Barbara Samuel (17 page)

Dipping her brush into a particularly intense metallic pink, Luna felt the pressure on the back of her neck give way suddenly. She hadn’t discovered the whole craft
thing until she was in recovery. Until then, she’d had no time to devote to it, and privately thought crafts were the desperate productions of women who had no meaning in their lives.

How life loved to play tricks! The early weeks and months of recovery had driven her insane with boredom, and in Kitty’s sewing room one day, she found an unpainted plaster statue of a pair of children in a garden, and all the paints that went with it. Kitty set her up in the basement and Luna spent the next two days engrossed.

At peace.

There was something so calming about it, the small movements, the tight focus, the concentration and the colors. Contrary to popular belief, most alcoholics were control freaks, and that small, simple control of
something
was very healing.

So Luna and Kitty took to wandering craft stores, and Luna tried nearly everything they offered at least once. Anything that required too much close work ended up making her more irritable, rather than less; she rejected cross-stitch and miniatures for that reason. Kitty suggested she stick with paint-related things, and Luna tried decoupage, more ceramics, even some floral watercolors, but it was finally furniture that captured her. Well, and the Barbie dolls, but that had been a hobby for a long, long time. Several, in various stages of dress and completion, looked down benignly as she worked this afternoon in the quiet rain, as if approving the fact that she was close to finishing the table. So was she. Working on Joy’s room had taken most of the summer, and although it had been very well received—and to be quite honest, she was inordinately proud of it—it wasn’t something she could display. And despite her protests to
the contrary, she loved people to look at her paintings and dolls and admire them.

From her perch on an unfinished chair, rickety but full of potential, Therapist Barbie said,
Do you think you might be an artist, then?

Luna paused, brush in the air. Considered.

Growing up in a place like Taos, where every other person you met was an artist, made anyone think twice about any calling she might have. Or think she might have. Artists loved it, loved the support they found among one another, and even bad artists were unusually sensitive to shadows and light and the brilliance of color. They came to Taos and fell in love, over and over, each one thinking they’d discovered something new. She’d seen Taos Mountain drawn, photographed, painted in oils, watercolors, acrylics and tempera, sketched in charcoal and pastels, even crayon.

But so much of it was
bad
art—things people had slaved over, thinking they were original and fresh and real, and they weren’t. They were just more recycled adobe churches and adobe doorways and quaint Pueblo renderings. Or more kitschy folk art, she acknowledged with a flush.

But the colors—how could a person escape them? They permeated everything. Growing up, Luna had not understood how the pink of Guadalupe’s robes and the turquoise windowsills and the flash of dark summer thunderstorms and the drenching of sunlight, day after day, influenced her. In discovering crafts, she could let that color out, here and there, for her own pleasure, with no ego whatsoever involved.

No, she wasn’t an artist.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t play. There was something so sensual about it, about painting the
plump, juicy rounds of a crimson drop of blood, something so transporting about losing herself in the curve of the brush against the surface. It was the only time she could stop thinking. She became the colors, the light, a prism through which something could be reflected, however poorly.

Delicately, she dotted Lowrider pink into the turn of a petal. Sometimes it was poorly done. But this was a good one.

Joy came in around four and carried a Coke into the room. “Mom, I wish you’d think about selling some of this stuff. It’s really cool, and I don’t think you’re seeing it.”

“Takes all the fun out of it.” She wiped a smear of paint from her wrist with a rag. “How was your day?”

“Okay.” They talked about Joy’s art teacher, and the math teacher, whom she liked and had told her she should move up one grade, to Algebra II, and the biology teacher who was too young and not in control of the classroom, and the English teacher with a mellifluous voice—Joy really used the word
mellifluous
—who had read one of Joy’s friend Maggie’s poems out loud. “It was really, really good, Mom. I swear. So, so, so sad, with these great images in it—sometimes it seems like I can see everybody else’s talents, things they can’t even see, but I don’t have any of my own.”

“We all have talents, love.”

Joy raised a shoulder, took a long swallow of Coke. “Well, I’m smart,” she said, her left leg swinging over the edge of an armchair. “I’m very good with numbers and I can speak up, but I don’t have any artistic talent of any kind. No music, no art, no writing, nothing. I’m okay at all of them, but not really good at any of them.”

Luna grinned, and touched up the edge of a petal with
a thin brush filled with black paint. “Gosh, then, you might be a business whiz or something unusable like that, huh?”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’m such a business type, can’t you tell?”

“Nothing wrong with business, Joy. There are business angles to creative work, too, you know. Maybe you can find something to do in that realm—run a gallery, or be a talent scout, or an agent. God knows artists need honest people in their corners. Most of them are not very good at that end of their work, and they suffer for it.”

Joy turned her lips down at the corners. “Hmm. I never thought about it before. I wonder how somebody gets into those kinds of things.”

“I don’t know.” Luna put her brush down and wiped her hands. “But you’re in a good place to find out. Stop in and talk to the gallery owners. I think there are some literary agents in town, and I know there’s a publisher or two. Gotta be dozens of people who’d be more than happy to share their experiences with you.”

The phone rang and Joy leapt up to answer it. The phone was right around the corner and Luna heard her bright, expectant hello, then a long silence. “Dad,” she said. “Dad, can you listen to—”

Luna felt that thud of dread, low in her belly, and thought of the freezer full of food. She raised her chin. Joy had gone silent, and Luna could hear the sound of Marc’s voice coming over the line. She stirred her brush in a jar of water, watching thin clouds of paint disperse, like blood from a shark bite into the ocean.

Joy said forcefully, “Dad, listen to me!”

Luna stood, ready to intervene if necessary.

A complaint, then Joy said, “You know, I kept calling in the evenings, hoping to just have a conversation with
you, and you couldn’t even be bothered to talk to me for three minutes, now all of a sudden you want me to come home and live with you?
No!”

She listened, then made a mewling protest. “That’s not fair, Dad! I don’t know how you can be so mean!” She paused, then, “It is not for my own good, it’s for
your
own good, and you’re mean and I hate you and I will never live with you again, no matter what you do.”

Luna capped the paints spread out around her, a pulse of anger starting to pound in her temples. Joy started to cry. “Please, Dad, don’t do this. Just let me live here. You have everything good out there already.”

She started crying, harder. Luna asked quietly, “What’s going on?”

Joy covered her eyes and handed the phone over wordlessly, running into her bedroom.

“Marc,” Luna said into the receiver, “what just happened?”

“I want her home, Lu. She doesn’t belong out there.”

“You don’t have any right to make that choice for her.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I’m her father and that’s what I want for her, and since you—her mother— haven’t been, shall we say, entirely
present
in her life, I’ll thank you to stay out of it.”

Luna laughed shortly. “We have an official custody arrangement that’s now in my favor, Marc, and I made it formal because I suspected something like this might happen. I thought it would take longer than a week or two for you to change your mind, but I knew you’d start trying to control her the minute she left.”

“Oh, please, spare me the melodrama.”

Luna closed her eyes. Took a breath. “Stop hurting her, Marc. Think about someone besides yourself for once.” She hung up, and went to her daughter’s room.

Joy was facedown on her bed, crying in the hysterically broken way only a teenage girl could pull off. Luna sat down beside her, touched her back. “Honey, don’t take it like that. Your father … is just who he is. You can’t change him.”

She flung her body over. “He always wants to control me! You know what he threatened on the phone? To take away my allowance! Just because he changed his mind?”

“It’s rotten. It is.” She folded her hands. “Maybe I can make it up. What’s he sending?”

“No, that’s not fair. He’s supposed to take care of this. He promised me, and he’s let me down so much, he can’t get away with this.”

Luna frowned. She chose her words carefully. “Joy, why are you so angry with him? I know he’s kind of a jerk, but that hasn’t changed much. Is there something you aren’t telling me?”

Joy moaned and turned her face away, curling her body into a little comma. When Luna reached for her, she flinched away, and a sick feeling went through her. “He doesn’t—”

“Oh, God, no.” Joy turned over. “Nothing like that. He doesn’t molest anybody, not me or anybody else. And he isn’t a secret heroin addict, either. He’s just a liar and a cheat and I hated finding that out about him, and I thought, all this time, that I was at least the one person he loved and cared about, but I found out now that I don’t matter any more than anyone else.” She pressed her face into the pillow. “Leave me alone,” she said in a muffled voice.

“None of this is your fault, Joy,” she said, then left her alone, closing the door gently behind her.

It was close to five, and she was supposed to meet Thomas at seven. She picked up the phone and dialled
the number from the note stuck to the fridge.
“Hold?”
answered a woman. Probably Placida.

“Can I speak to Thomas, please?”

“He’s not home. Call back later.”

“Wait, wait,” she cried, hoping Placida heard before she hung up. “Can you give him a message for me, or is there a cell phone I can reach him on?”

There was a sound of movement at the other end of the line. Then Thomas’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Hi, Thomas. This is Lu McGraw. I’m so glad I caught you.”

“Hi.” He chuckled, and she could hear rapid, annoyed Spanish in the background. “She lied to you. I was sitting right at the table with her.”

“She hates me!”

“Nah. You have to get to know her. What’s up?”

“I have to cancel. My ex called and my daughter is really upset and I think I’d like to take her to a movie or something. Can we reschedule?”

“How’s tomorrow?”

A sense of relief passed through her. “Sure.” Then she remembered. “Maybe not. I have to go to a wedding reception at the VFW Unless you’d want to put in an appearance with me and then we can go somewhere else?”

“I’m game. Should I pick you up?”

“No, I’ll be at my mother’s house. I’ll meet you there at say … eight o’clock?”

“All right.” A soft pause. She could imagine him standing in a kitchen, with the smell of food cooking all around him, maybe still in his work clothes. A whisper went over her skin. “I’m really looking forward to it, Luna.”

“Me, too.”

Thomas had no religion to speak of, not his father’s or his mother’s, though both had shown him their ways—
his mother taking him to Mass, his father the basics of sweat and earth. Thomas carved saints out of respect for the tradition, and he had built a sweat lodge because it was healthy and healing and he liked the dark, moist heat. And there was something about the lodge that made a man forget, disconnect from his life and his worries, give them over to the … whatever. Great Spirit. Universe. Something. He had a sense of things being out there, but was never quite sure what.

Since his date had cancelled out on him, he decided it was a good time to sweat. He piled round river rocks into the pit outside the lodge, and built a hot fire over it, liking the look of the sparks flying into the gray afternoon. It took several hours, and he tended it between other duties.

It had been a long day, running errands for his grandmother, trying to make arrangements to have her house gutted and finished so it could be sold. He intended to have her live with him now. She was too old to be on her own.

Something he hadn’t told her yet. Today, they’d gone to her house and collected some boxes of her things, and he’d been alarmed at the ennui that had come over her in those familiar rooms. She picked things up and put them back down, like a ghost brushing over the accoutrements of a life now gone. In the end, she’d only taken her clothes, unable to figure out what else she wanted with her. When they got back to his house, she had napped for hours.

She was so old. He didn’t know exactly how old, but she told stories sometimes about riding a wagon into Santa Fe, and the days when Indians sold their wares alongside the road. Some of that had likely gone on into the thirties. But Placida also remembered Pancho Villa’s raid in New Mexico, and he figured that put her into
her early nineties at the minimum. It made him tired to imagine being so old. Once he’d made a comment about feeling too old to start again after Nadine left him, and she shook her head. “You don’t know how many lives you lead in eighty years.”

He was on life number three or four, he figured. The young man who warred; the broken one who came home to New Mexico, to Taos and his roots; the wiser, calmer adult man who became a husband who created a home and stability for a family that never came. Now, he’d been forced to start another new life, without the family he’d prepared himself for.

As he puttered around the big old house, feeding the dog and cat, washing dishes so his grandmother wouldn’t do it later, sweeping the porch, tending the fire, listening to Tiny talk in a low, intent voice to his wife, he wondered how pathetic he was for wanting his old granny here with him, for adopting strays and lost men into his house so he wouldn’t be alone. He paused to look out over the vista, down the hill into town, and then to the mountains beyond, wishing with a sudden sharp yearning for the children he didn’t have. He had wanted them so much, sons and daughters spilling out of the rooms, filling the halls with their squabbling and laughter. They had tried and tried and tried, he and Nadine, and she had not conceived with him. Only with his brother.