Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [126]
“Then, when her trailer burned down, Libby moved in with us. And where were you then, oh friend of friends?”
Lewis considered this a rhetorical question.
Billie rolled on. “Red was over every night, of course. They were up there in her room doing some kind of weird no-sex routine. They must have worked it out eventually—she got pregnant, didn’t she?—although there’s no telling who the father really is….”
She backed off a few paces. “I gave her a wedding shower. I bought her the suit she wore at her wedding. Two thousand bucks worth of Jil Sander. I was her maid of honor. And what does she do? She takes up with the person who ruined my life.”
Lewis was halfway through a full-body surge of guilt when he realized Billie couldn’t possibly be talking about him.
SINCE taking on more administrative tasks, David Ibañez had fashioned a small office in what was once an old sunporch on the first floor of the Blue House. Lewis found him there scheduling speakers and panels for the AA meetings.
“Hey, Lewis,” he said, glancing down at the open datebook on his blotter. “Want to lead the meeting tomorrow night?”
“Maybe.” Lewis paused. “Look, I went to see Billie Fitzgerald.”
David looked down at his calendar, then up at Lewis. His face was still as glass.
“She won’t have anything to do with Libby unless you leave.”
“I was afraid it would be something like that.” David closed his eyes. “What do you think? Should I go?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
They listened to the small air conditioner laboring in a window.
“I left this valley for twenty years,” David said, “against my will. To humor her. I had that health scare recently, and realized I had to change some things. When this job came up, I really—”
“You don’t need to explain anything to me,” Lewis said. “But Libby has to be told.”
David scratched his pen on the blotter, drawing a craggy rock formation or febrile heartbeat.
“Right away,” Lewis added.
“Okay.” David slowly closed his appointment book. “Will you come with me?”
LIBBY was in bed, reading a parents’ magazine. Gustave was on the rug next to her, tied to the bedpost, when Lewis and David filed into the room. “Uh-oh,” she said.
“Well,” David said, “there is something I need to tell you.”
She turned to Lewis, scanning his face. He nodded: she could handle whatever was coming.
“What is it?” she said.
“Bill Fitzgerald?” said David. “I guess you call him Little Bill?”
Libby’s hands went instinctively to her belly, as if the news might be perilous to her pregnancy. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” David said. “He’s my son.”
LEWIS had heard parts of this story before, from David. But what he hadn’t heard riding up in the car from L.A., was that Billie Fitzgerald also attended Sally Morrot’s Thursday-night dinners, and that she often showed up in the groves those evenings when David was walking the irrigation lines with Sally.
Billie was called Mina then, short for Wilhelmina. She wasn’t one of Sally’s charity cases, of course, and in fact seemed to have formed a voluntary attachment to the old woman, and clearly admired her style and respected her half-baked utopian discourse. Mina even dressed like Sally, same muddy boots and jaunty hoe.
One night, after they walked Sally back to the mansion, Mina drew David into the trees and kissed him with her mouth open. For the next three years, they met secretly in the groves and hills during the summer. During the school year in Ojai, where they went to different private academies, they met discreetly on trails and in the stables at Mina’s school. They had to be careful. For all her free thinking, Sally Morrot never would have condoned David’s incursion into her elite corner of the social fabric. And David’s uncle Rafael, who knew without being told of his nephew’s involvement with Mina, warned him: “Watch yourself, mijo. El Cuarto kills for less”—El Cuarto being Mina’s father, William Fitzgerald IV.
“Old Bill,” said Libby.
“Yes,” David said.
Sally passed away midway through David’s senior year, when he and Mina were living together in San Francisco. He was at Cal, she a junior