Free Mothers and Other Liars by Amy Bourret Page A

gleaming brighter than it has since Mrs. Levy’s thrice-a-week cleaning lady had her elbows in the suds. The wood floors have been mopped and buffed and conditioned. Every inch of kitchen—appliances, cabinet faces, that grimy seam around the stovetop—has been assaulted with toothbrush and toothpick. Ruby has beaten and vacuumed rugs and carpets, bundled newspapers for recycling. And she has cried.
    She keeps waiting to feel some of Nana’s holiness. She can feel her raw fingers and elbows and knees. She can feel the itchy sweat on the back of her neck and down between her boobs. And she can feel tears carving deep ravines in her cheeks, eroding her face.
    Ruby held her own tears until Lark went back to sleep. In part, she held them for Lark. Mostly, though, she held them for herself.
    They’ve been there, every second since she found the article, pressing against her eyeballs like river water against a dam. Ruby has let a few drops squeeze through, but she’s been afraid that the dam would break and wash her away. Not even the mountains would be barrier enough to stop Ruby from washing off the edge of the world.
    But she couldn’t hold them back anymore. The flood of tears burns her skin, clogs her nose, chokes her throat. She has cried and cried and cried and cleaned—a soggy twist on that spit-and-polish thing—and still there is no sign of the swollen waters receding. If God was here in this mess of dailiness, He washed away in the suds and the salt. If the human body is 98 percent water, Ruby is a wisp of her former self. Surely she’ll blow away in a gust of wind before she has to face saying good-bye to Lark.

TWENTY-NINE
    Antoinette’s little blue convertible hugs the two-lane roads. From the driver’s seat, Ruby watches the road with one eye, and Lark and Clyde with the other. Child and dog hang their heads out the side of the car, cheek to muzzle in the rippling breeze.
    Ruby still feels like a wet rag from her crying spree last night. Yet when Antoinette knocked on the door early this morning, offering her car for the day, Ruby accepted without hesitation, loaded up Lark and Clyde, and headed north under a blue-umbrella sky.
    The Jeep is beloved, like a faithful pet all these years. But Antoinette’s little Mazda was made for days like this, on roads like these. Canada, Ruby thinks. She could just keep driving and driving and driving.
    Instead Ruby drives the Land of Enchantment’s Chimayo loop. They took Old Taos Highway through Tesuque, stopped at the village market for the best sourdough French toast on earth. The waitresses were their usual small-town selves, all honey this and darlin’ that. The French toast looked as beautiful as ever, pale daffodil butter melting on sugar-dusted golden bread. The bacon was cooked crisp, almost carcinogenic, just the way Ruby always ordered it, and the coffee was creamy and hot. But the meal could have been cardboard for all Ruby tasted.
    They stopped for a while beneath the towering walls of the Rio Grande Gorge to let Clyde romp around in the river, then they followed its banks farther north on the two-lane highway. Lark is quiet but not simmering. Ruby isn’t sure if her daughter has regressed to denial or if this is progress through the tunnel of grief. She’s just glad to have a break of sunshine from the anger cloud.
    Just before Taos, they crossed over to the high road, followed the snaking asphalt through the rugged hills, past dust-bowl towns shadowed by red cliffs and towering pines, and into Chimayo. Adobe walls older than time bank both sides of the narrow streets of the town. Ruby parks in the lot across from the church, tells Clyde to stay in the car. Together she and Lark cross the open square and enter the little chapel.
    After passing through the sanctuary, they walk into a tiny back room where wooden crutches and metal braces and yellowed testimonials are tacked to the walls, evidence of all the miracles that have come before them in this