San Celina County since the Spanish land grant days. Shelby was hoping not only to make some sales, but also to catch the eye of some of the San Francisco and Los Angeles art critics and dealers coming into town for our much publicized women’s western art show.

  “Roland’s putting this one in the window,” she said, her voice squeaking with excitement. She pointed to the photograph of me and the calves. Roland Bennett, a recent immigrant from San Francisco, had opened his gallery—Bennett’s Gallery of Western Art—two years ago. He claimed to be a distant relative of Buffalo Bill and loved wearing chamois-colored fringed jackets in honor of his flashy ancestor. Though I found him to be a bit pretentious and too Hollywood-kiss-kiss familiar with anyone he suspected of any social or economic importance, to his credit he had wholeheartedly supported women artists and was showing only women’s art in his gallery this month. I suspected his interest was more monetary than a deep concern for equal rights, but as Dove would say, when someone’s offering you free manure for your garden, don’t complain about the odor.

  “That’s great,” I said. “I hope you sell some of these, even though the thought of me in my dirty jeans as a centerfold in a national magazine is not exactly my lifelong dream.”

  “It would be nice to get a small pat on the head from the AMA,” she said, flopping down in one of my black vinyl visitor chairs. She referred to her family collectively as the American Medical Association and said the only artistic genes they possessed were the Ralph Laurens they wore on weekends. Her dark-lashed eyes skimmed over mine, then looked back down at the buckskin-covered photograph album she held, but not before I caught the glimpse of hurt. She only talked about her family in the lightest, most teasing terms, making jokes about what a source of mortification she was to her parents and brothers. Her unconcerned act didn’t fool me one bit, and my heart went out to her. When you’re twenty, whether you like it or not, your family’s opinions still form a big part of your self-image. But after getting to know her over the last couple of months, I guessed that she’d eventually discover who she was and learn to live with an acceptance of both herself and her family. For a split second, I didn’t envy Shelby’s flawless young complexion and was thankful to be halfway on the other side of thirty.

  “They’ll come around,” I said. “In the meantime, you just follow your heart. You have real talent, Shelby. There’s not a person in the world who can look at your photographs and not know that.”

  Her moist-eyed, grateful look was heartbreaking. “Somehow I feel like if I could get them in a magazine, maybe the AMA will take me seriously.”

  I looked back down at her photograph of me leaning against a fence post after shoeing a horse. I was wearing my stained leather chaps and a thin white tank top and held a dripping bottle of Coca-Cola against my neck. In the dim background, Gabe stood half hidden in the barn’s shadows, watching me with an expression of desire that caused my neck to warm slightly from the intimacy. My neck warmed slightly from the intimacy she captured in that one second.

  “Your work is always so surprising,” I said, quickly turning the photograph over. “And you’re a li
ttle sneak.”

  An impish smile appeared. “In all my photos I like to have a little unexpected surprise for the viewer.” She placed the leather-covered photo album she held on my desk. “I made this for you. They’re copies of my best shots. I even made the album myself. Copied one I saw in a fancy pants western catalog. I’m not through with you yet, but I wanted to say thanks for letting me tag along for the last couple of months and for inviting me to the barbecue on Friday.”

  I took the album and ran my fingers across the smooth leather. She’d painted my brand on the front and decorated the leather with bits of bone and feathers.

  “Oh, Shelby, it’s beautiful,” I said. “I’ll treasure it always. Thank you. You know, you’re going to have a ball. My family’s a bunch of hams, so you’d better bring along lots of film.”

  “Great! I can’t wait. I know I’ll get some good stuff.”

  “We’ll do our best to look interesting,” I said, laughing. “We’re tagging, vaccinating, and castrating. Ought to be some intriguing situations there somewhere.” I looked at her curiously. “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” I assumed she wasn’t flying home if she was going to be here on Friday. “You’re more than welcome to come on tomorrow, too. We’re cooking four twenty-pound turkeys.”

  “Thanks, but Kip and I are splurging and spending the night at the San Celina Inn. Breakfast in a canopied bed and a fancy Thanksgiving dinner with someone else doing the dishes. Then we’re going up to the hills near Lake Santa Flora to take pictures of condors or whatever wildlife surfaces. I’m trying to teach him how to shoot something besides a gun.”

  “You and Kip are still an item, huh?” Kip was one of my dad’s ranch hands, a young man from Montana who had worked for Daddy about six months now. His family owned a ranch north of Billings, but he’d grown tired of the cold weather and was hoping to buy a small spread in California eventually. According to Daddy, he was a young man of few words, but a darn hard worker. There was no higher praise from my dad.