Mirage 2012
21
Phoenix that same afternoon and would be gone through the weekend. Geraldine and her daughters had gone with him last year—both Mia and Tanya’s first time in a hotel. The girls had begged to go with him again, but Nolan—still reeling from the death of his two best nannies that spring, lost to impossibly posterior births—said no. “It’s not a vacation,” he told them harshly, and took Thom, the hired man, instead. That evening, Geraldine ladled out the stew she’d made that morning and pulled a loaf of bread from the fridge. The girls poured ketchup into their bowls and spread their bread with mayonnaise, tastes they’d learned from their father. “I have a surprise,” Geraldine announced. The girls looked up from blowing steam off their spoons. “We’re going to Hoover Dam.” Tanya gasped, choking for a moment on inhaled broth. Nolan claimed that Geraldine’s Hoover talk was just a foolish way of putting on airs. But Geraldine’s mother took pride in the connection. “Not everyone can say they’re related to a president,” she’d tell her granddaughters solemnly as they sat together in the front pew on Sundays. “You’re part of a special bloodline.” And then, last spring, Geraldine’s mother unexpectedly developed pneumonia, expelling a great deal of that very blood in her final coughing fit. “When?” Tanya asked. “I thought we’d leave tomorrow morning. We’ll ask Thom’s son to take care of the goats.” “Does Dad know?” Mia asked. Geraldine thought before answering. Nolan would say they couldn’t afford it. And they couldn’t. She’d probably have to take Mia and Tanya over to rummage through the closet of their neighbor, Nora Findlay, for hand-me-downs before school started in a few weeks. “No,” she told her daughter. “He doesn’t.” The girls smiled at each other and kicked their legs under the table in excited rebellion. They bowed their heads to their bowls and ate, scalding their mouths with piping-hot potatoes in their haste.