Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [7]
—Boy’s going to die a bachelor, she said at breakfast.
—I’m not a boy.
—Just my point.
Though Marcos, twenty-five now, had circled through liaisons with a couple of women he’d met on the show circuit—easy-in, easy-out affairs—he couldn’t fairly contradict her. He dropped into Franny’s diner because it happened to be next door to the bootery where he’d done the last of his grunts, as he called them. And, too, because he had noticed a waitress here the last time he was in town.
He ordered pecan pie and sugared coffee after coffee while watching her. Thin, even skinny, Franny moved with the fluid gestures of a dancer. Her lips were drawn into a benign pout, her nose and prominent cheeks were mildly freckled. She had rings on most of her fingers. Azure, her eyes were filled with light around the irises and rimmed by a fine line of black—eyes that reminded him of exquisite markings he’d seen on butterflies, so perfect as to seem counterfeit. Over the course of an hour he found himself infatuated.
—You keep drinking all that coffee and eating all that sugar, you’ll be able to float home, she said when Marcos ordered yet another piece of pie.
He laughed.—Franny’s a curious name, he said, reading her embroidered blouse.
—What name isn’t?
—Marcos, for one.
—Unless you live in Paris.
—There must be plenty of Marcoses in Paris, Texas.
Small talk, but it went on for an hour beyond Franny’s shift, the two having left to stroll around the plaza. Marcos surprised himself by inviting her out to Nambé, and she surprised herself by accepting. He offered Franny a ride home, and though she declined—she didn’t want him to see where she lived, her room outfitted with a plywood-on-cinderblock bed, a wobbly pine table and chair, a tarnished mirror edged with masking tape, and little more—she shook his hand as if they’d been friends for years.
Next Saturday afternoon he picked her up in front of the Palace of the Governors. The day was gusty and promised rain. As they drove up out of Santa Fe valley toward the pueblolands to the north, Marcos asked Franny to tell him more about herself, where she came from, what she wanted to do one day. And Franny obliged him with all the ingenuities Mary could convene.
She felt no guilt over telling deceptive stories, having had good reason to fabricate Franny, just as her father had his for not pressing Gallup authorities to search for his runaway daughter. She’d been legally of age, almost. Let her go if that’s her game, was his philosophy. He’d had enough of their battles, enough of trying to discipline his daughter. God bless and good riddance. Mary could almost hear him intoning to wife, children, any neighbor who would listen,—She had her eye on the horizon from day one, but she’ll find out the hard way, and when she does, she can come limping back home to see whether the door’s open or locked.
Well, she thought, he could keep his door and the prison that went with it.
—I was an only daughter, she lied to Marcos. Brought up by her mother, since her father was a career military man who spent years at a time on duty overseas. Served in the Gulf War. Her mother was some kind of mathematician at Princeton, an important one, so far as mathematicians could be important.
—They can, believe me. Marcos nodded his head toward the mountains where Los Alamos sparkled in the buttes beneath Redondo. —My mother knows a few of them up there on the Hill who’ve had a hand in changing the way the world works. Where’s your father stationed now?
—He died.
—I’m sorry, Marcos said as they drove past Camel Rock. Out the window he could see it was storming over Quemazón and Caballo to the north. Broom rain fell at an angle from a blueblack thunderhead. —Typical New Mexico weather, clouded on one horizon and sunny on the other.
The death of her father, she did admit, seemed weirdly abstract to her, like a series of numbers and symbols in one of her mother’s books, because she hardly knew the man, given his perennial absence. Marcos hadn’t asked, but she