Moonlight was pouring in through the bedroom window like a watery version of my mother's potato soup. Moon soup, I thought, hugging myself under the covers. Somewhere in the neighborhood a cat yowled like a baby, and somewhere else, closer by, a rooster crowed, even though it was nowhere near daybreak.

Chapter 10 The Bean Trees

Even a spotted pig looks black at night. This is another thing Mama used to tell me quite often. It means that things always look different, and usually better, in the morning.

And they did. Mattie called first thing to say that Esperanza was going to be all right. They hadn't pumped her stomach after all because she hadn't taken enough to do much harm. I made Estevan a big breakfast, eggs scrambled with tomatoes and peppers and green chile sauce, and sent him home before I could start falling in love with him again over the breakfast dishes. Turtle woke up in one of those sweet, eye-rubbing moods that kids must know by instinct as a means of saving the human species from extinction. Lou Ann came home from the Ruiz family reunion singing "La Bamba."

It's surprising, considering Roosevelt Park, but we always heard birds in the morning. There must be transients in the bird world too, rumple-feathered outcasts that naturally seek out each other's company in inferior and dying trees. In any case, there were lots of them. There was a type of woodpecker that said, "Ha, ha, ha, to hell with you!" I swear it did. And another one, a little pigeony-looking bird, said, "Hip hip hurroo." Lou Ann insisted that it was saying "Who Cooks for Who?" She said she had read it in a magazine. I had a hard time imagining what kind of magazine would go into something like that, but I wasn't about to argue. It was the first time I could remember her hanging on to her own opinion about something-Lou Ann not normally being inclined in that direction. One time in a restaurant, she'd once told me, a waiter mistakenly brought her somebody else's dinner and she just ate it, rather than make trouble. It was beef shingles on toast.

Gradually Lou Ann and I were changing the house around, filling in the empty spaces left behind by Angel with ABC books and high chairs and diaper totes and all manner of toys, all larger than a golf ball. I had bought Turtle a real bed, junior size, from New To You. We turned the screen porch in the back into a playroom for the kids, not that Dwayne Ray did any serious playing yet, but he liked to sit out there strapped in his car seat watching Turtle plant her cars in flowerpots. The fire engine she called "domato," whereas the orange car was "carrot." Or sometimes she called it "Two-Two," which is what I had named my Volkswagen, after the man who profited from my rocker arm disaster.

I had considered putting Turtle's bed out there on the porch too, but Lou Ann said it wouldn't be safe, that someone might come along and slash the screen and kidnap her before you could say Jack Robinson. I never would have thought of that.

But it didn't matter. The house was old and roomy; there was plenty of space for Turtle's bed in my room. It was the type of house they called a "rambling bungalow" (the term reminded me somehow of Elvis Presley movies), with wainscoting and steam radiators and about fifty coats of paint on the door frames, so that you could use your thumbnail to scrape out a history of all the house's tenants as far back as the sixties, when people were fond of painting their woodwork apple green and royal blue. The ceilings were so high you just learned to live with the cobwebs.

It wasn't unreasonably hot yet, and the kids were bouncing around the house like superballs (this was mainly Turtle, with Dwayne Ray's participation being mainly vocal), so we took them out to sit under the arbor for a while. The wisteria vines were a week or two past full bloom, but the bees and the perfume still hung thick in the air overhead, giving it a sweet purplish hue. If you ignored the rest of the park, you could imagine this was a special little heaven for people who had lived their whole lives without fear of bees.

Lou Ann was full of gossip from her weekend with the Ruiz cousins. Apparently most of them spoke English, all the men were good-looking and loved to dance, and all the women had children Dwayne Ray's age. She had about decided that every single one of them was nicer than Angel, a conclusion to which they all heartily agreed, even Angel's mother. A large portion of the flock were preparing to move to San Diego.

"I can't believe it," she said, "first Manny and Ramona, you remember, the friends I told you about that saw the meteor shower? And now two of Angel's brothers and their wives and kids. You'd think they'd discovered gold out there. Angel used to always talk about moving to California too, but I'll tell you this right now, Mama would have had an apoplectic. She thinks in California they sell marijuana in the produce section of the grocery store."