Barbara Samuel (33 page)

Luna loved her more than anyone or anything else in the world.

She crossed her arms. This time, she wouldn’t crawl away, wouldn’t crawl in a hole and hide, lying low so the forces of evil just wouldn’t see her.

She would fight him. She would find a way—whatever it took—to stand up for Joy and herself, for the right to raise her daughter, even if she wasn’t rich or successful, even if she’d had some bad years in her life and made some mistakes. Lots of great parents had made mistakes.

More than that, her gut just said Joy needed Luna now. She needed her mother as she made her way through these difficult years. She needed the influence of Kitty in her life, and the gentler world of Taos and all those other things. Luna wouldn’t let Marc’s egotistical charge take that away from her.

Joy came in just then, red-faced from the heat. “Hi,” she said, and went to the cupboard for a glass she filled with water and drank down, then filled up again. “It’s hot out there today. Wonder when the weather will break?”

Luna felt guilty all over again about the car. “Not long now,” she said, then gave her a rueful smile. “But then it’s going to get cold.”

“I can live with cold.” She plucked a handful of grapes out of the bowl. “What’s going on?”

Truth was always best. “I just talked to your dad. He wants you to come back to Atlanta.”

She lifted a shoulder, tossed a grape in the air, caught it in her mouth. “Yeah, so?”

“I’m willing to fight to let you stay here, Joy, but if
you feel ambivalent at all, maybe you’d be happier living there. More money, more room, better schools.”

“More hassles, more fights, guns in every locker, people who call me names when I date somebody who isn’t who they think it should be—” She paused. “And no you.”

Luna didn’t want to show how much that meant to her, and turned away, scrambling for a glass out of the cupboard. “Okay, then,” she said. “I’ll just keep telling him no every time he asks.”

Joy ducked into the fridge, pulled out a wedge of cheese, chewed on her mouth in that funny way. “Mom, I really want you to know that I like being here because of you, okay? Not because of the town or just to get away from my dad, but because I just think I’m more like you than like anybody there. And I want to be with somebody who understands that being different is just how you are sometimes.”

Luna hugged her, fiercely. “I’m so lucky to have you for a daughter.”

Joy hugged her back and into her ear said, “So, how much do you love me?”

Luna laughed. “What do you want?”

“Do you think I can get my hair back to blond? Ricardo keeps teasing me and calling me girl with wrong hair. I think he’d like to see it blond.”

Luna gave her a look.

“Oh, I know, I know. I’m not changing myself for a guy.” She lifted a shoulder, lowered her eyes, concentrated on a crumb of cheese she put in her mouth. “Nobody wears this here and I’m starting to feel kinda dumb about it.
And
we’re taking pictures next week.”

“In that case, I’ll be glad to do it for you. It shouldn’t even be hard. What do you say we call Grandma for a ride and go get the stuff now?”

“Cool.” She smiled shyly. “I think we’re going out later. Me and Ricardo, that is. Is that okay?”

“Hmm. Let’s talk about that in a minute, after I call Grandma.”

Thomas couldn’t stem his agitation, and he wanted to take off looking for Tiny or his car—which wasn’t, after all, a hard thing to spot. Instead, he paced the porch, up and down, and peered down the road every time he saw a dirt trail out beyond the cottonwoods. He told himself Tiny would be home on time, by 5:30, or the alarm on the ankle bracelet machine would go off at headquarters.

But it was getting close now. Five minutes past five.

The phone rang and Thomas snatched it off the porch railing. “Hello?” he said gruffly.

“Thomas?” Nadine said in a thin voice. “Can you talk now?”

Guilt—he’d been ducking her—slugged him. “Sure, kiddo, what’s up? Sorry I’ve been so hard to get hold of, but there’s a lot going on here right now. Work and
Abuela
and—ah, hell, lots of things.”

“It’s okay. I understand.” She sounded airless, her voice dull.

“Is the baby okay?”

“Fine,” she said with a fragile laugh. “I’m huge.”

Maybe it was that thin, brave laugh, but suddenly Thomas was slammed with a sense of loss again. It came in powerful images—her long thick hair, her rich mouth. Her body, so lush and sexual, spread naked on his bed. “I’m sure you look as good as you always do.”

“Well, I don’t.” There was a maturity in her sigh, a womanliness. “I guess that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Lookin’ good?” he joked.

“No, silly.”

At least she wasn’t crying. She just sounded so tired, so worn. Maybe it was being pregnant. A sudden swell of sympathy made him kind. He leaned a foot on the rail. In a juniper tree nearby, a pair of wrens started warbling. “What’s up?”

“First I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry for being so emotional on the phone the other day. I was just so freaked and I didn’t know where to turn.”

“It’s all right.”

She sighed. “There’s no easy way to say this, Thomas,” she said, and he felt a swoop of dread move through his belly, a nameless warning that made him want to keep her from saying it, but he only grunted.

“It’s ironic,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure your brother is cheating on me.” She said it calmly, like it was no big deal.

But Thomas’s body said otherwise. Every muscle in his body contracted, winced away from it. “It would be ironic,” he agreed mildly. “But I’m not sure what I have to do with it.”

“I don’t know either,” she said, and her voice cracked a little. “I told myself so many things, Thomas, when we were … when he and I—”

“I get what you mean.”

“When I cheated on you with him,” she said, more firmly, and he had a sudden visual of her tossing her long dark hair away from her face resolutely. “I told myself it was beyond my control, that passion swept me away, that we were soul mates and that made everything worth it.” Her voice went a little ragged. “Soul mates.”

He gripped the phone more tightly, feeling sweat make his palm slippery. Dread moved through his limbs like a swarm of flies, black and buzzing. A soft protest
built in him:
Don’t take me there, not again, I can’t breathe.

“The thing is, Thomas,” she continued, “is that was so much bullshit, and I can’t believe how selfish I was, we both were, to hurt you like that. You were my husband and he was your brother, and it was so ugly of us. I should never have—”

“Stop,” he said, harshly. “I don’t know what you want from me. Sympathy? Forgiveness? What?”

“Nothing,” she said, and there were soft tears in her voice now. “I don’t want anything. I just wanted to tell you that I understand now, and it was so wrong of me, and you are a good man and you didn’t deserve it.”

She understood now, Thomas realized with a distant ping of sorrow, because she truly loved his brother. He looked down the road toward Luna’s house, invisible just beyond that line of scrub oak. He thought of her throat, her hair, her mouth, and the dread in him eased. He drew a breath and said, “Maybe you should get some counseling, Nadine.” He avoided the obvious, that a man who could sleep with his brother’s wife was probably not the wisest choice as a husband, and with some weariness, he realized that Nadine was about to learn the same lessons his mother had learned. “It’s not just you now. You have to think of what’s going to be best for the baby.”

“So I’m supposed to just look the other way?”

“I can’t tell you what to do, Nadine. It’s none of my business.”

A thick beat of silence. “I guess it would be foolish of me to ask if I could come stay with you for a few days, just to sort things out.”

He thought of Luna, her wary dark eyes, her tentative smile. “Sorry. That’s not something I can do.”

“Because of the white girl?”

Her bitterness somehow didn’t touch him. Calmly he said, “Yes. It would hurt her.”

Nadine was silent. “I’m sorry. That was wrong of me. I apologize.”

She hung up, and for a long moment, Thomas wondered if he ought to call her back. If she were swearing, wild, even weeping hysterically, it would be a lot more in character. It was one of the things that had most attracted and most repelled him—dramatic intensity.

And he realized that one thing he very much liked about Luna was that lack of drama. She was steady, calm. She saw, as he did, that life held enough drama without manufacturing it. With a sharp longing, he wanted to see her, be with her. Not for sex. Just to look at her calm brown eyes.

He punched the button on the phone and dialed her number. Joy answered with a breathless hello.

“Hi, Joy. This is Thomas Coyote. Is your mother there?”

“Yeah,” she said with obvious disappointment. “She’s in the garden. Let me get her.”

Thomas smiled. “Expecting a call?”

“Maybe.”

“Want me to call back in a little while?”

“No, that’s okay. She’ll kill me.”

“I have an idea, then. Hang up. I need a little walk anyway.”

“Really, Thomas, it’s okay. I was just cranky. I’ll go get her. Really.”

“I insist. I want to see her more than talk to her anyway.” And before she could waver anymore, he hung up and went to find his grandmother. It wasn’t until he came into the kitchen that he realized he was whistling. Placida was in her rocking chair, her mouth open as she
snored, and instead of saying anything, he just kissed her head. “You okay?” he said when she snorted awake.

“Fine, fine.”

Thomas suddenly remembered Tiny and blew out a heavy gust of air. “I’m going down to see my friend. If Tiny comes, tell him to stay put. If the monitor goes off, page me.”

But right then, the sound of a heavy engine rumbled in front of the house, and Thomas strode out on the porch to meet Tiny, who had the beginnings of a black eye but otherwise looked calm and cheerful. Thomas narrowed his eyes. “Where you been?”

“I went to see Angelica, okay? I won’t lie. I just needed to be with her, calm down a little. And we’re fine, okay?” He touched his heart. “I swear, brother.”

Thomas said, “Two weeks, man. That’s all you got left. Don’t blow it.”

“I know.”

He did look fine. Calm. And Thomas wanted, even more, to see Luna. “Look out for
Abuela
, man. She looks tired.” He pulled his keys out of his pocket. “I’m going out.”

Tiny grinned, slapped his arm. “See? A woman makes life better.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “Some of them do.”

One of the things that had snared Luna about her house when she was looking (and looking and looking and looking—it took a long time to find a house she liked that was also within her budget) was the patio. The house was an L, the living and dining rooms and kitchen in one wing, the sunporch, the bedrooms, and the bath in the other. Nestled between them, sheltered by an ancient cottonwood, was a patio laid with old, old brick. It was uneven after so many years, and things sprouted
up in the cracks all the time—grass and weeds and a stand of cosmos in one corner that she let grow. A bench formed of the same adobe that made the house ran along side it, all the way around the L, and she put a table and chairs out there, planted roses and petunias in tubs, and nestled pots of lavender and rosemary at intervals for the good smells. She didn’t have a fireplace, but hoped to one day add one.

She stripped the red and black out of Joy’s hair and they found a tint, Pale Wheat, that was very close to her natural color. The actual process didn’t take long—they ate a supper of fast-food hamburgers before they started, and munched on pistachios in the shell while they waited for the dye to take, sitting outside on the patio, enjoying the soft pinkish light and the cool breeze. Joy took off the black nail polish she’d been wearing and tried a coppery color. “Why do you think it’s so comforting to paint your nails?” she asked.

Luna grinned. “I don’t know. Same with getting your hair done, or getting a facial. Even shaving my legs makes me feel better sometimes.”

“I know why it feels good to get your hair done,” she said. “Somebody’s hands on your head feels good.”

“That’s true.” Luna rubbed the old polish off her own nails. She had to keep them fairly short because of the work she did, but at times in her life, they’d been very long indeed. They grew with no help from her whatsoever. Now she picked through the tray of bottles, chose a dark purply-plum and shook the bottle. She liked the ones with little beads inside. High quality product.

“Not purple, Mom. Be wild for once.”

“Wild? Why?”

“Just for fun.” She pulled out a turquoise shade. “This one. Trust me. It’ll make you happy all week.”

Best Friend Barbie, taking the color off her toenails, gave her a look.
Listen to your daughter.

What the heck. She could be a blue jay for a week. “How’s your friend Maggie doing?”

“Okay, I guess. Her mom is not going to work, though, she said. That’s a pretty bad depression, isn’t it?”

Luna frowned. “Can be.” Stop procrastinating, she told herself. Picking up the remote phone sitting beside them on the table, she asked, “Do you want to invite them over tomorrow? We’ll have Grandma come here instead of going there. Allie’s going to come, too.”

“Sure! That’s a great idea. Maybe we can play a game or something.”

“What’s the number?” Luna punched them in as she said them. A girl answered on the second ring, breathless. “Hello?”

“Hi, Maggie,” she said. “My name is Lu McGraw, your friend Joy’s mother. Is your mom home?”

“Um, she’s in the shower right now. Do you want me to have her call you? I think she’s got something to do tonight, but maybe in the morning?”

“That’s fine. In the meantime, we wanted to invite you both to come over tomorrow night for supper. Just a quiet thing, me and Joy and a couple of others. We’ll watch videos or play games or something.”

“Oh!” She sounded so startled it pained Luna. “I’d love to. I’ll ask my mom if she wants to come, too. I mean, if it would be okay if I came by myself if she … uh … has something else to do?”