Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [96]
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“Oh, God.” She was shaking. “We’re building a house up on the ridge and the plumber needed a light….” She pointed to the pegboard behind him. He turned and automatically plucked the light down for her. The orange cord was tangled with a black cord and he began shaking them apart. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Red and I. We’re married, you know.”
“No. I didn’t know.” He looked up from the cords. “How would I know that? Married?”
“For two years now.”
“No shit?” He started coiling loops of cord around his elbow and the crook of his hand. “You married that fat old guy?”
“And what fat old guy would that be?”
Lewis flinched as if shocked by the cords he held. Red Ray stood behind Libby, framed in the door.
“You!” Lewis yelled. “You fat old guy!”
The air crackled with three-way glances, swaying crazily between hostility and joy. Then Red stepped forward, hand extended in welcome.
AS SOON as the initial trauma subsided, Libby found herself serenely indifferent to Lewis, for which she liked herself enormously. She didn’t begrudge Red his obvious elation, either. Red had mourned Lewis so often in the last few years, growing suddenly pensive with thoughts, not of Lewis’s misbehavior—dumping Libby, punching Red, abandoning his job—but of his own blunders. “By continuing to sponsor him after I’d started seeing you,” he told Libby often, “I betrayed his confidence.”
They delivered the light to the plumber; then Red took Lewis on his evening rounds while Libby napped. When they returned, Lewis came in for coffee but refused Red’s dinner invitation.
“No, n-no, that’s okay,” he stuttered before leaving. “I’ll call you soon.”
Once the Fairlane vanished down the roadway, Red had turned to Libby and looked so pleased, so bright in the face, she was almost happy Lewis had come.
After dinner, she put in a load of laundry and was surprised to find Red lying in the dark on their bed, staring at the ceiling. She curled up next to him.
He stroked her hair. “Was having Lewis here upsetting to you?” he asked.
“I didn’t rush off to kill the fatted calf, but I’m glad he came. You seemed so happy to see him.”
“I am happy, and a little relieved, too.”
“Then it’s worth it,” she said.
Red searched her face in the dim light. “If it’s all right with you, I’m thinking I might ask him to help out at the house. Just until we replace John.”
The former house manager, acting out his version of tough love, had driven a nineteen-year-old to Happy Yolanda’s. “You don’t like sobriety?” he asked. “Then drink. Right now. Here’s a twenty.” The kid had gotten out of the car and called his parents, who promptly sued Round Rock for reckless endangerment; John’s dismissal was part of the settlement. Since then, Red had brought in a series of interns from the Ventura College counselor-training program, but nobody, so far, he wanted to hire on a permanent basis.
“Would Lewis even be interested?” Libby asked.
“Said he needed a summer job.”
“It’s kind of a shame,” she said. “Here these guys go to school to be professional counselors, and you want to give the job to somebody without any training.”
“Yeah, but these damn interns all go straight from recovery houses into the training program. It gets so airless and cultish. At least Lewis has been slugging it out in the real world.”
“But, honey …” Libby snuggled into his neck. “You went to work in recovery right after you got sober.”
“And look what I did. I hid. Took me over ten years to pull my head out of the sand—and I never would’ve if I hadn’t met you.” He nipped her ear. “I wish I’d gotten out there like Lewis has.”
“What? As a student? You give him too much credit. But I don’t care, go ahead and hire him if you think that’s best.”
Red kissed her eyebrow. “Only if you’re okay with it.”
She mentally tested images of Lewis to gauge her own response—his curly hair and long limbs, his porous, sandy skin—and found no residual longing or even interest, except perhaps for the way laughter could