Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [111]
“Sorry.” Libby stuffed the teeny garments into their shopping bags. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
Billie gave a broad, backhanded wave, as if to sweep Libby and all the baby clothes out of the house.
Putting the baby presents in the trunk, Libby saw that the Mercedes had a flat tire. She didn’t want to go back inside, so she started trying to change it herself. She had to stand on the tire iron to get the first bolt off, which seemed exactly like something the doctor told her not to do. She was about to start walking home when Billie’s foreman, Rogelio, arrived and took over.
Later that afternoon, she called and got Billie’s answering machine. “Sorry if my asking about Little Bill upset you. I was so happy to see you—and all those amazing gifts, oh my God! I just wasn’t thinking very clearly.”
She didn’t hear back, and told Red about it that evening. “She’s just so changeable. A fortune in baby clothes one minute, a face full of mud the next.”
“You and I both need a vacation,” Red said. “Now that the house is almost done, and the farm’s running smoothly”—he knocked the pine table—“let’s get away. God knows when we’ll have another chance once this baby pokes her head out.”
YVETTE called and offered them three days in mid-August at the Ahwanee Hotel in Yosemite. She and her husband always reserved these dates, but this year they were going to Greece instead. If Libby and Red didn’t mind paying $160 a night, they could have the room.
“Did Red tell you we were thinking about a vacation?” Libby asked her.
“No. I haven’t spoken to him lately. We just thought you two might be interested.”
Red didn’t care how much it cost. Summertime reservations at the Ahwanee, he said, were impossible to get, so this was a real coup.
“Did you and Yvette go there every year?” Libby asked.
“No, I never stayed at the Ahwanee with Yvette. Must be a Bob thing.”
Libby called Yvette to accept the offer. When Red took the phone to thank his ex-wife, he became monosyllabic and grunty, as he always did when he spoke to her, and signed off quickly.
“I can’t imagine the two of you together,” Libby said.
“She reigned and I obeyed,” Red said, “except when I vanished for three days at a stretch. Our marriage was a kind of drunken opera.”
“It’s even harder to imagine you drunk.”
“I was a merry drunk—up to a point. After that, you don’t want to know.”
LIBBY was pulled from sleep by a low, focused growling: a song, it seemed, of pure evil. She opened her eyes to see, inches from her face, bared teeth and a lip snagged over a curved yellow incisor. Her scream, taking root somewhere near the base of her spine, tore through her body and emerged with such force and volume that, instantaneously, the beast vanished and Lewis and Red materialized in its place.
“A huge, wild dog,” Libby rasped. Her throat would be raw for a week.
“It’s only Gustave. He’s adopted us.” Lewis was trying not to laugh. “He’s not wild, just not highly socialized. But he’s harmless. Sorta like everyone else I know.”
“Guess what?” said Libby, “I don’t find it funny.”
“Gustave’s okay,” Red said.
“You didn’t see him snarling.”
“He doesn’t mean any harm,” Lewis said. “That’s how he makes friends.”
“I’ll show him how I make friends,” Libby muttered. “I’ll drive him straight to the pound.”
“Good luck getting him in the car.” Lewis turned and walked out the door.
Libby gazed up at Red: snarling dog replaced by frowning husband.
“You really don’t cut Lewis any slack,” he said.
“So?”
“He’s obviously lonely up here. He likes that dog.”
“Nobody forced him to take the job.” Libby pulled herself into a proper seated position. She remembered the dog chasing her car a few times and had assumed it belonged to the junkyard down the road. She didn’t know he was the new farm mascot.
Red reached forward, brushed his fingers over the top of her ear. “Lewis is doing me a big favor,” he said. “And he was over here in a second when you screamed. He’s trying, Libby.”
“Well, he can keep trying.”
“You know, he washed all the