Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [108]
“Leave me a note saying what needs to be done. ‘Stain woodwork.’ ‘Spade garden.’ Or leave the punch list. I’ll go up to the house every week until …” He tried to think of a reasonable length of time. “Until it’s done.”
Libby brushed off her hands, flicked chocolate crumbs from her sweatshirt, and hazarded a look his way. It was true: her eyes couldn’t rest on him. “It’s hard to say if that would change anything,” she said.
“I’d like to try, anyhow,” Lewis said. “A shot in the dark.”
Back at his car, the right front tire was so low, it was almost flat. When he opened the trunk, he remembered he had no spare. In town, he filled the low tire, but couldn’t get it fixed because Fritz’s Texaco, the only gas station, was closed. He could risk the drive and make the last half of the Nightcrawler meeting, but a flat on the freeway would be expensive. He went instead to Round Rock and lay down in his bungalow until the phone rang. “You are home,” said David Ibañez. “Come play softball. The Doodads are low on men.”
“I’m not up to it,” Lewis said, “and I’m a Shithead anyway.” He spent the rest of the day in bed.
LETTUCE, David explained, contains a faint opiate; his mother and aunts used to make a tea from the leaves to soothe their restive babies. If Libby was having trouble sleeping, she might try some. If she needed something stronger, he told her, throw in two tablespoons of poppy seeds.
Libby obeyed this advice and had her first good night’s sleep in weeks. Try as she might to see things from Billie’s point of view, David did not seem, finally, a con artist. He was too soft-spoken, thoughtful.
She had conducted her own investigation. “So, you worked with cancer patients in Tijuana?” she asked when he came to the office to read client files.
“Not specifically,” he said. “Only those with chronic pain. I worked with one woman who had terrible joint pain after chemotherapy, and a man who had a tumor in his neck—benign, actually—that caused obliterating headaches. So, I haven’t had much experience with cancer, no.”
“If you have any bright ideas to see me through this thing I’ve gotten myself into, please”—Libby drummed fingers on her belly—“let me know. It seems like everybody I meet has a new horror story of an eighty-hour labor.”
“I’m no expert on childbirth,” David said. “I’ve only attended one birth, in New Mexico, and the only thing I remember is that the father cooked the placenta and gave a tidbit to everyone present. It was no worse than other organ meats. A bit chewier, maybe.”
Libby clapped her hand over her mouth, spoke through her fingers. “We won’t be having my placenta for lunch.”
“No?” He smiled. “I do know, though, that the general principles for pain management apply to labor. So much of pain is resistance to pain—you know, what they teach you at Lamaze.”
“When in doubt, hyperventilate?”
Red came in as David left, and Libby made the big concession: “He’s pretty nice.”
“David? Yeah, he’s working out really well.”
How had she ever found, much less married, a man who didn’t gloat?
THE NEW house was locked up tight. No note. No punch list. The roof had gone on, so Lewis walked around the site picking up scraps of roofing felt and broken cedar shingles. Also, the drywallers had evidently made great sport sailing odd pieces of sheetrock out of windows. He picked up these scraps, too, and kicked at the chalky stains in the pink dirt, a precise expression of the dejection he felt for this lonely, thankless task he’d assigned himself.
Red, arriving around nine, was surprised to find him there. No, Libby hadn’t mentioned anything about Lewis working at the house. “But this is great,” Red said. “I wasn’t looking forward to being by myself.” They stained window and door casings and applied coats of urethane. Red grew talkative and reminisced, describing Round Rock in its first years, when only six or eight guys rattled around in the mansion. “Doc Perrin or somebody from Social Model Detox was over almost