Barbara Samuel (37 page)

I hugged her. “It’s not your fault. I’m sorry he hurt you, Joy, but it’s because
he
was bad, not you, okay?”

She hugged me back, really tight, and kind of sighed in my hair. Like she needed, really bad, to tell somebody, and she figured she got the right one. So then we got embarrassed and scooted away from each other, and I told her about my dad and how old-fashioned he was. “Everybody always said that it was bad luck that he was overprotective and all that, but I didn’t mind it. He wanted to keep me safe, you know?”

“Yeah. My dad’s never home. He’d never know if I was safe or not. That’s what I like about my mom. She’s here so much it almost drives me crazy.” She laughed to show she didn’t mean it. “I just wish I hadn’t done it now, you know? Like it took some of the specialness out of it, to do it with him and have it go bad.”

I had a good idea, then, but everybody always thinks I’m so boring that I was afraid to say it, but then I did anyway. “Maybe you could just be a new virgin.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, just do whatever, you know, like tell the Virgin you’re sad about it and ask her to make you a new virgin, and you could start over.”

“I’m not Catholic,” she said, and I was about to feel really stupid, but then I heard the echo of her words, like she wished she was, so she could do that, and I said, “I don’t think she’d care. It’s not like she’s only the Holy Mother to Catholics, even if we’re the only ones who call her that. She can be anybody’s Holy Mother, right?”

Joy blinked hard, like she was going to cry. “Would you help me?”

“Yeah! My dad, he was like totally crazy for her, so I know a lot.” And then I remembered something. “Maybe, if I get to have a
qu’inceañera
, you could come, and you could do what I do. I don’t know if I can do it, now, because I was supposed to have it and then my dad died and everybody forgot.”

She didn’t know what that was, and I told her. “You go through these classes at the church to learn all about the Virgin, and then, on your fifteenth birthday, you get to have a big Mass just for you, and dedicate yourself to staying a virgin till you get married, then you have a big party and everybody comes. I had all the favors and my colors picked out. And you should see my dress. It’s just like a wedding dress, with silver stuff on it, the skirt and the sleeves. I even had silver nail polish to wear, and my mom was gonna let me have fake nails, just for the day.”

“And then your dad died and you didn’t get to have it?”

It was too soon, I told her. Only two months after he got killed.

Joy got all quiet, then says, “Do you hate talking about it? Your dad, I mean. What happened.”

I told her no. “I hate it more that everybody wants to act like he was never alive. He was in a car wreck— driving in the rain and a truck hit him. I couldn’t believe it when they told me. Like it was some bad joke and somebody was going to say, any minute, ‘Not really!’ Or that they were wrong, that he’d come home and it would be some other guy.”

But it was him.

“I miss him,” I told her. “He was fun, and he made everything good. He would hate it that my mom’s acting like this.”

Then she told me her mom used to be a psychiatrist or something, and maybe it would be good if my mom came over.

And then this is where the day goes really bad again. Because we heard this car door outside, and Joy gave me a weird look, like guilty, and she said, “Maggie, I been meaning to tell you something about my mom’s new boyfriend, but I couldn’t figure out how.”

“What?”

Joy looks over her shoulder, all worried, and we heard two voices, man and woman, coming up to the door. “He’s the one you wanted for your mom.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

But then in walks Joy’s mom and behind her is her new boyfriend, and they’re liking each other a lot and it was the
bruja’s
grandson. He smiled at me all nice, and says, “Hi, Maggie. How’s it going?”

I gave Joy a look and I could tell she got it, because she looked sad. “I was just about to go home,” I said.

And here’s the bad part, Joy’s mom was so pretty,
with all this pretty hair, so blond, like Joy’s, it was almost white, and it fell down in curls around her face, and she has these beautiful dark eyes that took up half her face, and she had rosy cheeks like she was crazy in love. When she saw me she smiled and said in a voice that was all warm, “You have to be Maggie. I’ve heard so much about you.” She held out her hand, but I pretended I didn’t see it.

“I gotta go,” I told them.

But that’s why the grandson came in, because they saw us and he thought I’d need a ride home, so late. “I just want to walk, okay? I do it all the time.”

“Hey, it’s right on my way,” said the grandson.
Tomás.

I shook my head, but I could see I’d lose. No way two grown-ups were gonna let a girl walk home alone at night, even if it was Taos. So I just pretended to be glad. “Okay.” And I let him take me home, but I didn’t talk.

So now I don’t know what to do. If there’s no guy out there for her, my mom’s gonna die.

Maggie

Saturday morning, Luna went to her mother’s house to pick up the list of chores and the keys. To Luna’s relief, Kitty flung open the door even before she got there, and she was herself again in a gold-and-white pantsuit with gold sandals. A trio of very thin gold chains adorned her tanned cleavage and gold hoops swung in her ears. “Hello, darlin’,” Kitty said. “Come on in.”

The thing they’d always done after a breach was just go on as if it never happened. But today, seeing Kitty so much her old self again, Luna couldn’t help herself. She followed her into the kitchen and threw her arms around her. Tightly. “I was so worried about you,” Luna breathed, smelling watermelon hair gel and Jean Naté cologne.

Kitty didn’t even resist. She hugged Luna right back. “I’m tough, honey, you know that.”

Luna thought of Thomas, describing Placida, and let her mother go with a smile. “I hope I’m just like you some day.”

“Oh, phooey. You’ve been tougher than me since the day you were born.” She clattered over to the sink, her little tush twitching in response to the high heels. “Like rawhide, your daddy used to say.”

Best Friend Barbie huffed.
So, just like that we’re gonna talk about him? Memories and all that bullshit you wanted forever and couldn’t get from her? I don’t think so!

But Frank came into the kitchen, and Luna didn’t pursue it. He gave her one of his hearty embraces, half hug, half shake. “How’s my girl?”

“I’m good, Frank,” she said, kissing his cheek. She couldn’t help wondering for the hundredth time how her life would have been different if Frank had arrived a little sooner. Kitty would have been free to shop and keep the house sparkling and cook beautiful suppers for all of them. Maybe Elaine wouldn’t have needed to insulate herself beneath all those layers of protection and beneath the umbrella of her religion. Maybe Luna wouldn’t have been so driven and wouldn’t have gone to college so soon and would never have met Marc.

But that would have meant no Joy, and she wouldn’t trade her daughter for any reason.

“Are you guys on time?” Luna asked, picking up a neatly printed list of instructions about the house and yard, including various numbers for the handyman, gardener, and housekeeper, who would still come once a week. The cruise details were there, too, with the list of stops sounding exotic and refreshing. “Greece,” she said with a sigh, pictures in her head of stark white houses tumbling down a hill to a vast, deep blue ocean. Taking a breath, she could almost smell the air, see the sunlight glittering off the waves. “You’re going to have a marvelous time.”

Kitty, bent over a cosmetics bag on the counter, murmured something and clicked into the bedroom. Luna looked up and caught Frank staring soberly after her, a very real pain on his face. She touched his hand. “This was a very good idea. And in case I’ve never said, thank you for taking such good care of my mother.”

He squeezed her fingers. “Darlin’, she’s the one who takes care of me.”

The sound of her shoes came back toward them. Kitty reappeared with a new sheaf of papers in her hands. “I almost forgot this,” she said. “It’s what the lawyer sent me—contact information, where the land is, everything. It’s all yours, sweetie.”

Luna nodded slowly, looking over the paper. “Do you want to know what I find?”

Kitty raised her bright blue eyes. “No, I don’t believe I do.”

“No problem.” She tucked the sheaf of papers into her purse. “Um, listen, will you leave the keys to the Toyota, too? No promises, but I’m going to keep trying.” She took a breath and confessed her secret. “I got my license back this week. Took the test, everything.”

Kitty squealed and hugged her. “I’m so proud of you, honey!” She took a ring of keys off the hook on the
wall. “I’ll bring you a super-duper Greek key ring and you can have it when you start to drive, how’s that?”

Luna laughed. “Great idea. Thanks.”

And really, there was no reason not to go then. Her mother would be back in a couple of weeks. It wasn’t as if they needed her help, either. So why was she standing here with her hands in her back pockets?

Thomas.

“Frank,” she said. “Can you give me ten minutes with my mom?”

“Sure thing, honey. I wanted to have the service station fill up the car and check the oil anyway.” He pressed a kiss to the part in Kitty’s hair. “I’ll be back in half an hour.”

She brushed a hand over his. “I’ll be ready.”

When the door closed behind him, Luna said, “I met someone.”

“The someone you had to rush to meet a couple weeks ago?”

Had it only been that long? It felt, in terms of depth, much longer than that. As if she couldn’t imagine how her life had flowed without him in it. “Yeah,” she said airlessly, wanting a cigarette. It would give her time to think, to breathe, if she could take one out, tap it on the counter, play with the lighter. Of course, she wouldn’t be smoking in her mother’s kitchen even if she still smoked. “He’s scaring me,” she said quietly.

“Scaring you how?”

She thought of their long, long conversations by phone late at night, the way it felt, lying in bed and talking to him. Thought of the note he sent to work, “Please make the florist a bouquet of blue flowers.” Thought of wanting to see him so badly this week that it was like a physical pain—and not being able, for one reason or another, to work it out. But that didn’t seem all that coherent,
and instead, she said, “I’ve wanted to meet him for two years.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“I know. I don’t know either. I don’t even know what I wanted to say except that I met him. He seems too good to be true, so it probably won’t work out.”

“Sometimes,” Kitty said, “men really are what they seem to be, baby. Not all of them desert you or betray you.”

“How can you even say that? Our lives were really hard because my dad just walked away, and then I found somebody else who also betrayed me. It’s not that easy, Mom, to just say, ‘Hey, maybe I’ll give it a chance.’ ”

Kitty paused. “I know. But you need to remember your daughter.”

A wave of guilt hit her. “It’s not like I’m making him a part of her life yet or anything. I—”

“That’s not what I mean.” She touched Luna’s hand. “What you need to remember about Joy is that she hasn’t seen many good examples. Her father has betrayed two women, your daddy left you, and you don’t want her waiting until she’s forty to trust somebody. You don’t want her shutting herself off because it’s dangerous and sometimes you get hurt.”

“Like I have?”

She gave her a sad smile. “Yes. And where do you think you learned it?”

Luna took a breath.

“Trust yourself, Luna, and let her trust you. Let her see you taking chances, falling in love, feeling things, living. It’s better like that, than living behind some wall forever.”

“I don’t know if I can,” she said, and that was more terrifying than doing it. “How could you stand it?”

Kitty lifted a shoulder. “One day at a time. That’s all it takes.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Luna started home, keys in her pocket. All the keys. As she walked, she jingled the Toyota’s pair against her fingers. It was a hot afternoon, belying the gold on the leaves, the whisper of winter settling in the arroyos and breathing across the evenings. It made her oddly melancholy, and glancing at her watch, she stopped in the coffee shop for a latte, then took it around the corner to the plaza, where she found an empty seat right away. That would have been impossible two weeks ago, or even last week.

Now, for the first time, she noticed the summer crowd had thinned and the few tourist clusters wandering around the shops were child-free. One very young pair, both with long blond hair and loose clothing that barely covered their perfect bodies, strolled hand in hand, obviously in love. In love with themselves, each other, with Taos—everything. She wanted to be them. Either one of them, with everything ahead and nothing behind her to regret.