Barbara Samuel (8 page)

Joy also could not believe that she had to connect to the Internet in the living room—because that’s where the phone connection was. “Haven’t you ever heard of privacy?” she complained. She was triply horrified to discover that Luna connected to the Internet with something as primitive as a modem and phone line. “You don’t have cable or DSL or
anything?”

Luna laughed. Gently.

They also discovered better things, such as the fact that they watched nearly all the same television shows, and loved to watch movies with a big bowl of popcorn between them. They liked the same foods and neither one much liked to talk first thing in the morning.

The best part was the house. In Luna’s old apartment, they’d always been cramped together during Joy’s visits. Luna had managed to win financing for the house eighteen months before, but it had needed so much work before she could move in—it was over two hundred years old, after all, and had been sorely neglected—Joy had not yet had a chance to stay there. It wasn’t a huge place—living room and dining room, a long narrow kitchen, two bedrooms with a bath between, but it gave the two of them space enough that they could each have some privacy and escape options.

Before school started, they shopped a little. While they were buying the basics—spiral notebooks (black) and pens and a backpack (black)—Joy asked about school clothes. Her father had sent money for them—to her, not Luna—and she wanted to know the best place to go.

They were standing in the school supplies aisle at
Wal-Mart, surrounded by packages of pens and notebooks with pictures of tigers and cartoon characters Luna didn’t recognize. She reached for a folder with a big-eyed girl and a faintly exotic look to her, remembering yellow folders with line drawings of sports figures. Had there even been a choice then? She couldn’t remember. “Who is this?” she asked.

“Mom.” It was a faintly aggrieved tone that asked what cave she’d been living in. “That’s Sailor Moon.”

“Oh! I’ve heard of her.” She flashed her daughter a smile and put the folder back. “You’ll need new clothes, I’m sure—I bet you don’t have much that’s warm, do you?”

“Not really. How long till I need them?”

“A month, maybe two, depending on how soon it snows.” She hesitated, wondering if this might also fall into the clueless category, but how much did certain things ever change? “Maybe it would be better if you waited until after the first week of school is over, so you can see what everybody else is wearing. They might have different styles than what’s popular in Atlanta.”

Joy played with the stud beneath her lower lip, sucking it in, then letting it go as she thought about it. Luna worried that Joy might take it the wrong way—she was big on “no game playing,” as she called it. Her weird hair, multiple piercings, and the henna tattoos she drew around her wrists and ankles were a badge of honor. An identity flag.

Which Luna understood in a weird way. She’d grown up in the seventies, after all. Not exactly a normal decade.

Joy let go of the stud. “Good idea. Not,” she hastened to add, “that I’ll change anything. But I might want to see, just in case they’re wearing something good.”

Her first day of school was Luna’s first day back to
work—August 28. They’d registered the Thursday before, and Joy had waved to a kid who’d lived next door to the old apartment. An auspicious sign, and one that seemed to make Joy feel pretty comfortable.

They shared a part of the walk that first day, since Luna had to be at work at seven. Although she didn’t kid herself that this would be a long-term bonding ritual, it was still pretty good. The morning was bright and cool. Joy wore her fishnet shirt (black) with a red tank beneath it, a pair of bell-bottom jeans (black) that covered her feet in their combat boots (black), and a flowered scarf over her head. She looked as beautiful as a blue jay against the backdrop of pale green fields.

“Are you nervous?” Luna asked. She herself was wearing jeans and a simple scoop-neck T-shirt and walking sandals. She carried her work smock over her shoulder so it wouldn’t get sweaty.

“Kinda.”

“If you need me, don’t hesitate to call.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad!” She shrugged. “At least this isn’t dangerous. In Atlanta, sometimes it was.”

“It was?”

Joy widened her eyes. “Yeah,” she said in that “duh” voice. “Don’t you read the papers? The most dangerous kids in the country are spoiled little rich boys with access to guns.”

Luna chuckled. “I forgot.” She paused. “Um … don’t underestimate the gangs here. They might not be spoiled little rich boys, but they’ve got their own set of angers.”

“Mom.”

“What?” She didn’t grow up with these kids. She was an outsider. Luna worried about it. There would be girls who would challenge her—tough girls who didn’t have
anything to lose. “Girls,” she said. “I’m talking about girls, not boys.”

“I’m fifteen, not six.”

“I know.” She smiled, lifting a shoulder. “And I trust you. You’ll make friends fast.”

At the main drag, they parted company, Joy going off to school, Luna heading to the Pay and Pack grocery store. On the way in, she nodded to Ernesto and Diane, smoking outside on the park bench management had put in the shade. “Still off?” Ernie asked.

“So far so good.” Lifting her shirt sleeve to show the patch, she said, “Seventeen days.”

“Goll, that’s good,” Diane said. She was nineteen and Hispanic and had the longest eyelashes Luna had ever seen. “I’m just too weak, I think.”

“You’ll do it.” Luna lifted a hand and went in, suddenly very jealous of the fact that they were smoking and she wasn’t. Not fair.

Luckily, because she’d been gone, there was a lot to do. Another woman, Renee, filled in when Luna took time off, but she generally made a mess of things. Or not a mess, exactly—she just didn’t do things the way Luna liked them done. Tying an apron over her shirt, she got to work cleaning up, checking the displays to see what was offered for sale, what sort of bouquets Renee had made up, and what might be left; checking the water level in the potted ferns and dieffenbachia and English ivy—a real pain in the neck in the dry climate; they always fell prey to spider mites. Luna tried to talk people into buying pothos, instead. Finding them all dry as a bone, that was the first priority. She fitted a narrow green hose to the sink in back and turned on the water, drawing the hose behind her as she made her way around the plants and buckets and coolers, filling them all up.

It wasn’t exciting work. It wasn’t particularly challenging. It was, in the lingo of AA, a Job. She’d taken it when she’d been sober ninety-three days, and at the time, it seemed like God himself had ordained it. It was peaceful. The flowers, the coolness of the water, the smell of the plants and earth and carnations and roses. She loved putting her hands in dirt, and not having to dress up for work. She adored making bouquets from the big tubs of flowers that were delivered twice a week from a greenhouse in Albuquerque. Within a year, she’d taken over the department from the desultory administration of the former manager, and profits went up 23 percent the first six months.

So she stayed. The salary was decent and there were medical benefits, a little profit sharing, a retirement plan. Enough for her needs. She never had to take it home and worry about it, as she had so often with her clients. And there were fringe benefits to working in a grocery store—people she worked with and people who came into the store. It was possible to help someone every single day, and no matter how grumpy she felt when she came in, the flowers never failed to cheer her.

Lately, her mother had started to ask if Luna was planning to stay in the store forever, or if she might be thinking about going back to counseling. If it were anyone else, Luna would have said it was simple snobbishness talking, the idea that one sort of work was more valuable than another, that a florist was less valuable to the world than a psychologist, but it would never even occur to Kitty to rank jobs like that.

Luna had had no answer for Kitty that day. She still didn’t. Every so often, she considered the idea of returning to counseling, and then just as quickly rejected it. The flower business was just fine.

But this morning, she discovered that not even a shipment
of narcotically scented freesias could distract her from the difficulty of not smoking. It was rough. She’d never smoked on the job, per se, only in the break room in the old days, and then outside—which actually gave her a little more freedom, since there was a door right between the counters and the big metal sink.

She kept thinking it would get easier. In some ways, it was getting harder. She was discovering all the ways she’d used cigarettes in her life. At work, she’d used them a lot—as a reward and a retreat, to give herself a break or get away from an annoying or difficult situation, or—well, a million reasons. Get the bouquets finished, go outside. Get through a meeting with her control-freak boss, have a cigarette.

She also used the breaks as an escape, usually when her assistant was going on too long about her latest love affair—of which she had many. Jean, twenty-three and pretty, with trendy clothes and hair that came down over her forehead in a plastered, plastic kind of way, came in at ten. Before she even had her apron tied, she started talking. “I met the most
amazing
guy last night,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed pink. “We sat there and talked, you know, like we’d known each other forever, I swear.” She paused to wash her hands, scrubbing at a mark from a nightclub. “We talked movies and work and then”—she shook her hands and took a paper towel from the white metal dispenser on the wall—“we talked art. Art with a capital
A
.”

Jean had come west from some grimy town in the northeast, studying art at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque before fleeing to Taos, where she spent her days at the store, her nights alternating between painting oils of coyote skulls and drinking heavily with other aspirants to the O’Keeffe crown. She didn’t even
notice that Luna had said not a single word to her. “He just had such deep eyes, you know?”

“Mmm.”

“We drank until three, can you imagine? I almost couldn’t get up this morning.”

In spite of herself, Luna smiled. Those were the good old days—party all night, sleep three or four hours, work all day and be ready to do it all again the next night. “Sounds interesting,” she said, muting Jean’s voice as she trimmed the stems of some aging chrysanthemums. Needed to put them on special today, she thought, running her index finger along the deep rust-red flowers, getting lost a little in the shape, the color, the tiny, tiny curls of the petals.

“So,” Jean said behind her, “you think I should see him again?”

“Mmm.” Luna glanced at the clock: 10:15. Usually, she’d gone out for a cigarette at this time, both to escape Jean and to breathe some fresh air on the patio that overlooked the Sangre de Cristos. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“Well, I just told you, there is a little bit of something weird about him. Maybe he’s like a serial killer or something.” She crossed her arms. “Or maybe he’s just creative, right? Like me.”

A sensation like someone snapping a rubber band across her forehead made Luna turn from the sink almost violently. “I’m going outside for a few minutes. If Josh comes by, tell him I’ll be back in twenty.”

“You aren’t smoking are you?” Jean smoked, but she was—as she’d told Luna often enough—young enough to get away with it.

“No,” she said, and almost ran for the door.

Outside, she sucked in big lungfuls of air. It smelled of someone else’s recent cigarette, and she forced herself to
walk away from the patio, out to the road beyond. She’d walk ten minutes out and turn around. Maybe work off some of the tension.

One of the books she’d read on the process of quitting had suggested that cigarettes were a way for some people to avoid saying things they were afraid to utter, and the urge to smoke was a signal to pay attention to what you were trying not to say. So as she stomped down the road under the hot, midday sun, she thought about it. What would she say to Jean, beside the obvious:
Leave me alone, will you?

Thinking that eased a little of the pressure. Hmmm. She tried it again.
Stop talking so much. I took the job to have silence, not this endless, mindless chatter.

A tangle of nerves eased. Very interesting.

Okay, then, what else? Both intrigued and bemused, she dug a little deeper. What else might she say?
Please don’t tell me about your love life. It makes me lonely and it makes me worry.
Even better. The roar really started subsiding. Was there more? Luna thought about it, remembering to breathe deeply as she walked. Sweat started trickling down the back of her neck, and she reached up to tie her hair in a knot around itself.

A new thought came up, and she said it out loud. “Jean, please stop drinking so much. You’re going to take home the wrong guy one of these nights and get hurt or worse, you’ll end up drowned in a ditch. In fact, I really wish you’d stop picking up strangers. It’s dangerous.”

Nearly every bit of the urge to smoke was swept away. Luna didn’t know if it was the walking or the talking, but either way, it was a relief to lose it. Swinging her arms hard to loosen the muscles of her shoulders and neck, she wondered why some people could keep
their thoughts to themselves without resorting to smoking or drinking, while she had used both. What was she so afraid of?

And how weird was it that she was headed into middle age—okay, it had arrived—with a master’s degree in psychology, and had spent ten years as a therapist without ever knowing this about herself?

Best Friend Barbie, who wore jean shorts and a halter top and her dark hair in a ponytail, said,
Well, you always had your shields in place before now, right?

Good point. Cigarettes had been doing a lot of work. Maybe, she thought with a frown, she didn’t really want to give them up when there was so much she needed to do right with Joy. Maybe some people just needed the chemical barrier in order to manage the world.

Oh, please
, said Barbie,
addict as delicate flower?