Gift of the Golden Mountain Read Free

know I was going to be out of commission for a time with a shattered leg.
         Looking out the window gave me no pleasure, untended as my garden was these past weeks. It turned out not to be a bright day, as promised, and I was glad. The sun had been erased by a fine white fog that washed in about midmorning, first in quiet reconnoitering puffs, then in strong invading gusts. In the sunlight, the bougainvillea glowed a garish purple against the white glare of the DeLuccis' garage, but in the fog it became a soft, pastel pink. Sara would appreciate the fog. Her eyes had become sensitive to light these past few years.
         Sara. How long had it been since she was here? Almost a year, nine months at least, since she had been well enough to venture out of her house on California Street. Which meant that this trip, even if it was a relatively short distance, would have a purpose. That was what troubled me. I shifted again, determined not to let myself get lost in the vagaries of what Sara might be thinking, or why Sara was coming that morning.
         I had lived in the cottage long enough to know all of its sounds, and I knew how to filter certain of them: the mad whir as the refrigerator switched on, the methodical ticking of the gas

heater as it gained momentum, children's laughter lifting from the schoolyard down the hill. If I couldn't move about, I could at least listen to the world outside. I switched on the radio. Static crackled, then an apocalyptic voice from some far place intoned: On this day in a little known corner of the world once called French Indochina, the French army has been defeated by the Vietminh forces of Ho Chi Minh at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Silence then, until suddenly calypso music blasted out and I switched the radio off.
         I heard the Cadillac as it turned the corner and began the laborious climb up the hill, its great engine grinding and complaining. The auto, like the small woman who would be perched on its rear seat, her gloved hand grasping the chromium handle, was of good, prewar stuff; both had been well tended over the years; each was, quite simply, old.
         The car and the woman and the driver had been coming to my cottage for more than thirty years, long enough to have developed a ritual. I considered trying to get up to go to the door, to be there when Sara arrived as I always was. I actually went so far as to move one leg—the good one—before giving up. Sara was ill and I was only mending, but it didn't matter. I couldn't move. Annoyed with the intransigence of my body, I leaned back on the pillows and tried to be content with imagining a scene I knew by heart.
         I listened as the car pulled up to the cottage, noted the full roar of the engine as Henry shifted into reverse to curb the wheels on the steep hill. Henry had been hired when Sara purchased her first "machine," as she called them, a Pierce-Arrow. A slow three-count and there was the solid thud of the driver's door closing; another six-count and he would have gone round to help Sara out of the back, holding her firmly with one hand while he closed the door behind her. Once, not all that long ago, Sara would have been out and up the steps before Henry could come around to open the door. I could not remember when Sara had started to wait for his help. Now I could hear them on the stair, and the soft, fussing sounds they made to each other. "Watch it here, Miss," Henry

scolded, and Sara muttered something about him watching out for himself.
         And so they came: slowly, Sara's age and the heart condition she would not admit to, impeding their progress.
         "Faith?" Sara called out.
         "Back here, on the sunporch," I answered, shaken by a new weariness in her voice.
         Sara appeared in the doorway to the little sunporch, flushed from the exertion of climbing the cottage steps, looking so fragile it seemed a small puff might blow her away.
         "What's going on here?" she