Round Rock (39 page)

“It’s the only secret this town ever kept,” David said. “Berthe Kipness once saw us in a restaurant in Los Angeles, and Rogelio spotted us at that campground on the Dennison Grade. Either Billie didn’t believe them, or they never told her.”

The three of them sat quietly in Red Ray’s former bedroom. The late-afternoon breeze, bearing a cool tone of ocean, flapped the cover of a magazine, shifted hairs on their heads. Lewis had taken a chair by the bassinet, in which the calico cat lay curled and sleeping.

“Billie had told him his father was some kid,” David told them, “who’d died in a car wreck before he was born. When Bill was ten, he asked about his other grandparents and aunts and uncles on his father’s side. Why didn’t they want to meet him? That night Billie took fifty Valium, and he never asked about his dad again.”

“She really wants things her own way, doesn’t she?” Libby said.

“Don’t we all?” said David. “This spring, I was given an herb that kills you in twenty-one days unless you make enormous changes in your life. Warriors and sorcerers used to take it as part of their initiations; in more recent times, it’s been classified as a poison. As my uncle says, it makes you grow up or die. I finally had to forgive myself for my childhood crimes. I had to stop capitulating to Billie, and stop running. I really had to come home.”

“I know,” Libby said. “This damn valley. You yearn for it even when you’re here.”

“I knew this job might be problematic,” David said. “Red and I talked about it.”

“You told Red?” said Libby.

“Only in the most general way.”

Libby’s eyes filmed with tears. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you.” She handed a water glass to Lewis. “You guys go back to work. I need some time to think.”

S
HE PHONED
Lewis at the office the next morning and invited him to stop by for a bowl of Gloria’s
albóndiga
soup. “That’s meatballs to you, Lewis,” she said.

He walked across the roadway to Libby’s house. Gloria, a tiny woman with a thick gray braid, had the darkest eyes he’d ever seen. She was on her way out the door, but put down her purse and ladled out a bowl of soup for him. “
Contenta hoy
.” Gloria nodded to the bedroom.

Libby sat propped up in bed, eating her soup. She looked happy. The back door was open. The calico cat sat on the stoop, having a stare-down with Gustave, who was tied to the oak tree. Every now and then, Gustave let rip an excruciating, bloodcurdling whine.

“Don’t you love soup on a hot day?” Libby pursed her lips to suck in the skinny vermicelli. The air in the room seemed light as helium.

“I gotta get this recipe,” Lewis said.

“Lard—that’s the secret,” said Libby. “When Gloria was browning the meatballs, I asked what smelled so good in there.
‘Manteca,’
she said. Pig fat. Nectar of the gods.”

“I read that lard’s actually better for you than butter. Less cholesterol, more amino acids, something like that.”

“Hey, you’re preaching to the converted.”

They slurped up their noodles.

“So, I called Billie,” said Libby.

“You
talked
to her?”

“No way. She didn’t pick up. I left a message.” Libby regarded the meatball balanced on her spoon. “I said, ‘I just have one question. What gives you the right to deprive your son of his father? That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard. Every child has that right!’ Oh, I was really on my high horse.” She raised the meatball to her lips. “And I also said, ‘Come to think of it, you haven’t been very nice to me, either. Until you deal with some of this stuff and start treating people with some compassion and honesty, I don’t think I can be your friend.” Libby popped the meatball into her mouth.

“You said that?”

“I know, I know,” Libby said with her mouth full. “Can you believe it?”

Lewis started to laugh. “You dumped
her
?”

Libby paused to swallow. “I know David’s far from blameless, but at least he tried to correct his mistakes. I believe in him. He and Little Bill do seem to have a good, open—”

“Wait a sec, Lib. You told Billie you wouldn’t be her friend anymore?”

“This is what gets me,” Libby said. “Billie always says people don’t change. It’s her war cry. But she’s the only one who never changed. I mean, look at all of us. Who knew we’d end up here, together, slogging through all
this
?”

O
BEDIENCE
T
RAINING
for Adult Dogs was taught Saturday mornings in Buchanan’s Plaza Park. Before he could enroll Gustave, Lewis had to take him in for shots. The vet said he was about fifteen months old, healthy as a horse, and probably half large terrier—Airedale or schnauzer—and half Great Dane.

When Gustave met the other dogs, he spooked, barked like a hellion, did his usual cower-and-piss routine, and otherwise identified himself as the class problem. The teacher, a middle-aged corgi breeder named Beverly, was reassuring. “Obedience training exists to help dogs like Gus.”

The Santa Bernita is a small valley, so Lewis wasn’t surprised to know two of the other dog owners. One was Carl, his first roommate at Round Rock, who had stayed sober and was still teaching high-school biology; Lewis had seen him briefly at Red’s funeral. Carl had a shiny chocolate Labrador named Valrhona, Val for short. They walked to the drinking fountain during the break, dogs lunging on their leashes. “I’m still in shock over Red,” Carl said.

“I really miss him,” said Lewis.

They stood kicking at the grass until the dogs whined and pulled them back to the present.

Lewis’s other acquaintance was Phyllis, formerly his favorite waitress at Denny’s. He didn’t recognize her at first because she’d stopped bleaching her hair. She was now a short-haired, nondescript brunette, boyish, still skinny, though not quite so severe-looking as before. Phyllis’s dog, Tessie, was a peculiar little terrier mix that looked more like a badger.

“Denny’s was a cesspool,” she told Lewis after class. “My boss stalked me, called me up drunk at all hours. I had to quit.” She had moved in with her mom and gone to massage school. “I found out I liked learning physiology and anatomy.” Now she was working toward
a nursing degree, making straight A’s, and giving massages at a physical therapy clinic in Buchanan.

“Wanna meet Ralph?” she asked.

Ralph, her son, had parked himself away from the class because Tessie couldn’t concentrate at all if he was in sight. A skinny teenager lying on a blanket in the sun and reading a book, Ralph had stringy brown hair, a sunken chest, and an undernourished pallor. He shook Lewis’s hand, said it was nice to meet him, and looked him in the eye. Lewis liked him right away. Phyllis gave Ralph a ten-dollar bill to buy burritos and Cokes. “You want something?” she asked Lewis.

“That’s okay,” he said.

She turned to Ralph. “Don’t let them put that fire juice on mine or I’ll kill you.” Ralph started smirking. “Don’t think I won’t,” she growled. “I’ll wring your neck.” Her son danced off, waving her money.

“He’s a good kid,” she said.

They sat down on Ralph’s blanket and Lewis saw he was studying algebra and Spanish.

Phyllis touched Lewis’s arm. “Where you been?”

Her eyes were gray-green, her skin freckled. She was a good listener; she nodded at appropriate moments, made sympathetic noises. When Lewis told her about Red’s sudden death, and his own decision to stay on at Round Rock, she said, “It sounds like you’re a good friend to those people there. I hope they appreciate you.”

“Oh, they do.”

“So what’s anybody doing for you?”

“They’re all
nice,
you know.”

“Nice?” Phyllis said. “All right. Lie down.” She patted the blanket. “On your stomach.” Lewis did as ordered, resting his chin on the edge of the blanket. Grass blades speared his nose. Tessie and Gustave chased each other in large circles around them. Quickly, Phyllis straddled his rump and placed her hands on his upper back. She pushed her fingers into his shoulders and neck. It had been so many months since Lewis had been touched that he was flooded with gratitude and something cool and shadowy, like sorrow.

“Take off your T-shirt,” Phyllis said. She moved instinctively to little pockets of stored pain and crunched them with her thumbs until he squirmed and groaned. She lifted his arms and jiggled them.

“Relax,” she said. “Give me all your weight. Let go. Give it up, Lewis, for crying out loud.”

The sun bore down. Phyllis’s hands ranged up and down his spine, quarrying pain with alarming precision. The dogs barked and ran around them faster and faster, their paws thudding, sometimes so close that grass and dirt sprayed the side of Lewis’s face and he felt the near-rasp of a toenail.

Phyllis slowed down, then rested her hands on his back. His body rang. She climbed off, and he pulled himself up to look at her. His arms were wobbly. They gave each other a long look, the kind that usually ends in a kiss. And Lewis meant to reach up, grasp the back of her neck, pull her to him. But he made no move. With Phyllis, he saw, it could go either way, kiss or no kiss. She wore a sly smile. The air itself seemed taut. He liked looking at her sharp, pretty face, those deadpan eyes, the slightly upturned lips. Kissing
would
break the tension. He held off for a moment, and a moment after that, amazed that anyone could actually stop to consider such things, and then amazed again at how keen and sweet the holding off itself was, as if the anticipation alone had bloomed into some bright, open space.

Abruptly, the dogs threw themselves down, panting, on the grass nearby. Their tongues were pink and very long. Phyllis burst out laughing; then, gazing past Lewis, she pointed. “Look, here’s Ralph, bearing burritos across the park.”

A
BAND
of contractors had slid into Rito in late summer and built fifteen townhouse condominium units across from the packing plant. The construction crews worked so fast with truckloads of prefabricated products, that a model unit was ready for viewing by early September.

The condos, Libby asserted, proved that Billie Fitzgerald was moving away, because otherwise she would have fought the zoning variance with routine ferocity.

Most of Rito’s inhabitants had never lived in a brand-new place, and some of the women were taken with the air conditioning, wall-to-wall carpets, and dishwashers. When word came that a number of the condos would be leased, and that the management would accept social-service housing vouchers, a contingent from the Mills Hotel
walked down to check out the units. They walked home decrying paper-thin walls, windows flimsy as cellophane, tiny toilets. The wall-to-wall, they said, smelled like fish. A few young couples made down payments and moved in, but most of the units remained empty.

At Round Rock, David Ibañez became the new director. He talked Pauline into leaving her pain clinic for consulting work; she would move up in two months. They didn’t yet know where on the farm they’d live, because Libby hadn’t decided which place she’d inhabit after the baby came: the new house on the ridge, her old house on Howe Lane, or Red’s bungalow in the village.

Lewis’s friend Kip became the new house manager. He couldn’t make a living with his acting, he said, and helping drunks recover might beat waiting tables, at least for a while.

The farm’s unwritten no-women rule was broken when David and Libby hired a young woman from the Culinary Institute. Lewis, then, went back to working full-time in the office. After much fine-tuning and fretting, Lewis finally turned in his dissertation the last week of September. Promptly accepting it, his committee wanted to see him for the defense in two weeks’ time.

Libby grew enormous. “Maybe I’m having a pony,” she said. “That would be fine, so long as she’s healthy.” Libby’s face puffed up, her ankles swelled. Turning over, she claimed, was a major endeavor. Barbara came up two weekends in a row, and the two of them watched marathons of videos and planned the birth, which began to seem more like an open house than a hospital procedure. A Lamaze home tutor came; Barbara and David Ibañez both took the instruction so that one, the other, or both could coach her through labor. Pauline was also invited to attend the birth, and Gloria, of course, and even Lewis.

“Me?” Lewis said to Libby. “You want
me
there?”

“Yes, I do.”

Dearest Red, It’s over eight months now. The cerclage was removed yesterday and any time, the doctor says, we can have a healthy baby. I have a monitor now—it’s for a baby, but it’s also wired to Lewis’s house, so I can be alone here for the night without worrying that I’ll be too whacked out to remember anyone’s number.

I can’t tell you how glorious it is to walk outside. I’ve been so
bored in this bed all these large, long days. I think I have missed you with every cell in my body, one by one. I have cried my weight in tears—certainly in tears and also, probably, in phlegm. (Why is it nobody ever talks about that part of weeping?)

W
HEN
Lewis returned from the successful defense of his dissertation, he and David spent the rest of the afternoon teaching Gustave not to run at cars. Libby watched from her back stoop. David had Gustave on a heavy-duty retractable leash. Lewis would peel out with all the provocation his Fairlane could muster and when Gustave leapt, David yelled “
No!
,” threw on the lock, and pulled as if he were setting the hook in an eighty-pound yellowfin. “Sit!” he thundered.

Gustave sat, and David rewarded him with a hunk of hamburger. Gustave remained sitting, shivering madly. Lewis backed up, over and over. Again and again he hit the gas. Gustave was a fast learner: after four leaps, he sat through every kind of fishtail or popped gear. Enough hamburger, thought Libby, and that dog could learn English.

Next, Lewis switched to the Mercedes, and then to David’s Land Cruiser. Poor Gustave, unleashed, quaking in all his subdued instincts, allowed the vehicles to pass without incident.

Lewis gave the dog’s head a jubilant, thorough scratching. “He really should’ve won Best Dog at obedience school, and not just Most Improved.”