Jenny asked bluntly, “Did he hit you?”
“What?” Leah jerked, and her coffee sloshed on the table.
“Did he hit you?” Jenny repeated, unabashed. “Usually when a man’s got a temper they aren’t too emotionally mature, and they look around for a punching bag.” Her face darkened. “I should know. My family was a regular fight club.”
Leah grabbed at the opportunity to take the embarrassing focus off of her. “What do you mean?”
Jenny sighed and looked around the table at Greer, Whitney, Leah, and finally Joshua. “Some other time I’ll go into all that. Let’s just say for now that I had to make a choice not to be a victim. And I’m sticking to it.”
“Okay, how about you?” Whitney’s sharp, dark eyes cut to Greer. “Men?”
“I’m leaving.” Joshua rose from the table. “Not that I don’t enjoy girl talk. I just have some guy stuff to do: poker playing, cigar smoking, bear hunting with a blunt bowie knife, that kind of thing.” He collected his helmet. “I’m gonna go next door and see Dad.”
“Okay, honey, I love you. See you tonight?
“Sure. Bye.”
Greer watched Joshua leave and then was surprised to find all three women staring at her. “Dad?” asked Jenny.
Greer sighed. “It’s a long story.”
Whitney leaned comfortably back in her chair, taking her coffee mug into her lap. “I’ve got all afternoon.”
Looking around at the three remaining women, Greer saw nothing there but loving interest. She took a deep breath and began. “Dario’s been a second father to Joshua since he was four years old. I fell in love with my husband, Geoffrey, when we met hiking up in Joshua Tree. He was working in the area; I was vacationing. Anyway, we got married and had Joshua. Geoffrey was always honest with me, and when he came and told me he’d met someone else, I was upset but I understood. I’d always known it was a possibility, and frankly, Geoffrey and I were always better friends than lovers. Joshua was three at the time, so I won’t say that the next year was easy, but we got through it, made the transition. Geoffrey didn’t desert Joshua or me, but he’d met the love of his life. It was just meant to be. Even I could see that.”
Whitney nodded. “So Dario was your partner, and he became like a father to Joshua when Geoffrey died?”
“Long before that, actually.” Greer smiled gently and looked at each woman’s face wondering what she would see next. “Dario and I didn’t open the first salon until two years after Geoffrey’s death.”
“So, I don’t get it. When did he come into Joshua’s life?” asked Jenny.
“When Dario married Geoffrey, and Joshua got two dads.”
There was absolute silence. None of the women looked away or wavered. Leah took a sip of her coffee.
Then, as Greer watched, the corner of Whitney’s eyes crinkled, and Greer could tell that a joke was coming.
“No wonder you don’t date,” she said dryly.
The moment was broken, the mirror of shocked silence shattered with a tinkling musical giggle into a thousand tiny pieces, each reflecting a few seconds of pain, time, a life, dissolving and falling into the women’s laughter.
“You know,” Jenny said when they’d recovered, “I read somewhere that if you ask a man what part of a building he relates to, it’ll tell you what kind of man he is. Like, say he says ‘roof.’ That would mean he’s very protective. What was Geoffrey?”
Greer thought. “A sliding glass door; he never hid anything.”
“I asked my husband and he said he was a wall.” Jenny sighed. “I could have told you that, after having to break through it with a sledgehammer.” She turned to Leah. “What was your delightful ex?”
“The septic tank,” Leah said, surprised at her quickness in responding. They all laughed again.
Jenny turned and looked over at Sterling, who was looking through some superglossy design magazine as he ate his salad. “Sterling?” Jenny called out. “If you were to describe yourself as any part of a building, what would it be?”
Without missing a single beat, Sterling said in his crisp British accent, “A flying buttress.”
They all laughed again. “Well, at least you’re honest,” Leah said. “And that’s good.”
“Honesty’s good,” Greer echoed as she felt his eyes watching her. She glanced up at the clock on the wall and stood. “I’ve got to get going; I’ve got a client at one.”
She said her round of good-byes and, turning to the door, almost collided with Sterling, who was on his way out. She glanced at his lunch; his salad was only half-eaten.
“Oh, sorry,” Greer breathed, a kind of girlish excitement flushing her face.
“Not a problem. Here, let me get the door.”
She mumbled her thanks, hoping that the other women hadn’t seen the rush of color in her cheeks. Sterling fell into step beside her.
“Well, business looks good,” he said, and Greer was surprised to find that he sounded ever so slightly nervous.
“Very good.” They had reached her door, and she paused with her hand on the handle but didn’t push it. Searching awkwardly for something to say, she was reminded of why she had stopped dating. “Uh, how’s yours?”
“Great, actually. There’s a lot of turnover in the neighborhood right now, and people want to remodel the landscaping as well as the house.”
“Oh,” Greer said, slightly surprised. “I thought you were doing quite a bit of business in Europe?”
For two seconds Sterling’s noble brow drew down into a concentrated frown. Then, like water restored to lucid clarity as the ripples of a skipped stone flowed away, his face cleared and he laughed, a sound that reminded Greer of sunlight streaming through a dense forest, of ferns glistening with drops of dew, of the rumble of distant thunder.
All of the things she liked best.
“You’ve been listening to Pistol,” he said when his eyes rested on her again. “I have been getting some correspondence from Italy, but that would be my final divorce documents, from my Italian marital mistake.”
Greer felt her smile widen as her heart opened a small door. “Well, we all have one of those. A marital mistake, I mean, not necessarily an Italian one.”
He frowned slightly again with sensitive concern. “I thought that your husband had died.”
It was Greer’s turn to laugh, and in the sound of it Sterling felt the warmth of a fire crackling while silent snow fell all around. He heard a soft breeze rustle the leaves of a poplar tree, and the silvery tinkle of water flowing over a thousand tiny falls in a mountain stream. His heart took on a wrinkle as hope made a dent in the smooth hardness of his hurt. “I’m sorry; I didn’t realize that was a funny thing to say.”
“It’s not.” Greer kept the smile, but her eyes saddened. “But what I meant was that I was divorced before Geoffrey died, and you’ve been listening to Pistol too.”
Sterling mock pouted. “Guilty,” he said.
“And besides,” Greer continued, “there’s no such thing as a marital mistake, really, only a learning experience. Mine wasn’t a mistake anyway; we always knew it was borrowed time. We just loved each other as people so much. Do you understand?”
Sterling nodded solemnly. “Yes. I do.” He sounded envious. “Unfortunately, I have no such defense. It would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that we like each other very much at all right now.”
Tilting her head curiously to one side, Greer noted, “You must have once.”
“Yes, once. But then reality set in and there were just too many cultural differences.”
“Like what?” Greer didn’t know if she was crossing a line, but she liked talking to Sterling, and she wanted to sustain the conversation.
She needn’t have worried. With a deep sigh and a sad shake of his head, Sterling said morosely, “Though I loved her lasagna, she could never learn to make steak-and-kidney pie. Alas that it should be so.”
Greer laughed again. “Well, I couldn’t even learn to make m
y own traditional dishes. I’m Greek, and I never learned to make spanakopita.”
“Ah, those little wedding appetizers that flake all over your suit. Never cared for those, and I have a deeply held belief that you should never eat triangular food.”
“That’s an interesting belief.”
“Everybody’s got to believe in something.”
“I believe I’ve got a client.” In addition to amusement, there was more honest reluctance in Greer’s voice than apology. “I’ve got to get going.”
Sterling took hold of the door handle, and as he swept it open for her he bowed slightly and said, “We shall meet again at Philippi.”
“Or at the coffee shop, anyway.” Greer beamed warmly at Sterling as she started past him, and the grin was bounced right back at her.
From his station halfway back down the salon floor, Dario watched the exchange, nudging Jonathan and gesturing for him to observe as well.
At the last moment Sterling placed a hand softly on Greer’s shoulder in a familiar way, and Greer turned back to sustain the contact before smiling a good-bye and entering the salon with an added lightness in her graceful, swaying step.
The two men raised delighted eyebrows at each other. “Well, well,” mused Dario. “What have we here?”
“Flirtation at the gates,” Jonathan confirmed. “She’s under friendly fire.”
“And from a worthy adversary, from everything I’ve seen and heard.” Dario watched Greer disappear into the hallway. “I think we might need to help this along. Just a little nudge in the ribs.”
“Oh, please.” Jonathan half snorted. “It’ll take a hard shove between the shoulder blades for that girl. You need to launch her off the edge. We’re talking about damaged heterosexuals in their forties.”
The two men grimaced conspiratorially at each other.
Then Dario showed his teeth as he said, “Man the battle stations.”
Chapter 13
“Not to be too nosy, but what’s with your brother’s prison tattoos?” Dario asked nosily.
Paul smiled in his usual way, but his eyes saddened. “Oh, something bad happened, and he spent a few years working out in a small yard surrounded by barbed wire.”
“Is it a family secret?” Dario was watching Paul as he finished putting in the last of the tile on the ledge above the sinks he had installed. He was good at it. Dario had found that Paul was one of those people who could do numerous things well, once you actually got him to show up.
Paul shrugged automatically in response to the direct query, but his ruddy face had reddened slightly. “I guess not. I kinda got him into a bad situation.” The laugh surged up again, as though even this, his brother’s prison sentence, were an unavoidable situation that had to be taken with a grain of salt and a sense of humor. Which, thought Dario, of course it was.
Paul glanced up at Dario and saw nothing but intelligent interest on the taller man’s face. “See, I was married for a while and she had a few kids before.” He paused, his smile pushing his cheeks up into rosy mounds.
“A few?” Dario asked.
“Four.”
“Oh, my.”
To his credit, Paul laughed. “She had four more with me. I’ve got custody of them all now.”
“Eight?” Dario was thunderstruck. “You have eight kids? For God’s sake, man, that’s a litter!”
The chuckle bubbled up. “No, I’ve got my four. The other ones were older. But the father of her oldest boy was . . . well.” Paul looked up with a sheepish grin. “Let’s just say he was a loser, and he was making threats and stuff.”
Paul went back to spackling, and Dario stood casually with his arms crossed, waiting. He had a few minutes before his client’s weave was done baking.
“Anyway, I went over there with the boy, who was thirteen, to try to talk to his father and get him to stop being so aggressive, and Army came with us. When we got there the guy was drunk and just wanted to pick a fight. He got out a gun and shot at us.” Paul made it sound as though shooting were an everyday occurrence in his life.
Stunned, Dario asked, “He shot at his own kid?”
Now Paul turned a full-on grin toward Dario, and with a tremolo of humor under the words he said, “He missed!”
“Jesus,” Dario swore. “Nice dad.”
“So Army runs to his truck and gets out his gun and shoots back at the guy.”
“And he didn’t miss?”
“He winged the guy.”
“Self-defense, right?” Dario asked, trying to stay as conversational as Paul, but with difficulty.
“Well, that’s not the way the police saw it.” Paul shrugged again as though, fair or unfair, the flow of events was a force of nature and we were all jetsam on the tide. “It might not have been so bad if Army hadn’t run off. But he was scared. The guy was pissed at me for being with his ex and his kid, so he said I was the one who shot at him, and I was arrested.”
“But he shot at all of you first! The kid was a witness!” Dario could feel a sense of outrage surging up in him. That wasn’t fair.
The shrug again, the acceptance. “I didn’t want the boy to testify against his own father; it was his word against his dad’s anyway. And by the time the cops came, the guy had gotten rid of the gun, cleaned up, and his bullets had missed us.” Paul paused to laugh. “Bad luck.”
“Did they catch Army later or what?” Dario asked, trying to piece it all together.
“No,” Paul said slowly, shaking his head as though to knock the grin off, but it stayed put. “He turned himself in when he found out I’d been arrested.”
“And he spent six years in prison.” Dario was impressed. Good brother.
“It would have been seven, but I cut a deal with the DA and took part of the blame. I spent a year in jail. Not the big house, but the county lockup.”
“Was it horrible?”
The shoulders did their little jig and the smile deepened as the laugh came up again. “It wasn’t great.” Paul turned and wiped some white Spackle off of the deep blue tile. “The worst thing was that it was a big dorm kinda room, and they never turned off the lights or the television.”
Dario shuddered. “The depths of hell,” he commented.
“Not as bad as what Army went through.” For the first time, Paul looked as though his story disturbed him in spite of all his efforts to remain jovial. “It changed him. I’m just glad he lived through it.”
“He must be very bitter,” Dario said.
The indefatigable laugh rose in the words again as Paul said, “It didn’t do much for his sense of humor.”
Dario watched the wave of amusement pass through Paul and saw the disturbed concern that returned after it. “Hell, I’d go back and kill the son of a bitch.” Then quietly he asked, “Are you worried about him?”
Paul finished, wiped his hands, and turned full-face to Dario. The warmth that radiated from the plumber didn’t cease, but the simple honesty in his eyes almost made Dario turn away.
He asked, “Wouldn’t you be?”
Dario held his look for a long moment without smiling back before he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Deeply.”
Paul cleaned up his things, and the two men walked together to the front. Dario stopped at the counter to get a check for Paul and a cigarette for himself, and they both went outside.
Parked just off to the left was Paul’s truck, a large, rusty affair. Tied in the back of it was an enormous German shepherd. Dario lit his cigarette as he walked toward the truck. “Nice dog,” he said, and extended a hand.
The dog went for it, snapping and lunging, Dario only just managed to pull back in time. Paul had gone to the far side to put his toolbox away; he shouted a command and the animal quieted.
“Oh, sorry about that.” He chuckled a bit. “That’s my brother’s dog, and a tree limb fell last night, broke part of his fence. He lives out, kind of remote, but still. You can’t really let a dog like that wander.”
“No,” Dario ag
reed wholeheartedly, “not a good wandering dog.”
“I’m gonna help him fix the fence tonight. So, don’t worry; I won’t have to bring him again.” Paul’s laugh rumbled along under his reassurance, as though the whole idea of a man-eating dog were a funny concept.
“Well, your truck is safe; that’s for sure.”
“Yeah. Kind of funny—my convict brother picked a police dog.”
Dario nodded and backed up onto the sidewalk. “People get used to things.”
Paul laughed again. “I’ll just be glad to have somebody else watching him.”
As Paul drove away, Dario wondered if he had meant that Army was watching the dog, or the other way around.
Chapter 14
The light in the room softened as the direct gaze of the sun disappeared over the edge of the high canyon walls outside to look down on other places. Greer liked the twilight; it was a strong time for romantic magic.
On the little brazier, a small dried rosebud and drops of magnolia oil sizzled as they evaporated into a sweet scent that altered the feeling as well as the smell of the air. In Greer’s hand two acorns rested while she bathed them in the thin white smoke rising in front of her. When she was satisfied that every exposed place on the seeds had been touched, she wrapped embroidery floss around them like belts, one in blue and one in pink, knotting the strands tightly so they resembled sashes on two fat little gnomes, and left a long strand hanging from each one.
She smiled and hummed as she worked, thinking of Jenny and her husband and imagining them together. Immediately she sensed a rosy, golden cord traveling from one to the other, a strong connection of love, but there were other things around the couple as well, dark ropes that had attached themselves to one or the other and strained to pull them apart. These lines were links to the past, baggage. Still holding the acorns snuggly in the palm of her left hand, Greer focused on each of the dark cords one at a time and snapped the fingers of her right hand as she pictured the ropes being cut and then dissolving away.
Last, she took an end of the floss from each acorn and began to knot them together in a complex but beautiful design, and while she did this she chanted:“Unbind the past and weave together,
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