Barbara Samuel (19 page)

Elaine was already there, her own heart readied by the intro of “Summertime.” She’d slowed all the way down, and her eyes closed, her body swaying and grooving, and she was right on the beat, like her body became the guitars and the drums.

Then she lit the torch of her voice. It was a hard song to sing, rough and high, but Elaine got around that by dropping it an octave and letting her deep alto ring out like a gravel road.

When the CD went into “Turtle Blues,” Kitty and Luna both reached for their drinks, knowing that Elaine was on now. She started to sing, deep and wild, “I ain’t the kind of woman who’d make your life a bed of ease,” and Joy stopped in her tracks. To stare.

Kitty and Luna grinned at each other. No one got Elaine. The church secretary in her bad, short perm, her hair the most dull color imaginable—that bland shade between blond and brown that’s neither one—wearing a T-shirt with little glitter butterfly appliqués across the chest, a pair of ordinary, old-fashioned glasses on her face, singing the blues like her bones were made of them.

Of the three of them, Elaine was the most damaged. Kitty got through because she had girls to raise. Luna was warped, undeniably, but she had a certain faith in things that never did go away. Elaine just had a hell of a time believing in anything, except her Christianity, and sometimes Luna thought Elaine used religion like a shield, something to hide behind. She was so afraid, all the time. All the time.

And when her sister sang like this, Luna wanted to cry. Cry for lost chances, for things that would never be, but Joy didn’t have all that baggage. At the end of the song, she said, “Aunt Elaine, I can’t believe you can sing like that and you’re not out there doing something with it.”

Elaine just laughed, getting a drink of water. “It’s just a game.”

“No,” Joy said, fiercely. “That’s a
gift.”

Looking a little abashed, Elaine said, “Thank you, Joy.”

“You don’t waste gifts.”

Elaine blinked. “I’m not wasting it. I sing in the choir.”

“That’s wasting it,” Joy said. “You’re not singing the blues at church, are you?”

“Well, not—”

“It’s a sin to waste a voice like that,” Joy said, and dashed away a tear. “And I’m mad at you that I’m nearly sixteen years old and you never even shared it with
me.”
She shook her head. “Anyone want anything? I’m going to the kitchen.”

“No, thanks.”

Luna raised her eyebrows at Elaine. “And a little child should lead them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Luna spied the clock, and slapped her hands together. “Oh, God! I have to go right now! Mom, call me a cab—I gotta get out of here, and there’s no time to both change and walk.”

Kitty perked up. “Do you have a
date?”

“Kinda. What I don’t have is time to talk about it much right this minute.” She rushed into the bathroom to change her clothes, rubbing lotion on her bare legs beneath the white skirt, putting on some lipstick from her mother’s gigantic store. “Mom!” she called around the corner, “can I borrow this burnt raisin lipstick?”

“Take whatever you want, darlin’.” Kitty clicked down the hall. “What are you wearing? Oooh, I like the gold sandals. Nice with your tan. And what a fine rear end you’ve got these days, girl.” Kitty came up beside her and they looked into the mirror. Luna peered at herself, focusing on the things she liked—her round dark eyes with a little gold eye shadow, her mouth that looked pretty good with the lipstick—rather than the ones she didn’t, which were numerous. Wildly numerous. She put a hand on her lower belly. “Too tight? I’ve gained a little weight without the cigarettes.”

“Sexy,” Kitty pronounced.

Luna touched her hair, careful not to do too much to it since it was halfway behaving, just kind of ringlets instead of the wilderness of frizz it could sometimes become. “What should I do with my hair?”

“Not a thing.” Kitty inclined her head. “You are beautiful, Luna McGraw, and don’t you ever forget it.” She slapped her on the butt. “Come on, what do you know? Stomach in, chest out, chin high, sugar. And what are you saying?”

Luna grinned, sucking in her belly, throwing back her shoulders. “What man in his right mind wouldn’t want me?”

Kitty winked. “There you go.” A horn from outside. “Have a good time, sweetie.”

Thomas waited outside the VFW for Luna, listening to the music spilling out the doors. It was a Spanish band, young, with a dusky-voiced singer. The music stirred him up, made him pace as he waited, and he wished for some of the calm of the sweat back again. He’d sweated out the sorrow of the day, but that seemed to just leave room for anticipation.

She came in a cab, stepping out with her wild blond curls falling down around her face. She wore a white skirt that showed her powerfully muscled legs, and a plain white peasant blouse that framed her shoulders and neck perfectly. There was much to like about Luna McGraw, but as she came toward him tonight, luminous and a little shy, he fell into her big dark eyes. Fell in. Reached out for her before she even spoke, taking her neck and bending down to kiss her full on the mouth.

She kissed him back with a little sound, pressing her body into his, and he raised his head. “Hi.”

“Hi.” She smiled up at him. “You pulled your hair back.”

“I can let it down.”

She inclined her head. “No, maybe it’s better up.”

“Better how?”

“You know very well. That hair is dangerous.”

Thomas chuckled. “Yeah?” he said, and reached around for the end of the braid to pull off the rubber band. “Do you have a comb?”

“No, leave it. It’s all right.”

He grinned and unwove the braid, combing his fingers through it. When he got to the top, he shook his head a little. “Okay?”

“Allow me.” She took a comb from her purse and he turned to let her smooth it for him, liking the tentative feel of her hands skimming through his hair. “It’s so long,” she said, and her palm traveled the length of it. His skin rippled, nerves popping awake after a long sleep.

When she stopped, he turned, ready to make a small joke to ease the tension, but she had not entirely loosed his hair, and she wrapped it around her wrist and looked at him, tugging lightly to draw him down to her. “I’m trying to be a grown-up here, Thomas,” she said, “but you are the sexiest man I think I’ve ever seen, and all I really want to do is touch you.”

They slid into a pool of shadow by the wall and he pressed into her the way he’d been wanting to since the first time he saw her, feeling her thighs on the front of his. Her arms curled up around his neck, opening her breasts to his chest. Their mouths meshed, opened, and her hands moved on him, down his back, along his sides, then down his thighs, exploring. And he explored
in return, touching her surprisingly small shoulders, the softness of breasts, her ribs and strong hips.

Then they stopped kissing and he braced himself on the wall and they rubbed hot and hard together, wordless, letting their bodies speak for them. Chest to chest, hip to hip, her hands on his back restless and smooth at once. He bent his head into her neck and put his hands around her fanny, pulling her tighter, sighing at the press of her mouth to his throat. He thought he should maybe take it somewhere else, but it was good like this. Good when she pressed upward into him, made a soft sound of regret. “I guess we oughtta go inside,” he said.

“I’ll be in major trouble with everyone if I don’t put in an appearance,” she said, sighing. “Hold that thought, though, huh?”

He leaned in and kissed her once more. “I promise.”

“Wait,” she said, and peered up at him, pulling a tissue out of her purse and handing it to him, then taking a mirror and lipstick out of the tiny thing herself. “Wipe your mouth or everyone will know.” She stepped into a pool of light, reapplied her lipstick, smacked her lips together and gave him a bright wink. “Better?”

“Gorgeous,” he said, the skin on the back of his neck tight. What a sexy thing that was, the way women put on lipstick. The way she did it. “Am I good?”

“Perfect.” She held out her hand, and tucked the tissue back in her purse. “Let’s go. No more kissing until we leave.”

He took her hand. “This all right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “This is really good.”

The reception was in full swing—the tables crowded with people in dress clothes, the dance floor full of couples doing a basic two-step. Paper streamers and balloons decorated the walls, and at the head table, the
bride and groom were tucked together like a pair of swans.

The wedding was for Luna’s coworkers, but as soon as they walked in, people started talking to Thomas, of course. He nodded to one table, stopped and shook hands with a man at another, and waved at another. An older man with a friendly, if slightly boozy smile waved back cheerily. “That’s my cousin Victor, there. He used to sing all over, but he’s worn out now. He’s a good man. Give you the shirt off his back.” Thomas smiled down at Luna. “He’ll ask you to dance.”

“I don’t dance very well.”

“He won’t care.”

“Then I’ll say yes.”

He took her hand gently then, and Luna felt as if she’d surprised him in some way.

She loved walking through the room with him. Women eyed him. Men respected him. They looked at her differently—and she couldn’t remember if any of her coworkers had seen her with any guy before. She didn’t think so. “Let’s go say hi to the bride and groom,” she said, “Then we can find a place to sit down.”

A voice came from the gloom to her right. “Lu!”

Peering through the clouds of cigarette smoke, she saw Jean at a table with several other people, including a properly brooding and beautiful Byronic sort with a three-day growth of beard and limpid dark eyes. She introduced him as Gary, and waited for Luna to introduce Thomas. She didn’t. “We’re going to say hi to Linda,” Luna said, moving away. When they were out of earshot, she said, “Hope that didn’t seem rude, but she’s a gossip and a nosy girl and I don’t want to share any more of my life with her than is absolutely necessary.”

“That’s cool.”

They greeted the happy pair, then nabbed a tiny two-seater right on the edge of the dance floor when another couple vacated it. “What do you want to drink?” Thomas asked. “I’ll get it.”

“Ginger ale,” she said. “And Thomas, don’t avoid a beer or something because I don’t drink, okay?”

“Sure?”

“Yes. I’m very well aware that not everyone is an alcoholic.”

“It doesn’t make you want it yourself, to sit with somebody who’s drinking?”

“Sometimes,” she admitted, and looked around the room. There were a lot of things about drinking she missed, and this was one of them—she’d loved settling into a warm, friendly drinking establishment to fall into the bottle with everyone else. “But that’s my struggle, not yours, okay?”

She liked the respect in his dark eyes as he nodded.

What about tonight?
Therapist Barbie said.
Aching for a tequila now? A nice way to blur the edges so you could sleep with him without excuses?

It was a thought. It would make it easier and she really wanted him and worried about the consequences. But drinking not only dulled the worry, it dulled the experience, and
if
she slept with Thomas Coyote, she wanted to be fully cognizant of every single, blessed minute.

No, she didn’t want a drink. Not tonight. But as she sat there waiting for Thomas to come back, the same could not be said for cigarettes. She watched a woman smoking at a table not far away. Watched, almost mesmerized as she inhaled, paused, let go of a breath-softened cloud of blue smoke. Luna’s sinuses quivered.

“It gets easier,” Thomas said, putting the drinks down.

“What?”

He chuckled. “Smoking. You were staring at that woman like she was a hypnotist.”

“Busted.” She grinned, shook her head. Glumly, she stirred her ginger ale with the tiny blue and red straws. “This ain’t my first rodeo. I’ve quit so many times it’s ridiculous.”

Thomas spied someone across the room. “Damn.”

Luna glanced over her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“Do you know that woman? Angelica?”

“Sure. She’s a cashier.” Not a bad position in the hierarchy of grocery store work. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s her husband who lives with me.”

“The one who—Oh.” Luna winced, watching as the woman kissed a man next to her. “And I take it that’s not the husband.”

He shook his head, his mouth grim.

“You aren’t responsible, Thomas.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.” He shifted in his chair, putting his back to her.

Luna looked at the woman. She was a little overweight through the middle, and her shirt was tight, showing off a lot of cleavage at the top. Her eyes were heavily made up. The guy she was with was nothing spectacular, the kind of man who was once a pretty boy and now didn’t have anything to fall back on.

A twinge of something went through Luna, a kind of yearning, like catching the scent of a particular moment in time. For the space of a few seconds, she was transported to a plain room with fans blowing from two different corners over a collection of women pouring their hearts onto the floor in a spill of beauty and hunger, longing and pain, laughter and healing. It was sharp and sweet, incredibly fierce.
I could help her.

A man stopped by the table, thin and rugged as a
long-used rope.
“Cómo está su abuela?”
he asked, his fine brown hand on Thomas’s shoulder.

Thomas answered in Spanish, a language Luna didn’t speak, even though she knew she ought to. She could gather the gist of it—
she’s fine, the house is not so good, who knows why these things happen.
The old man liked Thomas for taking care of his family the way he should. Things like that mattered around here.

When the man moved on, Thomas said, “I’m going to have her live with me. Take care of her.”

“She’s pretty old.”

“Yeah. She remembers Pancho Villa’s raid in New Mexico.”

“Amazing.” Luna sipped her ginger ale, imagining a bandit man with a big mustache and ropes of ammunition in a cross over his chest. “How romantic.”

“She doesn’t think so. She said once he was nothing but a petty criminal with a good imagination.”