by Beverly Bird
“Better give me that. It doesn’t match your ensemble.”
Her laughter was as thick and sultry as her voice could get when she was feeling emotional, he realized. Again, it touched him physically, like warm breath on his skin. It was going to be an interesting weekend.
He finally looked down at the purse in his hand. “Oh.”
Ricky laughed again, louder. Dallas handed it over to her.
“Thanks,” she murmured.
“You’re welcome. Your credit cards are all still intact.” Suddenly, his eyes narrowed. “Aren’t they, Sport? No more long-distance calls to those nine hundred numbers?”
“I don’t have any credit cards,” Ellen pointed out softly. He looked at her oddly and she shrugged. “Accumulation,” she reminded him.
“Oh, that’s right. No interest charges, no hefty mortgages. The idea does have merit.” Finally, he became aware of Ricky watching them a little too curiously, a little too avidly. “So how do you want to go about this?” he asked.
She glanced down at her watch. Her wrist was fine boned and narrow. Accumulation notwithstanding, he appreciated the way she dressed for a spring afternoon. She wore azure blue shorts and a matching T-shirt. He got the feeling that she spent more money on clothes than was probably acceptable. He was glad. She had great legs.
He found himself wondering if he would have a chance to give in to his impulse to touch them, too.
He realized that she was talking and that he wasn’t paying the least bit of attention. “I’m sorry. What?”
Ellen felt her heart squirm as his eyes came back up to her own. Ricky. Just keep thinking of Ricky, she told herself. She was doing this for him. She could keep his father at a distance just as long as he didn’t get close enough to touch her again.
Panic fluttered a little in her belly anyway. Panic...and a warm, liquid feeling of anticipation.
She cleared her throat carefully.
“It’s after four o’clock,” she repeated. “I called the park before I left home and they close at four. So I guess there’s nothing we can do but check in at a motel and kill time. Maybe have some dinner somewhere.” She forced a lazy shrug. “We can visit the Bosque site first thing in the morning. Then, if you want, we can head back on Route 60. If we take the interstate north from there, we can stop at the Isleta pueblo and mission.”
“What’s that?” Ricky asked.
“That’s where our People crossed the Rio Grande on the Long Walk,” she told him. She dragged her eyes back to Dallas. “It seems a shame to skip it since we’re all the way out here anyway.” And it would keep them busy, she thought, would keep them focused on Ricky.
Then something inside her spasmed. It would also prolong the weekend, she realized suddenly. But the suggestion was already made and Ricky latched onto it. Dallas was nodding.
“That sounds neat,” Ricky said.
“Okay by me,” Dallas contributed. “What motel? Did you have a place in mind?”
She opened her mouth and shut it again. The study commission was picking up the tab for her room, and being the thrifty, government-funded operation it was, they had probably chosen the cheapest place they could find. But she couldn’t say as much in front of Ricky.
“There’s a place called the El Rancho right up the road.”
“Sounds delightful,” Dallas drawled. “Five star?”
Her mouth tried to kick up into a grin. “Probably more like five roach, but...” She trailed off, trusting he would understand. He did. He nodded.
“Does it have a pool?” Ricky asked.
“Don’t get your hopes up, Sport. Besides, by the time we check in, it’ll be too chilly to swim.”
“We passed a place that had a sign that said there was a pool inside. Can we go back there?”
“Do you want to spend the weekend driving around or do you want to visit some of these places?” Dallas asked. “That motel was all the way back in Albuquerque.”
“Oh.”
Dallas ruffled his hair. “Come on. We’ll make an adventure out of it.” Ricky got back in the car.
“We’ll have to,” Ellen murmured, watching him slip behind the wheel. It was several long moments before she remembered to get into her car as well.
* * *
The El Rancho did have a pool, a small thing perched up on a concrete island in the middle of the parking lot. It had fake palm trees. When Dallas saw them, he let out a bark of laughter.
Ellen tried to shrug, but it turned more into a shiver.
“Cold?” Dallas asked.
When you do that, I feel it inside. She shook her head. “Someone walked over my grave.”
“That’s an Anglo superstition.”
“And I went to college in Albuquerque.”
He seemed to consider this. “Tuition almost demands accumulating money.”
“Not if you’re given a scholarship. And they’re easy to get if you’re Native American. The government is still trying assiduously to educate us, to get us to stop driving around in old, beat-up trucks and pay the banks lots of career-earned money for Cadillacs.”
Her expression had darkened again. He watched it and put two and two together. “The American government is still a source of friction, after all these hundreds of years?”
“Maybe tomorrow you’ll understand. It’s been two hundred years of...well, power plants. They just can’t leave us alone. It still kills them that we’re not like them, and they still feel they have the God-given duty and right to change us, to pull us away from our doctrines because they just can’t understand them.”
He nodded and moved away from his car. “Let’s go check in and see what other awesome amenities we have at our disposal.”
Ricky raced off to inspect the pool, Dallas yelling after him to be careful. They went into the office. She wanted to dislike him for being a snob, but he truly wasn’t. He wasn’t being condescending. He was taking the whole situation with good humor, finding laughter in plastic palm trees.
He gave the desk clerk his credit card and looked down at the key he got in return. “Room eighteen. How about you?”
Ellen finished with her paperwork and dug her key out from beneath it. “Nineteen,” she answered softly. Well, what had she expected? Barbara had made the reservations for both of them, although Dallas was paying for his own room.
“Definitely an adventure,” he murmured.
She gave him a level look. “Ricky will probably think so. He seems easy to entertain.”
He gave that grin again. “So’s his father.”
Ricky burst into the office, sparing her a response. “Hey, Dad, it’s seventy-one degrees.”
“What is?” Dallas pulled his eyes away from her and looked at his son.
“The pool. That’s warm enough to swim.”
“It’s not the pool I’m worried about, Sport. It’s the air temperature.”
“Actually,” Ellen ventured, “if you bundle him up in a towel as soon as he gets out and if he goes right back to your room, he should be okay.”
“Yeah!” Ricky agreed. “You said she was a nurse, Dad. If she thinks it’s okay—”
“On one condition,” Dallas interrupted. “No getting in and out of the water. No diving boards.”
“There isn’t one.”
“Then no slides.”
“Ah, Dad.”
“Take it or leave it. If you go in, you stay in. When you get out, back to the room with you.”
Ricky obviously knew when to negotiate and when he had gotten the best deal he could for himself, Ellen thought. She smiled faintly as he headed back for the door.
Dallas looked at Ellen again. “I’ll run down to that fast-food place and get us something to eat, if you don’t mind staying with him for a little while. Is that okay with you?”
Mind? she thought wildly. “That’s fine.”
Dallas scowled. Why had her voice dropped all of a sudden? Why such evident emotion over a simple favor? But there was no ti
me to wonder. Ricky stuck his nose back in the door.
“Come on, Dad. You’ve got the room key. I want to change into my suit.”
“All right, we’re coming.”
* * *
By the time Dallas got back with hamburgers and fries, Ricky was waterlogged. Ellen was wondering what to do. She sat at the edge of the pool, hugging her knees to her chest, part of her so warm inside, watching Ricky’s little-boy antics. It took great restraint on his part to stay in the water. She was impressed by the way he stood by the deal he had made with his father, even though Dallas was nowhere around.
All the same, his lips were beginning to turn blue and she could see that the tips of his fingers were getting shriveled. She sighed, rubbing her forehead. She didn’t really have the authority to tell him to get out, and she suspected she would have a good fight on her hands if she tried. Still, she was supposed to be the adult supervision around here.
Dallas saved her. Just as she was opening her mouth to make a mild suggestion about going back to the room, his face appeared above the metal fence ringing the patio island.
“Dinner’s on,” he called out.
“Just a few more minutes, Dad.”
“Sure. Take your chances that there’ll be something left. I’m hungry.” He turned back for the room. Ricky bolted out of the pool with no more provocation than that.
Ellen grabbed a couple of the towels they had brought from his room. “Hold up there!” she called out. He stopped dutifully and let her wrap them around him.
She let her touch linger on his small shoulders just a minute. She didn’t mean to. But he was there, he was close and he smelled like chlorine. She ran her hands briskly up and down his arms. For this one small space in time, he was hers to protect again. How was she supposed to do that when she was shadowboxing with a wolfman?
“Two hamburgers gone,” Dallas called out from the room door. “Five to go.”
Ricky pulled away from her and ran.
She followed more slowly, her heart inching up in her throat. The door to room eighteen was wide open. She stopped there without actually stepping inside.
Somehow she was going to have to establish some distance here, she thought again. Things were falling into place too sweetly, too cozily. She’d barely even set foot in her own room yet. She’d only managed to open the door and toss her overnight bag on the chair right inside before Ricky had started calling to her to come to the pool.
Now she surveyed theirs. It was awful. There were two double beds with bright turquoise spreads. The carpet was burnt orange, a shag style that was so passé she could scarcely remember it. She supposed management had been trying for a southwestern effect, but all they had achieved was garish. A television sat precariously on a tilted, narrow stand. That didn’t bother Ricky. He pushed a hamburger into his mouth with one hand while he grabbed the remote control with the other, turning the set on.
“Are you eating?” Dallas asked her in a neutral voice.
“I...yes. Sure.”
The hamburgers and fries were spread out on one of the beds. Ricky was sitting on the opposite one; Dallas stood at the foot of the one laden with food. As Ellen took a careful step into the room, Dallas moved around to sit down there, leaning his back against the headboard, stretching his long legs out in front of him.
Ellen grabbed a rickety chair from beside the TV and pulled it over to the foot of the bed. She took a hamburger for herself.
“Here.” Dallas reached to the nightstand to get her one of the sodas there.
“Thanks.”
“It’s diet. I hope that’s okay. I try to keep him off sugar when at all possible.”
She paused in midchew. “Is it hard?” she wondered aloud.
“To keep him off sugar?”
“No. Being a mother.”
Something happened to his strong face. She cursed herself for causing the pain there, but then it settled. His eyes took on a thoughtful quality.
“I’ve learned to respect the hell out of women who do this as a matter of course.”
“It’s usually the mother who’s a single parent.” As she would have been, she thought, if only, only, she had had the courage to fight back, if only she had known how.
At least Ricky seemed wonderfully happy. She couldn’t imagine what she might have done if things hadn’t turned out the way they had. She swallowed back the pain as Dallas nodded.
“Yeah,” he answered. “Juggling jobs and the sniffles. Snatching sleep, and never getting enough of it. I’m lucky. I have my own business. What would have happened if those chicken pox had come last year and I worked at a factory?”
“You would have taken a week off and probably gotten fired for it.”
He nodded. “Exactly. But by the same token, I’m at a decided disadvantage. Mary just knew things, instinctive mother things. I have to grope in the dark. Like with the sugar.” Suddenly he grinned and she found herself smiling back bemusedly. “It was right after Mary died and this kid was wired, night after night. I thought it was some kind of by-product of grief, but it wasn’t. It was cola after cola after cola, beginning with the funeral and right on through all these care packages friends brought me. I can’t stand the sweetness, so when I finally dragged myself off to the grocery store, I bought diet. That night he went right to sleep, and I finally put two and two together. Then there was that discussion about blue—” He choked suddenly, swallowing whatever he had been about to say.
“Blue what?” she asked curiously. He was watching Ricky almost warily, but the boy was glued to the television and not paying any attention to their conversation.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, you were about to say something.” What? she wondered. He didn’t seem offended or pained, as he might have if she had trespassed on something too difficult to remember. He seemed...embarrassed.
It didn’t go with what she knew of him. For the first time she realized what a dichotomy he was. Determined and in control of everything, keeping the upper hand without yielding an inch. And yet he was sensitive and somehow vulnerable, too. It made her like him far too much.
Suddenly he crumpled his hamburger wrapper in his hand. He shot off the bed so quickly she jumped up as well, startled. Her chair toppled over and her feet got tangled in it. She tried to twist at the last moment so she wouldn’t land on the wood and break it, but she couldn’t manage it. Her feet remained ensnared in the rungs and she hit the seat with the small of her back. The old, cheap wood cracked and splintered.
In the next second Ricky and Dallas were both bending over her, their jaws gaping. “Are you all right?” Dallas demanded.
“What happened?” Ricky asked.
Dallas reached to help her up. She shoved his hand away. “Your father moved like someone set his tail on fire,” she snapped.
“Nobody said you had to run.”
In spite of herself, she looked up at him. His sky-colored eyes were fast on hers, probing again, hot, curious. “Yes,” she managed. “Yes, I do.”
She got up on her own, stepping carefully out of the shattered rungs of the chair. Something spasmed in her back and she put a hand there, flinching.
“I’ll run out and get you some aspirin,” Dallas said, his voice instantly softer, more concerned. “Or maybe we should try to find an emergency room. How badly are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” she managed. “I just twisted something.”
“We should make sure.”
“Dad, she’s a nurse,” Ricky said again.
“You just don’t want to hang around a hospital all night,” Dallas accused. “Don’t be selfish.”
“Really,” Ellen said, backing away from them. “I’m fine. And I have aspirin in my bag. I’m just going to go back to my own room and lie down.”
Something in her voice told Dallas she wouldn’t be dissuaded. Her wariness was back, some undercurrent of panic, and when she got that grim set to her jaw she could be the most stubborn person he’d ever met
. It had been there the night she’d left them in Shiprock, he remembered.
She made a move toward the door and he didn’t try to stop her, though he wanted to badly. He’d enjoyed talking to her almost as much as he’d enjoyed touching her.
“Hey, just go through that way,” Ricky said suddenly.
She looked around at him. “What way?”
“There.” He ran to the door that joined their rooms. Ellen hadn’t noticed it before. Her back had been facing it. Now she felt something lurch inside her.
How utterly cozy.
“It’s probably locked, Ricky,” Dallas said.
“Nah, I already checked it out. See?”
The door on their side was indeed ajar. Now he pushed at the one on her side. It swung open easily.
“Convenient,” Dallas observed quietly.
“Yeah,” Ricky agreed. “Now we don’t have to go all the way outside if we want to talk to each other or something.”
“Or something,” Dallas agreed.
Ellen realized she was shaking her head, slowly, back and forth, mutely. Then she jerked into movement as though someone had hit her, going to the door.
“Good night,” Dallas said from behind her. “See you in the morning.”
She slammed her side shut and leaned her back against it, closing her eyes.
She didn’t believe him.
Chapter 9
The knock came at her door at half-past midnight. Ellen had been waiting for it. She was curled up in bed, watching TV blindly, and every time a thump sounded through the paper-thin walls, every time she heard their muted voices over there, she jumped a little. But when Dallas finally knocked she ignored it.
With any luck he would think she was in the bathroom and go away. Then he did it again and she pushed the covers back angrily, scrambling to her feet, glaring at the door. If he kept it up, he would wake Ricky. And he would keep it up. She already knew him well enough to have no doubt of that.
She pulled the door open a crack and he put his palm flush against it, easing it a little further. He stepped toward her and her temper flared. Her first instinct was to move back, to keep some distance between them, but then she would no longer be blocking the door. It would effectively be an invitation for him to come into her room, and she had the sure sense that he was doing it on purpose.