Barbara Samuel (7 page)

Allie came up the walk with a giant blue bowl in her hands. A tall, wispy woman with long, dark hair, she wore a batik print skirt with a plain, V neck leotard and
several hundred pounds of silver jewelry including a heavy silver pentagram set with a gorgeous moonstone. Alicia was Wiccan. She ran a little candle shop not far off the plaza, a narrow shop said to be haunted by the ghost of a Spanish woman who killed herself in the back over a lover who’d gone astray. Lots of those kinds of stories around Taos.

“Ooooh,” Luna said as she came up the steps, and pointed to the pent. “That’s new.”

“Cost a fortune,” she said, “but worth it, don’t you think? I had to have it.” She lifted the bowl. “I brought fruit salad. They had everything fresh, fresh, fresh at the farmers’ market this morning.”

“Excellent.” Luna took the bowl and accepted a kiss on the cheek. Allie smelled of violets. “My mother is bringing spareribs, and Elaine is doing dessert.”

“Yum. That turtle cheesecake she brought last time was to die for.” She held the door for Luna. “One thing you have to admit about your sister is that she’s a
great
cook.”

“Yeah, too bad we have to pray over it all for two hours.”

“All paths lead to one place,” she said with a shrug.

Luna laughed, carrying the bowl into the kitchen. “You fake! The pent is just an accidental oversight, huh?”

She winked. “That medieval cross she had on last time was just a teeny bit obnoxious.”

“Oh, she’s had it a million years. Avon.”

Allie trailed into the kitchen, where Luna tried not to look at the spot where Thomas had been standing twenty minutes before, but it seemed she could still smell him, and if she looked there would be ghostly footprints where he’d been. “I’m the first one here,
huh?” Allie asked, going straight to the bowl of chile on the counter.

“You knew you would be.”

She opened the lid on the Tupperware container and inhaled deeply. “Who made the chile?”

“Um.” Luna picked up a dishtowel to twirl around in her hands. “This guy brought it over as a thank you. His grandmother set her house on fire last night and I called the fire trucks.”

“Wow. What house? What happened?”

Luna told the story, watching as Allie tore off a section of a tortilla and dipped it in the bowl. “You want me to heat some of that up? Maybe I ought to go ahead and put it on the stove, warm the tortillas. Everybody will be here soon.”

“Wait a minute,” Allie said suddenly, eyes narrowing.

Busted.

“What guy was this? Old, young, good-looking? What?”

It was hard to think of a way to answer her, because suddenly, Luna was thinking about the way he had tasted, the way he felt next to her, and it was almost tactile, as if some piece of him had stayed behind in the kitchen.

“Grandson,” Allie said. Her mouth opened wide and she lifted her brows. “Oh, my God. Really? It was
him
, wasn’t it? TC—The Crush?”

Luna twisted the towel into a tight coil. “His name is Thomas Coyote.”

Allie’s eyes glittered. “Is he as sad as he looks?”

“‘Fraid so.” She fished a saucepan from beneath the counter and put it on the stove. “Divorced, twice. The second one just a couple of years ago, and the ex is about to have a baby.”

“Damn.” Allie leaned on the counter with a sigh. “I
really thought he might have been one of the good guys, taking care of his grandma like that.” She dipped a tortilla up and down in the pool of chile. “And damn—he is
so
hot.”

Suddenly, she straightened and dashed around Luna. “Hey, there’s my girl!” she cried, and hugged Joy, who was just coming out of the bedroom. Luna grinned, seeing by her daughter’s faint blush that she was a little embarrassed as always by Allie’s exuberance, but loved it nonetheless.

“Hey, Auntie,” Joy said. Her hair was pulled back into a butterfly clip, with artful pieces drifting down here and there, but she’d changed into an oversized plain T-shirt and jeans, and she’d left out the lip stud. Thank heaven. Her feet were bare, showing toenails painted black.

Allie pulled back to examine her. “Wow,” she said without falseness. “New look, huh?”

“Yeah.” Joy shrugged and one hand went to her multi-pierced ear.

“I think I like it. Rebellious.” She leaned in close. “How many times are your ears pierced?”

“Eight to the left, seven to the right.”

“Oh! One for each year?”

Joy laughed, shooting her mother a very pleased look. “D’you know that you’re the first adult to get that?”

“Some would say that’s because I’m not an adult.” Allie laughed. “What else? You have any others?”

“Belly button.” She lifted her shirt to show a jewel in her navel. “And I had one in my eyebrow, but my dad made me take it out and it closed.”

“Ow,” Luna said, touching her eyebrow. “Didn’t that hurt?”

“Not that much.” She pointed to the one at the top of her ear. “That one hurt. It took forever to heal, too.”
Giving her mother a cautious glance, she asked, “Are you mad?”

Luna shook her head honestly. When there was time and privacy, she intended to find out what was behind the flurry of body mutilations, but mad wasn’t the right word. “Any tattoos?”

She looked away. “Uh. Well, one. Small, though, and hidden.”

“Do I want to know where?”

Joy turned and lifted her shirt again, to show a small, colorful Celtic knot on the small of her back.

“Now, that’s very nice,” Luna said. “Excellent work and a good spot. It won’t wrinkle.”

“Eww!”

“It’s true, though,” Allie said. “I can’t even imagine how all you kids are going to look at seventy, with your tattoos dripping. You made a good choice.”

Luna glanced at the clock and jumped into motion. “Everyone is going to be here soon. I need to get the table set.”

“I can help,” Joy said.

“No, sweetie. You’re our honored guest and get to sit around talking tonight. No work, period.” She kissed her cheek and Joy didn’t seem to mind it, giving Luna a smile as Allie took her hand and pulled her into the corner so she could capture all the details of Joy’s past eight months.

At Joy’s home in Atlanta, a dinner party meant eating in a room with a crystal chandelier, at a table that could seat sixteen with all the leaves in it. There were matching crystal glasses for water and wine, silver bread baskets lined with linen napkins, white china with little fern patterns, and silver candlesticks with white tapers burning politely at intervals. If there was music, it was
something like Chopin or Mozart. Joy always felt strangled in that room.

Walking into the dining room of her mother’s new home in Taos, she wanted to twirl around and spread out her arms to take it all in. It was Luna’s first home of her own, and it had taken her a long, long time to save up for the down payment. The thing Joy loved the most about it was how different it was from the house in Atlanta. Everything there came in colors like champagne and ivory and oak, with maybe a little forest now and then. The rooms were long and square with windows framed in two layers of curtains—drapes and sheers.

This room had a long, antique table, banged up in the best possible way, and wooden chairs Joy’s mother had painted with moons and stars, coyotes and skeletons, roses and crosses, all in really bright colors. Two sets of long doors opened out on to the smell of evening and chamiso coming in on a breeze from the patio. One plain adobe wall was hung with photographs of people—all the people Luna loved, she said with a happy smile—and there were fat candles all around the room, and an iron candelabra Luna showed Joy the first time they’d come here, when the house was so trashed Joy had privately wondered if her mother was insane.

Now she understood what her mother had said that day—that the iron candelabra was a connection to another time, like the wooden floors that were uneven in places from so many people walking on them over the years. The wide wooden boards were dark with age, but now they had a nice coat of something shiny on them, and a big plain rag rug kept you from slipping around too much.

It was kind of crowded, too, but in a good way. Joy squeezed between her Grandma Kitty and Allie, glad that she didn’t have to sit in the chair next to her aunt
Elaine, who was really fat and sweating, and she was nice, but sometimes she complained too much. Her mother said Elaine was still in denial, whatever that meant.

“This table is too big for this room,” Elaine said.

Luna passed cloth napkins around. “So you’ve said ninety-seven times.” She held out her hands and everybody else joined hands and Luna said, “Elaine will you say grace for us?”

Next to Joy, Allie muttered, “A short one, please goddess,” and Joy had to bite her lip to keep from laughing, because it was totally true—Elaine could pray for a really long time. Joy glanced up to see if she’d heard, but it didn’t seem like it. Elaine and Allie weren’t crazy about each other.

Elaine said, “God Almighty, King of Heaven and Earth, Conqueror of All Evil, we come together tonight to welcome Joy and praise your name.”

Joy, still tired from flying—it was a lot scarier to fly than it used to be—drifted on the up-and-down sound of the prayer. A smell of sage and water came through the doors, and it just felt so good to be here, where the music was an old kind of rock, but at least not classical, where the food sent up steam smelling of so many different things. It was good, too, in a way, to be with a group of only girls.

Elaine said “Amen” a lot faster than Joy expected and she looked up and caught her mom’s eye. She winked. Joy winked back.

They all dug into the food then, and this was different, too. Sometimes, the butter came the wrong way, and everybody talked at once, to one another, joining in conversations this way and that, making this big wave of sound and happiness Joy loved. Allie made everybody—even Elaine—laugh really hard with a story from
her store, about a tourist kook who’d been sure Allie was an alien, like himself, from the Pleiades. “I have to say I’ve heard some strange come-ons in my time,” she said, “but that takes the cake.”

Even that was different. Joy couldn’t even imagine any of her stepmom’s friends talking about a man coming on to them. Of course, they were all married. That probably made a difference. At the thought of April, a tiny pang ran over her heart, and she pushed it away.

When they were cutting into the turtle cheesecake, Joy leaned into her grandma, who’d been very quiet most of the night. “Are you okay, Gram?”

She patted Joy’s hand. “Fine, sweetie. How about you?”

“I’m so happy.”

Kitty took her napkin out of her lap. “I vote we do sing-alongs.”

“Yeah!” Joy cried. She loved it when they did that— put on old albums and danced and sang. Everybody got to pick their favorite, and play it like it was karaoke.

“Mom, not everybody jams like you do,” Elaine protested.

“Elaine, darlin’, you’re the best singer of all of us.”

Allie leaned her hand on her chin, looking to Joy like an Afghan hound who lived next door in Atlanta, sleek and pointy and elegant. “I could do tarot card readings.”

Elaine shook her head. Joy felt sorry for her all of a sudden—and she realized that Elaine was a lot like April in a way. They were always trying to be safe.

Maybe Luna had noticed they were teasing her a lot, too, because she reached out and took Elaine’s hand. “What would you like to do, Sissie? Scrabble, maybe? Trivial Pursuit?”

Elaine said, “I think we should ask Joy.”

Joy straightened. “I think …,” she said, looking at Allie, then Kitty, then Elaine and her mom. Elaine was the greatest at Trivial Pursuit, but Allie was tense, too. “Let’s play Trivial Pursuit, but only if Allie will give me a tarot reading after. Will you?”

Kitty’s hand snaked out and touched the back of Joy’s neck, and the touch made her feel important and special. Joy smiled at her.

“Tarot is black magic, you know,” Elaine said. “Every time you give the devil power—”

“Elaine,” Kitty said quietly, sipping from her cup.

Elaine went quiet. Luna said, “Pass another slice of that cheesecake down to Allie, Elaine. She’s been talking about it all day.”

Kitty winked at Luna across the table. Joy beamed.

It was so good to be home.

To get Joy settled and registered for school, Luna had a few days of vacation time, and she threw herself into the pleasure of having Joy with her, really
living
with her. It was not uniformly easy. Luna discovered that she hated Joy’s music, headbanger-loud, a fact that amused Joy quite a lot. “If it’s too loud, you’re too old, Mom.” Luna didn’t tell her the expression had been around since she was a teenager. Wincing at the sound of bands with names like Slipknot and Disturbed and Mudvayne,
Luna did veto a poster that made her feel vaguely sick to her stomach—a collection of white dreadlocked boys with fake blood all over them. And to think people had once thought the Rolling Stones were bad boys.