There was hardly any moon that night, but gradually our eyes were able to take in more and more detail. The flowers themselves were not spiny, but made of some nearly transparent material that looked as though it would shrivel and bruise if you touched it. The petals stood out in starry rays, and in the center of each flower there was a complicated construction of silvery threads shaped like a pair of cupped hands catching moonlight. A fairy boat, ready to be launched into the darkness.
“Is that?” Turtle wanted to know. She touched it, and it did not shrivel, but only swayed a little on the end of its long green branch.
“It’s a flower, dear,” Virgie said.
Lou Ann said, “She knows that much. She can tell you the name of practically every flower in the Burpee’s catalogue, even things that only grow in Florida and Nova Scotia.”
“Cereus,” I said. Even its name sounded silvery and mysterious.
“See us,” Turtle repeated.
Lou Ann nosed into a flower at eye level and reported that it had a smell. She held Dwayne Ray up to it, but he didn’t seem especially awake. “I can just barely make it out,” she said, “but it’s so sweet. Tart, almost, like that lemon candy in a straw that I used to die for when I was a kid. It’s just ever so faint.”
“I can smell it from here.” Edna spoke from the porch swing.
“Edna’s the one who spots it,” Virgie said. “If it was up to me I would never notice to save my life. Because they come out after dark, you see, and I forget to watch for the buds. One year Edna had a head cold and we missed it altogether.”
Lou Ann’s eyes were as wide and starry as the flower she stared into. She was as captivated as Turtle.
“It’s a sign,” she said.
“Of what?” I wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “Something good.”
“I can get the pruning shears and cut one off for you, if you like,” Virgie Mae offered. “If you put it in the icebox it will last until tomorrow.”
But Lou Ann shook her head. “No thanks. I want to remember them like this, in the dark.”
“After you pluck them they lose their fragrance,” Edna told us. “I don’t know why, but it just goes right away.”
If the night-blooming cereus was an omen of anything, it was of good weather for traveling. The morning was overcast and cool. Once again we rolled the children out of bed, and Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray came with us over to Mattie’s. Turtle wanted to be carried, like Dwayne Ray, but we had the bags to deal with.
“We’ll just walk this little way,” I told her. “Then you can sleep in the car for a long time.”
Estevan and Esperanza had one suitcase between them and it was smaller than mine, which did not even include Turtle’s stuff. I had packed for a week, ten days at the outside, and they were packed for the rest of their lives.
Several people had come to see them off, including the elderly woman I had once seen upstairs at Mattie’s and a very young woman with a small child, who could have been her daughter or her sister, or no relation for that matter. There was lots of hugging and kissing and talking in Spanish. Mattie moved around quickly, introducing people and putting our things in the car and giving me hundreds of last-minute instructions.
“You might have to choke her good and hard to get her going in the mornings,” Mattie told me, and in my groggy state it took me a while to understand whom or what I was supposed to be choking. “She’s tuned for Arizona. I don’t know how she’ll do in Oklahoma.”
“She’ll do fine,” I said. “Remember, I’m used to cantankerous cars.”
“I know. You’ll do fine,” she said, but didn’t seem convinced.
After we had gotten in and fastened our seat belts, on Matties orders, she leaned in the window and slipped something into my hand. It was money. Esperanza and Estevan were leaning out the windows on the other side, spelling out something-surely not an address-very slowly to the elderly woman, who was writing it down on the back of a window envelope.
“Where did this come from?” I asked Mattie quietly. “We can get by.”
“Take it, you thick-headed youngun. Not for your sake, for theirs.” She squeezed my hand over the money. “Poverty-stricken isn’t the safest way to go.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“It comes from people, Taylor, and let’s just leave it. Some folks are the heroes and take the risks, and other folks do what they can from behind the scenes.”
“Mattie, would you please shut up about heroes and prison and all.”
“I didn’t say prison.”
“Just stop it, okay? Estevan and Esperanza are my friends. And, even if they weren’t, I can’t see why I shouldn’t do this. If I saw somebody was going to get hit by a truck I’d push them out of the way. Wouldn’t anybody? It’s a sad day for us all if I’m being a hero here.”
