No Place Like Home (22 page)

It was enough to make a stab of something go through my heart. “Amazing,” I said quietly, shaking my head.

The man paused broodingly to one side, scanning the grounds from beneath hooded lids, a study in ennui. His wrists and hands sported tattoos and rings. “Billy used to get a tattoo whenever he felt really bad about himself,” I said before I knew I would. “He always said it was a celebration, but it wasn’t.”

Malachi looked at me with the graveness that could sometimes give his normally playful expression so much more depth. “You still miss him,” he said in some surprise.

I lifted a shoulder, still snared by the look of the young man. The resemblance was eerie, and I felt echoey emotions bouncing around the air, shimmery memories of Billy twenty years ago, when he was still so full of himself and his dreams, always vulnerable to the darkness, but genuinely brilliant. “I know a lot of people think I just ran off with him to get away, or because he was a musician on the rise,” I said, “but I loved him. I really did.”

“We all did, Jewel.” He looked toward the youth, back to me. “I thought he hung the friggin’ moon.”

“Yeah. Exactly,” I said, shifting so that the guy would be out of my line of vision. “I keep thinking about the state fair. Michael has it in his head that he really needs to go, and I keep thinking there’s no way I can do it.” I swallowed, glaring into my red beer. “Not because of Michael or any regrets, which is what he’s thinking, but I don’t want to go and think about how much hope Billy had that night I met them.”

He touched my hand, waiting. I looked back at the Billy clone and let the sword of loss he roused come through. “We
connected
, all three of us, that night. I was as devoted as I knew how to be, as supportive and strong, encouraging.” I frowned. “I didn’t freak when he started getting lost, either. I mean I saw what was happening, that he was just kind of sliding down this . . . this slope, and he kept slipping out of my grasp.”

“Suicide is always rough on the people it leaves behind.”

“It wasn’t suicide!”

“Well, not in the sense that he took a gun and shot himself, but what do you think he was doing, Jewel? The way he saw it, he was a failure.”

“But he wasn’t. He was a good musician—he could have had studio work for the rest of his life. Even when he was really getting bad at the end, when I had to make him leave—Shane was only about eight or nine, and I didn’t want him hurt, you know?”

He nodded.

“Even then, they were still calling to have him come work. It was worth it to them.” I peered into the past. “And before he let it all get to him, he was good to us. He was a good father, a good husband, not that we were exactly married.”

Malachi took my hand. “Throw it in the river, babe.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

He made a gesture with his hand, tossing an invisible something into the air. “Take all the parts you can’t do anything about and throw ’em in the river. Keep the things you can use, the good days, and let the rest go.”

He made it sound so easy. “I don’t know how.”

“Yes, you do.” For the first time, I realized he was very close, his long-lashed eyes starry and liquid in the low light. I don’t know which of us moved first, but somehow, we were kissing. Gently. The best kind of kiss in the world, or one of them, the soft give and take kind, the comforting kind with just a hint of more lurking.

It was so exactly what I needed in that particular moment that I shifted a little to let him in, inviting the sweep of tongue, bracing myself with one hand on his thigh. For a minute he hesitated, and I opened my eyes to see him looking at me, very close, and then his lids swept down and he came inside, almost against his will, and I followed him back.

Kissing. Most men just don’t get it. They get past it as quickly as they can, diving onward to earthier things. The man who knows how to kiss and likes it, who isn’t afraid of it, is a gem indeed, and Malachi liked it. He was good at it. There’s as much an art to it as there is to a handshake, and it has as much to say about a person.

Malachi’s lips were relaxed but not squishy. He didn’t crush my mouth or grind my teeth or shove his tongue halfway down my throat. He . . . played. Danced.

He pulled away first. “I really like kissing you,” he said a little roughly.

“I bet you ruined your chances with the girl, though.”

“The girl?”

I straightened, trying to blow it off. “Yeah, the girl with the belly ring.”

He snorted. “
Way
too young, sugar.” He picked up his glass, drained it, looked around for a server. “I think Billy Boy is her guy, anyway.”

“Ah, of course.” For a minute, I felt sorry for her. But that was foolish—the kid only looked like Billy. That didn’t mean he had to end up like him.

“I do like the belly ring,” he said, and leaned closer to me. “But not as much as your tattoo.” He made a show of pretending to look down my shirt.

I tossed my head. “Too bad. So sad. You let a seventeen-year-old talk you out of it, so why would I bother with you?”

He laughed, and leaned in closer, his breath on my neck. “What makes you think I’m not going to do anything?”

I looked at him. “Whatever you say.” He was lying and I knew it, and he knew that I knew it. He wanted to be in my bed almost as much as he didn’t. I scared him—and since my ambivalence was hardly resolved, I figured that was a good thing. “You know what you’re missing.”

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “Yes, I surely do.” He stood up. “I’m going to get another beer. You want one?”

“No, thanks. I have to drive.”

Friday morning, Shane arose with the sun and me and rushed through breakfast so that I could drop him off at the restaurant before I made my rounds with the pies. He was going to stay with my mother tonight and tomorrow to help cook, and it made me feel oddly uncomfortable that he was spending so much time with my parents. Shane had surprised me with the wish to stay and help tonight with the millions of pizzelles that would be made for the wedding. “You don’t mind, do you, Mom?” he asked. “Me helping Nana cook?”

I looked to the left, waiting for a break in traffic, so he wouldn’t see my face. “No, why do you ask?”

“I dunno. You just seem kinda funny about it.”

Pulling into traffic gave me a minute to come up with a response. “Does my dad talk to you?”

“Sure. He has all along, when you weren’t around.”

“That’s good,” I said. And it was. I was just . . . jealous, maybe. Jealous that my son could go to the house I grew up in and hadn’t set foot inside of in twenty years. That he could work in the restaurant, drinking Cokes in an apron after the dinner rush. “You like him?”

“Mom.”

I peered out the windshield at the red stoplight, willing it to turn green now. “Yeah?”

“If you miss him so much, why don’t you just talk to him?”

“It’s not that easy.” I thought of the day in front of Jane’s house when I’d tried, when I’d held out my branch of peace and he’d ignored it completely. “He’s stubborn.”

“He misses you, too.”

“Maybe. That doesn’t mean he can forgive me.”

“I don’t understand that,” he said.

“I know.” I cleared my throat. “Don’t spend too much time worrying about it, all right? We’ll work it out someday.”

At the restaurant, I spied only my father’s car in the lot and gave Shane the pies to take inside. “Mom. Won’t you try?”

“Not today.”

He shrugged, annoyed with me, and I even understood why. But there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d open myself up to an all-out rejection from my father in front of the boy who had begun to love him.

After I delivered the pies to the various spots on Friday’s list, I met my sister Jane down on Union Avenue. We had a dual purpose—instruction in sexy underwear for Jane, and a dress for our mother.

I arrived first and parked across the street from the enormous red sandstone Union Depot, a landmark in more ways than one. Like so many such places in cities across the country, it had been built on a grand and glorious scale, with elaborate wood trim and stained glass. It had been an enormously busy hub before air travel, particularly during World War II, when troops were moving in and out constantly.

But the station’s greatest claim to fame was from the Great Flood of ’21, when the Arkansas River nearly took out the city of Pueblo. During the height of the cataclysm, water had risen to the clock on the tower, and as I always did, I lifted my eyes to the imaginary mark so far above my head that I had to squint against the brilliant blue sky to see it. I never had been able to truly get my mind around that much water, and I couldn’t now. They said it washed all the way across what is now the highway and up Goat Hill. Afterward, they harnessed the river with huge levees behind the station.

Along the street, merchants were opening their shops, putting out chairs and tables on the sidewalk in front of the cafés, rolling out the bright canvas awnings, taking down the protective gauze from the windows full of boutique goods. Standing there, touching history, touching time and geography, a little piece of myself settled back into my heart with a sigh.

I didn’t see Jane, and she startled me a little when she touched my arm. “Good morning!”

“Hi!”

She inclined her head. “What’s that smile for?”

“I was just thinking how amazing it is that the city has turned itself around so much.” I looked at her. “You probably don’t really remember how bad it was.”

“Not really.” She wrinkled her nose apologetically.

We started walking and I pointed out an old, faded sign with broken lights that would have once flashed an arrow to the sleazy bar below. “When I left, this whole area was pretty slimy. Rough bars and dirty junk shops, that’s it. Half the rest of the buildings were closed. There were fires down here all the time.” We passed an empty building that waited for someone to restore it, the windows protected by plywood. “Everything looked like this.” I looked up at the obvious renovation taking place on the upper stories—more pricey lofts for young professionals. “Only not so clean.”

“Pueblo never seems to change that much to me.”

“Well, some things always stay the same,” I said slowly, remembering. “But it was bad here when I left. So many people lost their jobs with the mill, and they ended up losing their houses and their cars and everything. And they didn’t have any money to spend on going out to the bars or the restaurants or the stores, so everybody else started losing money, too. It was depressing. Now—”

She laughed. “Now it’s growing.”

“It didn’t die after all, I guess.”

“How could a city die?”

“A lot of people thought it would.” We got to the end of the block and I stopped in front of a naughty, upscale underwear shop. “Are you ready?”

Her eyes widened as she looked up at the sign. “Yikes!”

“C’mon, kiddo. Nobody bites in here.”

It was fun. A lot more fun than I had expected to pick out sexy nightclothes for my perfect little sister. She would look so good in all of it that it was really just a matter of helping her to figure out what kind of sexy she liked and felt comfortable with. Some women like feathers and froufrou, some like slinky and elegant, some like trashy, some like virginal. Jane was not in the latter category or we wouldn’t have been there at all, but that was all we really knew. For the first ten minutes, she kept referring her questions to me, as if I had some magic font of knowledge, and I finally pulled about seven different kinds of things off the rack, in all different colors and styles, and said, “Try them on. See how they feel. See what makes you feel fabulous.”

Giving me a doubtful look, she clasped them all to her chest and marched off.

While she was in the dressing room—for a really long time, I noticed with a grin—I flipped through the lingerie. Most of it was designed for women either a lot younger or a lot thinner than me, but there were some nice, heavy satin gowns in garnet and emerald that I liked, and a very wicked red corset that I judged would take off the top of Malachi’s head. He was a man who would definitely like trashy. For a long moment, I imagined myself in it, a saloon madam, maybe, and thought of how his face would look if I put it on and showed up in his bedroom. Bet he wouldn’t be worried about a seventeen-year-old’s opinion
then.

A black leather miniskirt leapt into my hands and I paired it mentally with the red corset. Bad. Very bad indeed. Especially—I looked at the wall where the stockings were lined up—with black fishnets and high black heels. Wicked, wicked, wicked.

I put it back—the money alone was impossible—and shook my head. It said something about my personality that I was less worried about what my kid might think than Malachi was. Something not very good about my personality.

Suddenly, I was ashamed to be in here with all the erotica on the wall, with thong bikinis, ashamed for letting myself imagine seducing a man when my son was in such a troubled place, when my best friend was dying, when my father still wasn’t speaking to me for the same kind of crimes.

It all mocked me with its shallowness. The games and toys seemed tawdry, the tattoos tacky.

“Jewel?” Jane stuck her head out of the dressing room door. “Will you come here a minute?”

Wiping the sudden depression off my face, I moved forward. “Sure, sweetie. What is it?”

“I’d like your opinion,” she said, and her cheeks were flushed. “I mean, it’s kind of racy, you might not want to see all that, and I’m sorry for asking if it makes you uncomfortable, so you can say no if you want, but I’m—”

I put my fingers to my lips, smiling to put her at ease. “Your body won’t embarrass me.”

A sigh heaved out of her. “Good. I just can’t decide between two of them.” She waved me in, holding her blouse against her chest modestly. The dressing rooms were plenty big enough for both of us and I closed the door firmly behind me. When she just stood there, blushing, her blouse clasped to her, I said, “Close your eyes.”

She did.

“I guess the one you’re wearing is the first one?”

She nodded. Around her crisp white blouse I saw the edges of black and a long, A-line skirt. A silken weight of lace roses, very elegant. I somehow wasn’t surprised she’d liked this one. Gently I reached out for the blouse and she let me have it. “Keep your eyes closed if you want,” I said. “Sometimes that’s easier.”