Joanne really laughed at that one. “Oh, right, as if that has ever made any difference!”
“Come on.” I used my best little-sister whine. “You got to wait in the car last time. It’s my turn to sit this one out.”
“You are such a baby” Joanne pushed open the Jeep door. “I can’t believe you always get your way.”
“Me!? Always get my way? You were the one who said you wanted cake!”
Joanne paused, blinked, and seemed to have no comeback. “Well, so I did. And here we are. In front of a bakery. Imagine that. I guess I’ll go buy a cake.”
I shook my head as she pranced into the store, chin held high.
A few yards away I spotted what looked like a rubbish bin and decided to throw away our empty water bottles. Getting out of the Jeep, I noticed a half-filled beer bottle sitting upright only inches from the back tire.
That probably explains why Joanne pulled into this spot at such a crazy angle. I might as well throw it away before we back over it. The last thing we need is a flat tire!
With all the bottles in hand, I headed toward the bin. A uniformed police officer stepped out of what looked like a barbershop, and with his hands resting on his wide belt, he spoke to me in Spanish.
I offered a congenial smile and nodded.
He’s probably thanking me for cleaning up the streets a little.
“Just tidying up.” I held up the bottles as he stepped closer.
He asked me something, and I returned a blank look. Reaching for the beer bottle, he shook it as if to verify it wasn’t empty.
“It’s not mine. It was over there on the street by our Jeep. I didn’t want to back over it.”
Does he think I was drinking the beer?
I vaguely remembered a warning the cruise personnel had issued when we took the shuttle into Ensenada. Joanne and I were still in a state of stunned silence because of the trauma with the toddler, but something was said about it being illegal to possess an open beer bottle on Ensenada’s sidewalks. Did that law apply in San Felipe as well?
“It’s not mine,” I stated emphatically, pointing again to the Jeep. “I found it in the street.”
With all the compassion of a stone, the officer reached for his handcuffs as he spoke to me in Spanish.
“No, no! You don’t understand! I didn’t do anything. I was just cleaning up. That’s what I do best.”
He held the handcuffs to the side and kept talking to me, his chin motioning toward the Jeep.
“Do you want to inspect the Jeep? Is that it? Are you asking if I have any more beer? Because I don’t. It’s just water. Do you want to see? You can come look. Let me just throw these bottles away over here and—”
As I took two steps away from him, he yelled something.
“Okay. I won’t go anywhere. I’ll just stand here. My sister is right over there, in the bakery, getting cake.” I tried the only Spanish word I could think of. “Pastels. She’s buying pastels.”
“¿Pasteles?” he asked.
“Si, pasteles.”
Just then Joanne stepped out of the bakery, and from my throat came a terrified sounding, “Jo-anne! Over here! Come quick!”
My startled sister hurried over, carrying a thin cardboard box.
“Everything okay?” She looked at me and then at the officer.
“He thinks I was drinking. But that’s not my bottle of beer. I was trying to clean up the street.”
“She does that,” Joanne said to the officer with a smile. “She likes things to be organized.”
He wasn’t impressed. The handcuffs made an irritating clinking as he slowly moved them from side to side. His eyes were fixed on the pastry box Joanne was holding.
“¿Pasteles?” He put down the beer bottle.
“Yes,” Joanne said proudly. “I bought two dancing ladies and some sort of coconut cream cake, I think. It looked good, but the woman at the bakery couldn’t tell me what it was.”
Joanne turned to me. “The woman in the bakery spoke English. You should have gone in.”
I couldn’t believe Joanne was being so flippant and friendly with this guy. Opening the lid to the cake box, she nodded for the officer to look inside.
“Does that look like white cake to you? Or is it coconut?”
“He doesn’t speak English,” I whispered to Joanne. “I think he’s threatening to arrest me.”
“For throwing away rubbish?”
“No, I think because the beer bottle wasn’t empty. Remember what they told us on the shuttle in Ensenada?”
Joanne looked confused. I doubted she remembered much of those announcements.
“Hey,” Joanne said, as the officer reached into the box and lifted out the coconut covered piece of cake. “I meant for you to identify it for me, not take it.”
An ancient system had gone into play between the officer and the two of us.
“No, that’s okay.” I quickly nodded at the Federale. “You can have that.”
He returned his handcuffs to his belt loop, and with a satisfied expression took a big bite of the cake.
“I see how it is.” Joanne closed the lid on the box. “Come on, let’s leave while we still have our dancing ladies.”
I had no idea what Joanne was talking about, but I remembered Aunt Winnie saying something on the phone the morning I left about eating a dancing lady for her. Apparently dancing ladies were a Mexican pastry.
To be on the safe side, I didn’t throw away my empty water bottles in case a law existed about not recycling plastic. I made Joanne cross at the corner so we wouldn’t be jaywalking. We had just climbed into the Jeep, with me driving this time, when the officer called out to us. He was slowly coming across the street.
“Do you have any more money on you?” I asked Joanne.
“Yes, but I am not going to give that man cash for a bribe or a payoff or whatever you’re suggesting. You’re the one who always is standing up for justice and saying the world isn’t fair. I can’t believe you want to pay off this guy.”
“I don’t. I was asking if you had more money to buy a couple of pastries in case he wants to eat ours.”
Joanne shook her head as we watched him approach. “It’s still not fair.”
The officer walked around the vehicle and seemed to be pointing out that we weren’t lined up in the assigned parking space.
“I was trying not to run over the bottle of beer,” Joanne said plainly.
Moving to the back of our Jeep, he patted the Mexican blanket that covered our groceries and gave a chin-up gesture asking, I assumed, something along the lines of, “What are you hiding under here?”
“Bottles of water,” Joanne said with a slice to her words. “Are you thirsty now?”
He pulled back the blanket and helped himself to one of the bottles, holding it up as if to make sure we weren’t smuggling vodka into the country.
“You’re welcome to have that.” I reached over and gave Joanne a nudge.
“That’s right. Help yourself.” Lowering her voice she added, “We know you will anyway.”
He was satisfied with two bottles of water—apparently the going rate for parking crooked on this side of town.
“Adios,” he said to us and waved us clear.
I backed up slowly as Joanne firmly held the pastry box in her lap. “Men like that…,” she muttered under her breath.
“Hey, relax. It’s okay. He didn’t haul me off to jail. We have plenty of water. And you bought an extra piece of cake anyhow, right?”
Joanne’s expression didn’t uncloud. She was acting like me. I tried to remember all the wise things she had said to me in moments like this.
“There were so many like him in India.” Joanne spoke through still-clenched teeth. “Those young girls would come to us and …” She couldn’t finish her sentence.
I knew the medical team Joanne worked with specialized in restoring young women who were victims of slavery, specifically girls who had been sold into prostitution. H
er prayer support letters had contained sanitized versions of the horrible injustices done to girls as young as nine years old, when they were sold by their parents into a life of abuse.
The intensity of what Joanne must have experienced over there never had connected to anything I could relate to. My daughters were safe. I was safe. Joanne was a saint. That’s how I saw it. I preferred to stay sheltered and not to hear any specifics of her experiences, even after she came home, and we started our routine phone calls.
“You’ve seen a lot of injustice, haven’t you?”
Joanne nodded. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
I drove back the way we had come and turned on the street I remembered seeing listed on the map. “Now what?” I asked Joanne. “Can you pull out that paper and tell me where we turn next?”
“It looks like you keep heading toward the beach. We’re looking for a short road called Mar Vista. When you reach Mar Vista, turn right, and it should be right there. On the beach, I guess.”
“I’m getting excited,” I said. “Are you?”
“I guess I am. It’s like going after treasure in some ways. We’re closer, but we still don’t know what we’re going to find.”
“Didn’t Señor Campaña at the bank say it would be easy to sell the house, if we didn’t want to keep it?”
“Yes, I noticed that little comment, too. The key, I think, would be to find someone other than the bank to buy it.”
“Of course, we might want to keep it,” I commented, thinking of a lovely, tile-roofed house sitting on the sand next to the ocean like a fat hen settled into her nest.
I turned right on Mar Vista and stopped the Jeep. Before us stretched hundreds of yards of perfect, white sand broken only by an occasional palm tree that clung to a stretch of land close to the undeveloped road. Behind us were two spacious homes that looked as if they had been built only recently. In front of one house sat a shiny new pickup truck with a dune buggy attached to a trailer. The other house looked as if it was still under construction. Neither of those could have been Uncle Harlan’s. But they looked like the beautiful start of an upscale neighborhood.
“So where’s the house?” I looked at the map.
“I guess we have to go down this road a little farther,” Joanne said.
The road wasn’t paved, but that didn’t surprise us. Clumps of some sort of overgrown beach grass sprouted to our left. Shooting up from the center was a single, rather spectacular palm tree.
I smiled. “It’s over there. That’s Uncle Harlan’s palm tree. Do you remember? From the photo?”
“I see jungle-style weeds and a palm tree, but where’s the house?”
“Let’s find out.” I drove a quarter of a mile to the left, parallel with the beach.
Then the dwelling came into plain view. I stopped the Jeep so we could take in the full ambience of our newly inherited beachfront property.
“It’s … a … trailer,” Joanne said slowly. “A sci-fi-style silver trailer.”
“I think they called them Airstreams.” I turned off the engine and got out. “You coming?”
Joanne, the normally buoyant one, sat with her two dancing ladies balanced in the box on her lap and chewed on her lower lip.
“I’ve never seen wrought iron bars on trailer windows before,” she said. “Have you?”
“Uncle Harlan was clever. We’ll give him that. Come on. I have the key here. Let’s see what’s inside.”
“Why? Can’t we sell it as is?”
“Without looking inside? It could be wonderful. Airstreams are retro, and retro is in. Where’s your sense of adventure, Joanne? This is too bizarre. I’m turning into you, and you’re turning into me. How did that happen?”
“Let me hold the key.” Joanne got out of the Jeep but still held the pastry box under her arm.
“Why do you want the key?”
“I just do. Let me open the door.”
“Why?”
“Okay, you know what? Never mind. You open the door. Go ahead. You do it.”
I stood there staring at my discombobulated sister, trying to figure out what was going on in that head of hers.
“Here.” I held out the key. “You open the door.”
She looked at the key, blinked, put the dancing ladies on the hood of the Jeep, and took the key from me.
Neither of us spoke as we stepped onto the large cement slab that formed the front patio area as well as the solid foundation for the silver trailer. The meshed lattice covering over the patio was in need of repair, but it was easy to imagine that at one time it had provided lovely shade.
A large lock ingeniously blocked the front door’s keyhole.
“Oh, great,” Joanne said. “We only have one key.”
“Try it on the padlock.”
It worked. We exchanged thrilled glances. It felt as if we were unbolting a weathered lock on a forgotten treasure chest.
“Here.” Joanne handed over the key. “You try the door’s lock.”
I tried to insert the same key into the front door, but it was too large. Our hopes sank.
“We don’t have another key.” I tried again. “This one is too big.”
Joanne took the key from me and tried it upside down. No good. “Why would Uncle Harlan do this?”
“Who knows? We can go back to town and find a locksmith or check back at the bank to see if we missed any additional envelopes.”
“Did you look through all the paperwork?” Joanne asked. “Maybe a second key was taped to one of the papers.”
“I don’t think so, but I’ll look.” I went back to the Jeep and pulled out a bottle of water. “You want one, Joanne?”
“Yes, please.”
I brought the water, the pastries, and the official papers.
“We can’t celebrate with our pastries, yet,” Joanne said. “We’re locked out.”
“So? We’re here. We made it all the way to Ensenada and all the way from Ensenada to San Felipe. We got to the bank, we signed all the papers, narrowly escaped imprisonment, and now we’re here. We made it, Joanne. That fact, in and of itself, is worth celebrating, don’t you think?”
“You’re right.”
Joanne and I sat together on the dirty cement slab in front of the door. First we looked through all the papers and the manila envelope. No extra key popped out. With resignation we opened the pastry box and lifted out the two slightly drooping dancing ladies.
“Why do you suppose these are called dancing ladies?” I held up the cream-puff type of dessert.
“Don’t you see it? This puffy part on the bottom is like the twirling skirt, the creamy stuff is the lady, and this smaller top slice of pastry is her head.”
“Or maybe it’s her hat,” I suggested.
“Her sombrero,” Joanne said with a faint chuckle. “These are little Sisterchicks in sombreros.”
“That’s better than being a couple of Sisterchicks in the slammer, like we almost were!”
“Here’s to being a couple of free birds.” Joanne held up her pastry as a toast so we could “clink” the dough skirts and say “cheers.”
“You’re sure calm about all this,” Joanne said.
“We accomplished something; we made it here. That feels like a huge step.”
“We aren’t inside yet.”
“So? We’ll figure it out.” I wiped my cream-tinged fingers on the side of the pastry box in lieu of a napkin. “Why do you suppose Uncle Harlan would put that massive lock on the door so it covered the normal lock?”
Joanne thought a moment, her tongue reaching for a dot of pastry flake that had stuck to her top lip like a snowflake. “I have no idea. Should we call Aunt Winnie?”
“She only came here one time. I doubt she would know.”
“Only one time?”
I nodded. “Yup, only one time.”
Like a watchdog waking at the slightest sound of a snapped twig, Joanne sat up straight and looked at me. “One time,” she repeated. “Tha
t’s it! Uncle Harlan put that big lock on there so it would be secure, but he’d only have to unlock the door one time.”
She hopped up and tried the door handle. Her theory worked; the door opened.
“You’re a genius, Jo!”
We stood back as the stale air escaped the hollowed-out silver bullet.
“All I needed was a little brain food.” She laughed. “Are you sure we’re ready to venture into the unknown?”
“Last one in is a crybaby.” I took the single step up into the trailer. The first sight that caught my eye made me scream and jump back. I bumped into Joanne, who was on her way in.
“What is it?”
“I thought it was a person, but now I’m not so sure.” My hand flew to my chest. “Look!
Joanne stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders, gazing at the long figure “sitting” on the sofa, “wearing” a fishing hat, and “reading” the newspaper.
“What in the world is that?” Joanne asked. “It almost looks like a fish.”
I burst out laughing and tilted my head to get a better view of the long-nosed, four-foot-long, shimmering blue-scaled fish.
“I can’t believe it! Uncle Harlan’s marlin!”
“Uncle Harlan’s what?”
“His fish! Aunt Winnie told me about this creature. They argued about this fish for years. I thought it was mounted on a piece of wood. I didn’t know it hung around like a stuffed member of the family.”
“Uncle Harlan’s marlin.” Joanne slowly walked over and touched the well-preserved dummy. “We have very strange relatives, Melanie. Does that concern you the way it concerns me?”
“All the time.”
I slid past the mannequin fish and opened the screened windows to allow some air to flow through the wrought iron burglar protection bars. “Open those windows in the front, will you?”
“Did you see this furniture?” Joanne leaned over to pull back the curtains and open the slatted windows. “This is leather. I don’t think this was standard issue for these trailers.”
“It isn’t as dirty in here as I thought it would be.” I opened the final window. The fresh air and light gave the space a surprising sense of livability for such confined quarters. “This is really nice.”