using a bowl as a frame, until she had enough to outfit a platoon of child Romans. Her jefa left the helmets to dry and gave a stealthy peek through the playroom’s window at the backyard. Pepe was gone and the plants in the tropical garden were mourning his absence even more than Araceli. The translucent stems of the begonia ‘Ricinifolia’ were performing a deep bow in Pepe’s honor, reaching down to kiss the drying soil at their feet, while their asterisk bursts of flowers, each pale pink petal the size of Samantha’s thumbnail, were drying and withering and being plucked off by the breeze. Like flakes of ash, the paper-thin petals caught hot drafts and floated magically upward and away from the garden and the window, where two women and a baby girl stood watching.
Later that afternoon Maureen changed out of her smock and yoga pants into jeans and a loose-fitting Stanford T-shirt of Scott’s. She put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and walked purposefully back into the garage, deciding to ignore the bottles of chemicals for the moment as she retrieved a stiff pair of garden gloves and some rusty tools. Then she marched up to la petite rain forest and got a good look at the crabgrass weeds that were filling up the dry soil at the base of the calla lilies and the banana tree. These could be removed rather simply, with a hoe, and Maureen began to do so, with a rhythmic and therapeutic hacking. Hurry, hurry, before the baby starts to cry. Maureen felt a pang of guilt when she remembered Guadalupe’s departure, and she regretted not having told her sons that their babysitter would never be coming back. Samantha would forget about Guadalupe quickly, but the boys would not, because after five years she had truly become “part of the family,” a phrase that for all its triteness still meant something. Her boys deserved some sort of explanation, but the thought of giving them one squeezed Maureen’s throat into silence: how much longer could she keep up the fiction about Guadalupe’s “vacation”?
Moving more quickly, Maureen retrieved a hose from the side of the house and sent streams of water over the ribbed banana leaves: a tree like this was worth having just for the wide sweep and silhouette of the leaves. That had been the impulse of planting la petite rain forest in the first place: to hide the adobe-colored wall behind it and create the illusion that these banana trees and tropical flowers were the beginning of a jungle plain where savage tribes lived and vines swallowed the metal shells of downed airplanes. With a quick spray the stand of Mexican weeping bamboo looked healthier, though Maureen didn’t have time to rake up the dead leaves clustering at their base. With regular watering and maybe a bag of organic mulch—tropical gardens needed mulch, didn’t they?—she might get la petite rain forest looking fit and trim again in time for Keenan’s birthday.
With Araceli’s help they would make it to the day of the party without any major embarrassments. It was to be both a birthday party and the annual, informal reunion of the old crew from MindWare, the company her husband-to-be had cofounded a decade earlier in the living room of Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian, a garrulous charmer and pitchman from Glendale. Maureen had joined them eighteen months later as their first-ever “director of human resources,” which in those undisciplined and freethinking early days made her a kind of company den mother. MindWare had since been sold to people who did not wear canvas tennis shoes to work, and the twenty or so pioneers who were its core had been dispersed to the winds of entrepreneurial folly and corporate servitude. Scott came out of his shell when “the Duo of Destiny and Their Devoted Disciples” were reunited and drank too much sangria, which was another reason why Maureen went to the trouble of making each party a small exercise in perfection.
Maureen stepped back inside and found Samantha resting her cheek against Araceli’s shoulder in the living room, looking out the big picture window in a somnolent daze while beads of sweat dripped from Araceli’s forehead. She’s been holding the baby this entire time. “Thank you, Araceli,” Maureen said as she relieved her maid of Samantha’s weight.
Maureen was carrying Samantha to the playroom when a flash of green on the floor caught her eye: her husband had left a trail of cut grass