Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  “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 catch him by surprise. When Red had shown him the jars of deflated, tarlike rotten eggs, he shook helplessly, his eyes brimming. That was the interesting Lewis, the part outside his ego’s jurisdiction.

  “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 New York.”

  Lewis gave him Red’s number. “Call him,” he said. “Tell him I sent you, and I’ll want a finder’s fee. Just joking—but he’d be lucky to get you.”

  Lewis fell asleep instantly, and woke at around three a.m. Lydia, he calculated, was over the north Atlantic, her plane a speck above the turquoise sea. A tightness in his throat and chest made him think he’d been crying for hours, possibly years, without knowing it.

  “GUESS who showed up Sunday?” Libby said. She and Billie were eating lox and bagels and fresh peaches in the adobe’s courtyard. Billie had a table set up between beds of flowering ginger; around them, dark, waxy green plants sent out arcs of spattery red and yellow blossoms.

  “I don’t know. Joe? Your parents? Red’s parents?”

  “Red’s parents are dead. Nope, your favorite: Lewis.”

  “Lewis who?” Billie grinned. “I hope you put arsenic in his catfish.”

  “He didn’t stay for dinner, thank God. But he’s still sober, and even quit smoking.”

  “Is he on the arrogance wagon too?”

  “Don’t get all excited now. He’s still a hundred percent Lewis.”

  “Maybe he needs another ride in my truck.”

  “You may get that chance. Red offered him a job.”

  Billie closed her eyes.

  “Don’t worry. He wasn’t interested. You think Lewis would move back here from La-la Land? All his friends are movie stars. But he might’ve found us an amazing house manager. A guy who speaks Spanish, sober about a zillion years. Oh, and he actually grew up on the ranch. He wants to come home, reconnect with his past.”

  “Yeah? What’s his name?” Billie sounded suspicious, as if such a person couldn’t exist.

  “David Ibañez. Distant cousin to Victor. Seems kind of weird that he wants to move back to where he grew up—you couldn’t pay me to move back to Montrose. But this is the most beautiful valley. And you never left.”

>   “Listen,” Billie said. “I know about him. He’s bad news.”

  “Oh, everyone was bad news in this business,” Libby said. “The last house manager was a heroin addict.”

  “This guy’s a swindler, a con man, a charlatan.”

  “Really? He seems so intelligent.”

  “He makes a good first impression, all right. That’s part of it.”

  “Even since he got sober?”

  “What does sober matter? That whole family is backward: it’s a level of ignorance and dealing with the world that’s not erased in one generation or even two.”

  “You like Victor Ibañez,” said Libby.

  “Victor’s a joke. And only a distant cousin. David’s family is all black magic and thieving. They sacrifice animals. They won’t see doctors. The kids die from staph infections, the women die in childbirth.”

  “But this guy lived all over the world. He’s educated, articu—”

  “He’s a pathological liar, Libby. I’d be surprised if he’s been east of Arizona. I know: those big brown Bambi eyes. The great brujo, Shaman of the Week. Try Sleaze King of the Decade. Did he tell you about his clinic in Tijuana, where desperately sick people pay thousands of dollars for coffee colonics?”

  “I thought it was a chronic-pain clinic.”

  “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

  “Uh-oh. Red really fell for him.”

  “I love Red,” Billie said, “but Red’s a chump. He’s the only person in town who’d hire that snake.”

  RED SHOOK his head. “Listen, I’d take anything Billie said with a grain of salt.”

  “But she knows him and we don’t,” Libby said.

  “She knows everybody in Rito, and if it’s a man, she’ll have some grudge against him. If I went by Billie’s opinions, I wouldn’t have hired our framer, our electrician, our plaster man. Every man she’s done business with, she bad mouths.”

  “Except you,” said Libby.

  “She’s had her problems with me, too.”

  Red would not be swayed. This was something Libby had come to understand: he had blind spots regarding certain people and championed them to the end, no matter how difficult, irascible, asocial they were, from Frank Jamieson and Lewis, to John the house manager and Ernie Tola.

  Libby couldn’t help but consider Lewis the source of this present unpleasantness. Hadn’t he sent David to them? Once more, however subtly and indirectly, Lewis had raised expectations only to dash them.

  “LISTEN,” David said. “I just spent most of the day with Red Ray. When I told him what you said about cooking, he said he’d love for you to cook. He doesn’t care if you can only do it for two months. He said, ‘Why didn’t Lewis tell me he wanted to cook? Of course he can cook.’ ”

  “Red said that?”

  “Yeah. So how ’bout you cook and I manage the house? We’ll take over the place.”

  The fact that David Ibañez and Red both wanted him up there was like a flattery cocktail. “It’s a thought,” said Lewis.

  “Think it over. I can’t give Red a definite answer myself until Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday?”

  “Just a few loose ends,” David said.

  RED BROUGHT David home for dinner in order, he said, to put Libby’s fears to rest. Still, she found herself mistrusting David’s good looks, that square jaw and long brown hair and graceful, muscled body. He did have an appealing alertness that was especially enchanting when directed her way—all part of a con man’s repertoire? He didn’t laugh, she noticed, or not much. And in the odd moment, during a pause in the conversation, he pulled into a dark quietness. Something was wrong with him, she thought, some weightiness or grief. When talk started up again, he shuddered slightly, shrugging off a tangible gloom.

  “It looks,” Red said, “like Lewis might come cook for the summer.”

  “Lewis wants the cook job?” she exclaimed.

  “He says he likes to cook,” David said.

  “And he’s good at it,” said Red.

  “This is what he’s going to do with his Ph.D.?”

  “It’s just till September, Lib,” Red said.

  “He’s actually taken the job?”

  “He’s coming up Saturday to do a little reconnaissance,” said David. “He’s bringing a friend.”

  LEWIS’S friend, Barbara, wore shiny, skintight bicycle shorts, a ribbed undershirt, and a leather vest. A peculiar outfit, Libby thought, to wear to an all-male recovery house; she had more hair than clothes on her back. Next to Barbara, Libby felt fat and bland and provincial and prudish and enormously pregnant. No wonder Lewis dumped her, when he could have this: impossible thinness, billowing apricot-colored hair, skin the color of drywall dust.

  Libby also envied Barbara’s expressiveness and her ease with the residents; she joked with them at lunch, belting out a deep, loud laugh at their jokes and talking easily, knowledgeably, about sobriety.

  After lunch, walking toward the village, Red, Lewis, and David wandered ahead, out of earshot, leaving Libby alone with Barbara, who asked when the baby was due (October) and if the sex was known (a girl, although sonograms can be deceiving).

  Libby decided to jump in with her own line of personal inquiry. “So, how long have you and Lewis been together?”

  Barbara squinted at Libby and broke into a broad smile. “Oh, no, we’re not together. Heaven forbid. No, I live with a guy.”

  “And he doesn’t mind you hanging out with Lewis?”

  “With Lewis?” Her smile sweetened, as if this question, while forgivable, was preposterous. “No, he doesn’t mind at all.”

  “Sorry,” said Libby. “I guess I assumed … You know, he’s male, you’re female. Very unenlightened of me.”

  Barbara moved closer. “I did go out with him real briefly a couple years ago.”

  “Me too,” Libby said. “Before you.”

  “So I’ve heard. You lasted a little longer than I did.”

  “Yeah, but you two ended up friends.”

  Barbara directed her squint at Lewis’s back, smiled again. “I love him.”

  “I can’t say that.”

  “Oh, Lewis has an affectionate nature. I have to beat it out of him sometimes, but he can be incredibly loyal and helpful in his own way.”

  “Red likes him, too.”

  At the village, the three men and Barbara went to look at the refurbished bungalow where Lewis might bunk, and also at the boarded-up bungalow where David grew up.

  Libby, claiming the excuse of pressing duties, ducked into the office, lay down on the sofa, and immediately drifted off. One of pregnancy’s few boons: the instant nap. A few minutes later, footsteps on the porch woke her up.

  “So tell me,” Lewis said. “What do you think so far?”

  “I like it here,” Barbara answered. “It’s so tranquil. And Red Ray is a babe. A total babe.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. And Libby too. She has such a great face.”

  “Libby hates me,” he said.

  “Yeah, well,” said Barbara. “And David’s adorable.”

  “He’s already taken, Barb. He has a rich girlfriend down in T.J.”

  “Lewis, please. You mean I’m already taken.”

  Libby didn’t have to guess that it was Lewis who kicked a porch support. A long silence followed—had they gone away?—then Lewis finally said, “You won’t miss me too much if I take the job?”

  Barbara’s laugh was so long and loud, it would’ve yanked Libby from the deepest sleep. “Lewis, Lewis, Lewis. Let’s get this straight. Who’s gonna miss whom?”

  ON A Monday morning, Red dropped his ’46 Ford at the Ruiz brothers’ garage, then walked up Main Street. The pickup needed its carburetor rebuilt, a job Red didn’t trust to anyone presently working in the Round Rock garage. He had considered waiting on the carburetor until Lewis came back up, but there was no way of telling if he was actually going to take the job. Convincing him to come cook at the farm was
like luring a skittish animal to hand-held food. Red had been careful not to push or get his own hopes up, while making it clear that Lewis was wholly welcome. Libby didn’t understand—and Red wasn’t so sure he did, either—why he so yearned to have him back at the farm. Some people you had business with in this life, and Lewis was one of those people in Red’s. Libby felt Lewis had already fulfilled his function in bringing the two of them together. Perhaps so; and he’d also helped Red see his own shortcomings as sponsor, friend, confidant—an unpleasant but useful lesson. Still, Lewis’s return was much prayed for, a second chance to set things right and, from there, assess what business might remain.

  Red walked until he came to the wood-slat bench outside his former law office, now vacant except when an accountant rented it at tax time. Red had overestimated how long it would take to hand his truck over and had fifteen minutes before Libby would pick him up on the way to her doctor’s appointment in Buchanan.

  The bench was in the shade of the building, but a sharp line of sunlight inched toward him. In one of the upstairs apartments over the laundromat a woman sang in a light, clear voice: “I’ll see you, when your troubles are like mine, I’ll see you, when you haven’t got a dime, weeping like a willow, moaning like a dove….” This song and the pending sunlight made Red think of Frank. Even when they were children, Frank cared for nothing so much as a prime spot in the sun and a brand-new cigarette.

  Frank now lived at the Buena Vista Rest Home in Buchanan, having run away so many times, there was no option but supervised care. Red had kept him out of such institutions for years, fearing that he’d be neglected and left to disintegrate. But Frank slid into life at the Buena Vista so smoothly it was almost a reproach. He had a reliable source of not only cigarettes and sunshine but also friendship—specifically with an elderly schizophrenic man and another large mute accident victim. Red invariably found the three parked, smoking, around a small trickling fountain in the courtyard. Orderlies called them the Terrible Three—not because they caused any trouble, but because it was so difficult to get them inside for meals or bed.