Free Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives by Betty Webb

owned?”
    “Solomon let me keep enough to build a simple house, but the house itself and the land it stands on belong to the Foundation.”
    Seeing the expression on my face, he nodded. “Yeah, I know. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But that kind of setup isn’t unusual on the Arizona Strip. For some folks, it’s not that bad because the prophets take care of all the legal fees everybody’s always racking up for one reason or another, and let me tell you, some of those legal bills can look like the national debt. So anyway, I rationalized my stupidity by telling myself that giving my money away was a fair enough price to get rid of my loneliness.”
    Loneliness.
Now there was a buzz word for you.
    Of all human emotions, loneliness ranked third only to hatred and love as the most powerful. The fear of loneliness kept battered women with abusive men, and cuckolded husbands with wives who didn’t give a damn about them. For some of us, the prospect of loneliness was so terrifying that it kept us
alone
, which was not the same thing. It’s my theory that you can only suffer the worst forms of loneliness if you’ve experienced its opposite—love. I hadn’t.
    Like many children raised in foster homes, I had always resisted forming attachments. Becoming attached to any foster family could bring a whole truckload of pain, because any day you could be wrenched away. Foster families, by their very nature, were temporary. Jobs changed, necessitating the family’s move from the state, leaving their foster children—wards of the state of Arizona—to find new homes. In some cases, foster mothers developed breast cancer.
    I wondered how Madeline was doing now. If the cancer that had separated us had recurred.
    Loneliness? Oh, yeah. I understood Saul better than he realized. “I get the picture,” I told him.
    His craggy old face showed relief. “Once I finished building my house Solomon told me I’d have to wait for a while to get a wife. He said that I had not yet been ‘tested in the Faith,’ whatever that meant. The real reason, I soon found out, was that all the unmarried women in the compound had been promised to other men, mostly Solomon’s relatives and cronies. Eventually, though, Solomon kept his word and gave me a wife.”
    Now his eyes looked as sad as Virginia’s. “That didn’t work out, either. Let’s just say Ruby and I never hit it off.”
    At this point, a Hispanic man wearing an apron emerged from the ranch house, carrying an immense steaming cobbler. The smell wafting from the deep dish had me nearly swooning with delight.
    Setting the cobbler down, the man said to Virginia, “This is the last of the peaches. Tomorrow we will start on the blackberries, and after that, the apples.”
    “Thanks, Juan,” she said. “Hey, how’s Consuelo doing? She any better?”
    “Consuelo will be able to help you tomorrow, she thinks. She is very sorry she has caused so much trouble for you.”
    “Phooey. She didn’t do any such thing. You just tell her to take care of herself. If she needs somethin’, juice or tea, you let me know and I’ll take it up to her.”
    Juan nodded. “I will do that. The guests in the other room are drinking now. Is that all right?”
    Leo chuckled. “Just as long as they don’t start rehashing World War II.”
    “Please?”
    Virginia smiled. “Just one of Leo’s jokes, Juan. Once you finish up in there, you go on upstairs and help Consuelo out. Take the evening off. I’ll go make nice with the guests.”
    Juan’s face broke into a big smile. “Thank you, Mrs. Lawler. I will do that.”
    He went back into the house, a happy man.
    The conversation, minor as it had been, reminded me of something that had puzzled me earlier. Mormons liked large families, but nowhere throughout the ranch house had I seen any evidence of children or grandchildren. Could their absence have anything to do with the sadness in Virginia’s eyes?
    I eased into the question. “I have a friend, Slim