Walk in Beauty (17 page)

Jessie chuckled and smacked her daughter’s rear with a playful hand. “Nobody said you can’t ask questions, just that you can’t ask people personal questions about themselves. Go brush your teeth and get ready to go.”

Giselle tossed her head. “Okay, but I’m going to have some questions for you later.”

“Great. If you do as you’re told, you can ask me a million questions.”

As Giselle obeyed, Luke chuckled. “What a kid.”

“Yeah.” Jessie shook her head, then stiffly poured another cup of coffee, her ease gone. “Luke—”

He held up a hand. “I don’t want to talk, Jessie. It doesn’t help anything.” A stab of disappointment sliced through his chest. “Last night never was.”

She took a deep breath. Relief, he thought. Looking at her coffee cup, she nodded. “It’s best that way.”

He ignored that. “Come eat some breakfast. We have a long drive ahead of us.”

“Ugh. I hate cereal.” She glared at the boxes. “I hate breakfast.”

“You can’t get your vitamins from coffee,” he said with a grin, imitating Giselle, and kicked out a chair. “You have to eat.”

She slumped at the table and rubbed her face. “I’m also not fond of all you cheery morning people.”

“Poor little owl,” he said.

With a roll of her eyes, she pulled the cereal over and poured some into a clean bowl.

“You did pretty well with that line of questioning,” he said. “I didn’t know what to say.”

Jessie glanced over her shoulder, lowering her voice. “I don’t know why she’s so curious lately, but every time she sees kissing on TV she wants to know how people get babies.”

“She seems so young.”

“No, not really. Not to start being curious.” She glanced at him. “You can smoke if you want to. There’s an ashtray in the drawer by the sink.”

“I had one outside already.” He leaned forward. “So what do you tell her?”

“The truth. Just depends on the day and how much she’s asking. Seems like the easiest way.”

He nodded and watched her as she ate. With her hair braided away from her face and no makeup, Jessie looked oddly vulnerable. Her skin, so tender and easily bruised, showed tiny marks from his loving. The sight made him want her all over again. Resolutely, he looked away.

Giselle returned carrying a brush. “I need my hair braided.”

“I’ll do it,” Luke said. “Come here.”

“You know how to braid hair?”

He chuckled. “Sure. I used to braid my own all the time.”

“I forgot. How come you don’t have long hair anymore?”

“For a man it’s easier to get work if you don’t have long hair.” He divided Giselle’s hair. “It’s easier shorter.”

“I like the picture of you with it long,” she said, bouncing a little.

“Be still,” he said, tugging the hair into a tight weave. “I have to work with people who don’t like it, though. You don’t want me to starve to death, do you?”

She giggled. “No.”

Jessie gave him a small, creaky smile, the first of the morning. In spite of everything, they were so familiar with each other it was hard to maintain distance or walls. He was thankful for that.

He finished Giselle’s hair. “We oughta get going.” Jessie washed the bowls and sent Giselle to get her things from her room—a stack of tapes and a radio, a box of crayons and coloring books. In a jar were the beads Marcia had given her, along with a small spool of thread and three slender beading needles. “Okay,” she chirped, donning her heavy parka. “Me and Tasha are ready.”

In the kitchen, Jessie filled a tall thermos with coffee, bent to give the cat a quick cuddle and joined them. “Me, too.”

‘‘Let’s do it.’’

* * *

Just that quickly, they were on the road again. Jessie sipped coffee from a plastic cup and stuck her feet under the blast of heat from the vent. That was one good thing about these older trucks, she thought vaguely. Always enough heat. Almost against her will she felt a rush of anticipation—she loved to be on the road in the morning, traveling toward the unknown and unexplored. The open highway held promises of adventure and excitement.

She glanced at Luke, so handsome and rugged in the early morning. If not for Giselle in the back, it would be all too easy to imagine nothing had ever gone wrong between them, that the past eight years had never taken place.

As if he read her mind, he glanced over. “Just like old times, eh?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “More or less.”

“I’d forgotten how it feels to be on the road.” He glanced at the side mirror. “I think I’ve missed it.”

“I’ve been doing it a lot lately, with all these trips to galleries.”

“Do you always take Giselle?”

“No. She’d miss too much school.” Uncomfortably, she glanced toward the Zuni Mountains and the high gray clouds above them. “I took her to Colorado Springs for sentimental reasons.”

He gave her a piercing look and reached across the space between them to brush his fingers over her cheek. “I’m glad.”

The tender gesture and the warmth of his fingers brought last night back to her, lush and sensual and overpowering. Throat tight, she shifted away.

Abruptly, he dropped his hand. Shoving the box of CDs toward her over the seat, he said, “Find some music to put on. There are some other CDs in the glove box if you don’t find anything you like in this box.”

Thankful for the distraction, Jessie riffled through the case. No Van Morrison, thank you very much. Nor Jackson Browne, nor Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. None of this music would do. It all sounded like the past. “You’re hopeless,” she said with a sigh.

“I told you I was. Coffee and newspaper at six, work at eight.” His smile was rueful. “I’m in a rut.”

Shaking her head, Jessie opened the glove box. A spill of papers, tools and CDs, even a couple of paperback books, exploded out, spilling into her lap. It surprised her into laughter, for this, too, was something she’d once teased him about—his tendency to load glove boxes with all kinds of emergency paraphernalia. “Ah, I think I found the parachute, General,” she said, shaking her head.

“At least there’s a reason for everything in there. I saw the mess in the back seat of your car.”

“Touché,” Jessie replied without apology. “There are only so many hours in a day. If I get around to cleaning something, it seems silly to waste it on a car.”

She dug through the pile of things in her lap, sheaving paper into a stack she slipped back into the glove box.

“Wait,” Luke said. “There should be a bag of tobacco under all that stuff. Drag it out for me, will you?”

She dipped her hand into the dark hole again, chuckling to herself. Her fingers encountered something heavy and cold and she drew out a man’s heavy silver cuff inlaid with turquoise and coral and abalone. Her heart pinched. Gingerly, she settled it around her wrist. “I can’t believe you still have this.”

“Well, I do.” He pulled a package of cigarette papers from his shirt pocket. “Roll me a cigarette.”

“Why is it in your glove box?”

“The tobacco? That’s where I keep it.”

“No.” She lifted her arm, feeling the cool weight of silver against her skin. “The bracelet.”

He shrugged. “I wore it one day and took it off to work. How ‘bout that cigarette. Please?”

Jessie dropped the subject, but she didn’t take the bracelet off as she attempted to roll the cigarette. In her mind’s eye, she saw the Oregon meadow of her dream, the meadow she had tried to paint. It was a day torn from the past, a soft summer dawn by the Columbia River. A mist had clung to the firs and dotted Luke’s long black braid with silvery beads of moisture. In the woods, blue jays scolded, squirrels chattered and a single deer danced to the edge of the river to drink, until it caught sight of the humans and bounded away again, leaping with exquisite grace over a low fence. Jessie, taking the magical morning to be a sign, gave Luke the bracelet she had purchased at a Seattle street fair. It was a token of the vow she had given him that morning, a vow to love him always.

In her mind, it had been as binding a vow as anything uttered before a priest or clergyman in a church. In her mind, she had married Luke Bernali that day. She knew he’d viewed it the same way.

Now she rolled a cigarette for that same man, in a truck much like the one he had been driving then, the weight of his bracelet on her arm. In agitation, she rolled the paper too tightly around the tobacco and it tore. “I can’t do this.”

“It’s all right,” he said quietly. “Don’t worry about it.’’

The gentleness in his tone unnerved her. It told her he, too, remembered that cool morning and the vow she had spoken. She took off the bracelet and threw it into the glove box. “I’ll do it.”

And, as if rolling a perfect cigarette were all that mattered, Jessie concentrated on doing just that. The paper smooth between her fingers, a pinch of moist tobacco…

“That’s right,” Luke said. “Now just shake it out so it’s even.”

She did and managed to smooth the paper around right, too. With a toss of her head, she handed it over. He grinned as he took it, then devilishly offered it back to her. “Maybe you need it worse than I do.”

“Don’t tempt me,” she said darkly. “I’ll throw every scrap of tobacco you’ve got right out the window.”

He laughed and scratched a match with his thumbnail, rolling down the window so the smoke would go outside. “Now dig that bracelet out and give it to me.”

“I’d rather not.”

“I know.” His mouth was firm in profile. “But it’s mine, and I want to wear it.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Too bad.” Abruptly, he stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and leaned over, snagging the bracelet from the glove box before she could stop him. With a lift of his chin, he cut her a glance and slapped the silver cuff on his wrist. “You’ve got your painting. I’ve got my bracelet.”

Jessie didn’t respond. The mess from the glove box still sat in her lap, and with annoyance, she grabbed a tape without checking to see what it was. She stuffed it in the tape player, then shoved everything back into the glove box the same wily-nilly way she’d found it. Just as she slammed the box closed, music poured into the cab.

“I’m on Fire,” by Bruce Springsteen.

Luke roared with laughter. Jessie slumped in her seat and glared out the window. “One of these days, I’m going to strangle you.”

“No, you won’t.” He grabbed her hand and kissed it. “You love me and you know it.”

L
uke teased her to keep from slipping away, but it was a lost cause. She curled up against the window and pretended to sleep, and he knew it was her way of escaping him. He tried not to mind, tried to tell himself he’d known it was coming and ought to have been prepared. He tried to tell himself—

Yeah, right. He’d been trying to tell himself since she dropped into his life again that it was dangerous to get close. But as usual, his heart overrode his reason. Now he would pay the consequences.

Jessie was simply incapable of letting down her guard completely, of giving her whole self to another person. The damage of her childhood made it so, and all the wishing in the world wouldn’t change it.

Irritably, he passed a slow-moving car. Once, he’d been willing to settle for that portion of her heart that she could give, but it had nearly drained him dry. No way he’d do it again.

If she wanted him this time, it had to be on his terms. All or nothing.

As she shifted back and forth, pretending to sleep, he set his jaw and focused on the dry high plains through which they passed, the jutting buttes and carved arroyos, the grayish green clumps of sage and clusters of yucca. There was no essential difference in the landscape itself; from southern Colorado onward, they had passed through the same country.

But slowly, the feeling of the land and the people changed. Not so many ranchers in hats and boots. Not so many crisp, square towns with a single stoplight at the center. More little villages centerpieced with an adobe garage and filling station, often with a rangy-looking dog guarding the step, places where the language spoken would as likely be Spanish as English.

There weren’t so many people out, bustling here and there on morning rounds, but Luke knew in the hills there were women cooking and men tinkering and children laughing. Somewhere, music was pouring from a radio up there and the song would be a Spanish ballad.

As they passed through one of the little villages, Luke gave a slow wave to a man crossing the highway and the man waved back, just a raised hand. It gave Luke a curious rush of pleasure. Here, he knew how things were. He knew what to expect.

Giselle banged on the window. Luke glanced in the rearview mirror, and she exaggeratedly rubbed her stomach. Beside her, Tasha popped up, tongue out as she panted.

Luke gave Giselle a nod of acknowledgment and looked at Jessie, reaching over to tap her arm lightly with the backs of his fingers. “Hey, Jess. Time to wake up.”

She straightened, blinking, and Luke wondered when she’d passed from pretending to sleep to the real thing. “I think we’ll stop in Gallup and get some lunch. Okay with you?”

“Sure.” She yawned.

Luke had never spent any time in the reservation border town of Gallup, but it wasn’t much different from Farmington, to the north. Neither were large towns, but the streets were thronged on the weekends with Indians come to shop.

This was Saturday. An odd dissonance—equal parts nostalgia, fear and delight—rose in Luke at the familiar sight of bruised pickup trucks and old cars crowded into the parking lots of small shopping centers and restaurants. It was this he’d been half dreading, half anticipating since Marcia suggested he and Jessie come down to lead the meeting. Everywhere were Indian faces, young and old and in-between, keenly familiar in shape and color and arrangement of expression.

As with the little villages on the road, he knew what these people were doing. He saw a youth carrying a toddler wrapped into a round bundle against the chilly wind, and chuckled, thinking of himself and Marcia. A mother strode along the street, dragging a two-wheeled basket half filled with purchases, and behind her trailed a gaggle of stair-stepped sons with new haircuts. Luke recognized the tan marks on the back of their necks.