Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [85]
That unexpected protectiveness again. “Lewis doesn’t mean any harm. Not really.”
“You’re defending him! After how he treated you? That’s sick, if you ask me. You dump Red and go back to him, I’ll kill you.”
“I’d kill myself first.”
Trying to sleep, Libby couldn’t stop thinking about Lewis, naked, striding through the woods, elusive as wildlife. She felt the old tug his elusiveness engendered. She recalled how he stared at her during sex so that small leaping sensations started up in her stomach and heart; and the expert, authoritative way he handled her body. Only then what? A cup of coffee, a shared cigarette, and back to their separate worlds until his desire—forget hers—built back up.
Insomniac, rehashing these old facts, she realized that this was the reason she and Red weren’t rushing into sex: so her long-legged and saturnine former lover could roam her thoughts a while longer, until she banished him for good. No matter how deeply or urgently she wanted Red, she wasn’t quite done with Mr. Fletcher. What more did she want—a final parting, a solemn handshake? Should the occasion to speak with him arise, she doubted she could even be civil. Nevertheless, part of her waited for him, for something, like an orphan girl sitting on a back stoop staring down an empty road.
ON HIS next visit to town, during one of his evening rambles, David Ibañez would notice the missing bungalow and ask his uncle what happened to it. “Up Howe Lane,” Rafael said.
David walked there through the orchards. The bungalow had belonged to the Rosales family, Octavio and Maria and their four boys; Eduardo, a.k.a. Eddy, had been his great friend. Like David’s parents, the Rosaleses had used their settlement money to move to East Los Angeles. David had seen Eddy a few months ago; he was married with two teenaged daughters and worked as a lineman for Water and Power.
David slipped up to the empty house and hoisted himself onto the porch. There was a bright three-quarters moon, and through a low, gauzy blue mist he could see lights down among the trees and a brightly lit oil well on the far hill across the valley. Though the bungalow’s windows were still boarded up, he could remember the many times he had sat at the rickety wooden table eating beans and grilled corn on the cob and María’s handmade tortillas. Who could have imagined then that the Rosaleses’ small, tidy home would come, as if airlifted, to this hillside well above the valley floor, to be inhabited by a divorced, violin-playing white woman?
RED HAD assumed—even hoped—that the inventory would never materialize and Lewis would essentially fire himself. Yet here he came, at the last possible moment, loping across the roadway, a fan of paper in his hands.
“Thanks,” Lewis said as he came inside. Red didn’t know what Lewis was thanking him for; then again, since the incident with Billie, Lewis had been consistently polite and subdued.
Red nodded at the coffee maker. “Fresh pot of mud.”
Lewis helped himself and took a chair at the end of the table. “Ready to hear this?”
“You want to read it to me?”
“Sure. Hell, I wrote it for you.”
“Let’s have it, then.”
“I’ll start with Fears,” said Lewis.
Red had heard so many inventories that the only thing he still found surprising was the candor of the writers. In addition to the standard fears—death, disease, intimacy—grown men had admitted their mortal dread of crossing bridges or riding escalators; accomplished, intelligent men feared that they were transmitters for space aliens, possessed by devils, or turning into wood, or thin air.
Lewis was afraid he’d start drinking again, that he didn’t deserve sobriety, that some invisible signal had gone out, and no woman would ever again desire him and he’d spend the rest of his life alone. He was afraid Red would fire him.
Red forced a smile and said, “Good secretaries are too hard to find.” He lit a cigarette; the cool air outside drew the smoke through the cracked window in a sinuous white rope. I should tell him now, he thought.
“ ‘I resent my father,