Beneath the Patchwork Moon (Hope Springs, #2) (7 page)

“Ready?” she asked, once he’d closed his door on the strangling thoughts.

“Do you know how many times I ate here in high school? After football games?” He fell into step beside her as they crossed the asphalt parking lot.

She shook her head. “I went to a different school, remember?”

Right. Even though she’d been at all of his games. “You St. Thomas kids had squat for a football program.”

“St. Thomas wasn’t much for athletics,” she said, stopping at the entrance and lifting her gaze to meet his. “Unless you count tennis. And fencing.”

“I don’t,” he said, and reached around her to pull open the door. She stepped through, her shoulder brushing his
arm, her hair catching on the sleeve of his forearm and clinging. He left the strands there as she searched out an empty booth and led the way. “You weren’t on scholarship, right? Your parents paid the tuition?”

“They did. And it wasn’t cheap. But I was an only child, and my dad wasn’t a fan of public schools.” She slid into her seat, then smiled as he slid into his. “Funny. I
was
an only child. For twenty-eight years. It’s hard to realize that’s about to come to an end.”

He pulled the laminated menu from the prongs of the condiment caddy and stared at the clip art of the daily special. “That’s gotta be strange, the idea of being a sister after all these years.”

“You were what, twelve when Felix was born?” she asked, the question returning him to his recent thoughts of his family falling apart, of his impotence at its happening.

He tried to keep the anger from his voice, but doing so made room for regret, guilt. Emotions he hated. It was so much easier just to stay mad, to be brusque, abrupt. “Yep. There were two years between me and Sierra, then Isidora came along four years later. Then Emilio, then Teresa, then Felix all within six years. The house smelled like sun-dried cloth diapers until I was fifteen.”

“Better than smelling like dirty ones,” she said, and after a moment he chuckled.

Their waitress arrived then, her uniform the same red, yellow, and orange of the neon sign spelling out
Malina’s
above the diner’s front door. Luna ordered coffee, tomato juice, bacon, and biscuits. Angelo chose the platter with the most pancakes and eggs, wishing for a beer to dull the sharp edge of his mood, having coffee instead. He had to remember the
things he needed—information, the truth, Sierra’s secrets—and forget the taste of Luna’s mouth.

Once they were alone, she stacked their menus, returning them to the circular prongs as she picked up their conversation. “Why the gap after Sierra, I wonder?”

“No clue,” he said, as amused by as he was curious about her interest. It wasn’t like they were intimates anymore, discussing family issues. Except Luna knew almost as much as he did about life in the Caffey household. At least, life before the gaping hole where Sierra had been. Though she didn’t know everything, the bad parts, the damage. He ran his right thumb over a scar on the knuckle of the left. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if my mother lost a child.”

“You don’t know?”

He shrugged. “If my parents had planned to add to the family every two years, I would’ve only been four when she did, since Isidora came along two years after that. I don’t remember knowing she was expecting.”

Their waitress returned then with their drinks. Angelo reached for his mug, preferring the bite of black coffee, watching as Luna tore open a sweetener packet and poured the contents into hers, then added enough cream to make a cow cry. Stirring, her eyes downcast, she asked him, “Do you miss them? The kids? Your parents?”

He hadn’t seen them in eight years, but then, they
had
disowned him. “Yeah. I miss them, but I guess the move to Mexico helped them get their lives back on track. Though I am kinda surprised they stayed.”

“So they’re still there?”

He nodded. “I get a card from Felix every once in a while.”

“But you haven’t gone to see them?”

“Trust me. They don’t want me there.” His brother’s notes, though short, always ended with the suggestion that he not visit. “I’m the one who called my mother’s family for help eight years ago, remember? It’s just that I thought they’d send money. Or come visit for a while. Not pack them up and take them back with them.”

Luna toyed with her spoon, no longer stirring, but still staring downward. “I’m not so sure your contacting your mother’s family didn’t make the inevitable easier.”

“How so?” he asked, because none of it had made much sense.

Not their walking away from the work they’d loved. Not their abandoning their home and their friends, turning their backs on church and school. Yes, he’d been the one to set things in motion, but he’d never expected his parents to give up so easily. Except hadn’t they done just that the day Sierra died?

Frowning, Luna shook her head. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I only heard the rumors. I didn’t get out much the first couple of years after the accident.”

Though after graduation she’d come to see him, visits that for both of them were an escape. “What rumors?”

“That the Gatlins had a lot to do with how bad things got,” she said, and finally,
finally
looked up.

Now he was the one frowning, her words like a bullet in his head, ricocheting and refusing to settle. Damaging. Their food arrived then, the smells of bacon and eggs and pancakes rising in smoky wisps between them. Angelo leaned forward, his wrists against the table’s edge. “Oscar was the one driving. Why would they go after my family?”

Luna unrolled the paper napkin holding her knife and fork. “Sierra was a scholarship student. She didn’t come from
the same social set or tax bracket as the majority of the kids at school. Rumor has it, and Angel, this
is
just rumor, that the Gatlins blamed Sierra for what happened to Oscar because she didn’t belong at St. Thomas. If she hadn’t been there, she and Oscar would never have met.”

“That’s crap,” he said, fumbling with his utensils, the steam from the food nothing compared to that rolling out of his ears. Sierra had earned her place at St. Thomas. She had more right to be there than those who’d paid their way with cash instead of talent. That the Gatlins, that anyone would think otherwise, would blame her when she’d been a passenger, a victim, when she’d been the one who had died…

“Of course it’s crap,” Luna said, the bite of her words tearing into his musings. “But sometimes grieving families can’t accept what happened as an accident. They have to point the finger at someone.”

“You pick up this psychobabble in therapy?” he asked, stabbing his short stack. “A support group? Some self-help book?”

She shook her head, using her fork to split a biscuit and butter it. “When I was in the hospital, and even after I was home and confined to bed, I had a lot of visitors. And did a lot of listening. I guess people would think I was sleeping, or too drugged up to hear their whispers, or even too young to understand the subtext of their conversations.”

“But you weren’t any of those things.” She’d always been bright, observant, and she knew people. Knew how to read them, how to manage them. Look what she’d done to him since he’d arrived. Here he was, still wanting to be angry with her, yet sharing a meal, having a conversation. Sounding a lot like they were on the same side. Like eight years of silence didn’t exist between them. That kiss…

“I don’t know,” she said, dragging a bite of biscuit through a syrup pool. “I slept a lot.”

He looked up, watched her smile as she pulled her fork from her mouth. She continued to smile as she chewed, and he shook his head, returning his gaze to his food, but not before it caught on her hand, where she held her fork. He grabbed for the distraction, because her smile was getting in the way of this being breakfast and nothing more.

Nodding toward her knuckles, he asked, “What’s with the scars? Those aren’t from the accident, are they?”

Having set down her fork, she held her hands in front of her, turned them palms up, then palms down, rubbing at a ribbon of red skin over the knuckle of her index finger with the thumb of her other hand. “They’re from my weaving.”

“They look more like they came from a brawl.”

Her smile softened, as if her thoughts pleased her. “If you mean have I done my share of brawling with scissors and thread and my occasionally recalcitrant loom, then yes. That’s exactly what they are.”

“I wouldn’t have thought working with yarn was as dangerous as working with power tools.” He flexed his own hands, watched the healed strips of his own skin tighten.

“I don’t think it is. I’m just…” She returned one hand to her lap, picked up her fork with the other. “Careless isn’t exactly the right word, but I sometimes get so wrapped up in what I’m doing that I totally zone out. I know that sounds dumb. But weaving for me isn’t the mindless repetitive motion you might think.”

“What is it?” he asked, though he would never have applied the word
mindless
to anything she did. She was too
mindful
of everything.

“Promise not to laugh.”

“Of course not,” he said, earning himself a roll of her eyes.

“My scarves… I don’t know if it’s like this for everyone, but I can’t work until I know what I want them to say.” She paused, and when he didn’t respond, she seemed to grow self-conscious, picking uncomfortably at her food. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Try,” he said, his chest tight with wanting to know more about this part of her.

She breathed deeply and lifted her gaze to his, holding his, as if she needed to know he was fully present before she shared this part of herself. As if she didn’t share it often. Or as if this bit of who she was wasn’t always taken seriously. Paid attention to.

He set down his fork, wiped his mouth, and placed his napkin next to his plate, silent, attentive. Almost like old times, when she’d talked and he’d listened.

“Earlier,” she began, “when I was outside and heard you on the guitar, I remembered listening to your father play. I loved when he did. It was one of the best parts of being at your house. The flamenco music, the fire and the passion. It makes me think of a deep pink, nearly red, rich and lush and full. Like a flower in a dancer’s hair. Or her lipstick. But it’s never red. And it’s not magenta, or a bright neon.

“So pink, and gold. Like the fires that burned in the living room fireplace. Long tongues of gold. The gold of pollen in the center of a hibiscus. A vibrant, living gold. Like that of a spiced peach. To go with the pink. And then I see black. Like a dancer’s shoes. Shiny patent leather. But there’s always a yearning in the songs, so I see indigo, I think. Or a violet-blue. So close to purple, but never purple. And yearning isn’t all
of it. There’s happiness. I’m happy hearing the music. Your father is happy playing. That’s pure orange.

“When I have the whole story in my head, the song, the laughter, the dancer’s skirts flying and the intensity I see on her face, when I have all those colors, I look at the yarn I have to choose from. You should
see
all the yarn I have to choose from. I’ll have to show you.…” The sentence trailed, and she found another path back to her tale. “I lay out the skeins, decide which color is the theme. The color the rest have to support and complement without overwhelming.

“Then I start. And I play music while I work. And I forget everything else but telling the story. I see the dancer and hear the guitar and know just when to switch threads. And I reach for the scissors and forget I moved them and manage to slide my knuckle along the blade. And that is why my hands look like they do, and why weaving the Luna Meadows way is to be avoided at all costs.” And that was it. The end. She reached for her juice, took a long swallow, sat back, and sighed.

He didn’t know what to say. The way she felt about her work, her art… He’d never felt any of that zeal, that involvement, that sort of attachment to what he created. She was an artist. He was a craftsman, and until now he’d been fine with that. It had served his father well. He’d thought all this time he’d been served, too. And maybe he had been. But something inside of him wondered what it meant to be consumed the way Luna was consumed. To live and breathe and know nothing else.

That sort of passion… “How does the kiss play into that?”

Frowning, she picked up her fork, avoiding his gaze as she asked, “The kiss?”

She was trying to play it cool. She was doing a terrible job. Color darkened the skin over her cheekbones, bloomed in the hollow of her throat.

“You heard the music. You came inside. You kissed me.” He finished off his coffee, shrugged. “I figure that’s part of the story.” Because it wouldn’t make sense for it to be anything else. He didn’t want it to be anything else. Anything else would get in the way, and so he waited, needing her to slip a knife through the cord choking him and set him free.

She looked down at her plate, her hands still, her hair a dark canvas behind her shoulders and neck. “I hated seeing you looking so sad. I know this can’t be easy, being here, all the memories. I wanted to give you what comfort I could.”

“So it wasn’t about the story,” he said, struggling to breathe. “You just wanted to kiss me.”

“Yes, okay.” Her head snapped up. “I wanted to kiss you. And it was equally clear that you wanted to kiss me.”

He shifted in his seat, braced his forearms against the table, and leaned forward, his voice low, his words fiery. “I’ve wanted to kiss you since I walked into the kitchen and found you climbing down from the chair.”

“What?” The word came out husky, almost a whisper, disbelieving and uncertain.

“I’ve wanted to kiss you since I walked into the kitchen—”

“I heard you,” she said, shoving at her plate and knocking it against her coffee cup, grabbing that before it spilled, her hand shaking.

He gave her a moment, savoring it. He wanted her off balance, wanted to jar loose the secrets she held. Then he came back with, “What? You’re not going to admit that you’ve wanted to kiss me just as long?”

Her chest rose and fell, the color on her face deepening. “What good would it do either of us for me to tell you that?”