Barbara Samuel (16 page)

“I got in last night,” he said. “You guys want a ride?”

Maggie laughed, light and girlish. “Joy’s been crying all the way from the school about how cold it is, so I guess. This is my uncle Ricky,” she said. “He’s my dad’s youngest brother.”

Joy went around the car and climbed into the backseat. It smelled like aftershave.

“Sorry,” he said. “I drove from San Diego. It’s a mess.” He reached around and pushed some clothes to one side. Joy saw that his hand was dark and smooth, and wondered what he’d been doing in California.

“It’s all right,” she said.

He inclined his head. “What’s with the hair?”

Joy flushed, touching it selfconsciously. “Just something I did to piss off my dad the senator.”

He grinned, and her heart flipped for real. His teeth were big and white in his angled face. “You’d be cuter as a blond.”

“Mind your own business,
Tío,”
Maggie said, slamming the door. “I like it.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a girl.”

Joy wondered how old he was, all the way to Maggie’s house, which wasn’t really very far in the car. She thought he would come in with them, but he didn’t. “Tell your mom I’ll come over after a while. Got stuff to do.” He looked directly at Joy. “Nice to meet you, Girl with Wrong Hair.”

“Joy,” she said.

He smiled with one side of his mouth. “I like that. See ya, Joy.” He drove off.

Maggie laughed. “Oooh, Ricky was flirting with you big time, girl!”

“I’m sure he flirts with everybody.”

“He does,” she said, and Joy felt pricked. “But he still thought you were cute.”

“He’s old, Maggie. Way older than us.”

She made a noise. “Nineteen, that’s all. He had to go to San Diego to help his sister. Her husband is in the Navy and she’s pregnant with twins and had to stay in bed. They wouldn’t even let her fly home, can you imagine?”

Joy shook her head, still feeling strangely light. Nineteen wasn’t that old. Not at all. She’d be sixteen in December.

They went inside and Maggie made Joy a cup of tea that smelled of cinnamon, then they went upstairs to Maggie’s room. It was a funny house, tall and narrow
and kind of dark, but Maggie’s room was under the eaves and had a bunch of windows. They opened them all up and lit cigarettes. “My mom never notices because she smokes, you know,” Maggie said, blowing smoke outside to the damp day.

“Better safe than sorry. Would she get mad if she knew?”

A quick shift of a shoulder. “I dunno.” Her face brightened and she tapped Joy’s knee. “But you know what? I think there’s this guy who might, like, bring her out of it. He’s the
bruja’s
grandson or something.”

The tea gave Joy a sense of calm and well-being, what April would have called a zenlike calm. The smoke added to the sense of floating. All the pressure drained right out of her neck, pooling harmlessly on the floor at her feet. “You’re matchmaking them, then?”

“Not exactly.” Maggie stared across the fields. “I’m not sure how, you know?”

“Mmmm.” Joy didn’t necessarily think matchmaking was all it was cracked up to be. But she thought about her mom. “I think my mom has a new guy. She got all silly about him the other night.”

“D’you ever wish your parents would get back together?”

“No
way.
My dad is such a jerk, I even wish my stepmom would get rid of him.”

“How’s he a jerk?”

Joy smoked for a minute, torn. She’d never really talked about this before and it made her feel disloyal or something. “He has a girlfriend.” Saying it out loud made her feel kind of sick to her stomach.

“Oh, yuck. Did you see her?”

“No. He’s pretty careful.”

“So how do you know? Maybe it just seems like it.”

Joy had tried to tell herself the same thing for months.
“No. He talks to her on the phone and meets her in other cities when he travels for business. He’s been seeing her a really long time, too, like five years.”

Maggie looked sad. “Does your stepmom know?”

That was the worst of all. “I don’t think so. He’s really careful.” She tossed the butt out the window and fell back on the pillows. “April, my stepmom, is rich and she’s like old southern money, so he needs her. This other person is just a nobody in some small town.”

“Ew. How can he be so mean?”

Joy shook her head. “He did the same thing to my mom. He cheated on her and made everybody think she was a drunk and then he took her to court and left her for his girlfriend.” She opened her eyes with a bitter smile. “Who was April.”

“What a drag.”

“Yeah.” She sat up suddenly, embarrassed that she’d said so much. “Your room is great. Is that the Virgin of Guadalupe?”

Maggie nodded. “It was in my dad’s car when he wrecked. She didn’t do such a good job, but he loved that statue, so I brought it in here.”

The statue, about twelve inches high, sat on top of Maggie’s dresser with a bunch of other stuff—a candle holder and a box with glitter all over it and a shrine covered with glitter and roses. Joy couldn’t make out the picture inside and stood up to get a better look. It was a black-and-white magazine picture of Tupac Shakur, his head down, his chest bare and showing all of his tattoos, his hands outstretched. A dollar bill with “Tupac Is Alive” written on it was glued to the bottom of the shrine. “Hey, I’ve seen these,” Joy said, “these kits to make shrines for dead rock stars. Never saw one for Tupac, though. Where’d you get it?”

“It’s not a kit,” Maggie said, and she looked offended. “I made it myself, from things around here.”

“Sorry, I mean, I just thought …”

Maggie inclined her head, the big dark eyes getting shiny and soft, and touched her index finger to the arch over the picture. “The day of my dad’s funeral, my mom made me go to the store. It was really hot and I didn’t want to walk, but she made me go get some ice for all the people coming over. That dollar was in my change.”

Joy said, “Wow.”

“It seemed like my dad was telling me something, that he was telling me to look for Tupac, you know?” She lifted her chin. “You probably think that’s stupid.”

“No,” Joy said, and meant it. “I believe in that stuff, messages and all that. It sounds like you and your dad were really close. If he wanted to talk to anybody, it would probably be you, right?”

The shiny tears in Maggie’s eyes welled up and spilled over, rushing over her smooth face in a streak of black eyeliner. “That’s exactly what I thought.” She turned back to the shrine, picked up some matches and lit a candle in front of it. “I want my dad to tell my mom that it’s okay, too.”

Joy took her time taking a new cigarette out of the pack. She didn’t want it, exactly, but it wasn’t like she had a chance to smoke at home and it was something to do to keep her hands and eyes busy. It seemed important not to say the wrong thing right this minute. When she fussed with the cigarette and got it going, she blew out a lungful of smoke and said, “So do you think Tupac is alive, like they say?”

Maggie took a new cigarette out, too, and lit it. She held it like an old hand, like she’d been smoking twenty years. “I don’t know. Not really, I guess, but then why
did I get that bill from my dad? Maybe I should be trying to find out for real.”

“Maybe.” Joy grinned. “It’s something to do, anyway, right? Better than school.”

They laughed at that, made a joke about one of their teachers, and then there was a slamming of a door downstairs. “Oh, shit!” Maggie whispered, and threw the cigarette out the window, tossed the pack under her bed and started waving her hand in the air. Joy followed suit, ducking and laughing when Maggie picked up a bottle of perfume and sprayed it all around.

“Magdalena!” her mother cried. “Come down. I have something to show you.”

“Be right there!” She paused, as if listening, and said to Joy. “She sounds good today. I’m glad you can meet her.”

Downstairs, Joy saw where Maggie got her looks. This was the thing about New Mexico that was different from Atlanta for
real
, the way women were beautiful. In Atlanta, everybody was into being a lady, like they’d just left a plantation tea. Around here, beautiful meant sexy or, sometimes, athletic. Maggie’s mom was in the sexy category. She had long hair and even though she was wearing a business suit, there was some chest showing, and her nails were long and red.

“Hi,” she said to Joy. “I’m Sally.”

“This is Joy, Mom. I told you about her.”

Sally hugged Maggie. “Look what I have.” She held out her hand, and cradled in her palm was a little pillow of fabric. “Mrs. Ramirez made it for me, a special charm.”

“Oh! Were you at her house today? Was her grandson around?”

“Yeah. She gave him one, too. Why?”

Maggie examined the packet very closely, then cut Joy a glance. “I just thought he was kinda cute for an old guy, that’s all.”

Sally grinned, touched her daughter’s head. “Are you matchmaking,
h’ita?”

“Nope.” She put the packet back in her mom’s hand. “We’re gonna go to the store. Bye.”

Joy paused. “Somebody named Ricky came by. He said he would see you later.”

“Oooh,” Maggie said, laughing. “Joy liked him, I think!”

“No, I didn’t. I was just being polite.”

Sally touched her arm. “Magdalena teases everybody she likes. Don’t let her bother you. Come back, huh? Have supper with us some night.”

“I will,” Joy said, then Maggie was pulling her along, out into the rain, where she danced lightly on the porch and gave Joy a happy smile.

Fridays were Luna’s short day. She left work at noon to do her weekly shopping. As was her habit, Kitty picked her up, popping open the trunk when she saw Luna dragging a very full cart. She started to get out, but Luna waved her back. “No sense in both of us getting soaked!” She pulled her collar close to her neck to shield against the drizzle, and loaded groceries into the trunk. There were the usual items that were too heavy to carry on her daily walks—bags of potatoes and oranges and apples, since they were on special this week; olive oil and orange juice and two gallons of milk. She’d also really stocked up on meats to freeze, and frozen veggies and pizzas, and things like frozen waffles and bagels Joy could fix for snacks after school or late at night or for late breakfasts on the weekends. She ate lots of eggs, so Luna took home an extra dozen to boil so they’d be in the fridge, ready to go whenever she was hungry. Kitty said, “My goodness!” and patted Luna’s shoulder. “I can see you’ve got a teenage girl in the
house. Lord, the two of you nearly bankrupted me, I swear.”

They stopped by Wal-Mart, where she picked up the rest of the school supplies Joy needed—a store of pencils and pens, extra spiral notebooks, a box to hold supplies for an art class—as well as the sundry paper products every household needed. It was always cheaper to stock up at Wal-Mart, much as the locals had protested when it was built, and it was a very long hike from her house.

“Do you want to have lunch?” Kitty asked.

“No, thanks. I think I need a little quiet time, actually.”

“Perfectly understandable.” She turned smoothly into the driveway. “Teenagers are noisy, aren’t they?”

Luna kissed her cheek. “Thanks, Mom.”

She put things away and cleaned up a little bit, running the vacuum and tackling the bathroom, gaining a rather motherly glow over the full larder and tidy home that would greet her daughter. In truth, she’d forgotten how much she liked that part of marriage—taking care of things, making a home.

By the time she finished her chores, she still had an hour of quiet time before Joy arrived home from school. The wet, gray day made her want a very special cup of coffee, and she took out her small French press and put the kettle on to boil. While it was heating, she measured out three-quarters Fancy Bourbon Santos and one-quarter Mexican Pluma Altura beans and ground them coarsely. When the water was almost ready to boil, she poured it over the beans in the press and stirred them with a chopstick she kept for the purpose, then let the mix brew for five minutes. When it was finished, she poured the coffee into her favorite oversize cup, painted with cats, and feeling luxurious, carried it into her “art” room.

The room, a strip of glassed-in porch behind the bedrooms, held the washer and dryer at one end, her craft supplies at the other. The floor was plain, ancient linoleum, and windows ran side by side all the way around two walls. It was an especially lovely place on a rainy day like this, the sound pattering lightly against the glass, the clouds softening the light and granting a sense of coziness. Through the windows to the east, rising above the scrub oak, showed a strip of Taos Mountain, his head buried in pillows of gray.

It wasn’t, contrary to Allie and Elaine’s recent nagging, the room of a real artist. More like the collection of a craft magpie. There was a cabinet filled with various kinds of paint, mostly acrylic, and brushes; plastic baskets of beads and feathers and even rocks she found on walks. One basket held nothing but
milagros
, the tiny cast metal things in shapes of fish or eyes or arms or whatever, used for all kinds of ceremonies and prayers and blessings. Another contained Barbie doll parts—shoes and belts and other accessories, but also spare arms and legs and torsos. There were whole dolls, too, but she wasn’t interested in small work today.

Taking a smock out of the cupboard, an old work shirt now covered with every splash of paint she’d ever used, she put it on over her jeans, then carried a small bucket of selected paints—reds, oranges, pinks, and black—to a round metal table that would eventually complement the Virgin of Guadalupe metal chair on her porch. The table had a rose with a bleeding heart at the middle, the painting Kitty thought was so creepy. Luna inclined her head, disagreeing once again. It was lush. It was bloody and vivid, but not creepy.