In the Midnight Rain (52 page)

Mutely, Tanya followed him into the dark autumn day. A sharp wind blew from the Sangre de Cristos Mountains, slicing viciously through her thin cloth coat. With a small shiver, she clutched it closer to her body, bending her head into the burst of bitter wind.

Ramón caught the movement. “Not much of a coat for this kind of weather.” Reaching into the cab, he brought forth a down parka and held it out to her. “It’s a nasty day, but Indian summer will be back tomorrow.”

Tanya was unaccustomed to simple kindness, and for a minute, she hesitated. A gust of wind blasted them, tossing hair over Ramón’s solemn face. With a dark, long-fingered hand, he brushed it away.

“Thank you,” she said. Shyly, she traded coats, giving him the old one, which he tossed into the truck.

Buttoning his own jacket, he asked, “What would you like for lunch—American or Mexican? The Blue Swan has great green chili, and Yolanda’s has good fried chicken.”

Tanya shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“Me, either,” he said. “You choose.”

She didn’t want to choose. She’d used up all her reserves of emotional energy, and there was still Antonio to think about. For herself, she’d like the green chili, but maybe Ramón would like hamburgers. She said nothing.

Nor did he. The silence between them stretched to a strained, awkward length. Tanya stuffed her hands in her pockets and waited.

At last he prodded her. “What would you like— Tanya? Can I call you Tanya?”

“Tanya is fine.” She took a breath and chose, watching his face carefully for subtle signs of disapproval. “I guess green chili sounds good.”

He smiled. The expression transformed his face, giving a twinkle to the depthless eyes, adding emphasis to the high slant of cheekbones. Tanya’s chest, tight with anxiety, eased with an abruptness that made her almost dizzy. She’d made the right choice.

* * *

Ramón stirred sugar into his coffee and watched Tanya carefully tear the wrapping from a straw. From the speakers in the ceiling came a soft Spanish ballad, mournful with strummed guitars and flutes. For a moment, he was transported to another day, another time, when he’d danced with this woman, when she had been a sweet, pretty young girl. . . and he’d fallen in love.

In those days, he’d often fallen in love. More often than not, his passion had gone unrequited. Upon meeting Tanya for the first time, so many years ago, he’d thought his infatuation was like all the others.

But in Tanya’s beautiful dark blue eyes there had been an almost painful yearning for things unnamable and unattainable. It had struck him deeply. As he’d held her loosely, her blond hair spilling over her shoulders, her youthful eighteen-year-old body swelling just slightly with the baby in her tummy, she’d told him about a book she was reading,
Tortilla Flat.
She’d said the name as if it were new, as if no one had ever discovered it before, and there had been magic and wonder in her tone, in her sweet innocence.

That she had reached the age of eighteen without knowing such a work existed, that she could find it on her own and love it with such passion, had touched Ramón in some quiet place. Until that day, he’d been too enmeshed in his anger to see what was plain if only he looked around him—a person didn’t have to be brown or black or red to suffer the indignities of ignorance and poverty. The realization that social class, not race, was the great deciding factor in American society had changed his life.

They had talked all afternoon, while Victor—Tanya’s husband and Ramón’s cousin—drank in the bar with the wedding party. They talked about books and movies, about ideas and hopes and plans. As he listened to her sweet, soft voice, and watched her eyes shine with excitement, Ramón had fallen in love.

And when Victor, drunk and evil-tempered, broke Ramón’s cheekbone, Ramón had almost felt it was deserved. Tanya was Victor’s wife, after all.

Ramón had gone back to Albuquerque, to his Latin-American studies, and had tried to wipe the beautiful young girl from his mind. He hadn’t known until almost a year later that Tanya, too, had paid for that golden afternoon. Victor had beaten her senseless and she’d landed in the hospital with seven broken bones, including ribs and wrist. By some miracle, the baby had survived. Tanya briefly left her husband after the hospital had released her, but Victor promised to give up drinking. Tanya had returned to him, and Victor kept his promise.

For a little while, anyway.

Looking now at the woman the girl had become, Ramón felt a little dizzy with lost chances and lost hopes and ruined dreams. She was not the softly round girl he’d been smitten with that day so long ago. Her hair was not curled and wispy, but cut straight across so it hung like a gleaming golden brown curtain at her shoulders. Her face and body were thinner and harder, lean as a coyote’s. She had a long, ropy kind of muscle in her upper arms, the kind that came from sustained hard work.

Her exotically beautiful blue eyes were wary as they met his. “Do I have something on my chin?” she asked.

He shook his head, smiling. “Sorry. I was just remembering the last time I saw you.”

The faintest hint of a smile curved her pretty mouth. “Boy, that was forever ago. Another lifetime.”

“It was.” He took a breath, trying to think of a way to pick his way through the minefield of memories. He opted for flattery. “You were so pretty I couldn’t believe you danced with me.”

A small wash of rose touched her cheeks. She glanced out the window, then back to him. “What I remember is how smart you were. You talked to me like I was smart, too. It meant a lot to me.”

Ramón smiled at her, feeling a warmth he’d thought far beyond his reach. “Me, too.”

At that moment, the waitress brought their food. Ramón leaned back and let go of a breath as the waitress put his plate down. Things would be all right. He hadn’t been sure.

* * *

Once she got some hot food inside her hollow stomach, Tanya felt stronger. The stamina and common strength she’d worked to build for eleven years seeped back, and with it, a sense of normalcy.

With a sigh, she leaned back in the turquoise vinyl booth. “Much better.”

“Good.”

The waitress came by with a steel coffeepot, topped their cups, and whisked away Tanya’s empty bowl. “I’m sorry I seemed so strange back at the station,” Tanya said. “It’s just a little overwhelming.”

“Don’t apologize. I’m sorry I startled you.” He finished the last bites of an enormous smothered burrito and pushed the plate to one side. “Let’s start fresh.”

“Okay.” She attempted a smile, and felt the unused muscles in her face creak only a little. “Didn’t you wear glasses?”

“Yeah.” His grin was wry. “I’m blind as a bat, but glasses aren’t real practical on a ranch.” He touched his lips with his napkin. “Weren’t you blonde?”

“Sort of,” she said with a shrug. “Victor liked my hair light, so I dyed it for him. This is the natural color.”

“I like it.” His gaze lingered, and Tanya saw a shimmer of sexual approval in those unrelentingly black irises.

An answering spark lit somewhere deep and cold within her, and Tanya found herself noticing again his mouth—full-lipped and sensual. On another man, it would have seemed too lush, but amid the savagely beautiful planes and angles of his face, it seemed only to promise pleasure beyond all imagining.

The cinders of burned-out feelings within her flared a little brighter, stirring a soft, tiny flame of awareness she’d not known in a long, long time.

Abruptly she quenched it, stamping hard at the spark to kill it. She tore her gaze away and poked her soda with the straw. “Why don’t you tell me about my job?”

As if he understood the reason for the abrupt change of subject, Ramón replied in an impersonal tone. “You’ll be cooking. Desmary has needed someone for quite some time, but it’s hard to find someone with institutional experience in such an under populated area.”

Tanya couldn’t resist a small, wry dig at her own background. “If it’s institutional food you want, I’m a master.”

He chuckled. “Good. Desmary, the head cook, can’t move around as well as she used to, but there’s no place else for her to go. You’re going to be her feet and her helper.” He paused to dip a chip in salsa. “She’s pretty independent, so if you can be discreet about helping her, I’d appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

“We’ve got a full house at the moment, twenty-five boys. They all have KP, so basically you’re in charge of just getting them fed, and they clean up. Anybody who wants to cook can sign up to help, and you’ll usually have a couple of boys every day.”

“How old are the kids?”

“The youngest right now is eight. They don’t often get into serious trouble much earlier than that. The oldest is seventeen. Most of them are twelve to fifteen.”

Tanya half smiled. “It’s going to be quite a switch for me to go from an almost completely female environment to one dominated by males.”

“And teenage boys are more male than they’ll ever be again.” Ramón shook his head. “There are few women out there. I’m trying to change that, so the boys can learn to treat women with respect.” He lifted one shoulder. “You may not always get it.”

“I can handle that.”

“You’ll have to.”

That sounded a little intimidating. Tanya lifted her eyebrows in question.

“There are rules to create discipline and order, to teach the boys how to behave themselves. If one of them is disrespectful, you’ll be expected to manage the situation.”

Tanya frowned. “What constitutes disrespectful?”

He grinned. “If it wouldn’t have gone over in 1920, it won’t go over now.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all.” His face was sober, but the dark eyes shone with intense passion. “Some of these boys are like animals when they come to me. They don’t know how to eat at the table, or how to dress for regular society. They treat women and girls like sluts or possessions, like a pair of shoes.”

Like a possession. Tanya felt the tightness in her chest again. That was the way Victor had treated her. And she’d allowed it for a long time. She looked away, to the calm scene beyond the windows.

“I’m trying to give them dignity, Tanya,” he said. “I think you can help me.”

Dignity. What dignity had she had, all these years? Had she ever known it? “I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all I ask of anyone,” he said, and picked up the check. “Are you ready?”

A swift wave of nerves and anticipation washed through her. “Yes.”

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SUMMER'S
FREEDOM

(Excerpt)

by
Barbara Samuel

Prologue

September

H
e stepped into the bright, hot day with a sense of numbness, looking first to the mountains, dark blue on the horizon, then to the sky, a clear turquoise painted with streaks of feathery white. A wind, warm and scented with pine, danced over open fields to brush his face with light, playful buffets.

On his body were civilian clothes—jeans and a clean cotton shirt. His sister had brought him his boots and a good leather belt. His hair, freshly cut, lifted over his forehead in the free wind.

For a long moment, he simply stood at the threshold of his new life, unable to quite believe all that had happened in the past week. As he stood there, a butterfly flittered through the air—bright yellow with spots of blue.

His numbness burst, like the chrysalis that had once held the butterfly, and from the deadness surged a thrust of pure joy. He turned to the man next to him and grinned.

“You never did belong here,” his friend said. “Go on, now. Don’t look back. Remember what happened to Lot’s wife.”

“Thanks,” he said simply, and took the first long steps into a future he’d never dreamed he would own.

One

B
y the time Maggie Henderson and her photographer arrived at the scene of the protest late Wednesday afternoon, a crowd had gathered. Maggie glanced at the heavy clouds hanging low over Cheyenne Mountain and turned to her photographer. “Rain would be the best thing that could happen this afternoon,” she said.

“I’ll second that,” Sharon McConnell agreed, tossing one of a plethora of braids out of her eye.

“Come on,” Maggie said as she pushed through a throng of black-leather-jacketed teens toward the center of the demonstration.

In front of a record store, a handful of teenagers dressed in pressed skirts and slacks marched in a slow circle, carrying placards protesting a rock band. From somewhere in the crowd, a portable radio blasted the music of the band, adding to the general chaos of shouts and chants.

Maggie couldn’t take notes in the jostling crowd, so she committed it all to memory—the noise and taunts and clashing cultures of the two groups. Suddenly, the crowd parted a fraction and Maggie caught sight of a slender, blond girl seated on the hood of a car. She looked a little scared, Maggie thought, in spite of her black jacket studded with metal and her swinging skull earrings.

Maggie grabbed Sharon’s arm. Shouting to be heard, she said, “Get as much as you can. I’ve got to go kill my daughter.”

Sharon’s dark eyes widened in sympathy as she nodded. Maggie headed through the crowd toward Samantha, unintentionally pushing in her haste to get to the fifteen-year-old trying so hard to be grown-up. These kids were all at least a year or two older than Sam, Maggie fumed. She had no idea what she was getting into.

“Hey, watch it, lady,” protested a girl in a striped tube top.

Maggie ignored her. The chants and noise were growing louder, and a kind of rocking motion rippled through the mass of teenagers. Distantly she heard the sound of sirens. Maggie caught a glimpse of Samantha jumping down from the hood of the car, before the crowd shifted again. Maggie was flung against the body of a boy, who shoved her roughly back. She staggered. The unmistakable sound of shattering glass sent a split second of silence over the crowd. Then all hell broke loose.