A Minute to Smile (32 page)

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(Excerpt)

by
Barbara Samuel

Prologue

September

H
e stepped into the bright, hot day with a sense of numbness, looking first to the mountains, dark blue on the horizon, then to the sky, a clear turquoise painted with streaks of feathery white. A wind, warm and scented with pine, danced over open fields to brush his face with light, playful buffets.

On his body were civilian clothes—jeans and a clean cotton shirt. His sister had brought him his boots and a good leather belt. His hair, freshly cut, lifted over his forehead in the free wind.

For a long moment, he simply stood at the threshold of his new life, unable to quite believe all that had happened in the past week. As he stood there, a butterfly flittered through the air—bright yellow with spots of blue.

His numbness burst, like the chrysalis that had once held the butterfly, and from the deadness surged a thrust of pure joy. He turned to the man next to him and grinned.

“You never did belong here,” his friend said. “Go on, now. Don’t look back. Remember what happened to Lot’s wife.”

“Thanks,” he said simply, and took the first long steps into a future he’d never dreamed he would own.

One

B
y the time Maggie Henderson and her photographer arrived at the scene of the protest late Wednesday afternoon, a crowd had gathered. Maggie glanced at the heavy clouds hanging low over Cheyenne Mountain and turned to her photographer. “Rain would be the best thing that could happen this afternoon,” she said.

“I’ll second that,” Sharon McConnell agreed, tossing one of a plethora of braids out of her eye.

“Come on,” Maggie said as she pushed through a throng of black-leather-jacketed teens toward the center of the demonstration.

In front of a record store, a handful of teenagers dressed in pressed skirts and slacks marched in a slow circle, carrying placards protesting a rock band. From somewhere in the crowd, a portable radio blasted the music of the band, adding to the general chaos of shouts and chants.

Maggie couldn’t take notes in the jostling crowd, so she committed it all to memory—the noise and taunts and clashing cultures of the two groups. Suddenly, the crowd parted a fraction and Maggie caught sight of a slender, blond girl seated on the hood of a car. She looked a little scared, Maggie thought, in spite of her black jacket studded with metal and her swinging skull earrings.

Maggie grabbed Sharon’s arm. Shouting to be heard, she said, “Get as much as you can. I’ve got to go kill my daughter.”

Sharon’s dark eyes widened in sympathy as she nodded. Maggie headed through the crowd toward Samantha, unintentionally pushing in her haste to get to the fifteen-year-old trying so hard to be grown-up. These kids were all at least a year or two older than Sam, Maggie fumed. She had no idea what she was getting into.

“Hey, watch it, lady,” protested a girl in a striped tube top.

Maggie ignored her. The chants and noise were growing louder, and a kind of rocking motion rippled through the mass of teenagers. Distantly she heard the sound of sirens. Maggie caught a glimpse of Samantha jumping down from the hood of the car, before the crowd shifted again. Maggie was flung against the body of a boy, who shoved her roughly back. She staggered. The unmistakable sound of shattering glass sent a split second of silence over the crowd. Then all hell broke loose.

As the bodies around her surged and pushed and roared, Maggie looked desperately for Samantha. She could see nothing but the black-and-silver jackets, jeans and flying hair. Someone screamed. The sirens arrived at the scene.

Maggie ducked flying fists, moving back as far as she could, intent now on saving herself from the unparalleled rage of teens who believed themselves wronged. A whisper of cool air touched her face, indicating a break in the hot press of bodies. She turned to flee.

An elbow, a knee, a fist—something unmoving and hard smashed into her left temple. Maggie staggered backward, clutching automatically at her head. She blinked hard and tried to stay on her feet.

The reporter in her knew that falling under the running crowd would be instant death. In spite of the stars shining with silver light in her eyes, she knew she had to keep her wits in whatever shape she could manage.

It wasn’t much. She stumbled, carried along in the flow of the crowd, and collapsed on the curb, blood streaming into her eye. Head wounds bleed a lot, she told herself, praying she wouldn’t need stitches.

“Maggie!” Sharon knelt next to her.

“Am I gonna make deadline?” Maggie asked weakly.

“Forget deadline—can you stand up?”

“I think so.” With Sharon’s help, she made it to her feet, pressing her palm hard to the wound. “I’m going to strangle a certain young woman as soon as I get home.”

“You won’t have to wait,” said a soft, contrite voice at her side.

Maggie reached out and grabbed Samantha to her. One of the skull earrings bit into her jaw, and she smelled the strawberry scent of Sam’s shampoo. Relief flooded through her.

“Come on,” Sharon said. “Let’s get you to the hospital.”

* * *

Later, as she held a fresh ice pack to the wound marring her eyebrow, Maggie thought the entire afternoon would make a wonderful letter to her brother, Galen, in New Mexico. He would love the absurdity of the three dozen calls she’d made to the newsroom of the small weekly newspaper she owned and edited, frantically trying to make sure that the paper would get to the printer in time for distribution tomorrow afternoon. He would laugh at her descriptions of the lecture Samantha had received about the dangers of not exercising proper judgment in the selection of companions, a speech Maggie had delivered with an ice pack pressed to her blackening eye.

She swallowed a mouthful of cold beer and kicked the front porch swing into a little rocking motion. The May night was incredibly warm for a Colorado spring. Maggie breathed in the gentle breeze, fragrant with the odor of new grass, and felt its recuperative powers spread through her shoulders and down her spine.

Samantha, looking a great deal more like herself in a ponytail and a pink cotton sweat suit, appeared at the screen door. “Do you need anything, Mom? I’m about to go to bed.”

“‘Mom’?” Maggie echoed. “You’ve been calling me Maggie for weeks.”

Sam had the grace to look ashamed. “I know. I’m sorry. But you really are my only mother, aren’t you?”

“You know I am. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“Good night.”

“‘Night, Sam,” Maggie answered gently.

She took another long swallow of beer. Sam would be sixteen soon. At the end of her first year in high school, she was beginning to ask difficult questions of herself, Maggie and the world around her—a normal, healthy step, but one complicated in Sam’s case by a search for identity.

Given the girl’s tangled parentage, the search was no surprise.

Sam’s mother, a photographer, had been killed in a bomb blast in Belfast when Samantha was nearly four. Maggie had met and married Paul Henderson, also a photographer, when Sam was five, becoming the only mother Sam had really known. Five years later, an amicable but imperative divorce had split Maggie and Paul. Since Paul traveled widely in his career, the decision that Samantha would live with Maggie had been a sensible one.

For the most part, the arrangement had worked out well. Even Sam’s present search for roots was not unexpected.

From the open door of the other half of the semidetached building came the sound of quiet blues. Maggie swung slowly in time to the sound of the mournful saxophone. At least her new neighbor wasn’t like the last ones, she thought, two single girls who had played their music until two or three in the morning, entertained friends constantly and even sunbathed in the backyard with their boombox at full blast. Although she had liked the girls, their noise had become a serious problem. Maggie hadn’t been sorry when they’d moved the week before.

Judging from the clues she’d gathered about the new neighbor, it was a man. Few women drove a truck or moved in during the course of one afternoon without the help of friends.

Now she added another tidbit of information—someone quiet, with a taste for blues. Nice.

As if on cue, a shadow emerged from the door of the other apartment. He walked out to his side of the porch and leaned on the railing. When Maggie’s swing squeaked, he turned, almost imperceptibly crouching as if to spring.

Seeing her, he straightened. “Sorry,” he said in a voice as deep as a mountain gorge. “I thought you’d gone in.”

He was huge; four or five inches past six feet, with arms like the branches of a great tree. “That’s all right,” Maggie said. “It’s your porch, too.”

He relaxed on the sturdy wooden railing of the turn-of-the-century porch. “Thanks.” His face was in shadow, but Maggie instinctively warmed to the gentleness of his resonant bass voice. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“No, not at all,” Maggie answered lazily. “There’s nothing quite as relaxing as a spring night, is there?”

“I can’t think of anything,” he agreed. After a moment, he asked, “Is that a black eye you’re nursing?”

Maggie lowered the ice pack, nodding ruefully. “I’ll probably look like a boxer by morning. Seven stitches right through the eyebrow.”

He made a sympathetic noise. “Bet that hurts.”

“It’s all right now, I think.”

“Did you run into a wall?”

“Yes,” Maggie said with a laugh. “A wall of teenagers.”

“Teenagers?” He sounded perplexed.

“I run a small newspaper directed toward thirteen- through seventeen-year-olds,” she explained. “We cover all the news of their community—and unfortunately, the news of the moment is a series of confrontations about a rock band. I got caught in the middle this afternoon.”

He stood to face her, leaning on the support post. “So then you’re Maggie Henderson, right? Of the
Wanderer?”

“That’s me,” she said, surprised. Not many people over the age of twenty had much use for the paper. “You’ve read it?”

“Yes. I like the music reviews.”

“Thanks. I’ll pass that on to the assistant editor, who’s also my photographer.” Maggie gave a small laugh. “And tonight she’s doing everything, since I’m incapacitated.”

“Talented woman.”

“Yes.”

“The paper is a great idea—most people overlook teenagers.”

“I agree. I don’t think it’s ever been tougher to be that age.” Odd, Maggie thought. Perhaps it was the darkness or her exhaustion or his gentle, vibrant voice, but she felt utterly comfortable with this stranger, even in her oversize T-shirt and worn-out jeans. “How do you like your new house?” she asked.

“I love all the windows,” he said, “and the bookshelves in the living room. Are both sides exactly alike?”

Maggie sipped a bit of her beer and let its golden chill cool her throat before she answered. “There’s a breakfast nook on your side that we don’t have, but that’s the only difference.”

“You can’t find places like this too often anymore,” he said. “Everybody’s building condos and putting in microwaves.”

“Speaking of microwaves,” Maggie said with a laugh, “don’t ever run too many appliances at once. My coffee maker in combination with the microwave or even the VCR kicks off the breakers.”

He chuckled appreciatively. “I’ll remember that. I just bought a microwave.” A pause, somehow filled with the lingering sound of his laughter, fell. “I don’t know how to use it, yet, but I guess I’m going to learn,” he added after a moment, a hint of self-deprecation in his tone.

“Don’t worry. I was terrified of mine at first, but it seemed almost criminal not to have one as fast as they cook things. My daughter’s the one who figured it all out for me.”

“Really?”

“She can use it to cook anything now.” Now that’s a bit of scintillating conversation, Maggie, she thought. Even wounded, she could do better than that. “What’s your name, neighbor?”

“I’m Joel,” he said. “Joel Summer.”

In the soft lamplight spilling onto the porch, Maggie could make out a hard-planed face and very dark, straight hair. The shadow view was promising enough that she wished for better light. “What do you do, Joel?”

He shifted again, crossing powerful arms over a deep chest. “I work at the raptor center.”

“Raptors are birds, right?” she asked with a frown.

“Big birds.” He grinned. “Eagles and falcons and hawks. Owls.”

She cocked her head. “That’s an unusual career.” The natural curiosity that had led her into newspapers prompted her next question. “How did you get into that?”

“I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love birds. As soon as I learned you could earn a living studying them, I knew what I was going to do.”

Maggie smiled. “You’re one of the lucky ones, then.”

“‘Lucky’?” There was a distinct edge of bitter humor in the echo.

‘”Blessed is he who has found his work,’” she quoted. “‘Let him ask no other blessedness.’” Maggie lifted her beer in a toast. “Carlyle,” she added.

“Nice theory,” he said.

Maggie heard the faintest tinge of resignation in his voice. “It’s not everything you’d hoped?”

“My work never disappoints me.” Again his grin flashed at Maggie, and she wondered if she’d imagined the other resignation. “Did you know a prairie falcon can fly 150 miles an hour?”

“No.” She smiled.

He smiled, too. “They’re the most graceful creatures God ever created.”

“Are falcons your favorites, then?”

“No, I don’t think I have a favorite.” He made a gesture with one hand. “They’re all—“he shook his head slightly “—magnificent. There’s no other word for them.”

The phone rang inside Maggie’s apartment, and she stood up quickly. The motion sent a quick, sharp wave of dizziness through her brain and she stopped, blinking until her vision cleared, one hand over her wounded eye.

Joel crossed to her in an instant, bracing her with a strong grip on her arm. “Are you all right?”