Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [80]
The boys charged off the edge of the pool, gleaming bellies white as those of frogs. I did not jump up and wave at my grandfather. I did not want to leave that lawn chair, ever. It wasn’t just the considerable fear of telling him about Steve, which, by extension would be a statement that I’d actually had sex with a man and was continuing to do so. Even though I had barely left the grounds of the Academy, I realized there in those hothouse corridors, I had finally seized on a clear identity, and in that clarity was liberation. I was free to fall in love, to make mistakes, be harangued and harassed, but they never shut me down. Just the sight of my grandfather threatened my new pride in being Ana; I knew he would turn my achievements into competition with him. Already I was looking back on new agent training as a bright moment of independence, in whose light I was able to shine because I had been on the other side of the country, away from Poppy.
There was a kamikaze scream and tepid water rained on my sandals. You did not just enter Poppy’s world. You surrendered to it. I forced myself out of the chair and headed for the pool gate.
“No running,” I told the boys.
I knocked. The curtain peeled back and there was the man who had raised me, not giving anything to the steamy morning light but a glimpse of grizzled cheekbone and a shank of nose, squinting between the brown folds of fabric like the beat cop he had been forty years ago, cagey as ever.
But then the door opened wide and the sun found his quick blue eyes.
“Annie!” He grinned and crooked an elbow around my neck, pulling me close. His leathery skin smelled of barbershop spice.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Goddamn airlines” was his reply.
The door swung shut. He had not turned on the lights, and the suitcase sat unopened on a shiny quilted bedspread the color of ripe cherries. It occurred to me I had never been in a hotel room with my grandfather.
“Want some ice?”
“What for? It’s cold as a witch’s tit in here.”
“Poppy. Don’t. That kind of talk exploits women,” I announced crisply.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It didn’t matter; I liked the sound of my brave new voice. I had endured. I was almost an FBI agent. I could make pronouncements now.
“You sure you don’t want something from the soda machine?”
“What’s the hurry? Take a load off.”
I plunked down on the bed. The frame wobbled like Jell-O, dipping me up and down as Poppy unpacked the old suitcase that had belonged to my mother, Gwen. It matched a makeup case she used to own, “a train case,” they called it, with unfolding trays that would rise up and present their treasures as you opened the lid. She died of liver cancer when I was fourteen. My father was an immigrant from El Salvador, a man I barely knew. I remember my mom as a passive and defeated person, but she must have had moxie to fall in love with a brown-skinned man in the 1960s. It would be years before I understood the circumstances under which my father, Miguel Sanchez, disappeared.
At a moment like this, you crave completion—parents, aunts and uncles and cousins, noisy and embarrassing, to shower you with affirmation and envy. Steve had a ton of family coming down from West Virginia; it was unsettling to be in that ice-cold motel room with Poppy, alone.
“So,” I asked him, “any words of wisdom as I go out into the big bad world?”
He considered. “My father always told me, ‘Wear a rubber.’”
“Nice.”
“What’s the matter?” he teased. “Does that exploit women, too?”
Just outside the window was a poisonous-looking tree with ugly hanging clusters of lavender blossoms and long green pods—something that belonged in a swamp, something out of