Barbara Samuel (27 page)

He felt a little prick of rejection, then realized how it would be to have to protect a child against the capri-ciousness of lovers who might be casual or serious— who knew, in the beginning, which would be which? “Okay.”

“That doesn’t hurt your feelings?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I’ll live with it. You’re right. We don’t know, do we, where we’ll be next week or next month?”

“Right.” She curled into him. “For now, though, I like it.”

“Me, too.” He closed his eyes, covered her breast with his hand, thinking idly of carving it into wood, this particular shape, wondering how to create the soft heft. It made him chuckle. To explain, he said, “I’m thinking of the Virgin Mary’s
chichis.
Think I’m in trouble?”

“I bet they all thought of them, all those sculptors who carved her breasts. They had to, didn’t they?”

“Mmm.” He curved his fingers around, memorizing it.

There was such lassitude in his limbs, such a sense of relaxation. His mind drifted, back to her daughter, the sweetness of the interplay between mother and daughter when Joy stubbed her toe. Joy. Luna must have loved her a lot to name her that. He spoke aloud the next thought. “Why did you leave her behind?”

Her body jerked the slightest bit at the question and he knew immediately it was wrong. “It was for the best at the time,” she said.

Thomas had heard the words before, that first night
in her kitchen. He shifted to one elbow so that he could look at her. “Because you drank?”

“Yes.” She pulled the cover up from their feet and over her shoulder.

“You don’t like talking about it.”

“No.”

“Does that mean you won’t?”

She took a breath and let it out. “Thomas, let’s just not, okay? It was a miserable time in my life and I hate thinking about it. I really let her down.” A shadow crossed her face, putting a frown between her brows. “This is probably more of the same kind of thing, too, but I can’t seem to help myself.”

“What is the same? Sex is the same as drinking?”

“Sometimes. And smoking and overeating and all those other compulsive things.”

He chuckled. “So I’m like a cigarette? You want to suck on me, baby?” He leered and leaned in close, biting on her shoulder playfully.

Luna laughed and pushed at him. “You know what I mean.”

“You take things too seriously.”

“Sometimes, I do,” she agreed, and raised her eyes. Guileless and wide and somehow wary, like a cat who’d been left in the alley, watching her owners drive away to their new home. “But with Joy, I’m not kidding around. I really want a second chance with her. A chance to show her that I can be the mother I should have been. And speaking of that—” She hopped up and threw his clothes at him. “You have to get dressed and come into the kitchen and we have to pretend to be civilized in case she comes home early.”

He put on his boxers and his jeans, interested now more than ever in the walls she was throwing up. “What if,” he said, buttoning his shirt, “I tell you the
worst things I’ve done? Will you tell me how you left her?”

She whirled. “Why do you want to know this stuff? Can’t we just start here?”

“We could,” he said. “But I want to know more than that.”

For a long moment, she only looked at him. “Come into the kitchen,” she said.

Luna washed her face at the sink and dried it on a cup towel, then took two sodas out of the fridge and carried them to the corner, where Thomas waited. She sat down.

“So?” he said.

A flicker of anger licked at her nape. “You’re kinda pushy, you know that?”

An unapologetic grin. “Yep.”

She poured soda slowly into her glass, carefully so it wouldn’t foam up too much. The vanilla scent of it wafted into the air. “I went to college when I was sixteen. I was just totally driven, straight As, landed a full-ride scholarship to CU. I met Marc there the first year. He was as working class as I was, only he was from Jackson, Mississippi, and the class structure there is a little more intense, I gather.”

Thomas nodded to show he was listening.

“We didn’t hook up right away, but we dated off and on for most of my undergraduate days, then got serious when we were in grad school. We got married when I was twenty-three and moved to Atlanta after he finished law school. We both had a lot to learn. How to dress, how to drink, how to have dinner parties for twenty-five, how to talk to people according to their societal rank … ” A sense of pressure built over her sinuses. “It was such bullshit. I hated it. But as I said, we were both pretty driven, so I did what I had to do.”

She took a sip of soda. “One thing that was required was a lot of drinking. Wine, martinis, scotch—all of it. I had a pretty high tolerance, which impressed Marc a lot; a woman who can handle her liquor in that crowd is an asset, let me tell you.” She paused, remembering. “Man, they drank a lot, those people. If you put them in bars and put beers and shots in their hands, instead of martinis and scotches, they’d be drunks. Not in that crowd, though. I knew one lady who drank gin morning, noon, and night and the servants just went around quietly behind her, picking up the slack.”

“Must be nice.”

“Enabling.”

“I guess.” He frowned. “So were you working, too, or just doing the corporate wife thing?”

She raised her index finger. “First bone of contention. I found out in college that I loved working with people who didn’t have many options. The money was never as important to me as being able to help people in some way, and in Atlanta, I found work with a clinic that specialized in counseling low-income families. The woman who ran it had landed a bunch of grants to get it open and she didn’t pay much, but I loved the work.” She looked at him. “If there was something like that here, Tiny could get the help he needs, instead of this crap the courts order.”

Thomas nodded, his mouth grim.

“Marc wanted me to get my Ph. D. so I could go hang up a shingle and treat rich folks, but I stood my ground for once and stuck with the clinic. At least it was something that was mine, you know? Nothing else was, trust me. I’m pretty sure I knew it even then.” She reached into a drawer and pulled out a photograph. “That’s me on the left.”

“Good God. What happened to your hair?”

“I straightened it in those days.”

He handed the picture back. “I like you much better like this.”

Luna looked at the woman in the photo. Her hair was restrained in a headband—pre-Hillary, the style had been quite popular with some women—and swung in a neat, ear-length bob. A demure blouse with a Peter Pan collar hid what had been a painfully thin frame, and she was laughing. Holding a martini. “Me, too,” she said quietly.

“So, then …?”

“So then I got pregnant with Joy. I quit drinking, quit the party rounds. I worked and gained weight and got ready for Joy. Marc hated it all—hated me not being with him at the parties, hated my body, hated my refusal to do exactly what he wanted when he wanted it done.” She shook her head. “I was so miserable, but there I was—you know?”

“Sure.”

“That’s when he started sleeping around.”

“You didn’t cheat on
him
, though, did you?”

Luna, feeling vulnerable, attacked in her own way. “Are you in love with her still, Thomas? I think I need to know that.”

He pursed his lips. Lowered his eyes. Not a great sign. “I don’t know the answer, Luna.”

“Then why are we doing this?”

“What? Finding out about each other?”

She met his gaze stubbornly. “You’re finding out about me, not the other way around.”

“I’m not trying to hide anything, Luna. I won’t lie— there’s a lot of shit left over from all that, but I’m not sure that I ever did love her. I never went after her—she was too young and she was too much trouble, too volatile, and I just wasn’t all that interested. But she was
pretty determined. And beautiful.” He shrugged. “She’s very beautiful. Exotic. Get a lot of points out in the world with a woman like that on your arm.”

She nodded.

“I’m trying to sort through it all, Luna. What was real and what wasn’t. The one thing I do know is that I wanted a family. She was available.”

And she’d made one with someone else. “I’m sorry.”

A shrug. “What’re you gonna do?” He touched her hand. “I really want to know about Joy. Keep going.”

Luna gave him a wry grin. “You’re stubborn.”

“So they say.”

“The background doesn’t matter all that much, really. I can blame a lot on Marc, but I brought it all on myself, Thomas. That’s what you need to know. He was an asshole, but I could have made a lot of other choices than the ones I made.”

“How?”

Suddenly, she wished they were still in bed, curled together. It would be so much easier to say all this if she didn’t have to look at him. “Marc was a lot of negative things,” she said. “But he was also a very good father. He really loved Joy and she really loved him, and I wanted to make our marriage work for her sake, so she’d have a mommy
and
a daddy. I didn’t, you know?” Her throat threatened to tighten up, but she drank some soda and it opened again. “To make that happen, I had to lie to myself a lot. Pretend I had no idea the reason he was so late so often was that he was with other women.” She scowled, ran a fingernail along the edge of the table. “That’s not exactly right, either. In hindsight, I knew he was seeing other women because the evidence presented itself, but I had no reason to suspect him then. I’m sure I felt it on some level and just denied it.”

“That’s natural, Luna.” He touched her hand, his fingers tracing the bones gently.

A sense of strangulation rose in her chest. “God, Thomas, this is so pathetic and awful. Why do you want to know?”

“It’s not pathetic.”

“Yes, it is.” She swallowed and stood up, moving away. “I don’t know that I—” She shook her head. She could have wild sex with him but she couldn’t tell him why she left her daughter behind? That was a skewed kind of intimacy.

Behind her, Thomas said, “The only thing I wanted was to be a father. I’m good at it. I like kids, and there are so many of them who need somebody—and then I found out I was sterile. It was such a blow. Such a blow,” he said more quietly. His face was open, and it was hard to look at him, see the pain there, in a face that once had been as full of energy and hope as hers had been, once upon a time, and know all that he’d come to lose. “It matters to you, the loss of your daughter. So it matters to me because I’m feeling something here and I think you are, too.”

Luna met his eyes and said, “At some point, I decided I needed to go back on the party circuit. And I remembered how much better drinking made me feel. So it became a habit. A little more and a little more. I had a good housekeeper, a live-in, actually, who helped keep things running when I was hungover. I never drank around Joy, you know, not until she went to bed if I was home.”

She braced herself on the counter a little more solidly. “Marc started to travel a lot, and I started to drink a lot more. I functioned, more or less. Worked and played with Joy, then got drunk every night.” Tears always showed up at this moment, and she couldn’t keep the
shine away, but she could swallow most of them if she was careful not to speak too quickly. “When Joy was about five, Marc met someone else. Someone from an old southern family who would be able to smooth his way into that world he wanted so badly, and over the course of two years, he set me up. He collected a lot of photos and receipts and everything else you can think of, to show that I was a drunk, and then he filed for divorce and for custody of Joy. I pretty much lost everything. My job. My home. My family.” She blinked. “My daughter.”

“Damn.”

“And that,” she said with bitter humor, “is when I became a dedicated drunk. I came back to New Mexico and lived in Albuquerque. Close enough, I think, to my mother and sister that I could get help when I was ready, but far enough away that I didn’t have to humiliate them.” She paused, took a breath, and said the last part. “It took three years, but I finally hit bottom and called my mother, and she came and got me into rehab. I’ve been sober four years now.”

He stood up and came over, putting his hands on either side of her, bending down to put his forehead on Luna’s. “He should have helped you instead of helping you dig your grave.” Very gently, he kissed the bridge of her nose. “I’m glad you survived it. That you’re here right now. That you told me the story.”

“I don’t ever want to talk about it again, is that clear?”

“You’re too hard on yourself,” he said in that gruff voice. “People fuck up, Luna, they just do. It’s part of the game.”

“Not like that,” she said. “Most people don’t abandon their children. They don’t get drunk and wreck cars. Three times, Thomas, I wrecked a car drunk. Most people don’t—”

He kissed her. Lifted up her face and kissed her silent. “Stop,” he whispered. “You were trying, trying to kill yourself and I’m glad you didn’t.”

Light caught unkindly in the scars on his cheeks, and she touched the roughness with her fingertips. “The real miracle is that I didn’t kill anybody else.”

“Or go to jail for a long time.”

“Yeah. Lucky, I guess.”

“Or white.” He smiled.

“That, too.”

“You need to stop being so cruel to yourself,” he said, hands in her hair. “You lost everything and you went crazy. That’s not so strange.”

She realized she was crying, and she hated that, but he tasted like hope. She might hate that even more. There was honor in his touch, and compassion, and gentleness, and humor, and how could she love somebody again? Ever? “Let’s talk about something else, okay?” she whispered. Then he was holding her and rocking her back and forth, and there was so much power and reliability in his body, in the way he held her.

His mouth was close to her ear, and his voice was low and gentle. “Let me tell you something, Luna-Lu. I haven’t been able to take a full breath in two years. Since I saw you with my grandmother the night of the fire, I’m whistling.” He pulled her closer, in that soft grind that was so suggestive, smiling down at her. “I didn’t even want to jack off, to tell you the truth. Now all I’m thinking is when can we do it again?”