Into the Wild. Beth Ciotta
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were bathrooms, labeled Señors and Señoritas, one of which was reasonably sanitary, Mary Beth decided after she’d checked them out. There was even a pay phone on the wall by the door. She picked up the receiver. It still had a dial tone. If she was lucky, maybe the previous tenants had left behind some food in their haste to skip out on their bills.
In any case the Tico Taco was now home.
“We won’t be going to Ouida’s,” she’d told Mr. Murdock. “We’ll be staying here. Could you help bring in our bags, please?”
“Here? But—but—but—” he’d sputtered like a rusty motor boat. “You can’t stay here!”
“Don’t I own it?”
“Well, of course.”
She smiled brightly. “Then I can stay here if I choose.”
“But it’s a restaurant. There are no beds.”
“I noticed that, too. But we can improvise, can’t we, Katy?”
“What’s improvise, Mommy?”
“It’s making do with what we have. We’ll pretend we’re camping and have lots of fun,” she said with a forced gaiety. “Those red booths look like they might do for beds. Pick out a soft one that you like,” she told her daughter.
“Okay.” Katy skipped away with her flop-eared dog.
Mary Beth turned to the elderly lawyer, who looked alarmed. “We’ll be just fine here, Mr. Murdock.”
“But, Mrs. Parker, it simply isn’t suitable for a woman and a child alone, especially with your injury. You’ll be much more comfortable at Ouida’s.”
“Perhaps so, but the plain truth is, sir, that I can’t afford to stay at the bed-and-breakfast. This will have to do.”
“Perhaps you could stay with friends, or I could advance you a small sum—”
She lifted her chin and stiffened her spine. “Thank you, Mr. Murdock, but no. The Tico Taco is perfectly adequate for the time being.” She pasted a big grin on her face. “Why, it’s the next best thing to a vacation in Mexico. We’ll have a grand time here. And it’s free.”
He hadn’t wanted to leave them alone, but she finally convinced him to go. After their bags were unloaded—Mr. Murdock muttering something about the modern generation of young ladies all the while—the man left. Mary Beth gripped the handles of her crutches tightly and resisted the urge to hobble after him, yelling for him to wait.
While Katy was still exploring, Mary Beth stood alone in the middle of the dining room and looked around at her new home.
Smells of corn tortillas, spices and old grease hung in the air. A coating of dust covered everything from the faded paper piñatas hanging from the ceiling to the scarred wood floor. It was a far cry from the lovely two-story home with the pillars that she’d lived in when Brad was embezzling money from the savings-and-loan company where he was vice president.
She ached to sit down in one of those old chairs, lay her head on the table and bawl like a baby.
But she didn’t. She’d learned early on that crying didn’t help her situation. It only made her face blotchy and alarmed Katy.
She was sick of playing the victim role. It was time for her to take charge of her life. A dozen times a day she told herself that. But that wasn’t as simple as it sounded, and she often overreacted in one extreme or the other. She was new to this business of being independent; it wasn’t her nature. There had always been a strong man around to handle things and it had been easy to acquiesce. Her father had been authoritarian and overly protective, and Brad had been mega-domineering. Come to think of it, J.J. had been that type as well—not as bad as Brad perhaps, but inclined in that direction. He was definitely a take-charge kind of guy. Was he still?
In a way, she supposed, this whole experience with Brad’s arrest and the mess she found herself in might be a good thing. “Things happen for a reason,” her mother had always said. Maybe one day she’d look back on this time and think of it as character-building, but it was hard for her to be philosophical when she was tired and scared and broke. She was beginning to think that character-building was vastly overrated. Maybe being an independent woman was overrated, too. She felt like a tangle of contradictions: determined to stand on her own two feet on one hand while wanting to yell for someone to save her on the other.
Sometimes life was a bitch.
Mary Beth knew that she couldn’t depend on a white knight riding in to save her—although it had been tempting to simply melt into J.J.’s arms and never let go. When he’d hugged her at the bus station, it had seemed so right. He’d seemed like a knight in a cowboy hat, and Naconiche had seemed like Camelot.
“Things always work out for the best” had been another of her mother’s sayings. That had become Mary Beth’s mantra. Somehow, some way, things were going to work out. She was determined to believe that.
And, dammit, she was going to become an independent woman or die trying.
Mary Beth turned on the ceiling fans and opened a couple of windows to air out the place, then she made her way to the kitchen. First things first. She and Katy had to eat.
Luck was with her. The pantry yielded a treasure trove, including several restaurant-sized cans of tomatoes, salsa, jalapeño peppers and beans. And more chili powder, cumin and other spices than she could use in fifty years. There was even part of a bag of rice and a ten-pound sack of onions that looked okay. The former tenants must have been in a powerful hurry not to have taken all the food along with them.
She found several blocks of cheese in the walk-in refrigerator, along with a few items past their prime, such as smelly milk, some rusty-looking lettuce and a couple of mushy bags of food she couldn’t identify. A shame about the milk. But she did find a box of individual cream cups, the kind used for coffee, two cartons of butter pats and five eggs that seemed okay.
In the big freezer, she discovered several packages of tortillas, an unopened box of chicken breasts that would feed Katy and her for weeks and another big box of ground beef.
She heaved a huge sigh and sent a prayer heavenward. At least they wouldn’t starve.
Making a quick tour of the rest of the kitchen, she found that the grill and the large stainless-steel gas stove were reasonably clean and in working order. She was grateful for her volunteer stint in the Junior League kitchens, since the stove was similar to one she’d learned to operate there. The grease in the deep fryer needed to be tossed and the fryer could stand a good scrubbing—but not now. Several big pots hung from an overhead rack, and there were enough smaller ones to do for Katy and her. There were two huge dishwashers and a triple stainless-steel sink.
“Mommy!”
“I’m here, honey.” She hobbled from the kitchen.
“Penelope and I have to go to the bathroom.”
“It’s right there,” Mary Beth said, pointing to the Señoritas door.
Katy frowned and glanced from the door to Mary Beth. “Would you go with us? Penelope is kind of…” The girl glanced at the door again.
Mary Beth smiled. “Uncomfortable in a new place?”
“Yes. I told her it was okay, but she’s uncomfortable.”
“No problem, sweetie.” She took Katy and her dog to the bathroom. And while she was there, she scoured the sink and other fixtures with an industrial-style cleanser she found in a cabinet.
The whole place needed cleaning, but she was too tired to tackle it all. She gave Katy a dust rag and instructions to wipe down the tables and booths while she tackled the kitchen and came up with dinner.
Other than a surface layer of greasy dust, the kitchen wasn’t too bad—apart from some things that looked suspiciously like mouse droppings. Rodents of all shapes