Barbara Samuel (18 page)

She had left a message on his machine, an urgent plea to call her. He’d listened to it, then erased it. He was too tired to listen to her histrionics.

Behind him in the living room, Tiny cried out something in protest, and Thomas looked over his shoulder in concern. There was a bang through the open window. Thomas put aside the broom and went inside to check on him. Tiny sat on the couch, his head in his hands.

“Let it go, man,” Thomas said. “Go take a shower. You can sweat it out.”

It was nothing fancy, a small hut built of willow and canvas, with a traditional blanket over the door. Under cover of darkness, with little spots of spitting rain hitting their flesh, Thomas and Tiny stripped to their skins and ducked into the darkness. Thomas scattered sweet grass over the rocks and ladled water over them. The scent filled his head, traveled on steam to his sinuses and lungs.

The rule was silence or song, and Tiny had had some trouble with that from the beginning. Tonight, he sat resentfully across from Thomas, his body gleaming with sweat, rage coming off him in hot little explosions. Thomas said, again, “Let it go, man.”

“I can’t.” He bowed his head. “If I think of her with another guy, it feels like somebody’s clawing my heart out.”

“I know.”

“Goddamn it, bro, how d’you do it? And it was your own brother!”

Thomas sprinkled water over the burning hot rocks, building up steam. When it curled down from the ceiling to envelope them, he closed his eyes. He saw blips of himself, wild with rage, drunk in the White Horse and trying to pick a fight. “It didn’t happen all at once. I felt the same way you do. Like I could kill somebody.”

Tiny slammed a fist to his skinny, hairless chest. “If she’s out there fuckin’ around, what’s that say to my kids, huh?”

“It’s a rumor, Tiny. You don’t know she’s doing anything.”

“She’s a cunt, man. She is. She’ll do anything.”

The brittle violence was in his voice. Thomas knew the sound, knew how that could feel, shards of glass ripping
along a man’s nerves. “Don’t,” Thomas said. “If you love her, respect her.”

“What about her respecting me?”

“She does. She loves you, too, Tiny. You love each other, and you made these kids together, and you’ve had good times.” The steam and heat burned through the air, along their skin. Thomas wiped his face, leaning his back against the twiggy wall. “You’ve only got three more weeks of class and then the restraining order can be lifted. Don’t do anything to screw that up.”

Tiny did not speak. That was the thing about sweating, Thomas thought. Even against your will, it could take away the darkness sometimes. It leaked away through your pores. “I love her, man, that’s all. I just never loved anybody else like this, never.”

“Love is a good thing.”

Another long quiet. “Yeah,” he said, at last. “Yeah, love is good.”

The weather was gorgeous Saturday night, so Luna told Kitty not to worry about picking them up—she and Joy would walk. Tucking her going-out clothes into a small canvas bag she carried over her shoulder, the delicate gold sandals and the white skirt that showed off her one really good feature, tanned, strong legs she gained by walking everywhere. The weather was cool and sweet, light with the coming of fall. “You’ve never spent a winter here,” she said to Joy. “Think you’ll like snow?”

“Are you kidding? I’m dying to ski. How often can I go, do you think?”

“I’ll pay for once a month. The rest is in your court.”

“That’s all? Once a month? How am I supposed to get money?”

“Hmm.” Luna pretended to think about it seriously. “I know! Get a job?”

But Joy was honestly annoyed. Maybe for the first time since she’d been here. “Doing what?” She put a little hit on the “what,” a little gesture with her head Luna thought of as African American. “Washing dishes? Working at McDonald’s? No one will
hire
a fifteen-year-old, for your information.”

“Trust me, you can find work here. The tourist trade needs bodies. I’ll be glad to put out some feelers to see what I can turn up. What would you like to do?”

Joy huffed. “I don’t want to get all dirty with other people’s slimy dishes, that’s for sure. Or their food.”

“Okay, retail, then.” She frowned. “You’ll probably have to change your hair back, or at least dye it just one color.”

“No way!” She shook her head. “I can’t believe I have to work to go skiing.”

Luna laughed softly. “It’s expensive, sweetie. Sorry. I just don’t have it—and frankly, it won’t hurt you in the least to work for the luxuries you want.”

“Whatever. I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“All right.” She let the subject go, breathing in the evening. “I love the smell of fall coming,” she said cheerfully. “Skiing aside, you have a lot to look forward to. There’s a lot about winter that’s magical.”

“I guess.” Joy tossed hair out of her eyes. “Are you planning to
ever
get a driver’s license again?”

Good aim
, said Barbie.

A scritch of nicotine craving broke on Luna’s nerves, but she took a breath and said, “Probably. Is it causing you a problem?”

“Duh. I had to walk home in the rain the other day.”

“Why didn’t you call Grandma? She wants you to call under those circumstances.”

“I didn’t feel like being nice.”

“Is that anything like now?”

She scowled at Luna. “I just think it would be sort of interesting not to have to walk everywhere all the time. It gets old.”

Something to think about, getting the license restored. But the idea made her feel a little woozy for reasons she didn’t bother to examine. The last time she’d driven a car … well, it hadn’t been pretty. “I’ll think about it.”

They walked up the long, twisting hill to Kitty’s house in silence. The sun was close to setting, and Kitty had lit a dozen hanging paper lanterns in the courtyard. The Beatles spilled through the open door,
Ob-la-di.

“I wish she’d get some new musical tastes,” Joy said.

“Okay, that’s it.” Luna grabbed Joy’s arm. “What’s with you tonight? Are you mad about me going out? Are you mad about your dad? What? You will not spend the entire evening flinging those barbs and trying to hurt people, do you understand me?”

Joy tossed that mass of hair around, adopting the long-suffering-teen expression every parent comes to know so intimately. “Fine,” she said, as if it had been Luna, not her, who had been throwing darts.

“What’s going on, Joy?”

Her head dropped, her hair falling forward around her face. “Sorry,” she said. “I talked to April and the boys today and I just missed them all of a sudden. It’s different here and sometimes that’s hard. I miss my cat. I miss my friends. I miss things just being the way they always have been, even though that’s why I wanted to change.” She tucked her hair behind her ear, the black fingernails looking stark against her pale white skin. “It’s not you, okay? I want to be here. But sometimes, I want April and the boys here, too.”

Hard to hear that. Even after eight years, it was hard to think one nice thing about the woman who’d settled in to take care of her daughter and hadn’t done such a
bad job of it. Hard to admit to herself that she still wished for Joy to hate April. Which made Luna a not very nice person, and she hated that. “Not your dad?”

“No. I hate him. Especially now. I hated him before I came, too, but now he’s just trying to get his own way like always and that’s just mean.” Raising miserable eyes, she said, “You know he couldn’t even talk to me for five minutes on the phone today? I’m really mad at him about this and he needed to respect me enough to listen, and he wouldn’t. He just blew me off. I hate that.”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

“It’s not your fault.”

The heavy glass door swung open. “I thought I heard voices,” Kitty said. “What’re you two doing out here? We’re waiting for you.” There was an edge of annoyance to her voice. Very unusual.

“Sorry, Mom,” Luna said. “We were talking about something important.”

But Kitty just distractedly turned and click-clacked down the hall paved with saltillo tiles. “Hey Jude” came on the stereo, and a little alarm went off in Luna’s head. Heart. “Jude” was a song that meant Kitty was thinking of her long-gone husband, or thinking about how to not miss him. It was hot-wired into Luna from a hundred nights and afternoons when Kitty played it, over and over, trying to make herself be less lonely. She didn’t cry. She didn’t fall to drinking martinis midafternoon. She didn’t start beating her daughters. She just put on the Beatles and tried to be brave.

The next song would be “Let It Be” and that was a song that broke Luna’s heart to smithereens each and every time.

As they came into the kitchen, Luna flashed a questioning look at her sister Elaine, who wore a blank expression.
She shrugged, obviously as aware as she that something weird was going on.

“I have something to tell you, girls,” Kitty said. “Elaine, there’s iced tea in the fridge; Luna, I made your coffee the way you like it.” She poured a giant white mug of it and passed it across the butcher block island where they all settled on barstools beneath the softly pink light overhead. The coffee smelled rich and hot in the air, deep as night.

Luna tasted it. “Excellent, Mom.”

“Joy, sweetie, what would you like? I bought some cherry Coke. Or some Pellegrino?”

“Oh, how did you know?”

Kitty winked one turquoise-limned eyelid. “I make it my business to know things.”

Once the drinks were served—Kitty pouring a rather large martini, which was not completely unheard of but definitely underscored the strangeness of everything— Kitty took a sip and said, “Girls, I have news.”

Luna exchanged a look with Elaine. “Okay, we know that part. What is the news?”

“It’s about your father.”

Luna felt like someone twisted her spine, just a little bit, at the very base. Sickening. “What?”

“I had a letter a couple of weeks ago,” Kitty said. “It was from a lawyer who wanted to find out if I was the Kitty McGraw who was once Kitty Esquivel, married to Jesse. I didn’t know what he wanted, but I called and left a message with the secretary, then forgot about it.

“This afternoon, he called back. Your father left us— all of us—a parcel of land up near Trinidad. There’s also an offer on the table for it from a development company that wants to buy it immediately.”

“Left it?” Luna echoed.

“For a lot of money?” Elaine asked.

“Yes,” Kitty said to both of them. With a French-manicured hand, she lifted her martini and took a big gulp.

“He’s dead, then,” Luna said, a lump in her throat.

“Brilliant, Sherlock,” Elaine said. “Not that it matters, since we haven’t seen him in decades.”

“We need to make a decision,” Kitty said. “The lawyer is mailing me some paperwork by express mail, and we can look it over together.”

“How much land?” Elaine asked.

“Four hundred acres.”

Elaine chortled.

Kitty said dully, “I guess we need to see it before we decide.”

Luna thought of the dreams of her father. No wonder. She’d probably been picking up on her mother’s thought of him. “Mom,” Luna said, putting a hand over Kitty’s. “Are you okay?”

She made a noise, an aggrieved little
tsk
, and took a tissue out of her pocket to press against her mouth. “No,” she said. “I … I’m … it’s just not fair. All these years without a word? Now this? After he’s
dead?”

“Yeah,” Elaine said. “If he had enough to buy all that land, he was doing just fine while we barely made it.”

“He’s dead,” Luna said again. “Now we’ll never know.”

“Know what?” Elaine asked with annoyance.

Kitty said it for her. “Why he left.”

After Kitty’s initial announcement and the first flurry of discussion, they all sort of let it drop. Luna discovered her thoughts skittering toward the reality—he’s dead!—then away, over and over. But she lost herself in the Saturday supper ritual. They made Belgian waffles with fresh strawberries, and she pigged out on a whole one piled high with freshly whipped cream, even though she’d promised herself she had to get serious about not eating anything too awful for a while. As it was, the jeans she was wearing were so tight around the waist that she had to undo the button halfway through the meal.

She wasn’t wrong about the next cut from the Beatles—it was “Let It Be.” Thankfully, that was the last one. Kitty seemed to snap out of it after that. She put on Janis Joplin and they ended up dancing barefoot in the living room to
Cheap Thrills
, Kitty shaking and shimmying all over the place in her good girdle and push-up bra. Elaine, Kitty, and Luna knew every single syllable,
and beat, and had millions of years ago worked out the routines. Joy threw herself into it quite creditably, and with her red and black hair and fishnet shirt, looked more Janis-like than any of the rest of them. Luna grinned at her, and by Joy’s wink, Joy knew it, too.

But it was Elaine who was always so amazing during these impromptu wild night sing-alongs. She often protested them because she was shy about her body and dancing, but in her secret heart, Elaine had always, always, always wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll singer. Luna remembered the posters on their shared bedroom wall, remembered Elaine belting out songs from the radio at school recess, just to surprise and shock everyone with the immensity of her voice.

Luna didn’t know exactly where the dream had gone—it seemed to slowly disappear as Elaine started gaining weight in her early teens, and was completely hidden by the time she graduated from high school, weighing 220—but every so often, it surfaced again. “Piece of My Heart” was guaranteed to bring out the blueswoman living deep inside Elaine. Luna and Kitty slowed, exchanging a glance. Luna shot a glance at Joy and lifted her chin to indicate Joy should watch her aunt as “Summertime”—a nice version, Luna thought, but nowhere close to the Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald masterpiece—finished.