Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [97]
“I won’t want to see him socially,” she said.
“That makes sense.” Red rocked her in his arms.
“And don’t be disappointed if he turns you down. You know Lewis. He does what he wants to do when he wants to do it.”
Libby stood and started taking off her clothes. Red was on his back again, staring at the ceiling. Libby felt a wee lurch and turned on the light. “You already offered him the job, didn’t you?” Rage was quickly making her head feel curiously weightless and hot.
Red, wincing, covered his eyes with his hands.
ALL THE way back to Los Angeles, in those stretches where he forgot to calculate just where in the air Lydia might be, Lewis would think about his visit to Round Rock, laugh, and hit his palm on the steering wheel. Red and Libby—married! He’d never considered their alliance as anything more than a bomb in his own life. Red, he always assumed, had stepped in as a form of chivalry—a way of saying “Enough!” to Lewis—and Libby had allowed it for temporary protection. That they might still be together had never occurred to Lewis; he’d never thought it through that far. And yet Libby had slid into his former job! That made Round Rock a real mom-’n’-pop operation, especially now that she was pregnant. Pregnant. He could see the baby: Red’s shrimp-pink skin, Libby’s droll, round eyes. And as if all those bungalows weren’t enough, they were building a house on ranch property. A sprawling, one-story new home strung out over the top of a high ridge, each room equipped with a lordly view of the realms. Well.
Lewis came home to six messages, surely one of them from Lydia. He listened as he threw open the windows. The first four were from Barbara: thanking him for speaking, asking him out to dinner, saying they were leaving for the restaurant, saying they were home and where was he, anyway? The fifth message was from his sponsor, Harry, who was in Cuba making a film. “Called to hear how the speaking went….”
It seemed as if five years had passed since he’d stood at that podium.
The last message said, “Hey, Lewis. This is David, David Ibañez. Just wanted to see if you got home all right, and to thank you for driving me up here today. Let’s see … I hope you’re doing okay with the girlfriend stuff. Call if you want to talk about it some more. Guess I’ll be up here for a while. Thanks again for the ride, and the company. If you feel like it, give a shout.”
It wasn’t too late—nine-fifteen—so Lewis called back. “Things worked out pretty well,” he said. “My old sponsor actually offered me a job at Round Rock.”
“What kind of job?” said David.
“House manager. It’s a live-in position. You keep an eye on things, make sure nobody’s chipping. Not anything I’d be good at or even interested in. But it was flattering he asked. It means, like, everything’s forgiven.”
“But there really is a job?” said David.
“A couple jobs, in fact. Red fired the house manager, and then the cook’s mom had a stroke and he’s leaving too.”
“And you’re sure you’re not interested?”
“Nah,” said Lewis. “I want a summer job, but I have to finish my dissertation. All those needy newcomers? Couldn’t do it. The cook job I might have considered. Cooking’s fun, and there’s not so much truck with the inmates.”
“If you’re seriously not interested in the house manager job,” David said, “I might be.”
“You?” Lewis never would’ve thought someone with David’s exotic, arcane background would consider working at a remote drunk farm. “What about the pain clinic?”
“I need to make a change,” said David. “And I could use a break from chronic pain. And sooner or later, I’ve got to stop working for the woman I’m sleeping with.” He exhaled loudly in almost a sigh. “Mostly, I’m just dying to move back to the valley. My uncle’s old, the place is changing; it’ll be housing developments and strip malls in ten years. And I like working in recovery. I did it for two years in