'What kind?' Davy asked. 'The tortillas are gone. I already checked.'
'Rita's not the only one who can cook around here, you know,' Diana told him.
'Can you make tortillas?'
'No.'
'Popovers?
''Well, no.' 'See there?' Davy returned glumly, and went back to working on the elusive basket.
Chastened, Diana retreated to the kitchen. Davy was right, in a way.
She had got out of the habit of cooking.
That was something Rita handled, and the older woman was much better at it than she was. There didn't seem to be any sense in rocking the boat.
Now, though, she looked through her larder, surprised by some of the things she found there. She settled on hot chocolate. She remembered hot chocolate as a cold-weather drink, one her mother would make for wintertime Sunday night suppers. Iona Cooper had served steaming mugs of hot chocolate accompanied by slices of toast slathered with homemade jam. There were always hunks of sharp cheddar cheese sitting on a platter in the middle of the table. Iona Dade Cooper's hot chocolate, cocoa as she called it, had been anything but ordinary. It wasn't remotely related to the new versions that came dried and in envelopes.
One at a time, Diana gathered the necessary ingredients chocolate syrup, sugar, salt, canned milk, and began mixing them as her mother once had, with a glob of this and a pinch of that. When the ingredients were all in the saucepan, she stood stirring it absently over the gas burner, remembering the sudden role reversal after her Mother's return from the hospital. She remembered the myriad cups of hot chocolate she had made for her mother, for both of them, in those last few months before the cancer had cheated Iona Dade Cooper of even that small pleasure.
After Iona's diagnosis, Gary returned to Eugene, while Diana dropped out of school-temporarily, she thought to stay home and care for her dying mother. Someone had to do it, and Max wasn't up to it. The process had taken two full semesters.
At first Gary came over on weekends to spell her a little, but that happened less and less often as the months wore on. It was too long a drive, he said. It took too much time away from his work. And Max Cooper didn't hang around much, either. On those rare occasions when he was there, Diana resented his being in the way and underfoot. When he started staying away, Diana barely noticed his increasingly prolonged absences. She was only too happy to have him out of the way.
Gradually, Diana's world shrank until it encompassed only her mother's room with its hospital bed and cot, the bathroom, and the worn path in the linoleum that led from the bedroom to the kitchen. The days and nights became almost interchangeable except that sometimes, during the day, the endless hours were punctuated by someone from town stopping by with a covered dish.
Iona Cooper. had always been a private person, but now the barriers between mother and daughter melted away, leaving them far more intimate than either of them wanted.
The forced intimacy deprived them both of dignity as Diana learned to do things she never thought herself capable of giving shots, caring for her mother's most basic needs, cleaning her, feeding her.
Pain, her mother's enemy, became Diana's mortal enemy as well. She fought it with whatever puny medications the doctors allowed her.
Hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, she battled the pain by engaging her mother in countless hours of conversation. Sipping hot chocolate, Diana and her mother talked for months, weeks, and days on end while the blessed periods of respite between one dose of pain medication and the next grew ever shorter and shorter.
'Why?' Diana asked one day. She had heard Max come in and stumble his way upstairs to his own room, bouncing off first one wall and then another, cursing drunkenly under his breath.
Iona's eyes opened and fixed on Diana's face. 'Why what?' She had heard her husband, too. The lines of communication between them were all too open. Both mother and daughter knew what the other meant.
'Why did you stay all these years? Why didn't you leave?'
Iona shook her head. 'Couldn't,' she said.
'Why not?'
'Damaged goods,' Iona answered. Turning her face to the wall, that was all she would say, and since turning away was all she had left, her only shred of privacy or self-determination, Diana respected the gesture. She didn't intrude, and she didn't ask again.
Rita ate a few spoonfuls An orderly brought d into her of watery vegetable soup before drifting back reverie.
The little adobe house the sisters made available to Rita and her grandmother was just outside the mission compound. one of the older nuns, Sister Mary Jane, set about teaching Rita the rudiments of Mil-gahn housekeeping, but the instruction process was hampered by Rita's poor gap of English. Sister Mary Jane also worried about the Indian religious training. When apprised of the girl's lack of formal situation, Sister Veronica, the sister in charge, declared Rita far too old to be placed in one of the mission's elementary classrooms or in one of the regular catechism classes, either.
She enlisted Father John's aid.
As early summer came on, Rita spent an hour with him each afternoon.
During the worst heat of the day, his office was cool and quiet. Rita was happy to be there. She loved smelling the strange Odors that emanated from his skin. She loved listening to the rumbly, deep voice that reminded her of late summer thunder on distant loligarn.
At school in Phoenix, Rita Antone had been a miserably homesick, indifferent pupil, but in the mission at Burnt Dog Village, under Father John's tutelage, she made swift progress.
