cruise. Have you ever been on a cruise? I haven’t, but I’m probably supposed to have a baby pretty soon and cruises are supposed to be, you know, all romantic and everything…”
Anna’s ears pricked up at this. Whether Bethy was telling the truth or spinning a fantasy, Anna couldn’t guess. Either way it was a bit of gossip to share with her housemate. The wicked glee at such a human foible was untarnished by guilt. Needing to catch her breath, Anna stopped for a moment, her butt on a slanting four-inch shelf, feet and hands on the two sides of the triangular chimney they clambered up. Gossip, unless aimed or honed sharp like a weapon, was natural to human beings. It showed interest in one’s fellows, interest in the well-being of the tribe. Gossip was a way to learn taboos, pass on warnings, share the burden of being human among many so the onus of bearing it alone would fall on no one person. At least that’s what Molly always said, and who would know better than she?
“Rock!” Bethy shouted.
Anna pressed her head back against the chimney wall and covered her face with her forearm. A stone the size of a softball grazed her right knee as it fell between her legs to clatter down the chute beneath her.
“You okay?” Bethy called.
“Yeah,” Anna said.
“Sorry about that. My fault. I shoulda poked it before I stepped on it,” Bethy said.
Looking up, Anna could see the other woman about twenty feet above her looking down through her wide-set feet, head and fanny in alignment with the forced perspective.
“No harm done,” Anna said and then checked her knee, locked to keep the pressure that wedged her in the chimney. Her trousers hadn’t torn, and no blood was seeping through. That was all she would know until she tried to bend it. Settling her other limbs and digits more firmly, she put her foot on a nice little outcropping. The joint was in good working order.
“Almost there,” Bethy called. “Don’t be such a slowpoke.” She vanished from Anna’s line of sight. Anna followed. Feet, hands, knees, back, and brain occupied with the business of ascent, she moved quickly. When she reached the point where she’d last seen Bethy, a vertical crack, two feet wide, with a lovely smooth rock bottom led off to the right. Anna levered herself into it and stood upright. After the chimney, the going was as easy as a stroll down a sidewalk in Central Park. Within less than a minute the crack ended. Anna stepped from the sandstone’s embrace onto a natural balcony the size of the stage’s apron in a small theater. Tumbled rock and blown sand created enough earth that a few hardy plants had taken root and were surviving, if just barely. Bethy was sitting on a rectangular boulder, sides so straight and size so perfect it would be easy to believe it was man-made.
“Cool, huh?” Bethy said, as Anna took in the vista.
The balcony was sixty or more feet above a finger of the lake, as close to an aerie as anything without wings was likely to get.
“This is amazing,” Anna said and laughed because, in this place, language failed her. The depth and beauty of evening’s muted palette on a canvas too immense for man’s imagining was enough to strike a poet dumb and a painter blind.
“Cool, huh?” Bethy repeated.
“Exceedingly cool,” Anna replied. Crossing to the stone, she sat down next to Bethy and let her soul drink in the intricacy of the view. The climb had taken less than an hour, and, though in the morning there would be new aches in heretofore unchallenged muscles, for the moment she felt pleasantly tired and inexplicably moved by this gift Bethy Candor had given her.
She doubted they were the first white women ever to set foot in this tiny Eden, a suspicion borne out by the dull round of a beer bottle cap pocking the dirt at the base of a small but dedicated cactus. Yet it was new and fresh for Anna, and she was grateful for having been led there.
“Thanks, Bethy,” she said earnestly. “This is a real treat.” She turned to smile at her companion just as Bethy Candor lunged for her.
FORTY-THREE
Regis was in a foul mood. Jenny was half sorry she’d bummed a ride with him back from her shopping trip in Wahweap. For the first time in years shopping was a pleasure. Commuting to town once a week to hit the grocery store for peanut butter and booze, and the Walmart for paper and plastic items that had become necessities for a modern household, was usually a tedious waste of a perfectly good lieu day.
Shopping for treats to share with Anna filled Jenny’s head with delicious plots and plans for camp suppers and lunch picnics. Now that Anna had taken on the task of turning herself into Superwoman, she was a most appreciative audience for Jenny’s culinary surprises.
“Bethy’s sure looking good,” Jenny said, thoughts of Anna reminding her of Regis’s wife.
Regis grunted. Rather than enjoying the lush bucket seats, he was standing behind the wheel of his sexy red boat as if by so doing he could urge greater speed from it. Lounging in the left-hand seat, Jenny had to admit he was visually compelling: good jaw, good chin and nose, hair wild in the wind, dark and wavy. Such a good-looking man, yet he’d always struck her as a nonevent, a bit of a cipher. Not that she didn’t like him, he just didn’t seem vital enough to waste much attention on. This season that had changed. Somebody or something had turned the lights on in his haunted house.
Rescuing her and Anna from drowning had been positively heroic. Even when they’d been wearing the tights and cape and rescuing him from the jar, he’d been more engaged than she’d ever seen him. Sniping at his wife, once done in an offhand desultory manner, was now done with a keen edge and an eye to her weak points. Regis Candor’s wattage had definitely been amped up. The anger he radiated as he pushed the cigarette boat to its limit was almost as tangible as the late afternoon sun on her skin.
Was it possible the someone who lit all her candles this season was the same one who turned on the lights for Regis? Jenny pondered that for a moment. Love of—or lust for—Anna Pigeon was not an area where she could be objective. Her heart insisted that, of course, every sighted intelligent creature on the planet must be head over heels for the little redhead. Intellectually, she knew that was nonsense. The rose-colored glasses had been given to her alone. Like Joseph Smith’s God-given golden spectacles, her glasses for translating the tablets of Anna Pigeon were not shared by the hoi polloi.
But Regis? It was possible. Clearly he admired Anna. From admiration it was but a small step to the desire for acquisition.
Jenny waited for jealousy to raise its little green head. It didn’t. It was Regis’s wife Jenny was jealous of: jealous of the time she spent with Anna on their shared lieu days, jealous of the mornings and evenings she stole for runs and working out on weights, jealous of the places she showed Anna and the knowledge of canyoneering she gave away, jealous of the temptations of the Zodiac and borrowed gear.
“Why are you staring at me?” Regis demanded.
Caught out, Jenny said the first thing that came to mind. “Didn’t you and Bethy used to stay in town on your days off?”
“We did. Why?” Her conversation distracted him from whatever was ruining his day. The white left his knuckles as he loosened his grip on the wheel.
“You seem to be more at the Rope this summer.”
Regis’s eyes darted to her face, to the windscreen, and back to her face. Not the double take of a comedian; the frightened look of a rabbit that can’t decide which way to run.
“Not complaining, mind you. I appreciate the ride and the company.” The last wasn’t entirely true. Jenny felt it was best to work and play well with others whenever possible.
Regis returned his gaze to the bow cutting through the waves, the boat’s steady pounding against the rough water echoing in the slight spring of his knees.
“We are spending more weekends at the Rope, I guess,” he said in an oddly confessional tone. “Used to be we’d go in every week to spend time with Kippa.”
Kippa, Jenny knew, was a French bulldog, a caramel-colored bowling ball eight parts energy and two parts unadulterated joy. Meeting Kippa was akin to wrestling with a manic dwarf Santa.
“She a year old now?” Jenny asked to be saying something.
