Barbara Samuel (5 page)

“Fine.” She smiled to show she meant it. “I dreamed about Daddy last night. Made me a little sad, I guess.”

A flicker of something went over Kitty’s face, but she never spoke of Jesse, and she didn’t now. With a little smile, she came over and hugged Luna in a breathless whirl of perfume and cosmetics, then pulled her inside with one arm because she had a shoe in the other. “I’m almost ready to go. Made some sweet rolls, so have one before we get out of here.” She limped into the kitchen on one turquoise sandal, and waved toward the coffeemaker as she leaned on the counter. “Help yourself. Caramel, just the way you like them.”

“You are so evil,” Luna said, knowing the last thing she should indulge in was a caramel pecan roll made from her mother’s store of wicked treats. Her clothes were getting ominously tight as it was—the other downside to giving up cigarettes.

But she took a china plate from the cupboard and served herself one anyway, knowing Kitty would not indulge, but she would drink the coffee. Luna poured two cups of the pale, watery brew. Sitting at the carved southwestern-style table, she watched Kitty struggle with the strap of her sandal, bracing her trim little butt against the counter. The angle showed off a generous amount of cleavage at the gold-adorned neckline of her turquoise blouse. Diamonds the size of walnuts glittered on her fingers. “Where’s Frank?” Luna asked.

“Golfing,” she said, finally getting the buckle caught around her pretty ankle. She shook down her trouser leg and tip-tapped over the saltillo tiles of the kitchen floor to the window over the sink. “We can probably
see him if you want to. He wears a red hat so I can spot him anytime.” With a girlish lean, she strained to see, and lifted a hand like he might see her waving. “There he is, on the seventh hole!”

Luna smiled. Impossible not to adore Frank, who adored her mother. A widowed Texas oilman, he’d met Kitty at the track where she worked as a cocktail waitress and pursued her kindly and relentlessly for six years before she agreed to marry him. She kept telling him it would never work, a waitress and a rich man, and he kept disagreeing and she’d finally given in with a collapse of tears and yearning that ripped his heart right out of his chest. Luna was there, living with her mother in the first, tender days of recovery. It was the only time in her life that she ever saw Kitty cry over her father.

All Frank did was take her in his arms, a big man with a paunch and a pate and the kindest, bluest eyes Luna had ever seen, and tell Kitty that he would cut off his own dick before he’d let her down. Which made her mother, the bawd, laugh so hard she kissed him.

That had been four years ago, and he’d made an art form of spoiling her. Kitty was finally learning how to enjoy it. He’d bought her the big Mediterranean-style house, and drowned her in jewels and took her on all the cruises she had dreamed of for two decades of what had to have been excruciatingly difficult financial times, raising two daughters alone.

Luna had no idea how she’d done it.

“Are you excited?” Kitty asked now, her eyes bright.

“Yeah. Maybe a little nervous, too.”

“Of course you are, but you remember that you’re a wonderful mother and trust your instincts. I am so excited to have our baby with us for the whole year!”

And Joy adored her grandmother. At least there was that. “I know. Me, too.”

“Let’s get moving, then, girl. Is your sister coming up tonight for the dinner?”

“Yes. Can she stay with you? She hates sleeping on my couch.” Luna didn’t say it, but she hated to have Elaine stay with her. She’d gone evangelical Christian about the time Luna turned to alcohol for her troubles, and it was a strain to listen to Jesus injunctions for more than a couple of hours.

“Oh, you know I don’t mind. We have tons of room.” She fastened an earring more securely and brushed her blond hair out of her eyes. She smoothed her slacks, picked up her turquoise leather purse, and said, “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

Thomas put off the phone call to his brother as long as possible. He avoided it by doing all kinds of Saturday chores—groceries for his expanding household, sweeping the floors in the halls upstairs, cleaning a bathroom, washing the animals’ dishes. He wasn’t allowed to get out his woodworking tools, however, until he actually made the call.

Finally, he went to the living room. Once it might have been called the sitting room or the parlor in the anomaly of a Victorian house in adobe Taos, a forgotten leftover that was still mostly shabby. He’d fallen in love with the house one morning on a walk, and talked Nadine into it. Another one of his failed projects, he guessed.

But the room was quiet and still just now. Sun came through the thin, old glass of the big front window and fell across the pine floor in bright swatches, caught on the breakfront Thomas had carved of cedar and the matching small table upon which the phone sat. This one was white, what once had been called a Princess
line. He picked up the receiver. The dial tone buzzed in his ear.

For a long minute, he listened to it, feeling vaguely seasick. He wouldn’t ask his cousins to keep doing his dirty work for him. But he prayed, as the phone rang in Albuquerque, that only the message machine would pick up.

Instead, it was a woman’s voice. Bright and cheerful, called from some pleasant task, it said, to listen to pleasant news. For one long, agonizing second, he could see her clearly—the heavy weight of black hair around her shoulders, the tilt of her exotic dark eyes, the line of her long neck. Too young for him, he’d thought when they met. She chased him, as his mother would say, for over a year before he’d even agreed to go anywhere with her.

“Nadine,” he said, “it’s Thomas.”

“I recognize your voice, Thomas. You don’t have to introduce yourself every time.”

“Yeah. Uh. I hear congratulations are in order. A baby in December?”

A half beat of silence. “How’d you hear?”

“James told me.”

“Yeah. Well, thanks.”

Thomas’s eyelid started twitching. He put the tip of his finger to it. “Is my brother around?”

“He went to the store. Do you want me to have him call you?”

“No. Just tell him that Placida set her house on fire last night and she’s all right, but she’s staying with me for now.”

“God, Thomas, is she all right?”

“I just said she was fine.” It had always annoyed him, this habit she had of repeating things. “I just didn’t want him to worry.”

“Thomas,” she said, “are you okay? I know how
much you wanted a baby and this couldn’t have been—”

“Don’t, Nadine.” He hung up. His hand was sweating so badly that he nearly dropped the receiver.

He was fine. Just fine. Right as rain.

Grimly, he joined Tiny and Placida in the kitchen, a room he liked for two reasons. One, it was enormous. Big enough to hold a table, one Thomas had made himself from a beautiful slab of maple, and eight chairs. Two, it was filled with light all day. One big window over the sink faced south, and a whole wall of smaller windows in a line looked east, down the hill and across the city.

But those were the only good things about it. It had been remodeled in about 1920, upgrading the plumbing, installing tin cupboards that someone, somewhere over the years had covered with ConTact paper in wood tones. Judging by the peeling, even that had been twenty years ago or better. The floor was covered in worn linoleum in a pattern that had faded to an indistinguishable muted gray. He kept meaning to do something to it—he could at least expose the floor underneath, see if it was worth saving.

Just now, it was a room filled with the richness of chiles and pork and the subtler scent of fresh tortillas browning in an iron skillet. Placida stood at the stove happily cooking for the man curved around the table like a comma. Thomas stopped to nab a fresh tortilla and smell her stew. “How are you this morning?” he asked, touching her skinny back. “You feel okay?”

“Good, good,” she said in Spanish. She lifted her chin to Tiny, happily devouring her cooking. “Your friend, he’s hungry. I cooked.”

Tiny grinned. “It’s good, too. Better than old bachelor cooking, eh?”

Thomas nodded, reminded with a punch to the gut of the phone call. “Pack some of that up,
Abuela,”
he said. “I’m gonna take some to your neighbor. Put it in the fridge and I’ll take it to her later.”

“No.” She didn’t look at him. “You stay away from her.”

He raised his eyebrows. “She saved your life.”

Stubbornly, she looked up at him. “No.”

“No, she didn’t save your life or no, I can’t take her some chile?”

“Both.” She raised her chin. “Tiny could take it to her.”

Thomas reached for a tortilla from the stack on a plate. “Nope.”

To avoid further argument, he ambled out on to the wide porch around the old house, tearing the warm tortilla into strips to eat. In one corner were his woodworking tools, and with a sigh of release, he picked up a twelve-inch block of soft pine with a few marks carved into it, and a chisel, and let the wood speak to him, take him away.

Placida’s family had boasted two talents, valued highly in the old world. Her father had been a weaver from Chimayó, and her husband had been a
santero
, a woodcarver who devoted himself to saints. Among her children, then her grandchildren, the weaving had continued, and Thomas had a cousin who was getting rich exporting blankets to tourist markets.

The carving had gone wanting. None of Placida’s sons were interested, and none of the grandsons until the very youngest, Thomas’s
Tío
Hector. And then Thomas, whose mother had often said he was born with a stick in his hand. She’d brought him up to Taos often as a boy, letting him spend the long, soft mountain summers with his great-grandmother and her grandson Hector,
who took care of her, and her goats and sheep. Hector had taught him by day how to work with adobe, how to make the bricks and how to build things with it so they lasted; by night, they carved saints and skeletons and other sacred objects.

He liked that his life contained this smooth continuity. That he could lose himself in the shape of a foot coming out from beneath a robe. That he could care for his grandmother after Hector died. That he’d turned his uncle’s fading business into a roaring concern over the past five years. His house still needed so much work because he had no time to devote to it, not because he had no money for it. There was a lot of money in Taos these days, and a lot of it flowed into Thomas’s pocket via adobe. Straw into gold.

Which somehow made him think of the woman who had rescued his grandmother. Her hair was straw and gold mixed together. Her eyes were dark. Wary. Almost as wary as his own must be. A rustle moved on his nerves, and he nodded. He would take her the chile no matter what Placida thought of it. It was only right.

The flight was late, of course, because Luna was so anxious to see her daughter. Kitty occupied herself with a pile of magazines, tearing out pictures every so often, pictures she would take home and glue into a spiral notebook she kept. The pictures weren’t of window treatments or garden ideas she liked; they were just pretty—as likely to be a bottle of perfume as a stained glass window. She’d done it for as long as Luna could remember, long before the current wave of “be kind to yourself” trends had come along.

Luna, never able to sit still for long, bought a latte from a vendor and carried it up and down the hallway, trying not to think of hijackers or broken engines or any of the other awful things that could happen to planes. As she paced, her daughter’s name rang through her mind like a song—
Joy, Joy, Joy.

From the moment Joy lifted her calm, inquisitive gaze to Luna’s face in the delivery room, Luna had been completely transformed. Ready to kill or die, ready to
sing and dance, a willing, hungry servant to the siren of motherhood.

Which made what happened later so much worse. She took a sip of her latte and blinked against the memories. Not today, she said to the demons threatening to slip out of their caves. Not now. Maybe seeking the calm of her own mother, she settled beside Kitty in one of the sculpted plastic chairs.

Kitty put down the magazine. “Is Joy happy about coming for the school year?”

“She seems to be. It’s hard to know with her the past year. I can’t get a good read on her.” It had been nearly six months since they’d been together, and though they talked on the phone and through E-mail a few times a week, it wasn’t at all the same. “She’s had some trouble in school, and Marc is really irritated.”

“What a surprise,” she said mildly. Kitty did not gossip—ever—and didn’t allow it in her presence, but even she found it difficult to be charitable toward Luna’s ex. And Marc was one of the few people in the world who wasn’t charmed by Kitty—one of the worst fights Luna ever had with him had resulted after Marc cuttingly said Kitty was about as charming as a Las Vegas streetwalker. “I bet poor Joy will be delighted to get out of that house while he runs his campaign. I’d just hate to have reporters in my face all the time, and you know they will be if they haven’t been already.”

“I’m sure.” Luna suspected that it was the campaign that had led to the change in custody agreement. A sulky teen might spoil a lot of photo ops. With Joy safely out of the way, Marc and his second family— scrubbed and blond and shiny—could pose as the all-American family at every event.

Not that she could say any of that to Kitty, and she was probably right: thinking that way never did anyone
any good. But truth be told, Marc was a shallow, social-climbing bastard who’d seriously wounded Luna at a very vulnerable time in her life—and done it in the most manipulative, cold ways imaginable. At times, she’d had revenge fantasies that would have made Attila the Hun’s blood run cold, and he’d deserved every single one and more.