Barbara Samuel (29 page)

Luna took charge. Putting an arm around Kitty’s shoulders, she led her into the kitchen, settled her in a chair, and said, “Stay.” Kitty’s Pomeranian came running in and whined pitifully, and Luna bent over and picked him up, dumping him on her mother’s lap. “Give your dog some love,” she said. “I’ll make you something to eat. How long has it been?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you eat breakfast? I don’t see any evidence of it.”

Kitty tucked her dog under her chin. The golden creature wiggled happily, but didn’t get overly excited, as if sensing there was more going on here. “I don’t know,” Kitty said. “I think so.”

Best Friend Barbie, braiding her hair, said,
Uh-oh.

It’s not that bad
, Luna argued, pulling out eggs and cheese and butter and lining them up on the counter.
Just a little depressed.

A little! When was the last time your mother went without her makeup? 1979?

Luna made coffee, heated butter in the heavy skillet, scrambled eggs with cheese, and sliced bread for toast, chattering lightly, asking simple questions Kitty could answer easily. As she put the plate down in front of her, Luna realized she was flat-out terrified. She had never, in all of her life, seen her mother like this. Nestling a fork next to the plate, she said gently, “Eat.”

Kitty picked up the fork and robotically put food in her mouth, chewing like she’d been programmed, but Luna figured it didn’t matter how it went in, as long as it did. She sat down opposite and petted Roger, the dog, drinking some coffee, wondering what she should do once Kitty was fed. In the bright light of the kitchen, she saw that her mother was getting old. The skin under her jaw was softening, and her eyelids were wrinkled. It pierced her.

When the eggs were gone, Luna edged the coffee cup over and Kitty picked that up, less robotically, and took a sip. “Let’s take this out to the back. I want to smoke a cigarette, and Frank will kill me if he knows I’ve done it.”

“A cigarette?” Luna started laughing. “Mom! You haven’t smoked in fifteen years.” Not to mention, Frank really would kill her. His wife had died of lung cancer. He hated cigarettes with a ferocity reserved for those
who’d lost someone to the weed—and had been a major nag force in her drive to quit.

“I know. It’s temporary.” She walked down the hall in her swishy robe, still looking gorgeous for all her di-minishment, and Luna loved her so much it was like a pain. Everything about her—the bravery in her shoulders that had had to carry too much, the vanity that kept her so beautiful, her absolute insistence upon believing the best of everything. There wasn’t anyone on the earth like Kitty McGraw Esquivel Torrance, and Luna didn’t know how she got so lucky as to be her daughter, but she was grateful.

They sat in the green and gold of evening on the deck that looked out over the blue sea of the valley. Kitty took out a Virginia Slim Ultra Light Menthol and lit it.

Luna reached for the pack and took one, too. “If you’re smoking, I’m smoking, too.”

Kitty looked at her for a minute, then nodded.

They sat back in guilty pleasure and smoked. Suddenly, Kitty said, “I slept with him the first time we went out. That’s not such a big thing now, but it was then. I was a virgin, because girls were, good girls anyway, the ones who wanted to get something out of life.” She looked toward the horizon. “And I was a good girl. Ambitious, but good.” She smoked, blew out a ladylike plume of smoke. “The first minute I laid eyes on Jesse Esquivel …” She trailed off.

Never, ever did Kitty talk about Luna’s father. Not anything about him. Not meeting him, not loving him, not marrying him, not him leaving. Nothing. It had been a forbidden topic since the day he left. “What I remember,” Luna said, tentatively, not sure it was the right thing, “is his arms. So big and strong and brown. Like posts.”

“It was his hair that got me that first day. He came
into the coffee shop where I worked and he had the thickest, shiniest, blackest hair I’d ever seen, and those big dark eyes. Just like yours.” She touched Luna’s hand distractedly. “If you weren’t so blond, you’d look just like him. So Spanish, not like me at all.”

“How did he pick you?”

“I was the cutest one,” she said, lifting a shoulder. “Long blond hair I wore in a pageboy and a good figure and I took care of myself, you know, not like some of those ranch girls. I had my nails done and my lipstick on right, and I just knew, one of those days, that some man would walk through those doors and take me away. And when your daddy walked in, I just knew he was the one.”

All at once, she crumpled a little, putting her hand to her chest, rubbing hard. Luna jumped up, alarmed. “Mom!”

Kitty raised her head, tears making her eyes neon. “Sit down, Luna. I’m not having a heart attack. Not that kind, anyway.” She drew on her cigarette. “It was a mistake to keep it in all those years, I can see that now. I just never knew what to say.” Her fingers worried the neckline of her robe, and she tapped the ashes off the cigarette. Luna realized she’d hardly been smoking hers, and put it out.

“You broke my heart,” Kitty continued, “missing him so much. You worshiped him—oh, Lord—like he was the sun and the moon, and I could understand him losing interest in a woman, but not his children. Not his baby.”

A gulf opened in Luna’s chest, and she saw it like the bloom of a rose, dripping blood. “I used to fantasize that he’d come for me after school. Just me. He’d drive up in his truck and whistle like he did, you know, and open the door and I’d jump in and we’d just drive
away.” She looked upward, to the tops of the trees. “And then I’d feel guilty for not caring if he came for you guys.”

“I used to hope they’d find his body at the bottom of a ravine somewhere. Or his truck in a river, lost to time.”

“So there’d be a reason.”

She nodded.

“You never had the sense of anything being wrong?”

She lifted her head, a perplexed little smile on her mouth. “He was a drunk, honey.”

Luna went still. Everything in her—every cell, every molecule, waiting.

“You don’t remember anything about it because he was careful. Didn’t start drinking until you went to bed. He—” Her voice caught and she looked away for a minute. “He stayed sober for work, but barely.”

“I see,” Luna said, and it said so many things. Then, “Why did you stay with him if he was an alcoholic?”

“The first time I went out with him,” Kitty said, and reached for her hand, “I slept with him. I did it even though I was a good girl, even though I knew that wasn’t the way to get what I wanted, because I was head over heels in love with him from the first minute I saw him. And nobody ever looked at me in my life the way he did—like I was the queen of everything.”

Luna knew the look her mother was talking about. She’d seen it in her father’s eyes, too, when he looked at her and said, “You’re my sweetheart, you know that? Daddy’s girl.” She’d seen it, every night, when he came in the door for supper and Kitty came out of the kitchen in her ironed apron to kiss him hello. “I remember it,” she said. “If you can’t trust that look, what could you possibly trust?”

“Exactly.”

They sat side by side in the lowering light, lost in their own thoughts. After a long time she said, “We need to see the land, Mom. I don’t know what was in his mind, but we need to at least see it before we make a decision.”

Kitty covered her mouth, as if trying to catch the pained noise that escaped through her fingers. “I can’t,” she said, and real tears appeared in her eyes, ran down her cheeks. Her fingers tightened on Luna’s. “I have to go away for a little while, baby. Frank’s made arrangements for a cruise, and we’re leaving Friday.”

“But—”
You can’t!
she wanted to say.
I need you. Joy needs you, I don’t know what’s happening with Thomas or my life and I feel lost, too.

However, her mother had earned this respite, this right to retreat after so many years of being brave. Luna really loved Frank in that moment, for seeing that Kitty was so wounded, for being there to take care of her. “That’s a great idea, Mom,” she said. “I’ll take care of the house, like always. How long will you be gone?”

“Two weeks. Greek islands.” She said it like they were going to drive to Denver for a couple of days.

Luna laughed, squeezing her hand. “You’re getting to be such a jaded traveler that Greece doesn’t excite you?”

Kitty smiled wanly.

“Mom,” she said quietly. “I need to see that land. I need to see what he left us, see if it helps me make sense of things. Before we sell it, I need to see what he saw.”

“I was hoping you would,” Kitty said. “You loved him even more than I did, Luna, and you were, right or wrong, the apple of his eye. I don’t know what demons drove him away, but maybe you understand him better than Elaine or I.”

“Because of the alcoholism?”

“No. Well, maybe, partly, I suppose, but I meant because you’re most like him. Driven and joyful and sad
and so alive. You’re as alive as he was, or at least you were. Maybe if you connect with him on some level, you’ll finally get past all the betrayals in your life.”

Luna took a breath. “I didn’t know you saw me that way,” she said in a small voice.

“Oh, baby, you’re so great. I’ve never been able to get it through your head how marvelous you are.”

“Thank you.” They sat quietly together, united in that invisible longing. “It’s okay to say you loved him, Mom. That this hurts you. That it hurt you then and it’s never really healed.”

Kitty lifted her chin. “Oh, I loved him. A part of me always will. But I can’t go back there, not if I’m going to survive. Frank is a good, honest man who loves me for real. He’ll never hurt me. Not ever.”

“I know,” she said. But how did you really ever know something like that?

And because it was getting too heavy, too deep, she said, “Hey, how about you let me fix your hair?”

Kitty smiled. “I guess I could do that. Let me get a shower and wash these cigarettes off, first.”

“All right. I’m going to call Joy.” Luna stood up, brushing off her rear. “And Mom, maybe before I go I could just sit in the Toyota again. Joy’s not happy with me not driving.”

“Sure. Get the keys now and you can try it while I’m in the shower, so nobody is watching.”

Luna hugged her. “You know I love you, right? That I feel like the luckiest woman in the world, to have you as a mother?”

Kitty hugged her back. “Thank you, baby. I love you, too.”

“I know.”

• • •

While Kitty was in the shower, Luna took the car keys from the hook by the door and slipped downstairs to the garage. The car, clean as dawn, sat waiting for her, dark blue and somehow affluent-looking. She opened the door and got in.

For a little while, she just sat there with the door open, enjoying the luxurious smell of it, the comfort of the seat, the high-tech look of the dash. She hadn’t had a car in a long time, and the ones she’d owned after leaving Marc had not been new. Good thing, too, since she’d wrecked all of them.

Wrecked cars. A gurgle of unease went through her. Sitting inside the dazzling machine, Luna rubbed her hand over the steering wheel and remembered each one. The first had not been terrible—early in her days in Albuquerque, she’d hit the gas instead of the brake when she pulled into a parking lot and totaled a 1983 Volvo on a light post. Minor scrapes and bruises, but the car was a loss. And because it had taken place in her apartment complex and there was no property damage but her own, she’d skated out of anything more than a slap on the wrist.

The second had been more serious. Maybe six months later. She only vaguely remembered it—she’d been very drunk indeed and had gone through a stop sign without even a glance. A pickup truck broadsided her, luckily hitting the back half of the car instead of the front, which would likely have killed her. She’d spent a couple of days in the hospital for broken ribs and bruised internal organs, but luckily, the truck driver wasn’t hurt, and even his truck had sustained only minor damages.

That one had lead to some community service and supposedly drug tests to check her sobriety, but she slid through the system pretty easily, simply changing
addresses and taking to walking everywhere. No one came after her.

The third one had been the bad one. She rolled a borrowed car into a ditch, and she couldn’t remember a single thing about it. That accident had marked hitting bottom, at least. Which led to coming home, which led to getting sober, which led to this moment in a Toyota in her mother’s garage, just waiting for Luna to be ready to drive. Frank and Kitty had chosen the safest model on the market, not because they doubted her intentions, but because they wanted her to feel protected behind the wheel.

Safe. Luxurious, or semi-so. Taking a deep breath, she closed the door, adjusted the seat and mirror and felt okay. She opened the garage door, then fit the key into the ignition. Her heart didn’t go skittering into anxiety, so she turned the key. The engine caught, a smooth, low rumble, and she sat there with her hands on the wheel, thinking about putting it into gear. Still no freak-out.

Very cautiously, she put the car into reverse and started to ease it out of the garage.

And that’s when it hit. Pure panic. She slammed on the brakes too hard as her body seized itself, her throat closing, heart stuttering, sweat breaking from every pore. Even the edges of her vision started to go black. Very slowly, very easily, she put the car back into place, turned it off, and returned the keys to the hook.

Not yet.

But maybe it wouldn’t be long.