Barbara Samuel (26 page)

I just took her hand and brought her back to the kitchen. “I’ll save her some. I promise.” But that extra plate on the table bugged me and I asked Ricky if he’d go get Joy, telling him about the stubbed toe and the reason she couldn’t walk over here even if it was so close. And he was up for it. Just pulled out his keys and went to get her. So then we had a nice supper after all and I think Joy kinda liked Ricky.

My mom’s not getting better though. I don’t know who’s going to help her. I don’t know who to ask. My grandma tried to get me to think about coming to live with her, at least until my mom is better, but how can I do that? Just leave her with nobody? She’d die for sure.

I have to go to school tomorrow. Night.

After Joy left, Luna found herself restless. Hungry. It was too wet outside to garden, but she put on a rain hat and started walking anyway, enjoying the soft drizzle that put moisture back into her desert-dried sinuses and lungs, dampened her face and eyelashes and lips.

Until her feet carried her there, she had not realized that she was going to walk by Thomas’s house. See where he lived and what it was like.

Like a teenager. How
cute
, said Barbie, cooing.

Not very. But she was still glad she’d done it when she saw it. In the soft drizzle, it looked a little shabby sitting
at the very top of a hill, the yard so steep that someone had created steps with railroad ties. It was a two-story Victorian anomaly with stucco walls and a porch that wrapped all the way around the front and one side. A woman would have hung flower baskets on the empty hooks, but the only flowers growing here were tall purple phlox and a giant stand of cosmos—plants that didn’t need anything but a glance to thrive. She remembered that Thomas had said the house was a stray he’d adopted and she smiled, liking him for that. There was grandeur left in her, that big house, and a kind of serenity in the big front windows that gazed over the valley. The view had to be amazing from those windows. She had a moment of house-lust.

Since she hadn’t known she was coming, she didn’t know whether she’d planned to go to the door or just walk by, but the choice was taken from her when she spied Thomas himself sitting in the shadows of the porch roof. He sat in a chair, something in his hands, and his dog came leaping off the porch, skidding on the wet grass as he came toward her, happily licking her hand, then bouncing back toward the porch as if to say, “C’mon! It’s so great to have a visitor!”

Thomas stood, not smiling, and Luna had a bad moment, thinking this had been an utterly adolescent thing to do and she ought to be flogged for not at least calling first. There just hadn’t been that much thought involved—she was acting on instinct.

He gestured for her to come up there, and she picked her way up the steps carefully, water dripping from her hat, her cheeks flaming. “I wanted to see where you lived,” she said, ducking under the shelter of the porch roof.

Thomas only looked at her for a long moment. “I’m glad you came—”

Tiny slammed out of the house, talking before he saw Luna standing there. “Hector Baca saw Angelica out this afternoon with some dickhead and I can’t get through to nobody to find out what’s going on. Thomas—” He saw Luna. “Oh.”

Behind her, the heavens suddenly opened and water poured through the split, a river from heaven pouring on the ground. Blocking her exit.

“Hold on one second,” Thomas said, putting his hand on her upper arm. “Don’t go.”

She nodded.

“Tiny, inside.”

They started to go in, but the phone in Tiny’s hand rang, and he answered it urgently, then shoved it into Thomas’s hand. “It’s your ex,” he said, and it was plain he meant Luna to hear, that he wanted others to suffer with him. He banged back into the house.

Luna wished for an earthquake to suck her deep into the bowels of the earth, out of sight. A clap of thunder burst in the sky and she jumped.

“Nadine,” Thomas barked into the phone, “what is it?” He didn’t move away, and Luna thought he might be doing it on purpose to reassure her that it didn’t mean anything, his ex calling.

She turned away, looking out over the valley. Eddies of mist made the fields of chamiso and sage look soft and furry, and the ankles of the mountains beneath the skirts of thick dark clouds were dark, dark blue. She tried not to listen, but it wasn’t like he made a secret of it. “That’s none of your business,” he said. Then, “Nadine, what do you want me to do?”

A longer pause, filled with the rain crashing around the porch. Luna could hear the tinny voice of a sobbing woman at the other end of the line. Thomas’s voice was gentler when he spoke again. “Maybe you need to go to
a counselor. If he won’t go with you, go by yourself.” Captured by something in his voice, Luna glanced over at him in time to see him drop a shoulder, hide a flash of emotion on his face. “Nadine,” he said. Then more strongly, interrupting. “Nadine—”

I might still be in love with my ex-wife.

Cheeks burning, Luna walked down the porch a little way, to give him more privacy. Through a window at the far end, she saw Placida sitting in a rocking chair in a big, old kitchen. Catholic radio played in Spanish, and she worked a rosary along with the announcer, blue beads spilling through her gnarled hands like hope. Luna had a sudden memory of her father’s mother, in a house with turquoise linoleum and pink bathroom fixtures, kneeling before a small altar she kept at the end of the hall. She had died when Luna was four, so the memory was very, very old.

Placida didn’t see her, and Luna stepped back a little to make sure she wasn’t staring rudely, but she couldn’t stop admiring the scene. It made her want to paint. A light over the sink showed a big black cat on the windowsill, his tail flicking, and the pool of light almost touched Placida. Her flowered housedress and the amazement of her hair, still probably down to her hips if she took it out of the braids she piled it into, mostly gray, but with some black left in it. Luna thought of her being on the earth when Pancho Villa was riding through Mexico, and sitting in a wagon on the road to Raton.

Close behind her Thomas said, “Nadine, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can help you.” He hung up and sighed, bending over Luna’s neck to plant a kiss there, the gesture somehow familiar even though they’d known each other less than two weeks. It was comfortable, and Luna found herself reaching for his wrist,
drawing his hand into hers, offering whatever he needed just then.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I came at a very bad time.”

“No,” he said, and tugged her closer, putting his chin down on her shoulder, his arms looped around her waist. “I’m glad you’re here. Come sit down.”

Luna settled in one of the chairs and he sat down beside her, picking up the piece of wood he’d been holding. A soft shape was emerging—a knee pushing at a drape of fabric, a foot. When he took up a knife, curls of wood drifted off the blade to dance into the air. “I think it’s a Virgin,” he said. “I haven’t done one for a while.”

“Santos?”

He nodded.
“Abuela’s
line used to have a lot of
santeros.”
He held it up, admiring it, and she loved the smoothness of his lines, the look of his dark hand on the wood. “Now I’m the only one.”

She smiled, but her hands were clasped hard and she made herself release them. Forcing herself not to ask about the ex-wife.

As if he read her mind, he said, “Nadine, my ex, heard about you from somebody. She wanted to get on my case about hanging out with a white woman.”

“Ah!”

“She’s also pregnant,” he added, “so she’s a little crazy, and she thinks my brother is running around on her.”

“Is he?”

He pursed his lips, gently shaping his thumb over the foot of the
santo.
“Probably. It’s what he does. He’s just like my father.”

“Not you?”

He raised his eyes. “No.”

The phone, sitting on the small metal table between them, rang, and Thomas looked at it with weariness.
“Sorry,” he said and picked it up. “Hello? Oh, Angelica, he’ll be really glad to talk to you.”

Tiny was out on the porch before Thomas had a chance to move, and grabbed the phone and dashed back inside. Luna could hear his voice, rising and falling in the particular sound of relief. She touched her chest, the ache there, and closed her eyes. “God,” she said quietly.

“Love hurts,” Thomas said.

The rain was letting up, and she rubbed her hands on her thighs. “I guess I’ll get back. Joy went to her friend’s house and I … ” She lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. My feet just brought me here.”

“Joy’s gone?”

She nodded.

“Your house is empty?”

Luna grinned. “Yep.”

He was on his feet, pulling his keys out of his pocket in a half second. “I’ll be back later,” he called to whoever, and grabbed her hand, tugging her to her feet and out to his truck.

Thomas didn’t even think. It took three minutes to drive to her house, another two to shed their clothes and fall into her big, extrasoft bed, piled with silky pillows in emerald and sapphire and gold. He pushed her, naked, into the piles of fabric and then just stood over her for a minute. She lifted her arms above her head and tilted her head sideways a little, as if offering all she was.

It slayed him. Outside, rain began to fall lightly, and the scent washed into the room, and Thomas could not breathe for looking at Luna. Her pale white flesh so bright against the vivid colors of her bed, the sparkle of an earring against her neck, the curve of belly that slid into thighs and the low triangle of hair, the bend of her knee suddenly revealing the secret between, her eyes so
wide and steady and deep, fixed on his face. Everything in him was aroused—his eyes and the palms of his hands, his knees and the skin across his chest; there was a buzzing around his skull and his tongue. He couldn’t think how to get them all on her at once, and tried one at a time instead.

First he looked at her, then bent over her and smelled her skin, then put his tongue on her shoulder and tasted it, nibbled her arm, pressed the flat of his tongue on the lower curve of her breast, making her breathe out in a soft gust as his hair fell around them, loose and trailing. His organ brushed her thighs, his knee bumped her calf.

“It’s been so long, so long, so long,” he said raggedly, using his nose to trace the line of her belly, his hands on her sides. He couldn’t think of ever burning like this, the low simmer going all day and night now, every nerve alive, hungry, waiting for the next chance. “This is so good,” he said. He put his fingers between her legs, wanting to make her cry out again, and he made it last, going so slowly so that he could watch her breasts rise and fall in the open while he touched her.

Her hands floated down his back, down his sides, over his buttocks. “Yes,” she whispered, and kissed his chin, his eyes, his forehead.

They made love, slowly, so slowly, rolling into satisfaction rather than roaring into it, and then they were free to lie in Luna’s bed, side by side, holding hands, which took away all the things he’d been worrying about, all the things he didn’t want to think about. On her ceiling was a folklike painting of the galaxy, the background dark, bright blue, the stars childlike yellow and gold and white, the planets shaped like hearts and painted like bowling balls. “Did you do that?”

“Yeah. It was fun, once I figured out how to get up there.”

“How did you?”

She grinned. “Rented a scaffold, Mr. Construction.”

He laughed softly. “Good thinking.” For a while, they were quiet, their bodies looped and tangled. “I love your house,” he said.

“Me, too. I always wanted an old adobe and now I have one.”

“How old is it?”

“Not sure, exactly. Around 1840.”

He touched the wall, whistling. “Pretty old. Mine was built in 1891.”

“That’s old, too. Does it have a story?”

“A blacksmith built it. Nothing matches. None of the windows are the same size. The floors are crooked.” He smiled. “Still love it, though. One of these days, I want to tackle the kitchen.” He looked at her. “I should have taken you inside.”

Luna lifted up on one elbow. “Wouldn’t want to get cursed by
Abuelita.”
She ran an open palm in a line from the hollow of his throat to the base of his organ, the exploration of a new lover.

He pressed her hand to his belly. “That’s ice cream. I keep a store of it, just in case.”

She kissed his belly button, her hair tickling his chest. “I love it.”

It pained him a little, made an ache grow right in the middle of his heart. “Thought women all wanted six-pack abs.”

“Overrated.” She moved, pulling the covers over them. “We can’t stay here long. Joy might come in early.”

“I understand. Just a minute or two more, huh?”

She settled her head on his shoulder, and he found he liked the fit. Sleepiness from the long day in the wind and sun settled over him, a quiet he hadn’t felt in a long time.
To keep himself from drifting off, he said, “I liked your daughter. She’s a good kid—funny and open-minded.”

“She liked you back.” She turned her head. “I’m not crazy about the two of you spending much time together, Thomas. I don’t want her to be in the middle of my relationships.”