Lunch

"I think I'll go up to the big house and make lunch. 12:30 or a little later OK with you?"

"Yes. A fine idea. Thanks. What are you planning? I can never think of anything. That's why I always eat the same thing. I can't think of anything else."

"I found a cookbook in one of the pantries and saw a couple of recipes I thought I'd try out. I bought the stuff for it yesterday. I've been sort of thinking about this. It's not much, I'm not really a cook, but I'd like to try it out."

"I never think about it until I get hungry, and then it's too late. Sounds like your plan is much better than that. Go for it, girl."

Once more alone in the shed, I put a wet cloth over the half-finished pot I was working on and just stared out the door at the mountains. It was good to feel alone, but I also enjoyed having another creature in the room to talk to.

Rose is a pretty girl. I can't tell if she is just dedicated to a life style or completely nuts. It may be the same thing. She makes the craziest decisions, things that absolutely can not work, and then gets terrified and gives up when they don't.

She is going to paint, if it's on cardboard with crayons to hold up to passing cars at intersections somewhere. I wonder if it's just because her parents didn't want her to? She's saving her money for a book on how to paint. What money? She has no money. She has no income. How can you think about saving what you haven't got and can't get? I guess you have to be Rose to think that.

Thor, the owner, has never spoken to me about expenses around here. I wonder what he thinks when he sees the credit card statement? I wonder if he even looks at it? He spent a lot of money building this ridiculous monster in the desert. What could he have been thinking? Did he really think he was going to sell it, to somebody even sillier than he was? Or is something else financial going on that I don't understand and never will? Some sort of way to hide money from the government or something.

I always supposed he and his wife were just rich and crazy, and that could still be the answer. Maybe as long as he pays me to keep the place up, he can pretend that it's all going to be a good deal in the future. Maybe he still thinks he is going to come out here to live eventually? Maybe his wife thinks so, and he is letting everything happen to please her? Who knows?

And I'm not really cheating him. I do keep the place up, and it is expensive to do that, especially out here.

I could pay Rose a salary, I suppose, out of my salary. I wonder if I should do that? Is it better than just not looking at the credit card slips, and letting her feel like she's cheating when she buys something for herself? Maybe I could just mention a line of credit per month on the credit card for her own expenses? That's what I would do about mine if I didn't get a salary. I'll think about that. If she is going to cook and clean around here I'll have to pay her for it. I wonder what she was making as a waitress?

None of this is finishing the pot. I took the wet rag off the pot and began rolling another bead of clay, putting myself spiritually back four thousand years or so and wondering what barley beer tasted like back then. I also found myself rather pleased and excited about the prospect of something different for lunch.

Lunch was really good. I could get used to this, I thought. We talked.

"I think I'm going to sell a pot. You know the one with zigzag markings that I copied from the pots we saw on the New Mexico web site. I got an offer via email of $180 and I pay the shipping. I think he wants to sell it to someone as authentic."

"Authentic what?" Rose asked, "You didn't copy anything exactly. It isn't a fake Indian pot, it's a real Claire pot."

"I'm saying that in the email I'm sending him. I'm not going to knock twenty bucks off of it either. He gets it for $200 and pays for shipping or he doesn't get it at all. It's an original, authentic Claire and it sells that way or no way."

"Atta girl. Besides, your pots are as good as anything the Indians ever made. Who says white girls can't make pots?"

"Rose," I said slowly after a slight pause, "have you noticed lately what color my skin really is? You are supposed to be good with color. Do I really look white to you? We so-called whites are actually chameleons. We turn brown in the sun. Indians aren't really from India, either. Columbus got that part wrong too. Or are you just indulging yourself in a racial slur?"

"Now how come you gotta talk dat way to me Missy Claire? Here I's been cooken and cleanen and slaven away all dese years for you?"

"Would you like another cup of tea, Miss Roseland?" I responded, ignoring on purpose all the fake black talk.

"Yes, thank yew, Miss Clarice, ma'am. I do believe I would." Rose answered in kind. "Thank yew ever so very much." The exaggerated Ebonics now gone and replaced with a rather ridiculous southern drawl, similar, except for the tilt of the nose.

On that note, we did the dishes and started back to the workshop.

"Claire, every time I walk by that gigantic tower on this end of the house I wonder what's in it. Have you ever been up there? Should I be cleaning it? And what about the other one? Same thing.

"I've never been in the towers. There's a door in the kitchen but it's locked and I don't have the key. It must go somewhere, the door I mean, and it looks like it should go into the tower. I never even found a door to the other tower. You know, we could do that. We could do that right now"

And with that we turned around and walked back to the castle to look for keys and doors.

We never found the key to the kitchen door. It wasn't in the office upstairs, it wasn't in any of the kitchen drawers, it simply wasn't anywhere. So we moved on to the other tower. We could see the tower on the left side of the front door from a window in the great hall, so we knew it had to be behind that wall somewhere. There wasn't a door that didn't go somewhere else from the reception area or the hallway so unless there wasn't a door at all, there had to be one in the great hall, but where? The wall was stone except for the fireplace and a floor to ceiling bookcase to it's left.

The only other door to this tower was bolted on the inside on the second floor in the hallway. We both stared at the bookcase.

"It has to be the bookcase," I said.

Rose agreed. We looked at the bookcase, feeling around for latches, strings, knobs, anything.

"Nothing here. Let's take the books out." Rose began to pull out books. Lucky for us, she started on the right and found the lever almost immediately at the right end of a shelf just about eye level. She pulled the lever. We both heard a small click. The book case moved away from the wall just enough for us to get our fingers behind it. We pulled. It moved, swinging on hinges on the left side. A dark doorway came into view.

I stepped into the darkness and felt for a light switch. Lights came on and we could see a room with an iron spiral staircase winding it's way upward to the floor above.

"In the movies, this is where the bookcase shuts behind us leaving us trapped in here," Rose said.

"Let's put a chair in the doorway."

We did that. We put the biggest chair we could move in the doorway, climbed over it and went up the iron staircase.

"That was probably silly," I said, "This isn't a horror movie. We could have at least checked to see if we could open the bookcase door from the inside."

So Rose climbed back over the chair into the great hall and pulled the chair away. Then I tried closing and opening the bookcase from the inside. Sure enough, I could close and latch the bookcase from inside and then open it again.

Thus reassured, we made complete circle of the staircase which brought us to the second floor landing. We unbolted the door and stepped out into the hallway. All of a sudden this whole operation seemed less scary, and we went up the iron staircase into the room at the top of the tower.

Gosh, what a view!" Rose said, "and look at all this! I was expecting something gloom and maybe even wet. I forget we were going up and not down."

The room was large and circular, and why not? We were in a round turret. The hardwood floor was very expensive and very expensively laid in a circular pattern with a large fancy compass rose in the center. Windows filled three sides of the walls, if you could describe a round room as having walls. The roof overhang kept a lot of sunshine off of the windows. A mahogany desktop counter circled the room except for the staircase opening. Drawers filled the space beneath the desktop except for two openings for desks. Two wooden armchairs with castors occupied the two openings.

Walking first to the center of the room and then to one of the windows, I remarked, "This place could be anything from an office to an observatory." The view really was wonderful. I could see the desert for many miles.

"What a place for a party!" Rose noted, "and nobody had been in here for a while."

Sand covered every horizontal surface, as expected, but not as much as we had seen downstairs.

"This room must be pretty tight. I wonder if the other turret is like this one. We've got to get into there someday. Could you paint in here, I wonder?"

"Are you out of your mind? I should get paint on this floor, or anywhere in the room? It's one thing to get paint on a concrete garage floor and quite another to mess up in here. No, there will be no painting in this room, despite the view."

I thought she was going to make me take off my shoes. But we went quietly back down the staircase, bolted the door once more on the second floor and pushed the bookcase back against the wall until we heard the little click that told us that it had latched once again.