the ranch during each summer as well as a long week during both the Christmas and Easter vacations. They had gone to boarding school in the East, although their mother, Lydia Henry Stack, of an old Philadelphia family, had moved to Marbella, on the coast of Spain, after her divorce from Mike Kilkullen in 1960.
There was nothing that coven of two could do or say to her now, Jazz thought, that could hurt her as they had when she had been too young to defend herself, but their arrival meant a weekend of false and forced politeness covering dislike and mutual mistrust.
And all the sugar coating was put on for her father’s sake, Jazz thought. He had never known how his older daughters treated Jazz. They had always made certain to be enchantingly sweet to her whenever he was around, and she, proud and stubborn, had chosen never to complain to him when they wounded her. Their weapons had been many, including jibes about her own mother, Sylvie Norberg, whom Mike Kilkullen had married immediately after his divorce. The Swedish actress, like a shooting star, had changed the face of film for ten years, until her death in 1969, when Jazz was eight.
“I forgive you, Susie,” Jazz said, getting up abruptly and giving the cook a kiss on the top of her head. “You were only trying to hide the bad news. I thought you were up to your usual intrigues.”
“A little of both,” Susie said generously to the young woman she knew she loved as much as she would love a daughter, assuming she’d ever had one, instead of three sons.
“I’ll go look for Dad.”
Jazz went to her room to change into jeans, so that she could ride up to the wide, shallow, natural bowl in which the Fiesta would be held. The bowl lay high in the mesas beyond the hacienda, and her Thunderbird was too precious to be used on the dirt road that led to the Fiesta grounds.
In the stables Jazz looked for Limonada, her favorite horse, a strawberry roan her father kept for her although she hadn’t lived at the ranch for twelve years. Limonada, he insisted, reminded him of Jazz, since her bright coat was a mixture of unnameable colors from dark honey to currant jam. Quickly Jazz saddled the fine-boned, alert mare, who curvetted and stamped and pranced in impatience. Riding like smoke, she reached the rim of the bowl in a few minutes. Jazz reined her horse in behind a sycamore above the bowl and, peeking out, surveyed the scene, looking for her father.
Dozens of caterer’s workmen were busy, some hammering on wooden grandstands, some erecting tents made of blue and white canvas, others busy setting up dozens of round tables and hundreds of folding chairs under the tents, so that they would be ready for the blue-and-white tablecloths the next day.
Jazz recognized a few familiar ranch employees among them. She knew their names as a child would know her uncles. Jose had taught her how to rope a calf with a reata, Luis and Pedro and Juan had taught her rough-and-ready Spanish during those hours when they’d had time to go fishing and taken her along; twice she’d been allowed to go looking for a mountain lion with those great shots, Tiano and Ysidor. Theywere all vaqueros, cowboys who worked on the ranch year round, as had their fathers and grandfathers.
Yet nothing seemed ready, Jazz thought, as she looked at the scene, not the dance floor or the horseshoe-throwing contest ground, not the barbecue pits or the trapshooting area. Even the space for the grand parade and roping contest hadn’t been cleared. The bowl looked as if anything could happen in it, a picnic, a rodeo or a horse race, but Jazz knew that by Sunday night the Fiesta would be as efficiently organized as ever, and the guests, many of whom came from out of state and even from foreign countries just for the occasion, would never dream of the amount of work that went into this one remaining evidence of the scope of old-time hospitality.
She searched awhile for her father, and once she’d found him she
There was nothing that coven of two could do or say to her now, Jazz thought, that could hurt her as they had when she had been too young to defend herself, but their arrival meant a weekend of false and forced politeness covering dislike and mutual mistrust.
And all the sugar coating was put on for her father’s sake, Jazz thought. He had never known how his older daughters treated Jazz. They had always made certain to be enchantingly sweet to her whenever he was around, and she, proud and stubborn, had chosen never to complain to him when they wounded her. Their weapons had been many, including jibes about her own mother, Sylvie Norberg, whom Mike Kilkullen had married immediately after his divorce. The Swedish actress, like a shooting star, had changed the face of film for ten years, until her death in 1969, when Jazz was eight.
“I forgive you, Susie,” Jazz said, getting up abruptly and giving the cook a kiss on the top of her head. “You were only trying to hide the bad news. I thought you were up to your usual intrigues.”
“A little of both,” Susie said generously to the young woman she knew she loved as much as she would love a daughter, assuming she’d ever had one, instead of three sons.
“I’ll go look for Dad.”
Jazz went to her room to change into jeans, so that she could ride up to the wide, shallow, natural bowl in which the Fiesta would be held. The bowl lay high in the mesas beyond the hacienda, and her Thunderbird was too precious to be used on the dirt road that led to the Fiesta grounds.
In the stables Jazz looked for Limonada, her favorite horse, a strawberry roan her father kept for her although she hadn’t lived at the ranch for twelve years. Limonada, he insisted, reminded him of Jazz, since her bright coat was a mixture of unnameable colors from dark honey to currant jam. Quickly Jazz saddled the fine-boned, alert mare, who curvetted and stamped and pranced in impatience. Riding like smoke, she reached the rim of the bowl in a few minutes. Jazz reined her horse in behind a sycamore above the bowl and, peeking out, surveyed the scene, looking for her father.
Dozens of caterer’s workmen were busy, some hammering on wooden grandstands, some erecting tents made of blue and white canvas, others busy setting up dozens of round tables and hundreds of folding chairs under the tents, so that they would be ready for the blue-and-white tablecloths the next day.
Jazz recognized a few familiar ranch employees among them. She knew their names as a child would know her uncles. Jose had taught her how to rope a calf with a reata, Luis and Pedro and Juan had taught her rough-and-ready Spanish during those hours when they’d had time to go fishing and taken her along; twice she’d been allowed to go looking for a mountain lion with those great shots, Tiano and Ysidor. Theywere all vaqueros, cowboys who worked on the ranch year round, as had their fathers and grandfathers.
Yet nothing seemed ready, Jazz thought, as she looked at the scene, not the dance floor or the horseshoe-throwing contest ground, not the barbecue pits or the trapshooting area. Even the space for the grand parade and roping contest hadn’t been cleared. The bowl looked as if anything could happen in it, a picnic, a rodeo or a horse race, but Jazz knew that by Sunday night the Fiesta would be as efficiently organized as ever, and the guests, many of whom came from out of state and even from foreign countries just for the occasion, would never dream of the amount of work that went into this one remaining evidence of the scope of old-time hospitality.
She searched awhile for her father, and once she’d found him she
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