Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [78]
“Does she want him back?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Does he want her back?” asked Perrin.
“If so, he hasn’t said anything about it.”
“You sleeping with her?”
“No.”
“You proposed marriage yet?”
“Of course not.”
“What the hell have you done that’s so goddamn momentous?”
“Kissed.”
“Kissed?”
“And agreed to something, I suppose.”
“Agreed to what, exactly?”
Red winced at the thought of describing what was still unspoken with Libby. “To try … I don’t know … to love each other.”
“Ahh. And it’s gotta be this kid’s ex-girlfriend?”
Miserable, staring at the ground, Red couldn’t deny it.
“Congratulations,” Perrin said. “I been waiting ten, eleven years for you to become human. Hallelujah! Welcome to life, in all its messy, tangled splendor.” The old doctor threw a bony arm across Red’s back and planted a sloppy kiss on Red’s cheek.
“Feh,” said Red. After all these long, lonely years, why was everyone kissing him now?
SUMMER mustered a final blast, vanquishing the early autumn chill with a heatwave of almost unendurable dryness and clarity. The air trembled like a dog trying to behave. Heat ignited the aroma of sage in the chaparral, the spicy, slightly rotten citrus dust in the orchards. Throughout the valley, people complained of bad sinuses, itchy eyes, and extended sneezing attacks.
David Ibañez was in town again, staying with his uncle. Both he and Rafael suffered from terrible hay fever and nursed cups of a naturally decongesting tea made from the mahuang plant, brewing more tea for anyone else who needed some. David had brought the mahuang seeds from an herbalist in Shanghai, and Rafael kept a good crop of the low, scrubby bush in his yard at all times. He said it was the best hay fever treatment he knew, and whenever Santa Ana weather kicked in, he was the most popular man in the valley.
David’s aunt Gloria was actually fond of this dry weather, since it reminded her of meeting Rafael. She was fifteen and living in L.A., in Lincoln Heights, when she’d fallen in love with an older man. After her sisters saw this man with another woman, her parents forbade her ever to speak to him again. Heartbroken, she couldn’t get out of bed, and wept for weeks, until her parents finally sent her to the country, to her aunt’s house on the Sally Morrot ranch. Rafael Flores lived in the next bungalow. He was eighteen, and no muy feo, said Gloria; but it was summer and there were Santa Anas, as now, and he was sneezing day and night. He sounded, she said, like a drowning man crying for help. And she could hear him snoring all night long. Although everyone was hoping the two of them would fall in love, Gloria said that wouldn’t happen until chickens could fly and vests grow sleeves. “But then,” she said, “it rained—in the middle of August, if you can believe it!—and Rafael stopped sneezing and he stopped snoring, and when I lay in bed at night, the world seemed far too silent and empty.”
LEWIS woke in the mornings with a sore throat, his aching face tender to the touch. Yet he was champing to get to work, continue the long slow crawl back into Red’s good graces. In a sense, it was a relief to have relinquished the favored-son status and all its attendant pressures. Red was holding back—no more meals together, no more late-night chats—until the inventory materialized, and who could blame him? Lewis himself knew it was a crap shoot.
First of all, Lewis had trouble with the categories: Fears, Resentments, Money, Sex, and Secrets had too much overlap. Working at Karmachanics, for example, he’d changed spark-plug wires and charged for engine work—did that fall under Secrets or Money? The majority of his Secrets also could be listed under Sex. It was all too confusing! Then, when he sat down to write, all he truly confronted was throbbing sinuses.
THE WINDS started up and blew all night. Old limbs fell from trees, and thousands of ripe grapefruit bounced on the ground, a ponderous, yellow hail. In front of the Blue House, fronds hurtled like kamikaze pilots from the sixty-foot palms. By day,