Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [67]
Then he wanted to gab. “Did you ever notice how the Big Dipper is always up there, hogging the sky? Every time I’ve slept over here, that’s all I see,” he said. “We should build a deck on the back of your house, maybe we’d see some other constellations. You awake?”
She didn’t answer, hoping he’d get the hint.
“I could live here, Libby. I could—if you let me.” A moment later, he was snoring.
She was too tired to think clearly. Maybe she didn’t understand some vital part of the evening. The word “scimitar” drifted into her mind. With a scimitar, she could slay Lewis. Off with his head. Like in those fairy tales where the princess sends her suitors on impossible errands. Harness the four winds. Suck up the Seven Seas. Eat a stableful of beef, including hide, tails, and hooves. Everyone who fails is slain. With a scimitar. She did want to live with Lewis. Maybe. Or slay him with a scimitar. One, the other, or both. No way she could fall asleep.
But she must’ve dozed off, because when she next looked at her watch it was 4:12 and Lewis’s side of the bed was empty. He was in the kitchen, dressed and pacing before the gurgling coffee maker.
“Would it be okay if I don’t go fishing?”
“I wasn’t expecting you to,” she said. “Only hoping.”
“I can’t take Red and Joe together, the whole father-son thing. Red’s so nervous around the kid.”
“I don’t think Red’s coming,” she said.
“Yes he is. He told me yesterday.” Lewis poured a cup of coffee.
Libby sat in a chair. She could go to sleep right here. Or maybe she was asleep. She felt a dry peck on her cheek and the door clicked shut.
At the lake, Libby huddled in her flimsy folding chair. The water was very low. Birds pealed in hunger. Red and Joe were a hundred yards away, slip-stitching the air with their fishing lines. A chilly breeze tempered the sun. A bird flew past like a black, disembodied hand waving across the horizon. Bye, bye, bye, bye.
RED CAME into the office and started picking things up—a geode paperweight, a pamphlet, a pencil sharpener in the shape of an orange—and putting them down. Lewis, updating files on the computer, couldn’t concentrate. “You okay?” he asked.
“Fine, fine.” Red lifted a vase off the mantel, studied its bottom. “So what’s cooking with you and Libby these days?”
Lewis groaned. “What, she been boohooing to you?”
“I was hoping we could all have dinner tonight.”
“I haven’t talked to her for a few days.” Lewis squinted at the ceiling, counting how many. “Four or five days,” he added. “I’m probably in purgatory. She wears me out, Red.”
“Relationships do take a lot of time and energy.”
“I hate that word. And besides, it’s not relationships. It’s Libby. She so damn oversensitive.”
“She’s oversensitive?”
“What, you think I’m oversensitive?”
“You?” Red pretended to think. “Oh, no, never. Not you.”
“Trust me. You should try her out for a few days. You’d see.”
“Why doesn’t that strike me as such a grisly proposition?”
Lewis snorted. “I wish you would take her off my hands. You’d be doing me a big favor. You take Libby and I’ll become the monk.” When Lewis stood, his leg was asleep, and he staggered around the desk. “You’d come crying to me, man.” Lewis yawned. He was at Denny’s last night until past three, then up at seven. He wished Red would leave so he could take a nap, but His Corpulence lowered himself into an armchair and slumped in thought. Lewis straightened stacks of paper, banging the edges against the desktop with percussive glee.
Red glanced at his watch. “Joe’ll be landing any minute.”
“Joe?” said Lewis. “Oh, yeah. Gone, huh?”
“I’m never ready to put him on that plane.”
Red’s sadness was unnerving. Lewis was supposed to be distressed, and Red the steady one. “Hey, Redsy. You want a cup of coffee?”
“I’m about coffee’d out, thanks.”
“You want to, uh, take a walk or something?”
“I thought it’d be good to have dinner with friends, that’s all.”
“Well, all right, already. Why didn’t you say so?” Lewis called Libby at