All My Relations Read Online Free

forgotten.
    The night of the first November frost, soon after the wild horse roundup, Oldenburg had asked Milton if he played cards. Milton didn’t.
    â€œToo bad,” Oldenburg said. “It gets dull evenings. Jenkins and I played gin rummy. We’d go to five thousand, take us a couple of weeks, and then start again.”
    â€œWe could cook,” Milton said.
    On Sunday he and Oldenburg baked cakes. Milton missed the pressurized frosting cans with which he’d squirted flowers and desert scenes at the CETA bakery, but Oldenburg’s cherry-chocolate layer cake was so good he ate a third of it. Oldenburg complimented him on his angel food.
    Oldenburg bought a paperback
Joy of Cooking
in Casa Grande. Though he and Milton had been satisfied with their main dishes, they tried Carbonnade Flamande, Chicken Paprika, Quick Spaghetti Meat Pie. Milton liked New England Boiled Dinner. Mostly they made desserts. After experimenting with mousses and custard, they settled on cakes—banana, golden, seed, sponge, four-egg, Lady Baltimore, the Rombauer Special. Stacks of foil-wrapped cakes accumulated in the freezer. The men contributed cakes to charitable bake sales. Milton found that after his nightly slab of cake sleep came more easily and gently.
    The men were serious in the kitchen. Standing side by side in white aprons tacked together from sheets, Milton whisking egg whites, Oldenburg drizzling chocolate over pound cake, they would say little. Milton might ask the whereabouts of a spice; Oldenburg’s refusal to label the jars irritated him. Then they sat by the warm stove, feet propped on crates, and steamed themselves in the moist smells.
    As they relaxed on a Sunday afternoon, eating fresh, hot cake,Oldenburg startled Milton by wondering aloud if his own wife were still alive. She had left him in 1963, and they’d had no contact since their second son was killed in 1969, more than ten years before.
    â€œShe wanted a Nevada divorce,” Oldenburg said, “but I served papers on her first, and I got custody of the boys. I prevented a great injustice.” He had sold his business in Colorado and bought the ranch. “The boys hated it,” he said. “They couldn’t wait to join the Army.”
    In Hashan, Milton said, she and her lover would have been killed.
    Oldenburg shook his head impatiently. “He’s deserted her, certainly. He was a basketball coach, and much younger than she was.”
    A Pima phrase—he knew little Pima—occurred to Milton. Ne
ha: jun
—all my relations. “Here is the opposite,” Milton said. “We should call this the No-Relations Ranch.”
    Oldenburg sputtered with laughter. “Yes! And we’d need a new brand. Little round faces with big X’s over them.”
    â€œYou’d better be careful. People would start calling it the Tic-tac-toe Ranch.”
    â€œOr a manual, you know, a sex manual, for fornication. The X’s doing it to the O’s.”
    Light-headed from the rich, heavily-frosted cake, they sprayed crumbs from their mouths, laughing.
    At the Pinal County Fair in May, Oldenburg entered a walnut pie and goaded Milton into baking his specialty, a jelly roll. It received honorable mention, while Oldenburg won second prize.
    Milton wrote C.C., “I’m better than a restaurant.”
    C.C. didn’t answer. When Valley Bank opened a Hashan branch in June, Milton transferred his account and began meeting his friends for the first time in a year. They needled him, “Milton, you sleeping with that old man?” His second Fridayin town, Milton was writing out a deposit slip when he heard Bosque say, “Milton Oldenburg.”
    â€œYes, Daddy just gave him his allowance,” said Helene Mashad, the teller.
    Bosque punched him on the shoulder and put out his hand. Milton shook it, self-conscious about his missing finger.
    Bosque was cashing his unemployment check. The factory where