One morning in April, as Bobby was picking the frogs in Monster’s hooves and otherwise getting the horse and buggy ready to ferry Pie to the refuge, I returned from walking Rogue. Pie was just coming out of the house; she was wearing a new hat.
“Did you buy her that?” I accused Bobby with my hands on my hips, as if I were an aggrieved wife.
His face turned ugly. “Where would I get the scratch to buy a silly hat?”
But Pie, you see, had remembered her assignment. The one I gave her.
“Bobby,” she called sweetly. “Here, I made sandwiches for your lunch.” She handed him a basket lined with a fresh linen towel. Then she waited till he helped her into the buggy.
Next thing I heard, Pie had shifted from working at the refuge with Eugenie to spending time with Bobby and the orphans at the Ladies’ Protection. She befriended some of the other do-gooder women there, women with fancy hats and deep purses, from the city’s finest families. It was Pie’s idea that they should form a committee to raise funds to rebuild the orphanage; the women insisted that Pie lead the effort.
Was I convinced that since Bobby loved me so much, he’d never turn to Pie? Did I think I had all the months in the world to change my mind? All I can say is that for a while it was a relief to be alone, with no one demanding more of me. By the time I got my feeling back, weeks had passed.
One night, I waited till the house was asleep. Wearing only my nightgown, I brushed my hair so it was long feathers, the way Bobby liked it. I shut Rogue in our attic room and crept downstairs and out the kitchen door.
There was no moon and I nearly broke my neck tripping over a shovel that was lying on the ground. I was already flustered, and the creak-groan of the heavy garage door rolling on its casters unnerved me more.
“Bobby?”
“Hey!”
“Bobby, please, just let me get this out: I love you. I do. I didn’t for a while, I mean, I sort of forgot. But I do—”
“Don’t,” he said sternly, rushing toward me, the heat of him, naked. “Don’t.”
I couldn’t see his face in the dark, and his tone had a bite. I supposed it was because he was hurt or mad, of course he was. I hung my arms around his neck, and searched for his mouth with my lips.
Then I heard rustling. No, it was more that I felt-heard another animal in that small space.
“Who’s that?” I whispered.
“V, it’s me,” Pie declared. That was all she said.
The next afternoon, when Cap, not knowing, told me that Bobby had taken Pie on a buggy ride to the ocean, I wanted to beg, Why, Bobby, why? But I knew.
Loose Papers
Tomorrow, April 18, they’ll come for me. They’ll bring me a corsage, wrap me in blankets, and strap me to my chair. They’ll take me down the road to Lotta’s Fountain. There at the crux of Market Street, they’ll take my picture for the paper: the oldest living survivor of the ’06 quake.
That’s tomorrow. Today, I’m just enjoying the peace.
“Vera, want to tidy a bit before the hoopla?” the nurse asked me this morning when she came to roll me this way and that in my bed.
My hands are spotted lobster claws, my nose and ears are the only parts still growing; if I make it to a hundred and six I can be an elephant for Halloween.
So I asked, “Gloria, just how much tidying do you think is possible for a body this far gone?”
Gloria chuckled. She thinks I’m a funny old bird.
I have lived beyond a century. A hundred years of bombs and push. A century where man’s genius made him a devotee of machines. A hundred years of world wars punctuated by the true miracles of penicillin and the silicon wafer and the Beatles. The first half of the century was hard on my body; the second half has been hard on my mind.
Even so, tomorrow they’ll park me beside Lotta’s cast-iron fountain, two relics of survival, and blast the horns and speak of the great shaker, as if it is a thing of the past. They’ll ask, How did you manage to survive the catastrophe?
And I’ll be a smart-ass and say, Which one? The last one, or the next one coming?
They won’t ask about the fire, that part has faded. It’s all quake now, and notions of a once-raucous city of hookers and gin joints on the Barbary Coast, of con men with gold-lined pockets and girls in low-cut dresses doing the cancan. They won’t ask about Mayor Schmitz, long dead, also forgotten.
We were more alive after the quake than we had any right to be.
Tan, Valentine, Capability, and I passed the one-year anniversary of the quake, April 18, 1907, in the gold house, where we shared our midday dinner and concerns. We were at the kitchen table one day when the post arrived, with a letter from the assessor’s office, which didn’t exist anymore, just a couple of desks in the temporary City Hall. The letter was regarding taxes. Taxes due. It turned out Rose hadn’t paid the taxes on the house in years.
“Look, your name is on the envelope,” Valentine said. “That’s gotta be a mistake.”
Tan, ever the scrapper, solved the riddle. He gathered those loose papers that had been waiting at the bottom of the safe the whole time and brought them to me. We fanned them across the dining room table. Glory be, they were deeds. Deeds and transfers and escrow documents. Carefully executed, signed in Rose’s hand.
Rose, it turned out, didn’t just invest in gold. She had her lawyers buy land in the ultimate fire sale, for a fraction of its worth. Barren lots, but one day worth
