Free Kissing Arizona by Elizabeth Gunn Page B

minutes after five on Monday mornings. It’s a little crazy but it works out. By eight thirty or nine I’m done, Enrique and I go have second breakfast someplace and still have the rest of the day for the yard.’
    â€˜That must be some yard.’
    â€˜You’d have to see it to believe. He’s a wizard with plants, that man of mine.’
    Rosa told her about coming to Tucson, a legal immigrant, just married, thirty-four years ago. ‘We rented a room . . . thought we was rich when we both got jobs and moved into two rooms.’ They had two toddlers, and were hoping to rent a house soon, when he was killed in a traffic accident.
    â€˜Me and my kids was very hard up for a while after that, lived in one room and ate very skimpy. I couldn’t find work because I couldn’t read English yet.’ A tiny shrug. ‘Couldn’t read Spanish much better. I got a friend to read the “help wanted” ads for me, the day Lois Cooper advertised in the paper for a housekeeper.’ She mused. ‘Just luck. That job with the Coopers saved my life.’
    One reason it went as well as it did, she said, was that her children and Lois Cooper’s were about the same age. ‘So even though we were crowded, I managed to take care of her kids and mine in that first little apartment behind the store on Grant Road. Did the laundry and cooking back there too while she ran the store out front.
    â€˜All those years of work, you know . . . we was never friends, but in some ways Lois Cooper and I understood each other better than we did anybody else.’
    â€˜Did she enjoy her children?’
    â€˜Nicole she was proud of but kind of strict, expected perfection. Tom, oh my, he was her baby and he could do no wrong.
    â€˜After they got the big store and moved to the house they got now in Colonia Solana, by then all the kids were in school and for a while I cleaned Lois’s house and two other big ones in that same part of town. Then I got lucky again and met my second husband. Enrique Torres, the man you met downstairs. He was good, treated my kids like they was his own. When he got on steady with the power company he said, “Why don’t you take it a little easier now?” So since then I just do Lois’s house two days a week and Nicole’s every other Thursday. Well, and Tom’s little place near the university, that don’t take much time.’
    â€˜No cooking any more?’
    â€˜They mostly all eat out now. And they’re gone a lot on weekends, all but Lois. She spends most of her free time at church or her sister’s house, I think.’
    Sarah said, ‘There’s some evidence to suggest that her husband killed her and then himself. Do you think that’s possible?’
    Rosa raised her shoulders, then her arms, and turned her hands up – a three-stage shrug that said life had become too incredible for words. ‘Since this morning I am not sure what is possible.’
    â€˜Sure. But . . . you knew them a long time. Everybody says they fought—’
    â€˜Argued. They disagreed, as married people will.’
    â€˜OK. Did they disagree enough to want to kill each other?’
    Rosa Torres watched her toes sadly for a few seconds before she said, ‘Maybe about the boy.’
    â€˜The boy? You mean Tom?’
    â€˜Sure, Tom. Only boy they got.’ After a couple of seconds she said, ‘Had,’ and her eyes grew bright. Sarah got ready to pass the tissue. But Rosa sat up straighter, sniffed once, and gave her a back-to-work nod.
    â€˜Are you saying the arguments about Tom were worse than the ones about the store?’
    â€˜Oh, the store.’ She dismissed the store with a backhand wave. ‘That was just how-to stuff. They both felt the same about the business. It was the center of their lives, and they each wanted to be the boss.’ A little sound, almost a laugh.