Crooked Hearts (32 page)

“Six years? Seven years? Something like that.” Henry lit a cigar and blew smoke at the ceiling. The only sign that he’d drunk a pint and a half of liquor in three hours was a slight glassiness of the eyes; otherwise, he was unimpaired.

“So she was—?”

“Sixteen. And already pretty as a picture.”

“But just a child,” Reuben pointed out, scowling.

“Oh, I doubt if Grace was ever much of a child. Not the way she was raised.”

“How was she raised?”

“Badly.” Henry scowled back at him. “I hate to think what would’ve happened to her if I hadn’t come along.”

Reuben fired up his own cigar. “Don’t you think you’re a little old for her?” he asked bluntly.

“Old for her? Certainly not. We complement each other—my wisdom and her freshness. My experience, her nerve. My—”

“Got it.” He slid lower, till the edge of the chair cut into his backbone. “You dealing or what?”

The afternoon wore on, with Reuben unable to summon the energy to get up and do something useful. Like what? The only useful thing he could think of would be to pack up and get out. He’d been here too long already. But this time he’d spent with Henry had accomplished one thing, at least: when he said goodbye to Grace, he’d say it without anger. Only sadness and regret. It wasn’t her fault she was devoted to Henry. If there was blame anywhere, Reuben deserved it, for mistaking her open, affectionate nature for something deeper than friendship.

Then too, that extraordinary night at the Bunyon Arms had disoriented him, clouded his judgment. Grace had a free, clean, generous sexuality you didn’t find in many women, but to read more into it than what it was only guaranteed misunderstanding. Out of the whole sorry mess, he could think of only one consolation: that he’d never said anything to her about how he felt. Anything of a personal nature, that was. So he could leave her with his pride intact. Bloody cold comfort.

“Hey, Grace, come and join us,” Henry called out unexpectedly, causing Reuben to fluff a shuffle. “Where’ve you been all day?”

She stopped in the doorway, looking trapped; obviously she’d intended to sneak past unseen. “Around.” Even from here, Reuben could tell she’d been crying. His chest tightened like a fist.

“Well, come on in,” Henry boomed. “Come on, you weren’t doing anything.”

“I was going to help Ah You with dinner,” she temporized.

“He doesn’t need any help. Come on, we’ve never tried this game with a third.”

She was about to refuse. Reuben saw it coming, and stood up. “Won’t you join us?” he said formally, pulling out the chair between his and Henry’s. “We’d both like it if you would.”

She stared at him for a long, tense minute, scrutinizing his face, clearly trying to figure out what kind of mood he was in this time.
Don’t worry,
he wished he could tell her,
you’re safe;
her tragic, red-rimmed eyes had taken the last of the fight out of him. But he’d never intended to hurt her. Even at his angriest, he’d never intended that.

Grace continued to hang back, wondering what to do. Henry was beginning to look puzzled, and she had no wish to draw his attention to her problems with Reuben. Reuben looked … oh, who the hell knew how Reuben looked?
Sad,
she’d have said, if that weren’t so outlandish. As if he’d lost something, and had no hope of getting it back.

“Grace?” he said quietly. Hopefully.

Disconcerted, she gave a careless shrug and came in.

The game was Flinch, and it took only a couple of hands to figure out that both men were cheating. The mood between them surprised her: she’d thought they didn’t like each other, but here they were, chuckling at each other’s jokes, interrupting each other’s sentences. Once she’d hoped they could be friends, but it didn’t matter much anymore. Now their jocularity just made her feel cold inside.

“Flinch,” Reuben crowed, two tricks into the third hand.

Henry reached for his discard. “You crimped that deuce,” he said admiringly, holding it up to the light.

Determined to join in, to sound lighthearted if it killed her, Grace heaved a humorous sigh. “I’d get a new deck, except it wouldn’t make any difference. You two would have it defaced in ten minutes.”

Henry looked flattered. “Look who’s talking,” he said proudly. “I taught her everything she knows.”

“That’s so?” Reuben said neutrally.

“Absolutely. You’ve seen her in action—isn’t she something?”

“She’s something.” He started to smile at her, but she glanced away.

Henry tapped her wrist. “Did you tell him about the time you convinced half of San Francisco you were Andrew Carnegie’s daughter?”

“No.”

“We cleaned up on that one,” Henry gloated. “She got loans so big you wouldn’t believe it, on promissory notes with forged signatures. Offered the gulls twenty percent interest, see, and repaid the borrowings early to make sure they came back for more. She—”

“Flinch,” she said loudly, plunking her cards down. “Tell him about the train you invented.” She made herself look at Reuben directly. “It could do a mile a minute, and it ran on water.”

Henry raked in the cards and started to shuffle. “Ah, that was a sweet one,” he reminisced. “I called it the Silver Pronto. The shares went like hotcakes at ten bucks a pop. I had diagrams, photographs—I told ’em it had a ‘vibratory generator with a hydro-pneumatic-pulsating vacue machine.’”

He and Reuben chortled, and Grace sat back, glad when the conversation shifted to swindles in general, not ones she’d participated in in particular. She listened with one ear while Henry bragged about his rash youth, when he’d sold fake death warrants for Salem witches to hobby collectors, bogus lottery tickets, nonexistent real estate, fake jewelry, phony stocks and bonds, windfall inheritances contingent on a small preliminary fee. The conversation turned philosophical, with the two men arguing over which human frailty benefited the confidence artist more, greed or vanity. “Every man I’ve ever swindled had larceny in his heart,” Henry declared, “and the easiest sheep of all is the one who thinks he’s helping you fleece somebody else.”

“That’s the truth,” Reuben agreed heartily.

“People don’t like to be fooled, but they dearly love to fool themselves. They don’t even hear you when you start your patter. They go into a dream.”

Reuben said, “That’s it, that’s right,” in perfect understanding.

“And they dream of all the money they’re going to make and how they’re going to spend it, and they’ve signed on the dotted line before they come out of the dream.”

“Right, exactly right.”

She stopped listening, because the light brown hairs on Reuben’s forearm had her complete attention. Nobody she knew slouched the way he did. He sat low on his long spine, dusty bare feet propped on the fourth chair, sipping warm beer in his shirtsleeves. His cheroot had gone out, but he kept it clamped in his strong white teeth. There was something so neat and clean about him, and she thought it was partly the way his hair grew out at his temples and the back of his neck, some vigorous, youthful strength in his profile. The set of his shoulders excited her, and the way he held his cards near his chest, the arrogant curl of his nostrils when he was bluffing …

“Your
play,”
Henry repeated.

She flushed, and drew a card.

Ah You poked his head in the door. “Missy Waters come in buggy, boss.”

“Lucille?” Henry’s face lit up. He threw his hand in and shoved back in his chair. “Well, this is a surprise!” he exclaimed, and hurried out into the hall.

Out of habit, Reuben checked Henry’s cards. “Pair of jacks,” he informed her. “Who’s Missy Waters?”

“Mrs. Lucille Waters,” Grace said tightly. “An old friend of the family.” The day had started off badly; why shouldn’t it go completely to hell?

Reuben was looking at her. She busied herself with shuffling the cards. She was a grown woman, too old by now and surely too mature to still be jealous of Lucille Waters just because she was perfect. But Henry was the only family Grace had, and for six years she’d lived in fear and dread that the beautiful, accomplished Lucille would take him away from her.

“She’s a widow, she lives in town,” she explained for Reuben’s benefit, keeping her eyes on the cards. “She and Henry … keep company. She won’t marry him till he gives up all his confidence games, and he won’t marry her because he’s not ready to go straight. It’s a standoff.” She looked up to see Reuben’s arrested face slowly break into a smile, and then a delighted grin. “What?” she said. He looked as if he’d just won the lottery.

“You mean Henry—you and Henry—you—”

Before he could get out whatever he was trying to say, Lucille and Henry swept into the room, arm in arm, beaming with goodwill. Grace stood up and greeted Lucille as civilly as she could, responding politely to the questions about her month-long stay with her “cousins in Santa Barbara” (the story Henry had cooked up to explain her absence while she was out soliciting for the Blessed Sisters of Hope). But it was no use: Lucille always made her feel like a surly child.

Every time she came to visit, Grace saw herself regressing to her worst, her most immature Grace-ness, eventually retreating into total, puerile silence. It was nothing Lucille did on purpose; she was unfailingly kind and gracious, and patient even when Grace was rude to her, although she hadn’t been openly rude in years.

It was just that she was so damn perfect. Watching her shake hands with Reuben, Grace noted sulkily how attractive she was, with her deep, stately bosom, the thick chestnut hair that was finally—thank
God
—starting to streak with gray, her handsome, smooth-skinned face, always alive with charm and intelligence. “Grace, you’re looking so beautiful,” she exclaimed, with every evidence of sincerity, taking the easy chair and reaching for the glass of sherry Ah You offered her, like a queen accepting her crown.

Grace ought to like her. How childish to hold back affection from such a paragon. But no matter how she tried, she couldn’t seem to see Lucille as anything but a threat. Reuben would go away soon, she could feel it; Willow Pond, the only home she’d ever known, was as good as gone, forfeited to the creditors. She wanted Henry to be happy, to have his heart’s desire, but—but—what would she have left if he abandoned her, too?

Dinner was an ordeal. Besides everything else, something was the matter with Reuben. “I have to talk to you,” he muttered urgently, following her out of the living room when she excused herself to go help Ah You. All she needed was another traumatic encounter with him tonight. “No,” she said tightly, “absolutely not,” and pushed past him, leaving him stranded. At the table, he stared at her in the oddest way, not saying much, but laughing uproariously at anything anyone said that was even remotely funny. Was he drunk? He hardly touched his wine, or his food for that matter. His eyes had a strange, excited glitter; he looked wound up, ready to explode. He made her nervous.

Somehow she got through the meal without snapping anybody’s head off. But she sagged with relief when Lucille said she couldn’t stay for coffee, she had to get home before dark. They said good-bye in the hall, and Henry went outside with her to her pony gig. Grace turned away, and walked straight into Reuben.

“Can we talk now?”

“No!” She slid past him; he started to follow. Luckily Ah You came through just then with an armload of dishes. She snatched a stack of plates out of his hands—”Here, let me help you”—and sailed down the hall ahead of him, heading for the kitchen.

She stayed there as long as she could, cleaning and washing, lavishing muscular energy on the grease-spattered stove. Ah You watched her in wise, knowing silence, which didn’t improve her mood. When he finally spoke, to say, “Lady redwing who wake up to find new wife in nest should never—”

“Don’t start!” she cried imperiously. “Not one word!”

He made her a low bow full of mock deference, and handed her the coffee tray to take up to Henry and Reuben; they were in the parlor, he told her, reading the afternoon newspaper Missy Waters had graciously thought to bring with her.

That proved to be only half true. Henry was reading, but Reuben was pacing. He looked like a big cat in a zoo, caged and restless, ready to leap over the fence. She handed him his coffee charily, afraid to get too near.

“Want to go for a walk with me, Grace?” he asked, smiling tensely.

“No.” What now? Was it a
campaign
to drive her mad?

“Why don’t you, Grace?” Henry asked without looking up. “Do you good. There’s going to be a full moon, it’s a nice—”

“Because I don’t want to!”

He lifted his head, startled by her tone.

“I’m—it’s—I’ve got a headache,” she said lamely. “Excuse me, I still have chores.” Without looking at either of them, she escaped again and went back downstairs, to scrub the pot she’d just told Ah You to soak overnight.

She couldn’t believe it when Reuben followed her. She thought the footsteps on the stairs were Ah You’s until a low, tentative voice said, “Hi,” from the doorway, and she whipped around, hands dripping soapsuds, and saw Reuben. “Oh, God,” she groaned, and took two steps sideways.

“Wait, Grace. You’re not scared of me, are you?”

That did it. Knees locked, back braced against the spice cabinet, she prepared for battle. “Scared of you? Scared of
you?
You miserable—There’s only one thing I want from you, Reuben Jones, and that’s for you to go away and leave me alone!”

He came closer.

“Don’t! Don’t, I can’t stand this anymore. No, don’t you
dare
touch me—”

“Grace—”

“Stop it, I mean it. If you think you can sweet-talk me, kiss me, and then turn around and tell me I’ve got no conscience—”

“That was before—”

“I’ve got a conscience! It’s telling me to stay away from maniacs like you.”

“Listen.
Would you be quiet and listen to me for one minute?”

“No, I won’t. You’re not the man I thought you were—”

“I know I’ve been—”

“—and I can’t stand how you treat me, Reuben. It’s not fair and I don’t deserve it. I’ve never been anything but straight with you—”