“How much we fight it when the darkness is replaced by light,” she answered.
Was she telling me that my poker playing was dark and that I had walked into the light that morning when I’d arrived at the Tumbleweed? Or was she angling for me to ask questions so she could deliver a sermon to me? Frank used to tell me not to ask a question if I didn’t want to know the answer. Something told me that if I swore out loud, Rosalie would preach at me, and I was too tired to do anything other than take a shower and fall into bed, so I didn’t ask her what she meant.
Scarlett must have thought the look on my face was because of the older pickup truck and the compact car parked in the space between the store and café, because she said, “The truck belongs to Rosie. The car is mine.”
“My SUV is in the parking lot,” I said.
“I didn’t think you rode in on a bus.” Scarlett walked three steps up to the tiny porch in front of an aqua-colored trailer. I was so tired that I didn’t even flinch when a lizard crawled across the porch.
Scarlett used the toe of her shoe to send the critter flying out into what passed for the front yard but was more like another small gravel parking lot. No picket fence or rosebushes—even though they would have been dead at that time of year—or a pet of any kind to greet us, unless that had been a pet lizard. Nothing to remind me of Paula’s house, with all the flower beds and her two big yellow dogs that ran out to meet us when we came home in the evenings. So why did a vision of them flash across my mind?
Rosalie covered a yawn with her hand. “I’m ready for a nap, and when I wake up, I’ll be starving. If either of you get up before I do, don’t eat all the corn bread.”
“No promises,” Scarlett chuckled and opened the front door.
In all my thirty years, I could never remember being inside a trailer house, and I was surprised to see how cozy and compact it was. I was standing in an open area with a short bar separating the tiny kitchen from the living room. A sofa with a recliner on each end was to my right. To the left, past the kitchen, was a long hallway.
Rosalie removed her coat and hung it on one of the wall hooks. “We take turns at taking a shower after work each day. Since you look like a warmed-over sin on a Sunday morning, you can have the first shower. But even if you own all this, you’ll have to be last tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am, but you sure are bossy.”
Scarlett laughed as she finished taking containers out of the paper bag and stacking them in the refrigerator. “She says that what she does is advising and she does it out of love.”
“That’s right, and don’t either of you forget it.” Rosalie shifted her stone-cold gaze from Scarlett to me. “Your bedroom is at the end of the hall. The bathroom is the last door on the right. You’ll pass the washer and dryer on the way. We are all responsible for our own laundry and for ordering the detergent we like. There’s some of those pod things thatMatilda used still on the shelf. They should last until Monday, when the supply guy comes by the café. You’ll need to write down what you want, because you’ll leave for Sierra Blanca right after the lunch run.”
“Why am I going there?” I asked.
“To set up bank accounts for the business,” Rosalie answered. “Matilda kept her money in Sierra Blanca, but when she died and the will was read, Larry moved it all to El Paso. And yes, Carla, I am bossy. Matilda left me in charge. She hoped that Larry would learn the business and I could help him straighten up his act. She would turn over in her grave if she knew what he had done this past year. Going through every dime she had saved, to the point that we are on the verge of bankruptcy. You are the owner of the place, so on Monday you will go to the bank, start an account, and then go file that deed at the courthouse so that everything is legal. You might even want to put a copy of it in a safe deposit box. It’s fifty miles down there, and the bank closes at four. Leaving when the last bus pulls away will give you plenty of time to take care of everything.”
Dealing with accounts was something else I would have to learn, but that would come on Monday. Frank and I dealt in prepaid credit cards that we could pick up at any bank. Those were only for hotel rooms. Everything else was cold, hard cash—until Paula came along, of course.
I suddenly felt a kinship with the place. Both of us needed some cash flow to keep doing what we wanted to do. “Why is the café in financial trouble?”
Rosalie yawned again. “Larry would come through on Monday and empty out the safe. If I hadn’t hid enough money for paychecks and to pay for our deliveries, we would have folded months ago. He let the insurance lapse, so if a tornado ripped the roof off or we had a pipe burst, we would have to pay out of pocket. Only, there was no pocket.”
“Then I guess the first week’s profit will go to buy a new insurance policy, right?”
“That would be a great idea. We’ll look into that after my nap,” she answered.
“We’ll give you our paychecks to put into our accounts while you are there,” Scarlett said.
“Did you do that with Larry?”
“Oh, no! After he moved all of Matilda’s affairs to El Paso, he never went back to Sierra Blanca. Besides, we didn’t trust him. One of us drove down to Sierra Blanca every two or three weeks to make a deposit.”
“Can I buy detergent or whatever I need at a Walmart there?”
“Nope,” Scarlett answered. “We try to get whatever we need from the delivery truck that comes every week. If you want a Walmart, you go to El Paso. Sierra Blanca is about the same size as Dell City. The difference is that it’s the county seat and has a bank.”
“I’m really out in the boonies,” I groaned.
Rosalie nodded and sank down into one of the recliners. “Yep, and it could be where you need to be if you give it a chance. I don’t know you, but you seem like a good person. Go get your shower. I’m next in line, and I need my afternoon nap.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
A memory of something my granddad said once popped into my head when I opened the door into the tiny bathroom. I was seven and he was dying when we’d gone to the hospital to visit him. He winked at me and said that the room they had him in was so small that he couldn’t cuss a cat without getting a hair in his mouth. He and my grandmother both died six months before my mama did. And then it was just me and Frank.
The trailer might have been as old as the café, because the bathroom was almost entirely pink. I wouldn’t have cared if they were turtle-poop green that afternoon. Everything was spotless, and I didn’t see a single roach or spider. On the trip from Tucson, I had hoped the utilities would be turned on so that I would have lights and water to wash up in the public bathroom. To have a place to live and plenty of food waspure luxury. I adjusted the water temperature and had one foot in the tub before I realized I wasn’t naked.
