On the Right Side of a Dream by Sheila Williams Page A

happened when I met Jess or later when I took off with Peaches to see the Pacific Ocean. I thought that too, once. But I was wrong.
    My life flip-flopped while I was in Arizona.
    The “consulting position” that I took with Nina started out as four weeks that stretched out to six, then a few months—and I squeezed as much into it as I could with two weeks here in Arizona, up to Salt Lake City, down to Tucson, with three weeks in Paper Moon in between. I visited Chaco Canyon—big, mysterious. I took a donkey tour of the Grand Canyon—bigger and more mysterious. I peeked over the edge of the Canyon, arm wrestling with my fear of heights all the way. I was amazed. The tiny thread of blue-black silk that was the Colorado River wound its way through the canyons like a decorative ribbon through the hair of Mother Earth. Beautiful. I mean, what else can you say?
    Peaches was impatient.
    “Tell Nina to get someone else because I’m picking you up in two weeks,” Peaches bellowed over her cell phone. “Nina’s one of those give ’em an inch, take four miles people. Jess gave me hell the last time I was there and I don’t intend to go through that again.”
    But I wasn’t worried about Jess. He just growls sometimes just to see if he still can.
    “If you’re in the mood to cook that badly, you might as well come back to Paper Moon before I run off all the customers,” Jess grumbled. “Fish Reynolds nearly took my skin off, complainin’ about the tuna salad. ‘It ain’t good like Juanita’s. Tastes like you forgot something.’ ” Jess mimicked Fish’s flat, tweedy voice. “I told him if he wants to have Juanita’s tuna salad, he’d better head to Arizona and fast.”
    I laughed. Jess and I had this conversation a lot. Whenever we talked, I had to remind him of some ingredient that he had forgotten. It was either the tuna salad, or the meatloaf, or the sweet potatoes.
    “You forgot to add sugar to the tuna salad,” I accused Jess.
    “Juanita, it just don’t seem right adding something sweet to a bowl full of flaked tuna. It’s against the Gospels.”
    “You didn’t add it, did you?” I said. I couldn’t help but grin. A long pause. I could see Jess’s jaw set like a boulder in a mountain.
    “No. And I didn’t put maple syrup in the sweet potatoes either.” He sounded proud of that.
    “I’ll bet Mountain had something to say about that.” I could see Mountain now, shoveling my sweet potato casserole into his mouth with a ham-sized hand and getting the marshmallows all over his top lip.
    “Yes, he did. You get your aura read yet?”
    “It’s the color of fresh-picked irises. Deep purple.”
    “Humph. Must be those hormone pills,” Jess countered. “I miss you, Miz Louis.”
    “I miss you, Mr. Gardiner.”
    And I did miss him. But not once did that man say, “Come home, Juanita, and stop this foolishness,” or try to make me feel bad because he missed me.
    “You got things to do, you go do ’em. I’ll be here when you get back,” he’d told me when I left. “Course, the diner might not have any customers left . . .”
    I liked to take long walks and, sometimes, if it wasn’t too hot, I meandered up the trails in Boynton Canyon and nearly cracked my neck looking up at the cliffs. That’s how I think things over, just put one foot in front of the other—away from cars and noise and people and their nonsense. I walk along the edge of a small canyon and study the red rocks. Sometimes, I think I can hear them hum. I have a theory about mountains and red rocks and rolling hills and thick, dense forests: God put them there to break up our line of sight so that we can’t see too far ahead.
    The phone call came in the morning before breakfast.
    I wasn’t any damn good the rest of the day. I threw out the omelet I made, burned the bacon to a black, nasty crisp, and put hot sauce on the French toast instead of maple syrup. After I mixed up a batch of chicken salad using yellow mustard