Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [133]
“Take off your T-shirt,” Phyllis said. She moved instinctively to little pockets of stored pain and crunched them with her thumbs until he squirmed and groaned. She lifted his arms and jiggled them.
“Relax,” she said. “Give me all your weight. Let go. Give it up, Lewis, for crying out loud.”
The sun bore down. Phyllis’s hands ranged up and down his spine, quarrying pain with alarming precision. The dogs barked and ran around them faster and faster, their paws thudding, sometimes so close that grass and dirt sprayed the side of Lewis’s face and he felt the near-rasp of a toenail.
Phyllis slowed down, then rested her hands on his back. His body rang. She climbed off, and he pulled himself up to look at her. His arms were wobbly. They gave each other a long look, the kind that usually ends in a kiss. And Lewis meant to reach up, grasp the back of her neck, pull her to him. But he made no move. With Phyllis, he saw, it could go either way, kiss or no kiss. She wore a sly smile. The air itself seemed taut. He liked looking at her sharp, pretty face, those deadpan eyes, the slightly upturned lips. Kissing would break the tension. He held off for a moment, and a moment after that, amazed that anyone could actually stop to consider such things, and then amazed again at how keen and sweet the holding off itself was, as if the anticipation alone had bloomed into some bright, open space.
Abruptly, the dogs threw themselves down, panting, on the grass nearby. Their tongues were pink and very long. Phyllis burst out laughing; then, gazing past Lewis, she pointed. “Look, here’s Ralph, bearing burritos across the park.”
A BAND of contractors had slid into Rito in late summer and built fifteen townhouse condominium units across from the packing plant. The construction crews worked so fast with truckloads of prefabricated products, that a model unit was ready for viewing by early September.
The condos, Libby asserted, proved that Billie Fitzgerald was moving away, because otherwise she would have fought the zoning variance with routine ferocity.
Most of Rito’s inhabitants had never lived in a brand-new place, and some of the women were taken with the air conditioning, wall-to-wall carpets, and dishwashers. When word came that a number of the condos would be leased, and that the management would accept social-service housing vouchers, a contingent from the Mills Hotel walked down to check out the units. They walked home decrying paper-thin walls, windows flimsy as cellophane, tiny toilets. The wall-to-wall, they said, smelled like fish. A few young couples made down payments and moved in, but most of the units remained empty.
At Round Rock, David Ibañez became the new director. He talked Pauline into leaving her pain clinic for consulting work; she would move up in two months. They didn’t yet know where on the farm they’d live, because Libby hadn’t decided which place she’d inhabit after the baby came: the new house on the ridge, her old house on Howe Lane, or Red’s bungalow in the village.
Lewis’s friend Kip became the new house manager. He couldn’t make a living with his acting, he said, and helping drunks recover might beat waiting tables, at least for a while.
The farm’s unwritten no-women rule was broken when David and Libby hired a young woman from the Culinary Institute. Lewis, then, went back to working full-time in the office. After much fine-tuning and fretting, Lewis finally turned in his dissertation the last week of September. Promptly accepting it, his committee wanted to see him for the defense in two weeks’ time.
Libby grew enormous. “Maybe I’m having a pony,” she said. “That would be fine, so long as she’s healthy.” Libby’s face puffed up, her ankles swelled. Turning over, she claimed, was a major endeavor. Barbara came up two weekends in