Chapter 30

We started for home on a Thursday, the next to last day of August. We'd ridden, and walked, and slept, and eaten, and talked, without further interruption from criminals or law enforcement. The only dead bodies we'd found were the carcasses of chollas, which though certainly tough enough to live in the desert seem, to me at least, to die more frequently than the other cacti. Perhaps it's just because they're the dominant cactus out there, but I don't seem to see nearly as many dead or dying barrel or old man or paddle or prickly pear cacti.

Cecelia had found the prickly pear crop was small, so we wouldn't have any jelly that year. We had, however, stocked up on cactus honey, that dark and delicious stuff that's the only honey we use. Clover honey, with its light color, is much prettier, but as far as I'm concerned there's nothing better than cactus honey. We all love hot biscuits, with dabs of butter melting on the open halves and the dark honey poured over the top.

We'd seen tarantulas and finally tarantula hawks, a couple of tortoises, half a dozen rattlesnakes, including one Mojave green, herds of the nearly wild cattle the OX Ranch runs, and once, far off across the valley, a wild burro. We'd heard the coyotes singing at night, we'd gone back to our little canyon and visited the owl colony that roosts high up on one wall, we'd watched nighthawks and then bats swirling overhead as they swooped and dived after insects as dusk fell. We'd all gotten darker – me and Darlia most conspicuously, since Cecelia's naturally darker to begin with.

Wednesday afternoon we'd packed up our gear and our trash, and headed for Needles. We'd gotten showers and done laundry, and slept in beds for the first time in nearly a month. It was the beginning of our return to civilization, and though all of us love our house in Albuquerque, and our friends, and the life we have there, we all were a bit homesick for the valley as we got up in the morning and turned in our keys. But we did have to get back, if only for Darlia to start school on time.

And as we headed east into Arizona, I felt a bit of anticipation building. I wondered what Cecelia would say when she saw the sewing machine in her corner. I'd almost forgotten about my surprise while we were in the desert, but now that we were returning to the city I remembered again, and only my long habit of surprising her enabled me to keep from blurting out the secret.

We spent that night in Gallup, for going home we never drive as hard as we do headed west. Gallup's right near the Navajo reservation, and there are a lot of Indians there, though indeed there are a lot of Indians in Albuquerque too, and anywhere in New Mexico. In some parts of the United States they either got killed off or driven out, and you can find anything except Indians, but they're a presence in New Mexico, and many of the tribes live on the same land they were on when the Spanish first came into the country. The Navajo don't have all of their traditional land, but they've still got the biggest reservation in the country – it's the size of New England, though only a few thousand people live there. The Navajo like to scatter out. I'm that way too. Whites tend to be more like the various Pueblo nations – they gather in big groups and live on top of one another. An apartment complex doesn't look all that much different from a traditional pueblo.

From Gallup to Albuquerque was only a couple of hours, and we pulled up in front of the house around 11 in the morning. I noticed that Cecelia's Mazda was in the driveway, but passed over that unusual sight for the moment – Rudy and Sara were coming out the front door to meet us.

It was a race. Cecelia headed for Sara, Darlia headed for Gacela, and I headed for Rudy, and for a few minutes all we did was swap hugs. I'm not enough of a mathematician to figure out how many different permutations six people can come up with, but I know there was a lot of hugging among us.

Finally, when we'd dried our eyes and gotten our smiles under control, I turned to Cecelia. "What's your car doing in the driveway?"

She smiled at me. "You should know, Darvin, that I haven't been here for a month, and have had no contact with anyone here." Now her smile became a grin. "But as it happens that is no excuse; I know precisely why it is there. Come with me." And she took my hand and led me toward the garage door – which, I realized, wasn't a door anymore, but a wall that matched the stucco of the rest of house, with two large windows in it, looking out onto Inez Park.

"What on earth is going on, Cecelia?" I asked, just as I saw the door in the new wall.

"Sara?" my wife said, and Sara dangled a key in front of my face. I took it in a daze, and looked back at Cecelia.

"Use it, my darling," she said.

I used it. The lock worked smoothly, and the door swung open ... on what was not a garage any longer. I felt a hand pushing me in the back, and realized I was blocking the door. I stepped in. There was a dark wooden desk in front of me, facing the door-that-was-now-a-wall, with a leather high-backed chair behind it. Around the walls were bookshelves of the same dark wood, and my library was arranged there, more neatly than it had been arranged in years. Under my feet I heard a wood floor, and light streamed in from the windows behind me and kept the dark wood from turning the place into a dungeon. On the wall behind the desk was a new portrait of Cecelia, one I'd never seen before. It showed her from the shoulders up, with her hair down in the semi-afro that I love but she never wears, her black tilted eyes bright, and that wonderful gentle smile on her lips. On the south wall – to my right as I stood there – I saw my license to preach and my ordination certificate, and my retired investigator's shield from the Red Hawk Police Department.