Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [134]
“Me?” Lewis said to Libby. “You want me there?”
“Yes, I do.”
Dearest Red, It’s over eight months now. The cerclage was removed yesterday and any time, the doctor says, we can have a healthy baby. I have a monitor now—it’s for a baby, but it’s also wired to Lewis’s house, so I can be alone here for the night without worrying that I’ll be too whacked out to remember anyone’s number.
I can’t tell you how glorious it is to walk outside. I’ve been so bored in this bed all these large, long days. I think I have missed you with every cell in my body, one by one. I have cried my weight in tears—certainly in tears and also, probably, in phlegm. (Why is it nobody ever talks about that part of weeping?)
WHEN Lewis returned from the successful defense of his dissertation, he and David spent the rest of the afternoon teaching Gustave not to run at cars. Libby watched from her back stoop. David had Gustave on a heavy-duty retractable leash. Lewis would peel out with all the provocation his Fairlane could muster and when Gustave leapt, David yelled “No!,” threw on the lock, and pulled as if he were setting the hook in an eighty-pound yellowfin. “Sit!” he thundered.
Gustave sat, and David rewarded him with a hunk of hamburger. Gustave remained sitting, shivering madly. Lewis backed up, over and over. Again and again he hit the gas. Gustave was a fast learner: after four leaps, he sat through every kind of fishtail or popped gear. Enough hamburger, thought Libby, and that dog could learn English.
Next, Lewis switched to the Mercedes, and then to David’s Land Cruiser. Poor Gustave, unleashed, quaking in all his subdued instincts, allowed the vehicles to pass without incident.
Lewis gave the dog’s head a jubilant, thorough scratching. “He really should’ve won Best Dog at obedience school, and not just Most Improved.”
Libby clapped, and Gustave ran free for the first time since the day Red died.
Okay Red, now this. Lewis says, since he’s finished his dissertation, he has to have a big project, one that will keep him going. He’s going to write a novel. A novel for our entertainment. Starring him, he says (big surprise). But we can all have supporting roles (such largesse). I promised I’d read through my journals for the juicy bits. He already wrote the prologue and read it to David and me last night. We laughed at every sentence; it’s all about the Santa Bernita Valley, and the oddballs who live here. He makes some stuff up about people—he made Yolanda into a nun! And you, it includes you, baby. You’re there, you and this crazy drunk farm.
JOURNAL in hand, Libby knocked on Lewis’s door. “You can’t believe how good it is to walk again. Even though I’ve metamorphosed into an elephant.”
Lewis wasn’t expecting company. Clothes were clumped everywhere, stacks of papers listed, dust bunnies drifted over the floor. “Sorry it’s such a mess,” he said.
“Looks like a bachelor pad, Lewis. Do you want me to send my housekeeper over?”
“No. Thanks anyway. The inability to take care of myself is one of the few things I have left to attract a woman.”
“Attracting women has never been your problem, Lewis,” Libby said flatly, and pulled out a chair at the dinette. The pile of papers on the chair slid onto the floor. Libby looked on helplessly as Lewis gathered them up. “So,” she said, “is there, uh, one particular woman for whom you’re setting this irresistible bait?”
“No, not really,” he said, straightening the papers. “Sometimes I think about Phyllis.”
“Not the masseuse? Now, she’s a kick in the head,” said Libby. “So funny. But tough.”
“Yeah,” said Lewis. “She fed her ex-husband ant poison.”
“My God! Did he get sick?”
“That’s exactly what I asked. Shit, yeah, he got sick.