-Milton W. Callon,

Las Vegas, New Mexico .

The Town That Wouldn't Gamble

INSIDE THE LINES.

Aunt May and Uncle Stan had been popular members of our community, nor was I without a wealth of friends and acquaintances of my own. In a remarkably short time, I had my parents' personal items cleared from the house. Mr. Patterson and Mr. O'Neill had dealt with the estate-an easy enough task as Uncle Stan had not believed in carrying debt. The house was paid for long ago, and his retirement had been generous enough that they had not been forced to take a reverse mortgage. Had they lived long enough that nursing care or other medical necessity had entered the picture, doubtless it would have been otherwise.

As it was, a month after my parents' deaths, the bulk of the problems were resolved, and I found myself sitting in the kitchen with Betty Boswell sharing a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of her excellent vanilla wafers.

"Have you decided what you're going to do with this place, Mira?" she asked.

"You mean sell it or not?" I said.

She nodded. "We have a nephew who is thinking of moving into the area, and, well ..."

"I don't know," I replied honestly. "I have my own house, and it's closer to the schools where I work, but it's not like anything is exactly far in this town. This place is bigger, however, and in good condition-and it would be a wrench to sell it."

"Ah," Betty said. She didn't look at all disappointed, and I made a mental note to see if this nephew really materialized, or if this had just been a polite way to fish for information.

"Actually," I said, "I'm thinking about running away from all of this for a while."

"Oh?" Betty didn't look at all surprised. If anything, she looked pleased. I wondered if she had something she wanted to run away from.

"School's out for another couple of months," I went on, "and I'm not teaching in any of the summer programs. I'd planned on it, but Aunt May and Uncle Stan died right about when I'd have had to start. I just didn't have the energy."

Betty knew this. She'd actually been among those who had advised me to take time off, but she nodded as if this was the first she'd heard of it.

"I was thinking about a long trip," I said. "I don't have any pets right now. My two old guys died this spring, as you know, and I'd been planning on getting a couple kittens or a puppy this summer, when I'd have time to settle them in. Now, though ..."

I stopped, swallowed hard, and dashed almost irritably at the tears running down my cheeks.

"Betty, I'm tired. Everything here is too full of memories and my life is too empty. I don't have anyone now-I mean, I have friends, lots of friends, good friends, but there isn't anyone I can't leave for a few months. Heck, with e-mail it won't even be like I'm gone. I want to get away. Then when everything doesn't hurt so much, then I can make some decisions."

"Where are you thinking of going?" Betty asked. "Back to Europe?"

I'd been on a Rhine cruise the summer before, me and Aunt May and Uncle Stan.

"No. Too soon. I want to go somewhere I haven't been for a long, long time. I'm thinking of going to New Mexico."

"New Mexico?" Betty tilted her head to one side in thoughtful surprise. "Didn't May tell me that was where you were born?"

"That's right. I haven't been back since I was nine. I was thinking about it the other night, and I realized that I haven't even been much west of the Mississippi. Uncle Stan took us to California a few times, and once to Oregon, but never the Southwest. It's a great place for an art teacher to go-I'm sure I'll come back full of new ideas and projects."

Betty wasn't fooled. "You've lost your parents and now you're looking for your roots, aren't you?"

"Maybe," I admitted. "You know I'm their adopted daughter, but did they ever tell you why I was available for adoption?"

"No, just that you were an answer to their prayers-a girl needing a home when they'd accepted they were unlikely to have children of their own."

I smiled at the familiar words, then sobered.

"My biological mother vanished when I was nine. I never knew who my father was. I still don't know whether either of them are alive. Maybe it's not so much that I'm looking for my roots-Aunt May and Uncle Stan gave me lots of good soil for settling those-I'm looking for an answer or two."

Betty's next words seemed like she was changing the subject.

"Have you read May's journals?"

"I looked at the most recent one," I hedged, "but I think I'll need to start at the beginning. She made some references to things she wrote earlier."

Actually, it was because I couldn't even look at that familiar handwriting without tearing up that I hadn't read further, but I couldn't make myself admit my weakness.

"Take them with you," Betty urged, and I saw she hadn't been changing the subject at all. "If you're looking for answers, maybe May had some of them, and didn't-or couldn't-tell you."

I frowned at her. "Did she tell you that?"

"Not precisely, but once she did say that Stan wanted to focus on the present with you-not on the past. She didn't precisely agree, but as you seemed so happy, she had decided to respect his wishes."

I thought about the house I hadn't known I owned, the escrow account, and slowly nodded. "Yes. I can see that. I'll take the journals with me, then."

"Good," Betty said. "Don't forget, even grandmothers have e-mail these days. Keep in touch."

I smiled at her. "I will."

I decided to drive to New Mexico. Freedom to go where I wished and move at my own pace was only part of the reason. I have a not-so-secret vice. I'm a scrounger.

It's actually not a bad trait for an art teacher these days, when budget cuts have reduced the budget for nonessential electives like art. (Though I do wonder that budget can be found for computers costing thousands of dollars, and in-classroom television monitors, but not for drawing pads and colored pencils.) As I've mentioned, I teach at three different schools, just a few days a week at each one. Even with the savings that gives the system, I'm continually pinched for supplies. We're encouraged to tell the students to bring in their own, but that only goes so far.

So I scrounge. Some of the stuff is fairly usual-milk jugs, cardboard, aluminum cans, newspaper, old magazines. Other is a bit stranger: parts from discarded toys, broken glass, odds and sods of lumber, old clothes. You can find interesting things at Goodwill or the Salvation Army, too. But practicality or potential recyclability isn't the unifying factor in what catches my eye-I Dumpster dive for color.

Plastic is about the best-scraps in brilliant, impossible hues, often twisted into very strange shapes. Fuchsia. Screaming green. Neon orange. Magenta. Fabric can be a good source of odd colors, too, as can the glossy paper used in advertisements.

The current trend in education is toward helping each student feel good about him or herself: validated, empowered, whatever. That means the sort of fussy requirements for perfection that my own art teacher could impose on her better students is not considered acceptable. My own students do a lot of collages, mosaics, papier-mache figures. I'm also encouraged to assign projects that can serve more than one purpose. Posters or banners to illustrate various issues are always popular with the administration, as is work on stage sets or costumes.

My scrounging loot comes in handy for all of these. I knew I'd just about go crazy on a long trip where I had to leave goodies behind, so, ignoring the probable cost of gasoline, I had the garage give my two-year-old, fire-engine-red pickup truck a thorough going-over, loaded my bags into the back beneath the camper shell, and hit the road. Almost at the last minute, I added in the metal box containing Aunt May's journals.

I didn't look at the journals the first few nights, but somewhere in Kentucky, I discovered that the novel I'd picked up at a thrift shop had good reason for having been consigned to oblivion. It had one of those annoying plots that wouldn't work at all if the heroine weren't both optimistic and dumber than a box of rocks. I chucked it at the wall in annoyance, considered trying the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, then permitted myself to acknowledge the metal box.

Reluctantly, I heaved myself off the bed, my hand fishing in my pocket for the key I'd carried just about everywhere with me since Mrs. Boswell had given it to me. I slipped it in the lock, and for only the second time since I'd been given the box lifted the lid and looked inside.

Now, as before, I was struck not by how many journals there were, but how few. There were only twenty or so volumes, none terribly thick. Nor was Aunt May's handwriting so tiny that she crammed volumes onto each page. Surely if she had been keeping these journals her entire life, as Betty Boswell had seemed to think, then there would be more.

I'd already identified that the journals were stacked so that the first in the sequence was at the bottom of the left stack. Now I took it out. The cover was puffy, lightly quilted, and covered with a pale pink fabric. The years of storage away from light had preserved its attractive sheen. On the front cover the word "Diary" was printed in gold, in a loopy script. A tiny lock clasped the cover shut, but an equally tiny key attached to the cover with a bit of pink yarn opened it. The volume fell open as I pressed on the minute latch.

The entry was dated shortly before I had come to live with the Fenns. I stopped before reading, checked other volumes, but this was indeed the first. I frowned. Had Betty misunderstood? Or had Aunt May deliberately misled her? Or was there another box of journals somewhere? I thought I'd gone through every closet, box, and cabinet, even opening trunks in the attic that were so heavily coated in dust that it was clear they hadn't been opened for decades.

I continued frowning as I stared down at the slightly yellowed page, and the first words resolved my confusion-even as they added to it.

"For the first time in my life, I have decided to keep a diary. So much is happening now, so much I need to remember as it happens, not confused by time's passage. This is where I will begin."

I read and reread the words, as if I expected them to change. Then I accepted what I'd known from the start. Even if there had been a journal that started back when Aunt May was a girl, within a volume or two, I would have skipped to this very point-to the point where I entered the story of Aunt May's life. It was an egotistical admission, but true. In the privacy of that motel room with its generic layout and generic furnishings I felt safe admitting it.

Yes. I wanted to know about Aunt May, but even more I wanted-needed-to know about myself. Ever since my twenty-first birthday I had felt a niggling suspicion that Uncle Stan had been holding something back. Learning of my continued ownership of the house in New Mexico had confirmed that suspicion without giving me the least reason why he should have done so. These books might hold the answer.

Even so, I delayed a little more, making coffee in the tiny two-cup pot provided by the motel management, fishing out the bag of dark chocolates I'd bought at a grocery store earlier that day. Then, with a fragrant mug of steaming coffee set on the bedside table and the bag of chocolates near my right hand, I again opened the journal.

COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES.

For the first time in my life, I have decided to keep a diary. So much is happening now, so much I need to remember as it happens, not confused by time's passage. This is where I will begin.

We are to have a child. Is that the right way to put it? Maybe I should have written this in pencil, but now it is too late. I shall try to be more clear.

We (Stan and I) are being given the opportunity to be foster parents to a little girl. Her name is Mira and she is nine years old. She has fair hair, and a slim, almost fragile figure. It seems that her mother has disappeared, and that no one knows anything at all about her father.

I don't know much of anything about the usual arrangements for foster parenting, but I think this one must be a little odd. For one thing, we will not be able to formally adopt Mira for a good while because her mother is missing, not dead. The whereabouts of her father are unknown. That isn't the oddest part, though.

The odd part starts with some of the conditions to which we must agree. The first pair are the strangest. We must agree to move our place of residence and change our names. Mira's trustees have agreed to help Stan find a job in some likely place, and as he had been getting rather sick of how his current employers won't acknowledge that he's finished his degree, that's fine.

The name change is a bit odder. However, neither Stan nor I have any living family, so there isn't anyone we will insult by doing this. Since we moved to Idaho for Stan to finish his degree work, we have fallen out of touch with some friends, and those we have made here are not terribly close. That's a hard thing to admit, but I know it's probably all my fault. I couldn't handle all those women with their children and their smug pity of childless me. Stan has been too busy between work and school to really care.

I've often wondered over the course of this last week or so whether Stan and I were permitted to be Mira's foster parents precisely because we have so few ties. Why is that important? What is it about Mira that demands this? I'm afraid to ask for fear they'll take her from us.

There's another condition as well. We are never to-under any circumstances at all-take Mira back to the town from which she came. It's a small place in New Mexico, so I can't imagine why we would do so-except to enable Mira to experience her roots. THEY-these mysterious trustees seem to demand capital letters-THEY apparently don't want her to do this. THEY don't even want us to go to New Mexico to pick her up. We are to meet her at the end of her journey. THEY have indicated that they would prefer that Mira never go to New Mexico at all. I wonder why? Is there more to the disappearance of Mira's mother than we are being told?

The other conditions seem pretty reasonable to me. We are to handle Mira's finances, but THEY will review them. We must submit to an annual inspection of our home. I rather suspect, given how THEY are, that we will be checked out more frequently but less formally-at least for the first couple of years. It's rather creepy when you think about it, but I don't mind. I'm head over heels at the idea of having a little girl of my own to raise. I'm going to try and be good to her, so very good, so what do I have to be afraid of?

Okay. I'm being honest here. I'll write it down. I am afraid. I think Stan is, too, but we're not talking about it. The only thing either of us will admit is that we have our chance to finally be a real family and we don't want to blow it.

INSIDE THE LINES.

The next few entries were pretty normal stuff. How Uncle Stan and Aunt May picked me up at the train station. How I seemed shy, but interested in my environment. What we ate at the ice cream parlor, and again at home.

I matched Aunt May's memories against my own and found they rang true. She really was trying to report, not to project or speculate-at least not more than was reasonable.

I found one comment made a few days after my coming to live with them oddly interesting: "I think Mira must have lived in a home with very well-trained servants. It's not that she's demanding. The little dear tries very hard to be anything but-it's like she's afraid to be noticed. At the same time, she clearly expects to be waited on for small things, like having her clothing put out for her, or food placed on her plate. She is the oddest mixture of independence and passivity that I have ever imagined. But then what do I know about children?"

I had to stop reading after a few entries, though. Aunt May's meticulous accounts of my reactions to my new room and to every aspect of my new life were so full of her eager hope that we would bond that I could hardly bear it. I found myself saying to the empty air: "It's okay, Aunt May. It works out. It really, truly does." Then I started crying, and shut the journal lest my tears mess up the page.

That first entry gave me almost too much to think about as I drove. I had always blindly accepted the existence of my mysterious trustees. I had wondered if the Fenns' moving and changing their names had anything to do with me, but I hadn't wanted to ask. Now I knew. I was reminded of those relocation programs the police and FBI have for witnesses. Was I somehow a witness to something? Or was I being protected from whoever had made my mother disappear?

Either fit with the provision that the Fenns were under no circumstances to take me back to my hometown-and here I was in my bright red pickup truck, making a beeline to that very town. What was I heading into?

Probably nothing. Over forty years had passed since those provisions were made. Doubtless the danger-if there had been a danger-had been more immediate. No trustee had appeared on my twenty-first birthday to renew the restrictions. I was a woman not only grown, but on what people liked to call the wrong side of fifty. Doubtless the risk had been to the vulnerable child.

It struck me then that I was probably far older than my mother had been when she-the reality of it was still hard to accept-had died. My memories of Mother placed her somewhere in her mid-thirties, looking, except for that one time I'd seen her without her makeup, much younger. What would she make of her Mira, her mirror? I was no longer the slender, bigeyed child, but a stocky woman. Only my washed-out coloring remained the same.

Child of a rainless year. I hadn't thought of that for a long time, but as I sped along the highway the epithet came back to me, haunting me, so that I found my gaze scanning the horizon, looking for rain-and as I drove west and then south, finding none.

OUTSIDE THE LINES.

Mira has been with us a full year now, and Stan and I love her as much as we ever could have loved a birth daughter. She has returned our love with such eagerness that I find myself wondering what kind of upbringing did this little girl have?

Mira is not cold, far from it. Indeed, she turns toward affection as a flower does to the sun. No, more like a starving person might a banquet table: eager, but with a certain degree of caution, as if uncertain what her belly would be able to hold.

I find myself wondering what kind of woman her mother was. All we know about her is her name: Colette Bogatyr. It sounds rather French. Strange. I thought just about everyone in New Mexico was either Mexican or cowboys. I guess I don't know very much.

Does our Mira look French? Not particularly, to my eyes, but then what does French look like? All I know is that I was inordinately pleased when a woman in the grocery store told me how much we looked alike. They say that dogs come to look like their owners-or is it owners like their dogs?-in any case, might the same be true of adopted children and their parents?