“I heard Deana yelling about it in the parking lot. I’ve seen enough scuffles in here to last a lifetime.”
“Did Deana go?”
“Looks like she left with her skeleton friend, vowing never to set foot in here again, along with an impolite gesture to Zac. But, they had a similar thing a couple of weeks ago, so I doubt we’re so lucky to be rid of her.”
“Billy says it’s drugs.”
Tommy sighed and wiped spilled salt from the counter. “That’s what I hear.” He leaned against the counter. “But, enough about her, I actually came by to see how you’re feeling.”
“Fine.” Lee wiped the spotless counter with a wet towel and avoided his eyes.
“No more coughing?”
“Right.”
“Quiet in here tonight.”
She looked up at him. “It’s always like this unless you guys are playing.”
He grinned. “That’s good for us, I guess. This mean you’ll keep us around even if you change the place?”
“That why you came by? To see if you’ve still got a job?” She meant it to be a tease, but it came out as an accusation.
“No, I came by to see you.” His smile was gone and the way his eyes glittered she knew she’d hurt his feelings. “Matter of fact, I don’t know what you’ve concluded about me, but I don’t need this gig. I do it because I like Mike.”
“I didn’t realize there were so many venues in which to play in this thriving metropolis.”
“It might serve you better to withhold judgment about a person until you know more about them.” He gazed at her for a moment. “I guess I’ll see you around.” He walked out, without looking back.
* * *
Lee sat cross-legged outside the back door of the restaurant, hidden behind the stairs, Billy’s version of a chef salad on her lap. She watched streaks of orange and pink across the sky as the sun set behind the mountain, picking through the strips of American cheese and cubes of processed turkey to find the least limp piece of lettuce. She breathed in the sweet spring air and ran over the conversation with Tommy in her head. There was an undeniable energy between them, but he moved toward the attraction with the lightheartedness of the unscathed, and she fought it with the intensity of the walking wounded. On the surface he seemed the type of man all women wanted: sensitive, strong, someone to take care of you. But she knew there was no such thing as Prince Charming, especially for a pregnant Cinderella. She’d believed in all that once. But now she was a grown woman and could not allow herself, even under the current circumstances, to believe in a savior. Because underneath Tommy’s sensitive eyes, and caring attitude, even his heart-wrenching talent, was something hidden, some kernel of weakness, or meanness or hardness, with which her life could be unraveled. If her mother, the last five years with Dan, and the shocking revelation of the last few months had taught her anything, it was that life was like Dan’s games. Not only were there random occurrences of bad or good luck, but often there were obstacles from people you loved that seemingly came from nowhere.
She knew she’d hurt Tommy’s feelings tonight and probably turned him off her forever, which was good in the long run. Still, after he walked away she felt more alone than ever. She flicked her hair and chided herself. Dan died three months ago and she was thinking about a man she’d known for a month.
The sun did its final descent behind the mountain and only the orange shadow remained in the evening sky. She heard voices behind the trash bin and the flick of a cigarette lighter. The back door thudded open and then there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs. She looked over to see Zac strut across the parking lot, pulling a sandwich bag out of his pants pocket and disappearing behind the wooden structure that stored the trash bins. There were muted mumblings and then Zac’s voice as he came into view. “Tell him to text me. I’ve got some of the stuff he likes.” Two young men came out from behind the Dumpster. They had identical hollow cheeks and starved eyes and skin that stretched across jutted wrist and arm bones outside of the sleeves of their t-shirts. They were like freakish twin brothers in a circus, except one was short and one tall. They darted their heads around the parking lot before shuffling to a beat-up truck parked near the alley, jumping in and speeding onto the street.
Lee held her breath until she heard Zac run up the stairs and close the door.
The bastard was dealing drugs.
Chapter 14
The next day began overcast, but by mid-morning the spring clouds broke and sun streamed into her backyard. She knelt in the wet dirt, pulling weeds and dropping them into a plastic bucket. Too poor to get her hair cut since leaving Seattle, and the pregnancy hormones speeding the growth, her hair was long enough that she wore it in a ponytail to keep it out of her eyes. As she worked, the ponytail kept sliding to one side of her neck. It was pleasurable, the way it tickled her skin. Lord, I’m turning into nature mama, she thought, smiling. As her fingers dug the spring weeds from the dark soil, she was reminded of the life-giving properties of this land. Beautiful things sprouted from within this mineral-rich dirt. She thought of Ellen’s garden, the food that grew from the tiny seeds planted each spring. She stopped her work for a moment, noting at least four shades of green in the leaves of the hydrangea plant. She looked around the yard. As a child, the simple beauty of the hydrangeas, rhododendrons, the twin dogwood trees, the crab apple trees, all planted by her grandmother before she was born, had nourished her soul with their beauty and inspired her to be a painter. She breathed the scent of the soil, the sun warm on her back, and thought how the landscape ran through her still, even after all the moments in between the last time she plucked weeds from this flower patch and now.
There were footsteps and a knock on the fence. She straightened, shaking the dirt from her hands, seeing the top of Tommy’s head above the top of the gate. She opened it, saying hello. He backed away as the gate swung towards him and then stepped towards her and for a moment Lee felt he might move to hug her but then he stopped just inside, resting his shoulder on the frame. He gave a wry smile that seemed wrong on his face, so different from his usual grin that rearranged his features into a series of attractive lines and angles. “Hey, Lee.”
Her stomach fluttered at the sight of him leaning on the fence, his hair moving slightly in the breeze, dressed in jeans that clung to his muscular legs and a white t-shirt that draped his slim torso. She had the urge to run her fingers inside the waist of his pants, to feel what his stomach felt like next to her skin. She swallowed and moved her eyes to his face, gesturing for him to come into the yard.
As he moved past her into the yard, she had a fleeting thought that he gave her the same feeling of the sun suddenly disappearing behind the clouds on a spring day, the way he was distant and guarded and so unlike his usual self. She followed him farther into the yard, unable to take her eyes off the curve of his backside. She breathed in a gulp of air. “Thanks for coming by.”
He stopped at the steps and turned to look at her. “What’s going on?” he said.
She shuffled her feet and looked at a knothole in the fence. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I didn’t mean to sound the way I did.” She glanced back at him and attempted a humble smile. She hated apologies. “Sometimes when I try to be funny or flippant, it comes out sounding cold.” She surprised herself by how honest she was and immediately felt vulnerable. She backed up several feet to the fence. “I’m not a funny person. My friend Linus tells me that all the time.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Did you know Zac’s dealing drugs in the parking lot of the restaurant?”
He raised an eyebrow and clicked his tongue. “So that’s why you called.”
She flushed and blew a wisp of stray hair from her damp forehead. “You said if I needed anything to call you.”
He grinned and his upper torso relaxed. “So I did. To answer your question, yes.”
She crossed her arms across her chest. “Why didn’t you
tell me?”
He shrugged. “If you recall, I suggested you reconsider taking the job.”
She moved to the steps and sat, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Do you think Mike knows?”
He sat next to her, legs stretched out over the grass. “Doubtful. Denial and all that.”
“Why does he do it, do you think?”
“Lazy. Doesn’t want to do the work of a real job.”
She remembered Zac’s confession that day long ago at the river and wondered about his mother. “Does Mike ever talk about his ex-wife?”
“Never.” He looked at her then and she felt him take her in, all of her sensitivities and insights. He saw things that others didn’t. She felt anything but invisible. And for some reason she told him the story of the river and Zac. In the telling of it, something occurred to her that she hadn’t known. “I think what he did messed me up more than I knew. It was the first time anyone touched me in that way and it was pretty awful.”
His eyes were soft, like a caress. “Of course. It would.”
She felt her skin tingle as if he touched her. She got up from the steps and walked over to the hydrangea bush. “What do you think I should do?”
“Make the place successful so you have some leverage with Mike, and then run Zac out.”
“Of town?”
“You know that kid who came by the other day for the rec key?”
“The basketball player?”
“His mother dropped him at his grandmother’s and disappeared somewhere, either screwed up on meth or dead because of meth. Zac’s a big part of the problem here, and if it was up to me his sorry ass would be in jail.”
“Why don’t you turn him in?”
“I have. The police are too few and too lame to get solid proof.”
“If it wasn’t him, wouldn’t it be someone else?”
“Not necessarily. It takes a certain kind of talent to run that kind of business. Mike says Zac’s no businessman, but I disagree.”
“Why do you care so much?” she said.
“Same story you’ve heard a thousand times. My brother died of a drug overdose at fifteen.”
Lee sat next to him again. “My mother was a drunk.”
“She ever get sober?”
“No, she died from it eventually.” A robin redbreast hopped in the branches of the Japanese maple.
He shifted on the steps to look at her face. “How did your husband die?”
“He committed suicide.” Her voice was thick and she fanned her face with her fingers to stop the tears. “It’s still hard to say it out loud.”
He placed his fingertips on her forearm for the briefest of moments, his eyes kind but also shocked. “I’m very sorry. Do you know why?”
“I suppose the easy way to explain it would be that he killed himself over a bad business deal.” She told him of Existence Games and Dan’s arrangement with DeAngelo, and that she hadn’t understood the details of it until after his death. “But, he was a complicated man, even more so than I understood until it was too late. He had this obsession with success, especially financial, and I believe he couldn’t face it—losing the company and having this giant debt, but I don’t know for sure because he didn’t leave me a note or any explanation, other than the deed to the loan.” She stopped herself before she told him the rest, that she was essentially hiding from DeAngelo’s people. She didn’t want him to be in danger by knowing the truth. Plus, she was ashamed to be this desperate and to have allowed this to happen to her life. She said only, “I had to sell everything to pay the debt, and obviously I lost the company. And I’m pregnant. It all happened in an instant—one day I’m on top of the world, the next day my husband’s gone, the company’s gone, my financial security is gone.”
“It’s awful to watch your dreams slip away.”
“I keep wondering what I should’ve done differently.”
He murmured something Lee couldn’t hear and then reached down, plucked a blade of grass and flicked it with his index finger. “My brother and I were Irish twins, if you can be that when you’re Hispanic—ten months apart.” He rubbed the scar on his cheek. “The drugs just kept sucking him away until the person he really was disappeared. Even after all this time I wake in the night and wonder if there’s something I should’ve done differently. I understand that emotion only too well, but I also know that you can’t move on until you’ve accepted that you did the best you could.”
“I don’t know how to do that.” She was chilled and zipped up her sweatshirt. A frog croaked from somewhere in the yard. “I’m haunted with ‘what ifs.’”
He turned his face towards her, and her heart constricted. “I know. I’ve never gotten over the loss but I live each day with gratitude that I’m still here, that for some reason God spared me from the fate of my brother and so many of our friends who got into drugs and gangs. I make the most of this life—try to make it more beautiful with my actions and my music.” He laughed and shook his head. “Do I sound like a pretentious ass?”
She wanted to reach for him but instead mumbled, “Not at all.” Her voice threatened to break and she took a deep breath. “What you said was lovely. I just don’t know if I can do it.”
“You’re strong. You’ll get through this.” His gaze shifted to rest on her mouth.
Her lips parted and she felt herself lean towards him as if an outside force controlled her movements; something in the air was stronger than her own will, which was telling her to move away from him. He had a muscle that ran from his ear to the collar of his shirt and she wanted to put her mouth there to see if it was warm and salty as she imagined. “I should get back to work,” she said.
“I’ll go then.” They stayed like that for a moment, heat between them, until he moved his eyes from her mouth and back to the blade of grass in his hand. “Would you have dinner with me sometime?”
“I can’t.”
“Too soon?”
“Too everything.” She took the blade of grass from him, rubbing it into a ball. “I still feel married, for one thing. I’m pregnant.” She poked him with the blade of grass, trying to sound light. “Anyway, normal men don’t date pregnant women.”
He smiled but there was something in his eyes that looked sad, and how she wanted to kiss him then, to feel his body next to her. “I’m not normal.” He pulled the ponytail holder from her hair, and she felt him breathe her in and out, the scent of his breath chocolate. “Does your hair smell like strawberries because of its color?”
“Tommy.”
“Yes?”
“I’m only staying here long enough to get back on my feet. I don’t belong here.”
He let go of her hair, and a half-smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Say it isn’t so.” He stood and moved towards the fence. “Don’t hold it against me if I keep asking you out. I was born an optimist.”
* * *
Lee peeled dampened wallpaper from the hallway, short pieces at a time. She was now two days into her fourteenth week of pregnancy and awakened that morning to find the nausea gone as quickly as it had come, replaced by a surge of energy and a resolve to make progress on the house. On a footstool, she reached for a strip of wallpaper near the top of the wall. Sweat trickled down her back and wet gobs of paper stuck to her forearms and back of her hands. Just as she peeled a stubborn strip with her fingernails and dropped it in the bucket, she heard a knock on the front door. Wiping her hands on the front of her sweatpants, she ran down the stairs. A young woman and a boy stood on the charred porch.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” the woman said. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties and wore a long cotton dress and Birkenstocks. “We broke down. My car.” She pointed toward the road. “It did this shake, shake, shake thing and then it just died. I had to leave it there.”
The boy looked around the porch. “Did you have a fire?” He had big brown eyes, dark skin, and straight black hair. “Did a fire truck come?”
“It did.”
/> “I’m in first grade and a fireman came to my school.” His long brown eyelashes swept his cheeks and he clutched his stomach. “Mom, I’m starving.” He peeked at Lee from underneath his brown bangs. “I wanted to eat at Dairy Queen but my mom says you shouldn’t put all that junk in your body.” He leaned on his mother, wrapping his arms around her legs.
The woman stroked the back of his hair, introduced them as Annie and Alder Bell, and asked to use her phone. Lee motioned them in and handed Annie her cellular phone. “I just moved in, so you’ll have to use my cell.”
Annie’s face was blank as she looked at the phone. “I don’t know who to call.”
“A tow truck?”
“Does that cost a lot?” said Annie.
“I think so.”
“I guess I’ll have to call my boyfriend.” Annie touched her fingertips to her mouth. “He won’t be happy.”
Lee raised her eyebrows at Alder. “How would you like some lunch while your mom uses the phone?” Alder grinned and nodded his head.
Annie put her hand up, resting the tips of her fingers next to her heart. “No. It’s bad enough we barged in on you.”
“Nonsense. C’mon Alder, I’ll show you my kitchen.” Lee took Alder’s hand, which felt hot and plump in her fingers. She thought how beautiful he was and of her own child growing inside her. Would his or her fingers be so luscious, she wondered? In the kitchen, she pointed to a chair. “Sit down here.” She looked at him, shrugging her shoulders. “What do you eat?”
The River Valley Series Page 12