Walk in Beauty (3 page)

“Who did it?”

“Nobody knows right now.” He shifted the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “The next day, Mary and her son lost their brakes on the way into Gallup. They found signs of tampering.”

“Are you suggesting some kind of conspiracy?” Jessie shook her head. “Don’t you think that’s a little paranoid?”

“Maybe.” He eyed her steadily. “There’s a lot of money at stake for these people. We’ve reached almost all the major dealers in the Southwest the last few weeks. Do you really think it’s surprising they’d try to find a way to push back?”

“I guess not.”

For a moment he said nothing, and Jessie could see unease in the way he twiddled the toothpick in his fingers. Finally he asked, “Do you still want to go ahead with the appointment at the other gallery in the morning?”

“Of course. If we run at the first sign of intimidation, it’ll guarantee the situation won’t change.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Jessie, stung, looked at her paper napkin, crushed into a tight ball in her hand. “I knew what you meant,” she said quietly. “I’ll still go.”

“How did you get mixed up with this project?” he asked.

“I could ask you the same question. I thought I knew everyone involved.”

“My mother was a weaver, Jessie—that would be enough to catch my attention by itself.”

“I haven’t forgotten. It’s just that it seems I would have heard of you or something.”

“It’s Marcia who is really into the project. They couldn’t get ahold of you on the phone last night, so she called me and gave me a crash course.”

“Marcia—the Denver contact, right?” Jessie had heard Daniel speak of her, but never with her last name. “How is she?”

“Good.” His expression softened. “She’s a violin teacher—teaches Suzuki method to inner-city kids.”

Jessie found herself chuckling. “That fits. I bet she’s good at it.”

“She is.” He lifted a brow. “So, what about you? How’d you get involved?”

Jessie moved her plate out of the way so she could fold her arms in front of her on the table. “I met Daniel when I was pregnant with Giselle, and he sort of took us under his wing.” Carefully, she pushed a stack of breadcrumbs into a neat little pile in front of her. “It was important to me that Giselle have Navajo people in her life, so she’d know who she was. I couldn’t give her that, and Daniel—”

She chanced a peek at Luke’s face. He stared fiercely at his hands. A long muscle along his jaw stood out.

Jessie hurried on. “When Daniel started this project last year, he knew I was involved with a lot of other artists. He recruited me to get the support of the local art community.”

“You know,” Luke said, his voice oddly flat, “he used to be my best friend.”

“He was?” Jessie frowned. “He’s never said a word about you.”

Luke shrugged.

“He’s been a good friend to me,” Jessie went on. “And Giselle loves him.”

As if the knowledge pained him, Luke looked away from her to Giselle. An expression both hungry and joyful crossed his face. Jessie recognized it. It reflected the astonishment she still felt sometimes, watching Giselle at some ordinary task.

Nothing had prepared her for the love she felt for her child, something so deep and gripping and unfathomable Jessie couldn’t even define it. In loving Giselle, she found herself unable to keep even a corner of her heart aloof, as she’d always been careful to do with everyone else. Even Luke. Maybe especially Luke.

“I can’t believe it,” he said softly. “Look at her. She’s so beautiful and smart—she looks just like Marcia.” He turned a harsh gaze to Jessie. “Was it so terrible that you couldn’t have given me this small thing? Just to watch her grow?”

A vision of her alcoholic mother, drunk and incoherent, flashed across Jessie’s imagination. To spare Giselle that horror, Jessie would have done a lot more than simply leave Luke. “When I saw you last,” she replied quietly, “you were hardly father material.”

His lashes, black and straight, swept down. Dusky color stained his cheekbones and for an instant, Jessie was ashamed.

He cleared his throat and shifted, pulling a twenty from the front pocket of his jeans. He stood up. “I have some things I need to do before dark.”

Jessie nodded.

He paused at the tableside. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “Maybe I’m still not what you think she needs.” His eyes, dark and luminous in the cold light, were somber. “Don’t run away again, Jessie. Please.”

Her throat tightened dangerously and she bit her lip hard. “No. I won’t.”

“I can’t make the past right, but I really am sorry things turned out the way they did.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry—” he shook his head “—that’s all. I’m sorry.”

On the way out, he paused to murmur something to Giselle, his graceful, long-fingered hand flat on her back. Then he ambled out, waving toward the waitress in a friendly farewell.

It was still a full sixty seconds before Jessie could absorb his words. Then she buried her face in her hands, fighting back tears of rage and loss and mourning.

Once she’d had to choose between the child growing in her belly and the love that had healed her. It had been the hardest struggle of her life. For years she had mourned him, tortured herself with “what ifs” that had no bearing on real life. What if she’d been stronger? What if she’d seen the signs of his alcoholism in time to help him? What if she’d given him a chance and he’d been able to kick his habit?

Now he appeared, sober and strong, a perfect fulfillment of her most fervent “what if”…

What if he stopped drinking?

She looked at Giselle, bent over the pinball game with intense concentration. Eight years ago, Jessie had chosen to be this child’s mother, alone. She had chosen to devote herself to motherhood the way her own mother had not.

Through the window, she watched Luke’s truck pull into the street and drive away, feeling a plucking sorrow. There was terrible irony in all of it, she thought. If she’d never known Luke, had never reveled in the unconditional love and support he’d given her, she would never have been strong enough to leave him the way she had. Without the healing of his love, she would never have known how to love her child, to be the mother she was.

But she lived with the irony. For Giselle, she could bear the guilt.

The thought made her feel much stronger. Briskly, she stood up, gathered her daughter and paid the bill. Then she took Giselle out to explore Colorado Springs.

* * *

In the still of the evening, Luke bent over a bureau he’d bought at a flea market. Below the chipped layers of paint, he’d seen the extraordinary beauty of it, and now he lovingly sanded the ridges of the carved drawers, gently so as not to mar the delicate grain of the maple.

The smell of sandpaper and dry wood eased the tension he’d been carrying with him all day, as did the repetitive motion and the simple beauty of the wood itself. At sixteen, he’d landed his first carpentry job and fallen in love with the profession. Over the years, he’d learned almost every aspect of it, from framing buildings to making drawers that moved smoothly on their rollers to this delicate kind of refinishing work.

Recently he’d found a huge market for the work he loved best—recreations of Victorian-era woodwork for the stately homes built during the heyday of “Little London,” and now being reclaimed by up-and-coming young professionals. He made banisters and baseboards and wainscoting. On weekends he browsed flea markets and garage sales for pieces like this that would be sold to the same people who contracted reproduction spindles for their stairways.

Luke’s enormous black cat wandered into the room, meowing plaintively. Luke chuckled as Nino bumped his shin and scooped the animal into his arms. “What do you think, hmm?” he said to the cat. “I bet someone is going to pay a pretty penny for this one.”

Nino meowed loudly in answer, his Siamese blood showing in his protesting tone.

Beyond the cozy warmth of the kitchen, the storm that had threatened all day was breaking. Wind moaned around the corners, rattling the dry branches of a vine outside the kitchen window. The sound was lonely. It underscored Luke’s sense of being haunted—by Jessie, by old specters of himself, by the past.

Nino jumped down and meowed to go outside. Luke crossed the tiled floor he’d laid himself and let the cat out. His dogs, hearing the click of the door, bounded up, tongues lolling, ears alert in hopes of being let in. “Forget it,” Luke said with a scowl. “I’ve had enough of animals tonight.”

Tasha, a wolf-Malamute mix, grinned and leapt for Nino, who crouched with annoyance at the dog slobber dripping onto his ears. Nino then reached up with one massive paw and slapped Tasha’s nose. No claws, of course. There were rules to this game.

Shaking his head, Luke closed the door and fetched a can of coffee from the fridge. There on the shelf rested a single bottle of beer. It had sat there now for nearly four years, ready in case he chose to fall. For one aching instant, Luke wanted to finally break down, twist off the top, gulp it down. He wanted to take refuge in one ice-cold beer to blunt the memory of Jessie’s golden eyes, staring at him with such fierceness this afternoon.

Instead, he made a pot of coffee and rolled a cigarette while he waited for it to brew. He leaned against the counter and flicked a kitchen match with a thumbnail, watching the reflection of the flame in the window. Beyond, snow floated down from a sky as cold as the past.

Had there ever been a man as stupid as he’d been with Jessie? That single, lonely beer in the fridge summed it up. He’d traded the greatest love of his life for booze.

As a boy, he’d lived on a reservation near the border of New Mexico and Arizona. There had been no drinking there, not ever. But sometimes his family would go into Farmington for supplies, and Luke’s father would sadly point to Indians standing in clusters at the doors of certain bars, fighting, sleeping on the blacktop roads out of town for warmth. “See?” Luke’s father said, over and over. “Don’t let yourself be an Indian like that.”

Luke was ten when the family moved to Colorado Springs, and the image of those drunks faded. By the time Luke joined the army at eighteen, he drank beer along with the rest of the young, homesick soldiers. He dismissed his father’s warnings as the overly rigid advice of a traditional—quaint but not altogether useful in the world beyond the reservation.

But even just the beer had sometimes given him hangovers that scared him. He would awaken with a swollen head and a clutching fear in his chest, feeling as if he couldn’t breathe, as if he were on dangerous ground. He’d go on the wagon for a while, but the problem never seemed that serious. With practice, he learned his limits and stayed within them. Only beer. Only a few.

In his kitchen, on this cold winter night, Luke shook his head over the illusions he’d built so carefully, the lies he’d told himself. He poured a cup of coffee, stirred in a generous measure of sugar and reached for the milk in the fridge. His gaze caught on the bottle of beer once more, but his hunger for it was dissipating quickly.

In the living room the stereo paused as a new record fell into place, then Jackson Browne was singing about the lengths a man would go to forget a woman.

Jessie.
Not a woman he’d been able to wash from his mind, though God knew he’d tried. He had buried himself in the arms of other women, in work, in projects. Another man would have used liquor. Luke didn’t have the luxury. His father, it seemed, had been right—at least about Luke. This was one Indian who couldn’t drink, not if he wanted to have a life.

He rubbed a restless palm over his chest, trying to ease the ache there.
Jessie.
Her name echoed through his mind, over and over, like a lost voice borne through a canyon by the wind. It seemed impossible that she’d just dropped into his life out of nowhere today, with no warning whatsoever.

He hadn’t forgotten her. Even after so much time had passed, a song or a certain kind of sunset brought his memories of her rushing back. He’d hear someone laugh, or turn a corner in the grocery store and see some woman with long hair, and he’d be instantly back in the past.

They’d met twelve years before, when Luke worked for her father in California, building an addition to the lawyer’s house by the sea. One morning he looked up toward the house and there she was, standing in the window of her bedroom, a soft white gown floating around her, her long, wavy hair lifting in the sea breeze. At lunch, she brought iced tea to the crew.

He told himself to be careful in the beginning. She was young, only a little past twenty, and somehow fragile—he didn’t want to hurt her. At the time, he’d been in no mood for settling down with one woman, and for several weeks, he kept her at arm’s length.

But somehow, he found himself seeking her out. They walked along the beach for hours in the evenings, talking and talking and talking. He learned her tragic story, shared his own losses, fell in love with her. And still he didn’t kiss her, didn’t even hold her hand.

Tired of waiting for him, she simply came to him one night in his tent on the beach. And Luke, for all his reasoning and caution, had not been able to resist the vulnerable way she offered herself. His will collapsed under the force of her innocent seduction, collapsed to the greater lure of his hunger for her.

As long as he lived, he would never forget the power of that joining. It had shattered him, and when the pieces came back together, he wasn’t the same man he had been before. Even now, he could see it—her long hair tangled by his fingers, her skin translucent and white in the moonlight. The sound of the sea underscored their passion, a passion so violent and moving and deep he still never thought of it without feeling her against his chest, smelling her skin and tasting her mouth.

From that night onward, they had been inseparable. When Luke grew restless in California, Jessie wandered with him, and for three years, they had lived an almost idyllic life—traveling and working and loving.

Luke picked up the sandpaper and eased a corner under the lip of the bureau, sighing. Their last year together wasn’t as easy to think about.