Spin the Sky (44 page)

Larry asks Lupe quietly, “Did you love him?”

Lupe makes a gulping noise. “Oh, Argos was a good friend. He will be missed.”

“So he was just a friend? Nothing more?” presses Larry urgently.

“No, but a good man,” sniffles Lupe.

“I’m glad,” Larry says gruffly. “I would hate to see you hurt.”

Lupe snaps, “Oh like you care about what hurts me.”

“What?”

Penelope has to really fight to keep from turning back to stare at Lupe and Larry. Their conversation is much too interesting.

She hears Lupe spit out, “All these years I haul food out to you in your stupid shack and you never so much as give me a second glance. I know you are mourning the loss of your wife and that’s as should be,
que Dios la tenga en la gloria
, but I am not made of stone.”

Larry sputters, but Lupe is having none of it. “No! I’m done. I can’t stand silently by as you drink yourself to death. I’m out. While I’ll never love anybody but you, I’m sure I can find a hell of a lot of fun out there. Mr. Cesar will tell me where to look. Sounds like he found all the good spots.”

Penelope smothers a giggle. Standing next to her, Cesar makes a strangled sound like he is doing the same thing. They share a look as they choke back laughter. Penelope doesn’t dare look behind her. She hears the cot creak as Larry jump up and clutches Lupe.

“You silly woman,” he cries passionately. “I started having feelings for you about a year after my wife died. I moved out of the main house because I knew it was wrong to feel this way about an employee and I did not want to impose upon you. Because I knew you could never feel the same way about me, a tired old wreck. You deserve a strong, healthy man and I won’t push myself on you. I only want you to be happy.”

The room is dead quiet. You could hear a penny drop on the Ag Level it is so quiet. Then there is the wet sound of an ardent kiss. Penelope is surprised at how disgusting the sound is when you aren’t one of the people involved in the kissing. She decides it is high time the Vaquero family got back to the ranch.

Making quick arrangements for Argos’ funeral, Penelope herds her family out the door, smacking Cesar hard on the back when he looks like he might crack up laughing at Lupe and Larry, arm-in-arm. He swallows his laughter and pastes a fake smile on his face.

Then she has to practically drag Trevor over to the closest medibox to get the bullet hole in his leg cleaned and the shrapnel dug out of his neck. When the machine starts laser-fusing the wounds, he complains at top volume until it gives him a big shot of the Poppy Ships’ finest painkiller. Then he keeps chuckling like he thinks getting his leg lasered shut is the funniest thing ever.

Cesar hovers over the boy the entire time, alternating between looking green and bilious or pale and light-headed.

“I don’t know how you survived this long,” Cesar confides to Penelope. “That kid gives me a heart attack every three hours. And I think my hair would go white all over again, trying to keep him from throwing himself out the airlocks all day long, or so it feels like. How do you do it?”

Penelope laughs, “Oh, I have my fair share of white hair from Trevor’s antics. And worry lines and the rest. Just think if we’d had more, though.”

“How do people do it?” Cesar shakes his head, overwhelmed by the mere thought.

“I have no idea,” Penelope admits.

As they walk back, suddenly Penelope can’t seem to find anything to talk about.

“So what did you do with those bees?” she finally asks Cesar as she slows to give the others plenty of time to get ahead. She doesn’t want to overhear Larry and Lupe talk love to each other because that’s just gross. She also doesn’t want to overhear Trevor and Nausicaa right now either, because she might have to jump in and be a mom and she just isn’t feeling up to it.

“I ordered them to go down and hang out in the Ag Level for now,” replies Cesar. “They seem happy with that. No doubt there is militant and highly effective pollination going on down there right now.”

Penelope laughs. “Space bees,” she giggles. “My life is totally ludicrous.”

Cesar’s asks, “Did you know my Dad had such an arsenal hidden out there?”

“No!” she cries, remembering to be shocked about that. “God, if I had known… No. I had no idea he was making that much money from that tequila still of his and I definitely didn’t know he was stockpiling Spacer War Two back there in that empty lot.”

Penelope says this loudly enough for Larry to hear her. He chuckles loudly and calls back, “Just because you don’t believe in violence doesn’t mean the rest of us have to play like Gandhi, darling. Talk is all well and good, but people tend to listen a lot better when they know you’ve got some fuck-off huge guns.”

Lupe swats him playfully and then starts lecturing Larry about his language in front of “the children,” but she does it gently. She goes on to nag him about walking around with a dislocated shoulder. There is mention of her special soup.

“So now what?” asks Cesar. He wants to know what happens next with them, but if Penelope understands that, then she isn’t ready to answer yet.

“Well, I guess we’ll have to do something with all the people who showed up to help us out,” she replies, dodging the question.

Cesar nods and they continue walking.

“And I guess, we’ll need to get together with some of the others and go back to the Moon to make sure the Seven Skies base is totally defunct,” Penelope says. Cesar agrees that they should, but thinks it can wait a few days.

When they do finally send ships out, the men find nothing but rubble, dust and desiccated corpses. At first, they credit Cesar with even more bloodthirsty thoroughness than he admits to, but when he sees scans of the area, he can only scratch his head and say there is no way his little ship did all that damage.

It looks like someone scorched the Moon Base down to the bedrock. The only explanation they ever get is a short message playing repeatedly on the Moon Base’s outgoing message beacon. The antenna is the only thing left functional.

The message shows a single person, a tall Asian woman staring into the camera. Trevor replays the message about a million times and can never glean any information about the kind of ship she has or where she came from or where she went.

She only says, “Goodbye, my Captain. I hope you found what you were looking for.”

And she smiles. It’s a pure and sweet expression and it makes her look like a young girl with her whole life ahead of her. No one ever sees her again.

Larry is the only person not appreciative. His favorite topic of conversation for far too many weeks is how women should mind their own business and give a man a chance to use all the weapons he’s got stockpiled for just such an occasion.

“What about us?” Cesar finally blurts out on the longest walk of his life. “You and me? Where are we going? Not right now, but relationship-wise. Like as a couple? As a family.”

Penelope starts messing with her hair. “So, I understand why you left. You felt you had to go to protect Ithaca and your family. I get that. But why didn’t you come back?” she asks in a very small voice. “I need to understand that first.”

Even though Cesar has been expecting this question for the past decade, it still knocks him flat.

“Well, you told me not to come back,” he mutters, his voice cracking a bit. “You hated the War. You loathe violence. You didn’t want me back even before I obliterated Mexico. I figured after that, you were definitely never going to forgive me. Truth be told, I didn’t think I deserved to be forgiven.” Cesar rubs his eyes.

Penelope arches an eyebrow. “Really? You didn’t just decide it was too much work to be married and raise a kid? You didn’t just blow us off to prance around the spheres having drunken adventures with scantily clad women?”

“No,” laughs Cesar. He knows he should be a little offended that she would think this of him, but he isn’t up to it right now. “No, I’m just dumb, I guess. Kept thinking if I made a big pile of money or did something heroic that didn’t kill anyone, you’d forgive me. Never managed to keep a big pile of money if I made it, though.”

Penelope giggles, “That was pretty dumb. Next time, just come home.”

“I don’t plan to leave ever again, so it won’t come up,” he promises, kissing her fiercely. She is flushed and dazed when he’s done. Cesar feels he ought to take advantage of that.

“So can I stay? Here with you? Can we try again?”

Penelope studies the ranch house in the distance and replies slowly, “Well, you could do that. It’s one option. But you’ve also got that shiny ship. You could leave and go anywhere. And I’ve got the ranch. It’s going to need so much work after the last couple of weeks.”

“I don’t want to go,” Cesar says stubbornly.

“But I do,” Penelope finally admits. “I don’t want to stay.”

Cesar must have stuck out his lower lip because suddenly Penelope says, “Oh, wow, that’s the same expression Trevor gets every time he throws a temper tantrum. So that’s where he got it.”

Cesar asks, “What do you mean you don’t want to stay? You can’t stand being around me so much that if I’m here, you are leaving?”

She shakes her head and sighs one of those deep, important sad sighs. “I’ve been here for fifteen years. I’m tired of it. I want to see the spheres. I know you came back because you are tired of adventure and want to settle down, but I’ve been settled all this time. Now I want to act up a bit, see the sights, you know?”

She gestures up and around, probably meaning the colonies around them. “Maybe even go back down to Earth and have a close up look at that big crater my husband made.”

That makes him crack a smile.

Holding his hands in hers, she says in a rush, “I do want to be with you. I want to try being your wife again. We’ll probably be horrible at it and fight all the time and eventually give up, but I’d like to try. Except I really want to go and you really want to stay. Maybe if I promise to come back as soon as the wanderlust empties out of me?”

Cesar laughs, but Penelope just arches an eyebrow like she can’t tell if it was a happy laugh or a bitter laugh.

“Lady,” he says, gently wrapping his large beefy hands around her small white ones. “You seem to be under the impression that there is some way you can get rid of me. It just isn’t so. Home is wherever I’m with you. If you want to go, then I’m going to follow you.”

Penelope lets out her breath.

“Oh good,” she half gasps. “I was hoping you would say that.”

Caesar pulls Penelope into his arms and she melts against him. He crushes his lips against hers.

“Don’t leave me again,” she whispers, smiling as a few tears course down her cheeks.

Cesar fleetingly thinks that it must be more exhausting to be a girl than a guy, but he never allows insightful thoughts to interfere with the moment, so he passionately kisses his wife.

“You are divine,” he whispers raggedly when they break apart.

A delicious smile curls across Penelope’s lips. She whispers back, “You are mine.”

They might have stood together like that for hours, but Trevor comes limping up to interrupt them. When he sees his parents blatantly making out in full view of the whole world, Trevor stumbles to an abrupt stop and starts studying his feet, but he doesn’t leave.

“Hey, uh, guys? Mom and Dad?” he coughs loudly. “Sorry to interrupt, but it looks like maybe Nausicaa didn’t so much ask her parents about coming back to Ithaca with me.”

Cesar and Penelope break apart and stare at him.

“What?”

“Yeah,” Trevor says, looking apologetic and scratching his shoulder. “I guess she more like just left without telling them, you know?”

“Oh,” says Cesar.

“Oh dear,” says Penelope.

“Yeah,” admits Trevor, shuffling from one foot to the other. “And I guess her parents are totally freaking out now on account of the raiders here and all the fighting. Lazar House just had that Sectarian riot, you know? So they want her home now. I was thinking maybe the easiest thing would be if I could go and drop her off in Dad’s ship?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” snaps Cesar in his best dad voice.

“No wait,” Penelope says, putting a hand on his arm. She looks into his eyes for a minute and then winks. “Maybe we can all go and drop Nausicaa off?”

Cesar smiles so wide he thinks his face might crack. “I hear Lazar House has great curry.”

“I’ve always wanted to try curry,” Penelope replies, grinning back at him.

“Cool,” Trevor cries, limping off to tell Ness.

“We’ll ride off into the sunset,” Cesar tells his wife, twining his hands in hers. “I’ll show you the worlds. Together, we can do anything.”

“We can spin the sky.”

THE END

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following:

> My husband and chief technical adviser for agreeing with me when I thought the book needed more explosions

> Elle Van Hensbergen for a really fantastic critique

> Ross Lockhart at Night Shade Books for being so darn good at his job

> Laura’s wooden leg

ABOUT THE AUTHOR