Kansas Troubles Read Free

not looking forward to. Namely, Gabe’s family. Specifically, his twin sisters and his mother.
    Though I’d seen pictures of them, talked to them over the phone, and heard quite a few stories in the last few months, they still didn’t seem real to me. Nor did the life Gabe lived in Kansas until he was sixteen years old, which was when his father died, causing Gabe’s life to totally change. After a few delinquent escapades that almost landed him in jail, his mother sent him to Southern California to live with one of his dad’s brothers in Santa Ana. Even with the photos and the stories, I couldn’t really picture this man, whose whispered Spanish words could melt me into soft wax, driving a tractor on his Grandfather Smith’s wheat farm, any more than I could imagine him crawling through the soggy jungles of Vietnam or working undercover in the barrios of East L.A. The only context in which I’d ever seen Gabe was in his all-business Chief of Police (or as I like to call it, his Sergeant Friday) personality or his easygoing at-home demeanor. Sometimes it almost seemed as if he appeared from nowhere, sans history, and plopped down in San Celina just for my benefit. It was different from anything I’d ever experienced, being intimate with someone I barely knew. Life with my first husband, Jack, who had known me since I was fifteen and was raised on a ranch as I was, hadn’t prepared me for the disparate backgrounds and complex emotional baggage people bring into middle-age relationships.
    “They’re going to love you,” Gabe said, dropping a kiss on top of my head and picking up his suitcase.
    “I hope you’re right,” I muttered as he walked out. I picked up the photo album we’d looked through the night before. The last formal portrait of his mother, Kathryn Smith Ortiz, was taken two years ago when she retired from forty-one years of schoolteaching. She was tall and broad-shouldered like Gabe and wore a prim, pleated-front grayish dress with pearl buttons and a gauzy lace collar. Under a cloud of lavender-tinged white curls, the somber eyes she’d passed down to her son reprimanded the photographer, probably for his bad posture. Being talkative as a kid and, to quote Dove, born with a mouth as sassy as a squirrel’s, I sent up a quick thanks that she hadn’t been my fifth-grade teacher.
    His twin sisters, fraternal not identical, were six years younger than his forty-three years, and two years older than my thirty-five. Rebecca Ortiz Kolanowski and Angela Ortiz. Becky and Angel. In their latest Christmas card photo, Becky with her husband and children appeared the quintessential Middle American family. Her golden-brown hair, ivory skin, and almost-indigo eyes revealed more of her mother’s Pennsylvania-Dutch background than her father’s Hispanic one. She was pretty in a fresh, milk-commercial kind of way. Her two tow-headed daughters appeared to be about eight and twelve. Her husband, Stan Kolanowski, sported a crew cut so blond it appeared almost transparent, and looked like the safe, dependable insurance broker he was.
    Angel was the image of her nickname, though Gabe said she’d done everything she could to live it down. One telling snapshot placed her next to a sparkling river, a girlish fist playfully threatening the photographer. Sunshine backlit her blond-streaked brown hair and dark almond-shaped eyes challenged the camera with a reckless, earthy expression that had probably caused more than one barroom brawl.
    Gabe appeared in the doorway. “All packed?”
    I zipped up my bag. “Yep. You know, it’s weird having a new family. Worrying like a teenager over what I’m wearing, what stupid things I’ll probably say, whether they’ll like me or not.” It hadn’t occurred to me until after our whirlwind marriage that this man came with family already attached. I hadn’t even met Sam, his eighteen-year-old son yet. Shortly after we were married in late February, Sam dropped out of UC Santa