Maggie started as the phone rang again. “I’d better get that before it wakes my daughter,” she said, her voice surprisingly even. “It was nice to meet you.”
He nodded, releasing her arm. “You, too.”
Maggie hurried inside, catching the phone on the fourth ring. It was Sharon, needing advice about the editorial page, which was ordinarily Maggie’s responsibility. Maggie gave her the stats she needed and asked, “How’s it going?”
“If you don’t think this is one of the best issues we’ve ever done, I’ll eat my hat.”
“Thanks, Sharon.” She threaded her fingers through her hair. “You know I trust you.”
“You’re just a worrywart. That’s the trouble with you self-sufficient types—you can’t delegate.”
Maggie grinned. “I delegated, okay? I promise I won’t call later.”
“Get some rest. I’ll see you Friday.”
As she hung up, once more firmly anchored in reality, she glanced over her shoulder toward the front door and smiled. It had been a long time since a man had made her mouth drop. She shook her head and turned off lights on the ground floor. Not even a man that gorgeous could jolt her out of her exhaustion tonight.
But as she climbed the stairs toward her bedroom, she wondered what it might have been like to offer him a beer and chat a little longer in the comfort of darkness.
* * *
Joel lingered on the porch after she had gone inside, reveling in the soft night and first insect noises of the year. Her company would have been welcome, but the night, too, was good—clear and full of stars. The gentle air fed his skin. His life had been void of such simple pleasures for a long, long time. He didn’t take them for granted.
The lights in the apartment next to his clicked out, leaving him in a deeper night. The tape that had been playing on his stereo had reached its end. Around the side of the house, he heard a cat meow raggedly several times, and overhead, a rustling in an elm signaled a squirrel or a bird.
Maggie, he thought. The name suited her in ways he hadn’t dreamed it would, suited her sturdy movements and the strength in her arms and legs.
The ragged meow of the cat sounded again, and frowning, Joel got up to investigate. It sounded hurt or hungry or weak. He peered into the bushes along the house and called softly in the accepted fashion, wondering, not for the first time, if the sounds used to coax an animal were universal or just American. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”
Deep in the bushes, Joel saw a flash of round eyes, and the cat wandered out, a big black-and-white tom with matted fur and a notched ear. He croaked another meow, looking at Joel with wary hope.
Joel made no sudden move. Instead, he spoke to the stray in a soft, even voice. “Somebody left you behind, didn’t they? I always hate that.” Slowly, he crouched and reached a hand through the rails. “I won’t hurt you.”
The cat shied, and giving Joel one more glance, dashed back into the bushes.
“You’ll be back,” Joel said, his heart tight. “You’ll see.”
* * *
Thursdays were Maggie’s only certain day off, and she reveled in the chance to sleep late and start the day as lazily as she could. A little after one, her grandmother came over with a copy of the Wanderer and a rich selection of pastries in a square white bakery box to share over coffee. It was a Thursday afternoon ritual.
Since she hadn’t seen the paper yet, Maggie was particularly glad to see her grandmother. “I was so worried this wouldn’t get out on time,” she said, eagerly snatching the tabloid-size weekly.
“Goodness, child,” Anna said in her Texas-shaded drawl. “What in the world happened to you?”
“Oh, I forgot you hadn’t seen me. Come on.” Maggie led the way through the living room to her spacious, sunny kitchen before she answered, shaking open the paper as she walked. When she saw the photo covering a solid three-quarters of the front page, she grinned, turning to show her grandmother. “This is what happened,” she said with a chortle. “Isn’t that gorgeous?”
Anna, dressed in a pale green shirtwaist dress with splashes of pinkish flowers, made a clucking noise. She poured a cup of coffee. “I suppose you were right in the thick of it.”
“Not intentionally, but yes, that’s where I ended up.” Maggie smiled as she examined the photo more closely, a good action shot of the crowd, with the demonstrators in the background and an angry boy in leather raising a fist in the foreground. His fist pointed perfectly to the hand-lettered sign in the background that read End Violence in Our Music. Ban Proud Fox. “Beautiful,” Maggie said with a sigh. “The kids are going to love it.”
“Which kids?”
“My readers, Grandma. The ones that buy the paper, remember?”
“Well,” sniffed Anna, “I think it looks like you support that vile music. You’re giving this whole thing so much attention.”
“You know better.” It was old ground. The war over the band Proud Fox had been raging for two months. “I think they write reprehensible lyrics and that they’re not behaving responsibly. But you know what they say about free speech. It’s not free unless everybody has it.”
Anna opened the box of pastries. “No sense in us arguing about it again.” A frown wrinkled her pale white skin as she arranged the sweet rolls on a plate, then took a seat at the table. “That cut looks pretty serious, Maggie. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Fine.” Maggie paused to look at herself in the mirror behind her plant shelf. Aside from the neat arch that sliced through her eyebrow, extending an inch into her forehead, she also had a colorful black eye. She brushed her straight, tawny hair away from the wound and turned back to her grandmother. “I’ll live.” She selected a cheese Danish from the plate on the table and sat down. “Better me than Samantha.”
“She was there?”
“Wearing a leather jacket, yet.”
“Ye gods. See what I mean?”
Maggie chose her words carefully. “None of this would be happening if those who didn’t like the band ignored it.” The Danish was perfect, and Maggie sighed. “Sam’s just going through some kind of identity crisis or something right now.”
“Are you going to let her stay with her dad this summer?”
“Of course I am.”
Anna dabbed her mouth with a paper napkin, her cornflower-blue eyes snapping as she gazed at her granddaughter. “He’s no good for her.”
“I disagree.” Maggie straightened in her chair and cocked her head, puzzled. “Are you angry with me about something? You’re not exactly cheerful today.”
For a moment, Anna measured Maggie. “I’m worried about you. I don’t like this job, and I think you’ve got more than you can handle in your stepdaughter, and you won’t accept help from anybody.” She stood up briskly and carried her coffee cup to the counter. She paused there for a moment. “I spoke with your mother this morning.”
Aha, Maggie thought.
“She’s talking about divorce again.”
Maggie eyed a bear claw, trying to decide whether to have a second. “Big surprise.”
“I didn’t raise her to be like this. Three marriages, all in the dumps. What’s wrong with her?”
“Well, I can’t speak for the second and third, but my father was not a gem of a man,” Maggie said. “I think she was brave to stick it out for the twenty years she did.” What Maggie’s mother did was her own business. The two had never been close, and over time had drifted apart to the point that they corresponded only infrequently. If pressed, she would have said she loved her mother but that they had nothing at all in common. Maggie’s true parent was—and always had been—her grandmother.
She went to Anna and hugged her. “Mom’s a big girl now, and you did the best you could. Let the rest go.”
Anna nodded, and when Maggie released her, peered out the window over the sink. “How are the lilacs doing this year?”
Maggie poured a second cup of coffee and glanced out. “Not quite open yet, but they�
��ll be pretty in a few days.”
“Who’s that man out there, Maggie?” Anna said sharply.
Maggie felt her heart flip oddly as she leaned over, bumping Anna’s shoulder as they both looked out the window. There, admiring the buds on a semicircular bank of lilac bushes, was her new neighbor. “Joel Summer,” she said quietly. He wore shorts this afternoon, and his legs, Maggie thought, were a sight to behold—winter pale but sturdy and corded with muscle. His hair in the daylight was dark chestnut, flicking sparks of deep red light when he moved his head.
As she watched, a stray tomcat wandered through the yard, a cat as big, in his own way, as the man who crouched to call him.
“Good luck,” Maggie said. The cat had been mistreated at some point, then left behind to fend for itself. It wandered the streets, slept on convenient porch swings, accepted food when it was offered but disdained human touch.
“What a scruffy cat,” commented Anna.
“I feel sorry for him,” Maggie said, and smiled, for in spite of Joel’s cajoling, the black-and-white cat veered off to the left and plopped down in a patch of grassy sunlight. Joel stared at him for a moment, then stood and went back into his house.
A minute later, he emerged with a can of tuna. He carried it toward the cat, talking and approaching slowly. A few feet away, he put the can down and backed off to squat nearby.
The cat was antisocial but far from stupid. As if expecting a blow at any minute, he moved toward the can, keeping an eye on Joel, who continued to talk to the animal but didn’t move. It ate with the kind of desperation born of long-term hunger, gobbling as quickly as he could.
“That’s kinda sweet,” Anna said.
Maggie nodded. “He seems like a nice person—works with eagles and hawks, he said.”
Anna lifted an eyebrow teasingly. “More than just nice,” she teased. Her laugh was surprisingly ribald and bold, coming from the mouth of such a refined-looking woman.
“Come on away from the window, Gram,” Maggie said dryly. “We have to watch your blood pressure.”
“Oh,” Anna said, disappointment thick in her words. “The cat ran off, got scared.”
Maggie glanced back out. Joel hadn’t moved and he watched the departing cat with a pensive expression on his face. She looked at her grandmother. “I have to admit he’s good-looking.”
“Now you come on away from the window,” Anna said. “Don’t want your blood pressure going up.”
“Oh, please,” Maggie protested, and laughed as she took her chair. “Men are like flowers, strictly for admiring.”
Anna halted in the center of the kitchen, hands on her hips. Maggie thought her grandmother was about to offer some proverbial injunction about the comforts of a husband in old age. Instead, she let go of another ripe laugh. “If you think looking at a man like that is enough, you’ve been working too hard.”
Maggie rolled her eyes and picked up the bear claw. “Forget it, Gram. I’m not interested. Men are terrific for about six months, then you have start picking up socks and changing the channel so they can watch their ball games.” She wrinkled her nose. “And they all want you to cook. Ugh.” With a grin, she added, “Sharon calls it PMS—Permanent Male Syndrome.”
Anna nodded appreciatively, her cornflower eyes sparkling. Then she patted her white collar into place. “The right man can make it all worthwhile.”
“Hmm…” Maggie murmured. As she focused on the flavor of brown sugar and pecans, she remembered the way Joel had described a prairie falcon in his resonant voice, the way he had searched for a word to describe the birds he worked with.
She heard his voice utter the word again. Magnificent.
Resolutely, she shut it out. “What else did my mother have to say this morning?”
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IN THE
MIDNIGHT
RAIN
(Excerpt)
by
Barbara Samuel
1
The sky was overcast and threatening rain by the time Ellie Connor made it to Gideon at seven o'clock on a Thursday evening.
She was tired. Tired of driving. Tired of spinning the radio dial every forty miles—why did the preaching stations always seem to have the longest signal?—tired of the sight of white lines swooping under her tires.
She'd started out this morning at seven planning to arrive in Gideon by midafternoon in her unfashionable but generally reliable Buick. She'd had a cute little Toyota for a while, but her work often took her to small towns across America, and if there were problems on the road, she had discovered it was far better to drive American. Since she'd lost a gasket in the wilds of deepest Arkansas, this was the trip that proved the rule.
The gasket had delayed her arrival by three hours, but at last she took a right off the highway and drove through a small East Texas town that was closing itself down for the evening. She had to stop at a gas station to get directions to the house, but finally she turned onto a narrow road made almost claustrophobic by the thick trees that crept right up to its edge. It hadn't been paved in a lot of years, and Ellie counted her blessings—at least she didn't have to look at dotted lines anymore.
Something interfered with the radio, and she turned it off with a snap. "Almost there, darlin'," she said to her dog April, who sat in the seat next to her.
April lifted her nose to the opening in the window, blinking against the wind, or maybe in anticipation of finally escaping the car. Half husky and half border collie, the dog was good-natured, eternally patient, and very smart. Ellie reached over to rub her ears and came away with a handful of molting dog fur.
As the car rounded a bend in the road, the land opened up to show sky and fields. A break in the fast moving clouds overhead suddenly freed a single flame of sunlight, bright gold against the purpling canvas of sky. Treetops showed black against the gold, intricately lacy and detailed, and for a minute, Ellie forgot her weariness. She leaned over the steering wheel, feeling a stretch along her shoulders, and admired the sight. "Beautiful," she said aloud.
Ellie's grandmother would have said it was a finger of God. Of course, Geraldine Connor saw the finger of God in just about everything, but Ellie hoped it was a good omen.
April whined, pushing her nose hard against the crack in the window, and Ellie took pity and pushed the button to lower the passenger-side glass. April stuck her head out gleefully, letting her tongue loll in the wind, scenting only heaven-knew-what dog pleasures on that soft air. Handicapped by human olfactory senses, Ellie smelled only the first weeds of summer and the coppery hints of the Sabine River that ran somewhere beyond the dense trees.
The road bent, leaning into a wide, long curve that ended abruptly in an expanse of cleared land. And there, perched atop a rise, was the house, an imposing and boxy structure painted white. Around it spread wide, verdant grass, and beyond the lawn, a collection of long, serious-looking greenhouses. Trees met the property in a protective circle, giving it the feeling of a walled estate. Roses in a gypsy profusion of color lined the porch and drive.
Ellie smiled. It was a house with a name, naturally: Fox River, which she supposed was a play on the name of the owner, Laurence Reynard.
Dr. Reynard, in fact, though she didn't know what the doctorate was in. She knew little of him at all, apart from the E-mail letters she'd received and the notes he'd posted in a blues newsgroup. In those writings, he was by turns eccentric and brilliant. She suspected he drank.
She'd been corresponding with him for months about Gideon and Mabel Beauvais, a blues singer native to the town, a mysterious and romantic figure who was the subject of Ellie's latest biography. Ellie had had some reservations about accepting Reynard's offer to stay in his guest house while she completed her research, but the truth was, she did not travel without her dog, and it was sometimes more than a little difficult to find a rental that didn't charge an arm and a leg extra f
or her.
As she pulled into the half-circle drive, however, Ellie's reservations seeped back in. E-mail removed every gauge of character a body relied upon: you couldn't see the shifty eyes or the poor handwriting or restless gestures that warned of instability. And arriving in the soft gray twilight put her at a disadvantage. She'd deliberately planned to get here in daylight in case the situation didn't feel right, but that blown gasket had set her back too many hours. At the moment, she was too tired to care where she slept as long as her dog was in her room.
* * *
Pulling the emergency brake, she peered through the windshield at the wide veranda. Two men sat there, one white, one black. It hadn't occurred to her that Reynard might be black, though thinking of it now, she realized it was perfectly possible. She gave the horn a soft toot—something she hadn't done in years but that suddenly seemed right—and the white guy dipped his chin in greeting.
Ellie stepped out of the car and simply stood there a minute, relieved to change postures. The air smelled heavily of sweet magnolia and rose, thick and dizzying, a scent so blatantly sensual that she felt it in her lungs, on her skin. She breathed it in with pleasure as she approached the porch, brushing her hands down the front of her khaki shorts, trying to smooth the wrinkles out. "How you doing?" she said in greeting.
They both gave her a nod, but nobody jumped up to welcome her. Ellie hesitated, wondering suddenly if she had the address wrong or something.
A raggedy-looking mutt was not nearly as reserved as the men. It jumped up and barked an urgent alert. Anxious to make a pit stop, April started to follow Ellie out of the car, but Ellie said, "Stay," and with a little whine, she did.
A low voice said, "Sasha, hush." The dog swallowed the last bark and perched on the edge of the steps and waited for Ellie to come a little closer. Its tail wagged its whole rear end.
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