Free Harriet Doerr by The Tiger in the Grass Page B

apparently come by herself to spend a week in Ibarra.
    The Evertons stood with the porter below the vestibule, and all three raised an arm to bring Kate to them before she could suffer a change of heart and simply travel on.
    At last she spoke. “I’m alone,” she said, and stepped down.
    The Evertons led their guest away from the station, saying nothing to each other and only “No” to the vendors of bananas and tacos, baskets and lace. Except that Kate, approached by a ragged child crusted with dust, bought his entire stock of candy-coated gum and paid for it in dollars.
    While Richard lifted Kate’s suitcases into the car, she stood motionless, her umbrella planted against the ground like a divining rod.
    Richard took it from her. “There won’t be rain for three months. Not until June,” he said.
    Sara, looking in the direction of the platform, said, “Here comes Inocencia.”
    An old woman, wrapped in a number of shawls and bent as a gnarled branch, approached them in a patchwork of skirts that swept the dirt and stirred up discarded trash.
    Ancient of days, Sara thought, and of winds and frosts and cobblestones. “Inocencia begs in Ibarra,” she explained to Kate, “and here in Concepción, when she can get a ride.”
    On the way back to Ibarra, Kate sat with Richard in front, and Sara behind with Inocencia. I would like to call her Chencha, as the cura does, thought Sara. It is less formal. But there was something in the old woman’s blackbird eyes, something about her slippered feet set parallel on the floor, that discouraged intimacy.
    They turned north from the station toward the mountains and in ten minutes were on a narrow road winding around hillsides and through gullies.
    “How was the train?” Sara asked. “Did the fan work? Was there ice?”
    As though she had not heard, Kate made no response. She has traveled so much that details like these are immaterial to her, Sara supposed.
    Neither of the Evertons asked about Steve. Once Richard pointed to three silos clustered in the corner of a field like white wigwams and once to a vineyard covered with the green mist of breaking leaves. “Revisions in the landscape since you saw it last,” he said.
    From the back seat Sara watched Kate nod.
    After that Richard said nothing at all and Sara spoke once. Reminded when they passed the chapel of a crumbling hacienda, she said, “Next Wednesday is the Day of the Priests. We are invited to a program.” This information produced no answer.
    Not until they turned west at a pond where cows grazed in the muddy bottom, not until the car started to climb toward the hills, did Kate utter a word. Then she said, “We are separated.” Not “Steve and I.” Simply “We.” As if she were pronouncing separation to be a universal condition, a state in which every man and woman slept and woke. Sara looked at the back of Richard’s head, as if for reassurance.
    As they neared the summit of the mountain grade, Kate spoke again. “Steve decided at the border not to come. There was no way to let you know in time.” She appeared to be talking to herself. “He says living with me is like serving a sentence.” She might have been addressing the burro asleep on its feet in the road ahead of them.
    But they blame themselves, Sara thought, in sight of each other, for the death of the child. Since the day of the accident, guilt has taken up quarters with them. And blame just outside the door, rattling the knob.
    Divide the blame, Sara wanted to tell her friend, who sat mute and stiff in the seat ahead. Blame the precocious two-year-old and his suddenly longer reach. Blame the box beside the door, the latch that didn’t stick. Blame your quiet street and the one car on it. Blame the mother of five who drove it and who wept at the time and is probably weeping still. Blame her.
    Sara said all these things silently to Kate as they reached the top of the grade. Now the car was bumping down the stony track into Ibarra, and