Crossers (24 page)

“‘That represents some evolution in your thinking,’” Yvonne mimicked. “This isn’t purely a personal matter. Getting my hands on that ranch will be a very good move from a business standpoint. I am sure you see the advantages.”

“I am not sure you do.”

“With that place and this one in our hands, we will
own
both sides of the border for a distance of twenty kilometers,” she said, to show how well she knew. “When the airstrip is finished, we will fly the merca in—our mota, the Gulf’s perico—load it onto backs or into trucks, and send it across. We will have our own people on the other side to guide it through and to keep an eye on what La Migra is up to. No problems with some cowboy calling the cops because he sees suspicious people, a suspicious vehicle. And we won’t have so many expenses paying mordida to customs inspectors at ports of entry because—”

“We will have our own port of entry,” Julián finished for her.

“Precisamente. For us, there will be no border.”

“I like this kind of talk much better. Now you are talking sense.”

“What? Did you think I had not taken all of this into consideration? I have thought of every detail that can be thought of.”

“It is your motives that trouble me. This—this passion of yours to get even for something that happened so long ago could cloud your judgment.”

“Nothing clouds my judgment,” she said with indignation. “I am a practical woman.”

“Then tell me, mi mujer pragmática, how you are going to persuade our American neighbors to sell out?”

She paused for a moment. “I won’t tell you. I will show you. Vicente’s nephew, Billy Cruz … I sent word to him to come today. For this very reason.”

“Billy Cruz? That pollero?” asked Julián, incredulously. His mother despised migrant smugglers.

“Him,” she replied. “Go outside and see if he’s arrived. Tell him we would like a word with him in private.”

She studied Cruz as he came in with Julián, a black Stetson pulled low over his forehead. She had met him only once before, and then briefly. Vicente told her that his nephew had been a prizefighter in his youth, and she saw that now, in his middle thirties, he retained a boxer’s physique, its pleasing lines accentuated by his snug striped shirt and tight Levi’s.

“Buenas tardes, Billy,” she cooed, rising and extending her hand.

“Buenas tardes,” he responded in a high, boyish voice that didn’t match the macho man’s body.

“I am a traditionalist about certain courtesies,” she said. “Please remove your hat.”

He snickered and bared his head. A good-looking guy—why hadn’t she seen that on their first meeting? Dense, flaxen hair, dark brown eyes, a square chin. His nose had been broken—in the ring, she supposed—and scar tissue marred his blond eyebrows; but these imperfections added to his appeal. Un buena cogida, she would bet.

“Have a seat,” she said, motioning at the chair. “I figure you would prefer we speak in English.”

“I’m okay in Spanish.”

She propped herself against the desk, palms on its edge, and flirted a little with her eyes. “But I think my English is better than your Spanish, and I wouldn’t want there to be any misunderstandings between us.”

He slouched into the chair with a studied nonchalance, placed his hat on his lap, and clasped his hands behind his head. Julián stood leaning against the door.

“First of all,” said Yvonne, “let me say that I’m sorry about Tío Vicente.”

“You’re a little late. He died nearly two months ago.”

“I’ve been busy,” Yvonne said. “But I was sorry to lose him. He was very clever at devising ways to conceal merchandise in trucks. One time he cut out the gas tank and installed a false tank inside, and you couldn’t see the welds with a magnifying glass, and dogs couldn’t smell the merca.”

“Yeah. He ran an auto body shop for years. In Nogales.”

“But maybe he wasn’t so clever in other ways,” she said.

Julián pushed off the door. “We heard that he stole a load of perico from Joaquín Carrasco. He ordered your uncle’s assassination.”

“Don’t know a thing about it,” Cruz said.

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” said Yvonne. “But you know, after he came to work for me, I sometimes asked myself the same question the girlfriend of a married man asks herself—if he is cheating on his wife with me, will he cheat on me with someone else?”

Cruz sat up straighter and fingered the brim of his Stetson. “Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“No. You seem a little … tense. Like a drink? A beer? A shot of bacanora? Tengo lo bueno.”

“I’ve got all afternoon to drink.”

“I want you to know something, Billy,” she said. “If I had been in Carrasco’s shoes, I would have put out a contract on your tío. But I’m in my shoes, and Vicente was working for me when they killed him. There will be a settling of accounts.”

“I stay clear of that shit,” Cruz said. “So I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“Yes, it’s good to be deaf sometimes. Your uncle told me you’re a businessman. You have a little business in Nogales.”

“A shuttle service. We take people to Tucson and Phoenix. Mexicans, mostly.”

“Documented Mexicans,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“But your main business is with the other kind. So tell me about that business. I don’t know much about it. It’s a good business?”

“Thinking of getting into it?” Cruz asked, smirking.

He seemed to be feeling more sure of himself. She was surprised that his cocky manner didn’t irk her. In fact, she liked it. At that moment, unbidden, a fantasy flickered through her mind, like scenes from a triple-X movie: Billy lay flat on his strong young back on her canopy bed, she on top of him; the vaquero who had called her an old woman was manacled to the bedpost, watching through the gauzy curtains as Billy pumped her full of the sweet marmalade of his little limb. La mermelada de membrillo. Look at this, cowboy, look at me ride this one, and then tell me I am an old woman. The picture shook her composure. Several seconds passed before she recovered it.

“I’ve got enough to keep me occupied,” she said, once more in command of herself, though her voice had grown husky. “I’m curious, that’s all.”

“Rip the seats out of a nine-passenger van, and you can fit eighteen, twenty pollos inside. Mexicans, you gross fifteen hundred a head. Central Americans, it’s five grand. Chinese, Arabs, ten thousand.”

“You’ve smuggled Chinese and Arabs? At ten thousand a head? Better money than I thought.”

“Not many. Ninety percent of my customers are Mexican.”

“What happens if a load gets busted? Lose a load of mota and you’re out of luck.”

“We charge up front. And I don’t lose too many loads.”

Es un poco presuntuoso, Yvonne thought. He is a little smug. “That’s right, your tío told me you’re very proficient. You know the trails, the back roads in the San Rafael and the Huachuca mountains like the back of your hand. A human map is what he called you.”

“I know the country pretty good. I have to.”

She paced around the desk and sat behind it, facing him directly. “And do you know a ranch over there, the San Ignacio?”

“It’s right across the line from you, ten miles from here, I’d guess. An old lady and her son own it.”

“And have you been herding your chickens through that ranch?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Cruz hesitated and began to fidget with his hat again. “There’s two brothers in Santa Cruz who own the routes into the San Rafael. I rent my routes from them. It’s a kind of toll, and right now the ones that go through that ranch aren’t for rent.”

“That toll must add a lot to your overhead.”

“A cost of doing business,” Cruz said in his high tenor. He sounded like a sixteen-year-old.

“These Santa Cruz cowboys, these brothers, work for Joaquín Carrasco.”

“I—I don’t know who they work for. I stay out of that.”

“Take it from me, Carrasco is their mero mero. So this toll you pay them goes into the pockets of the man who ordered your uncle’s murder. Doesn’t that trouble you, Billy? Where is your family loyalty?”

Julián, she could see, was growing impatient, but she was having fun with this.

“Like I told you, I stay out of that shit,” Cruz said. “I don’t know and I don’t care who works for who.”

“And who do you work for?”

“I’m self-employed. I work for myself.”

Yvonne shook her head. “Trabajas para mí. You work for me.”

Cruz widened his eyes in mock astonishment, or maybe it wasn’t so mock. “Since when?”

“Since right now. For your Santa Cruz cowboys to move their merca into the San Ignacio, they would have to move it through here first. Do you see any? No. I own this rancho. That means that I own the routes through here. Anybody who moves anything across the line from here—I don’t care if it’s mojados or mota or coke or a load of fucking onions—doesn’t do it without my permission. And I’m not giving it, except to you. Do you have anything to say, Billy?”

“Not much. I guess you do.”

“I do talk a lot,” Yvonne said, falling back into an amiable tone. “I’m a sociable person. No matter what you may have heard about me, I’m actually easy to get along with.”

“As long as you do what she wants,” Julián interjected.

“How’s that for a respectful son?” She rose and moved round to the front of the desk again, perching atop it, her ankles crossed. “And what I want you to do is the opposite of what you’re doing now. From now on, until I tell you otherwise, you’ll herd your chickens through here to the San Ignacio and
nowhere else
. Every other route in the San Rafael Valley is off limits. You’ll be doing me a service and yourself one—

I won’t charge you any tolls. All I ask is that you see to it that your strawberry pickers and toilet scrubbers don’t fuck this place up. What they do on the other side is another matter. The more they fuck it up, the better I’ll like it. Now do you have anything to say?”

Evidently he did not. He scowled, his scarred eyebrows crawling together like yellow caterpillars with segments of their bodies missing.

“You’re worried about what your Santa Cruz cowboys will say about this arrangement?”

“It’s something to think about.”

“But not for long, because what they’ll have to say is exactly, precisely nothing.”

Cruz jerked his shoulders up to touch his ears. A shrug? A twitch? She couldn’t tell. “What’s this all about? You want me to create a diversion, is that it? If the Border Patrol is busy chasing my people, there’ll be less of them to chase yours?”

“That’s part of it, Billy. The rest isn’t your concern.” Giving in to an urge to touch him, she hopped off the desk, crossed the room in two quick steps, and took hold of his hands, rubbing his calloused palms with her fingertips. “Strong hands. You know, a strong man out here in all this big, open country might think to himself, ‘Shit, I can do as I please out here. Who is there to see me?’ He might be tempted to herd his dirty chickens in the wrong places. That would be a bad idea.”

He said nothing. Yvonne, never content to make a point without underlining it, went on. “There was a terrible incident this past January. Not too far from here. Some bajadores ambushed a carload of mojados and killed all of them. Do you remember that incident? It was in all the newspapers.”

“Sure do remember. Those were my people.”

“Really? I didn’t know that,” she said truthfully. All the better, a fortunate coincidence. The dead chickens continued to serve a purpose. “So that’s one load you did lose.”

“Yeah. And it wasn’t bandits. Nothing was taken. Not a watch, not a wallet. They were killed for no reason.”

“Yes, that’s what the newspapers said. You know, the man who used to own this ranch was so frightened by those murders that he put it up for sale. I talked to him about it. He said that anyone who could commit such a horrible act was likely to do anything. It was just too dangerous for him to stay here. But then, he was very old and alone.”

Cruz dropped his gaze, raised it again. Holding on to his hands, she sensed the tension in him, the fear. She owned him. Bought and paid for. “Anything on your mind, Billy? Anything you’d like to tell me?”

“Not a thing.”

“All right, then.” She let him go and stepped back. “What do you say to our new arrangement?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“What do you think?”

“And you, what do you think?” she asked Julián after dismissing Cruz.

“You should try to make yourself less obvious. You were looking at him like you wanted to tear the clothes off his back. You’re almost old enough to be his mother.”

“Maybe it was you who wanted to tear his clothes off.”

“Eres una perra. Siempre tienes la regla.”

“I stopped the rag two years ago. The plan, mi hijo. What do you think? Dozens of mojados, maybe hundreds, running through the San Ignacio week after week, like a plague of locusts. A few months of that and—”

“They will be begging for someone to take the place off their hands.” Julián, a shoulder to the wall, hands in his pockets, adopted a reflective air. “But you know, these rancheros are tied to their land. Mexicans or gringos, no le hace. They are all tied to it. And those are difficult ties to break.”

“It wasn’t so difficult to break the ties of the guy who owned this place. Everything is for sale, that’s what my real estate cousin says, and he’s right. I am going to make our American neighbors so afraid of losing everything they’ve got, they will be greedy for anything they can get.”

“You are becoming a philosopher, mother.”

“Philosopher? No, a general. Like Pancho Villa. He invaded the United States, so I am going to invade a little piece of it myself.” She felt giddy. She laughed. “Señor Cruz will be my field commander, his chickens my army.”

“Don’t get carried away with yourself,” Julián said. “Pancho Villa lost his battle.”

12

S
PRING IS NOT THE SEASON
of renewal in the Sonoran Desert. It is the dry time of year, an annual drought. From mid-March till late July, the skies really are not cloudy all day, and after a while the clear blue overhead becomes monotonous and oppressive. Trees do leaf out, the cottonwoods first, the mesquites last, and desert flowers blossom, adding splashes of color to the dun landscape; but the grasses soon turn brittle as old newspaper, dirt tanks shrink from ponds to puddles to cracked mudholes, and rattlesnakes stir from their winter dormancy, each one as mean as a man awakening with a bad hangover, likely to strike at anything that draws too near, human, horse, cow, or dog. Spring is the season when migrants die in greater numbers, hundreds every year, their naked corpses (naked because in the derangement of extreme dehydration they rip off their clothes) sprawled in the greasewood and brittle-bush thickets, sometimes within sight of the road or highway they were struggling to reach. Spring is the season when even the lightning is dry, igniting range fires and forest fires on the mountainsides. And spring is the season when farmers and ranchers on both sides of the border talk endlessly and obsessively about rain. They think about it, dream about it, wait anxiously for it. The summer monsoons begin in July, hustled into Sonora and Arizona by the chubascos whirling in off the Gulf of California, and they end two months later; but their arrival and abundance is never guaranteed. Like a precocious child, they might show early promise and then fail; or they might withhold themselves and then pour forth torrents too late; or they might turn capricious—long arid days or weeks punctuated by brief biblical downpours that do little but scour the soil, wash out roads, and produce awesome flash floods, thundering and frothing in the arroyos, plucking giant trees by the roots like so many dandelions; or the rains might not come at all.

The spring of that year was especially trying for Tessa McBride. There were the usual woes of running a ranch—a mountain lion killed two of her calves, a well pump burned out—but it was the war that strained her nerves. About a week after the first bombs fell, Castle went with her to buy a new pump at a hardware store in Sierra Vista, a patulous hodgepodge of malls and subdivisions littering the desert near Fort Huachuca. Traffic was stalled near the junction of Highway 90 and the road to the main gate while a convoy of trucks and Humvees painted desert tan rolled out of the base, bound for an airfield somewhere and deployment to Iraq. The rumbling military vehicles, the unsmiling soldiers behind the wheels in their black berets and camouflage uniforms charged the air with a certain drama; universal history was rattling Arizona hinterlands that had scarcely felt the tremors of 9/11. Waiting for the convoy to pass, Castle noticed a stone monument with a plaque bearing a relief of a mounted cavalryman and the words
FORT HUACHUCA—1877
. Behind it, constructed of the same river rock, stood a small building that looked as if it dated back to the fort’s beginnings as an outpost during the Apache Wars. A sign out front declared that it was now a
WIDOWS’ SUPPORT CENTER
.

“I’ll bet that’s going to be a busy place pretty soon,” Tessa said. She lowered her window and shouted to the two military policemen directing traffic, “What about parents?” When they didn’t respond, she blew the horn to get their attention. “Hey! Do you have a support center for parents?”

One of the soldiers, wearing an armband with the letters MP sewn on it, sauntered over like a highway patrolman who has nabbed a speeder. “What’s the trouble, ma’am?”

“No trouble. You have a support center for widows. I want to know if you’ve got one for parents.”

The MP scowled. “If you want any information, you can see the base information officer, ma’am. You can get a visitor’s pass at the main gate.”

“I don’t want a visitor’s pass!” Tessa said. Her voice had a quavering, fragile sound. “If my daughter gets killed over there, can I count on counseling from the army, or do I just get left with a coffin and a flag?”

“Tess, what the hell are you doing?” said Castle, a little alarmed. He had never seen her behave this way.

“I can’t answer that,” the MP replied. “I suggest you contact the base information officer.”

The tail end of the convoy had meanwhile gone past, and the other soldier was signaling civilian traffic to come ahead. The car behind Tessa’s pickup honked its horn; then the driver pulled out into the left lane and shot by.

“You’ll have to move your vehicle. You’re blocking the road, ma’am,” said the MP, putting an edge on the last word to let her know that his reservoir of patience was draining fast.

“I will do that, but only because you’re so damn polite. And thanks for being so extremely helpful.”

“What the hell were you busting his chops for?” asked Castle as they drove on. “He’s only a soldier like Beth. A kid.”

“A robot is what he is,” Tessa snapped. “‘You will have to move your vehicle, ma’am. Your
vee-hick-el.’
” She seemed to find her unreasonableness gratifying. “Why couldn’t he have said ‘truck’? What’s wrong with ‘truck’?”

Castle sat beside her almost every night for the next two weeks. He would drive to the Crown A around five in the afternoon, they would eat dinner—she cooked, he cleaned up—and then they’d begin their vigil in front of the TV. Sitting on the couch with space between them, like an old married couple, they followed the progress of the Third Infantry Division (the unit to which Beth’s supply battalion was attached) as it battered its way toward Baghdad. They became familiar with places they’d never heard of before, Najaf and Nasiriyah and Karbala, and they got an education in the sectarian rivalries of Islam.

“Exactly what the hell makes a Shiite a Shiite and a Sunni a Sunni?” Tessa asked one night. “And why do they hate each other?”

Castle didn’t know; he supposed it was for the same reason Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland hated each other, that is to say, for no good reason at all.

They were watching CNN when the early reports came in that an American supply convoy had been ambushed. Several soldiers killed; several more, including two women, missing in action. She flew into her bedroom and flew out again, clutching one of Beth’s letters. The return address bore the name and number of her daughter’s battalion. “What unit were they from?” she shouted at the TV. A reporter, against a background of mud-walled huts and date palm trees, was giving further details … Eleven confirmed dead, five missing, the two women believed to have been captured by the Iraqi army … Names withheld pending notification of next of kin … “Then tell us the goddamn unit!” Tessa hollered, then switched to CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, yelling the same question. She turned to Beth’s basic training photograph. “What did you have to join the fucking army for? If you had your shit together, you’d still be in school.”

She did not come back to herself until, a day or two later, the female soldiers were identified as Privates First Class Jessica Lynch and Lori Piestewa. Lynch had been rescued from an Iraqi hospital by Special Forces; Piestewa, a Hopi Indian from Arizona, had died of her wounds. Tessa hugged Castle and cried out thanks that Beth was all right, her joy and gratitude immediately producing guilt. That poor girl’s family. Christ, what right did she have to be so happy?

One April afternoon they took a break from war-watching to treat a cow with a prolapsed uterus. Castle acted as a kind of surgeon’s assistant for Tessa and Tim McIntyre, who held a lidocaine syringe in one hand, a long curved needle and cotton string in the other. McIntyre prodded the cow, trailed by its three-day-old calf, into a steel headstall in one of Tessa’s corrals. She called for the syringe, instructing Castle to stand aside when she jabbed the needle into the animal’s haunches—there was a danger of getting kicked or sprayed with cowshit. Neither of these mishaps occurred.

“My dad told me that my granddad used to do this out on the range with a Coke bottle,” McIntyre said while they waited for the anesthetic to take effect. “He’d carry one of them sixteen-ounce bottles in his saddlebag, along with a carpet needle and kitchen twine. Come across a prolapsed cow, he’d shove the uterus back in with the bottle, then he’d stitch her up.”

“What happened to the Coke bottle?” asked Tessa, intrigued by this novel method.

“Oh, he’d leave it in there. It stopped the uterus from poppin’ out again.”

“I imagine it would stop a bull from getting in,” said Tessa.

McIntyre blushed and looked down at his scruffy boots. He was a devout born-again Christian; a bumper sticker on his truck proclaimed his membership in an organization called Cowboys for Christ. “Never thought of it that way,” he said, “but I suppose that is true.”

The cow’s tail had stopped switching, indicating that her backside had been numbed. McIntyre slipped on a long latex glove and, with his fist, pushed the bulging uterus back into place, burying his arm nearly up to the elbow. Castle grimaced when he withdrew it, the glove glistening with slime, flecked with blood. Tessa took the needle and thread—it was as thick as a big-game fishing line—and began to suture the cow’s vaginal opening. She’d done two stitches when the extension phone in the stable rang. She jerked her head up and gave the stable a wary look, as if an intruder might be hiding there.

“Finish up,” she said, handing the needle to McIntyre.

She was crying when she returned, threw herself at Castle, and embraced him. “It was her! Beth! Calling from Baghdad.” She kissed him full on the lips; then, to show she was merely expressing her happiness, she kissed McIntyre in the same way. Castle thought his might have lasted a second longer than the cowboy’s. “Her outfit is at the Baghdad airport,” Tessa went on. “Can you imagine? Getting a phone call way out here from way over there? Somebody hooked up a sat phone. She couldn’t talk for long, less than a minute. But she’s okay. Never even had a close call. Oh, how wonderful to hear her voice!”

And to hear Tessa, you would have thought the war was over. For all practical purposes it was—Baghdad had been captured, Saddam had fled, his statue had been toppled. Castle looked into Tessa’s eyes, conscious that he’d made a long inner journey in the past month, a journey that was only halfway complete; yet he’d come far enough to share in her joy. He offered to take her to dinner to celebrate. He did not tell her that they would be celebrating more than the news of Beth’s deliverance. He didn’t know how to put it into words; or rather he did know, but he considered them words better thought than spoken: She needed him, he needed her, and in that mutuality he’d found the key to breaking his habit of seeing himself as the victim of an inexpressible tragedy.

They went to Elvira’s on the Sonoran side of Nogales. Dressed in another of her rodeo-queen outfits—snug pants, a fringed vest over a pearl-button shirt, a jaunty flat-brimmed hat—she drew stares from the taxi drivers congregated on International Street. It is the custom at Elvira’s to serve free shots of tequila before dinner. Tessa knocked hers back in the accepted fashion, sucking on a slice of lime, licking salt off her hand, then downing the shot in one gulp. Castle felt slightly dizzy, looking at the sheen of the lime juice on her red lips, at the tip of her tongue, flicking over the salt in the web of her hand.

They ordered margaritas with dinner and toasted Beth. Thereafter, over his chicken mole and her shrimp in garlic and butter sauce, they spoke of things other than the war, for the first time in weeks. Light stuff at first. Movies they’d seen or wanted to see. Their favorite albums. Then Tessa said that she was struggling to put her ranch into the black. Castle understood nothing about raising cattle but knew profit and loss, and suggested she build a Web site advertising her grass-fed beef. Combine it with a direct-mail campaign to independent meat markets in Tucson. He had the impression that she was captivated by the ranching way of life and paid little attention to the business end of things. Advising her on such matters gratified him; he thought it showed her that although he could not rope a calf, mend a fence, or heal a prolapsed uterus, he was nevertheless a strong and competent male.

Having drunk two margaritas at dinner on top of the tequila she slugged down before, she swayed when they stood to leave and grasped the back of a chair to steady herself.

“Christ, I’m smashed.”

“You don’t sound like it.”

“Hasn’t affected my speech, but motor control is slipping. I’m going to have to hang on to you.”

Outside he threw an arm around her shoulders, and she slipped hers around his waist and clutched his belt, leaning into him as they walked back to the pedestrian crossing. The streetlights were on, and neon signs blazed the names of cheap hotels and border bars. The cab drivers stared at her again.

“They won’t think I’m drunk,” she said with a tease in her voice. “They’ll think we’re in love.”

They had to let go of each other at the port of entry. Tessa had recovered somewhat and got through the customs line without a stumble. On the other side they resumed walking arm in arm, up the Terrace Street ramp, then up Crawford to the lot where he’d parked.

“Made it,” Tessa said, slumping into her seat. “I wish to say that you’ve been wonderful, putting up with my hysterics.”

“If one of my girls was over there, I’d be hysterical myself.”

“Do you suppose it would be less scary if it were a son instead of a daughter?”

“That’s not supposed to make a difference anymore.”

“Yeah, except that it does.”

He pulled out of the lot and turned onto South Grand, passing the old city hall. Tessa asked, “So do you think we could be?”

“Could be what?”

“What we looked like on the walk back.”

An intoxication that had nothing to do with tequila rushed into his skull. Instantly, she reached over and pressed two fingers to his lips.

“Don’t answer. That wasn’t fair of me,” she said. “It’s the tequila talking. Just want you to know that I am. Which puts you under no obligation.”

•  •  •

H
E WALKED HER
to her door, under the numberless stars of a sky unsullied by smog or city glow. She asked, “Would you care for another dance, Mr. Castle?” They went inside. She switched on a light, put the Ella Fitzgerald CD in the player, and then turned the light off. Dancing in the dark to those Gershwin tunes, those incongruous urban melodies rising on Ella’s spellbinding voice, ablated his self-consciousness, his usual reserve. He held her close and spun her around without bumping into a thing. He felt masterful. The kiss he gave her, on the second dance, was as timid as a fourteen-year-old’s. Her response was fervent, encouraging him to try again. Her body went limp in surrender, though not passive surrender. They fell on the couch, she on top of him, tugging at the buttons on his shirt. He fumbled with the snaps on hers, and then she knelt upright, stripped to the waist, and bowed, her breasts tumbling to his lips. He took one into his mouth, suckling while she held his head. They broke apart and finished undressing. Neither spoke, aware that one word would break the spell; they would see each other as ridiculous, a man of nearly fifty-seven and a woman of forty-five tearing at belt buckles and zippers, kicking off shoes, pulling off socks like frenzied adolescents. When their naked bodies came together again, Castle was lanced by the fear that he would suffer a mortifying failure. He imagined Tessa stroking his arm while she murmured that it was all right, darling, it happens to every man once in a while. He was ecstatic to discover that she would not have to offer any such soothing reassurance. They lay side by side, not talking, feeling serene. Tessa playfully ruffled his thinning hair, tweaked his ear. “Will your dog suffer if you spend the night?” she asked. “I damn sure will if you don’t.”