As wine entered his thoughts for a second time, another wave of conscience passed over him. On a sigh, he called up his favorite downtown florist and ordered a spring bouquet--roses would send the wrong message--to be delivered today to Michelle at her office. He told the florist to include a note saying, “Sorry I’m not the one. Terry.”
Then he was out the door. In the parking garage, he donned his leathers and helmet, backed his Harley out of its closeted slot, mounted up and roared out onto the street. By sundown, he would be five hundred miles away in Agua Dulce, Texas.
Chapter 3
Marisa came awake to a bedroom bright with sunlight. The aroma of something cooking teased and tempted her. A jolt of fear popped her eyes wide and she sprang from bed, nearly falling from being not quite awake.
She stumbled to the kitchen in her sleeping costume--boxer shorts and a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt--and saw Mama sitting at the dining table. At least a dozen slices of toasted bread, sans plate, stood in a stack on the tabletop. The bread loaf’s plastic sack gaped open and the remaining untoasted slices from the loaf were scattered across the kitchen counter.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Mama said, munching on a toast slice, her blue eyes looking huge behind her glasses lenses.
Marisa suppressed a groan. “That’s okay, Mama. I’m sorry I didn’t wake up.”
Last night, unable to shut out the endless parade of varying disasters that could result from the sale of Agua Dulce, Marisa had lain awake for hours. “I didn’t drop off until late. Is everything all right?”
“Oh, yes. I just made some toast.”
These days, having Mama in the kitchen alone cooking anything, even toast, was an unacceptable risk. Every day Marisa pondered if she should remove all cooking utensils from the kitchen and disconnect the stove.
Her brow arched as she whipped herself into wakefulness. A pain throbbed behind her eyes. “Lord, I’m late. I hope no one’s showed up for breakfast.” She went to the coffee grinder and fumbled through grinding beans, wincing at the noise the grinder made. “Listen, Mama, I’m gonna get a shower, then run over to the café and heat up the griddle. You’ll be okay here ’til I can get back, right?”
“Oh, yes. I’ll get dressed and take a little walk.”
“No!” The thought of Mama alone outside was another of Marisa’s nightmares. In the vast expanse of unpopulated desert that lay outside the singlewide’s walls, Mama could get lost in nothing flat. Marisa switched on the coffee maker and lowered her voice.
“No, don’t walk, Mama. I’ll come back after breakfast and we’ll take a walk together, okay?”
Her mother’s eyes teared and her chin quivered. “If you say so, Marisa. I hope you don’t forget. I do need my exercise.”
Shit. Now Marisa felt like a heel. Emotion so close to the surface was part of Mama’s disease. It had taken some getting used to because such displays were so out of character for the mother Marisa used to know. “Look, you need to eat something besides toast.” She pulled Cheerios from an upper cabinet. As the coffee dripped, she prepared a bowl of cereal with canned peach slices and set it in front of her mother. “Eat some cereal while I take a quick shower, okay?” The coffee gurgled to a finish and Marisa poured Mama a cup, then poured one for herself.
Carrying the coffee, Marisa padded to the hall bathroom, which was barely big enough for a tub/shower combo, a commode and a sink. The mobile home had a master suite of sorts on one end, but Mama used that.
Marisa hurried through a shower and shampoo, bumping her elbows on the fiberglass walls and vowing that when she got rich, one of the first things she would have was a decent-sized bathtub and shower.
She dried quickly and styled her hair. Cut to a shoulder-length bob, it required nothing more than a hairbrush and a few minutes with the dryer. She didn’t wear makeup, but this morning, she rubbed a bit of cream from every jar on the bathroom counter under her eyes. None of it seemed to lighten the dark circles or shrink the puffy pouches.
She pulled on a Western style shirt--white, with embroidered red roses and silky fringe hanging from arching yokes across the front and back--and stuffed herself into clean Rockies jeans. Through the belt loops, she slipped a Mexican tooled-leather belt with conchos and a silver buckle the size of a saucer. She pulled on cowboy boots and added some silver jewelry to her earlobes and wrists. Marisa, Queen of the Cowgirls.
Though she could ride a horse and had been around livestock growers most of her youth, she wasn’t a real cowgirl. Not even close. But it was important to look like a Westerner. In this part of Texas, near Langtry, where the legend of Judge Roy Bean flourished, and not too far from Billy the Kid’s haunt in New Mexico, the Wild West was what tourists expected to see. Since those roaming visitors were her and Mama’s bread and butter, Marisa would climb aboard a bucking bronc before she would disappoint them. She even laughed at their lame jokes about her being “Pecos Belle.”
When she returned to the kitchen, Mama had finished eating and, thank God, forgotten about walking. Marisa seated her in front of TV, then consumed another cup of coffee and slid all of the bread and toast slices into a Ziploc bag.
She reminded her mother that she would be back soon, then headed for Pecos Belle’s, carrying the toast slices with her. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade, she told herself. Only today, she would use the toast to make bread pudding. Waste not, want not.
As she made a tour through the flea market turning on lights, straightening displays, brushing away a speck of dust here and there, unlocking the front door, the sunrise began to brighten the large room. Early morning was the most peaceful part of her day. She enjoyed being alone in the café with its silence and its mix of spices and good food smells left over from the day before.
She put two flavors of coffee on to brew in the Bunn on the back counter across from the lunch counter, drew a large empty pickle jar full water, added two giant teabags and set it just outside the front door to steep.
Ready to begin work, she turned on the radio to keep her company and heard a new tune with a good dancing beat. She loved dancing--in that way, she was like Mama—but how long had it been since she had dressed up and hit a honky-tonk?
In the tiny café kitchen, she turned on the flame under the griddle, then set about measuring ingredients for bread pudding. Back when she’d had a job as a professional cook, her recipe for bread pudding had always been a favorite. She usually used sourdough bread she baked herself, but today, toasted store-bought white bread would have to do.
Soon, the delicious aroma of the baking pudding surrounded her. Savoring the smells of butter and vanilla, she hummed along with the radio as she cleaned and straightened the back counter. A car engine sounded out front, then died. She glanced across the flea market, out the display windows that took up the whole front of the building, at a state trooper’s black-and-white. She smiled inside.
Two minutes later the front door chimed and the best part of her life strolled in. Keith Wood, or just Woody to his friends. He had probably come for breakfast.In his taupe-colored uniform and gray Stetson, he looked good enough to
be
breakfast. She had a weakness for a man in uniform, especially one who was lean and tanned, with mysterious dark eyes and a slow, come-hither smile. She and Woody had been an item for about a year and he still came by several times a week. The good-looking sonofagun had touched every one of her secret places and she usually couldn’t wait for him to do it again.
“Hiya, copper,” she said, eager to tell him about the sale of Agua Dulce. Just a few weeks ago they had laughed about the widow posting the town for sale and the odds against someone ever being dumb enough to buy something like a town on eBay.
He took a seat on one of the round stools that fronted the lunch counter and she leaned across to kiss her favorite Texas DPS trooper. He kissed back, but without the usual enthusiasm. “Uh-oh,” she said, deferring her own news to listen to what could be bothering him. “Don’t tell me. You’ve had a run-in with some real bad guys.”
He shook his head and looked up at her with serious eyes.
She braced herself on her forearms just inches from his delicious lips. “Tell you what,” she said softly. “I could lock the front door for a while. There’s clean sheets on the bed and I know all sorts of remedies to take your mind off your troubles.”
Growing up, she and her mother had lived in the two-bedroom
apartment in the back of the building. Mama hadn’t bought the singlewide mobile home until after Marisa left home. Many times, Marisa and Woody heated up the apartment bedroom that had been Mama’s.
“Don’t I know it,” he said with a crooked grin.
She could see in his eyes he wanted to follow her back there. But she could also see it wasn’t going to happen today. Something was really bothering him. She touched his lower lip with her finger. “What is it, sugar?”
He lifted off his hat and set it on the counter. “You got just a plain old-fashioned cup of coffee?”
She tucked back her chin and widened her eyes in a display of mock surprise. “What, no French-Columbian-Traditional-Campfire blend flavored with vanilla?”
He snickered and she stepped away and poured him a cup from the carafe labeled REGULAR.
“Smells good in here,” he said. “What’s cooking?”
“Bread pudding. Comfort food. Be done in a few minutes. Want some?”
He shook his head and lifted the mug to his lips. After a long sip, he set the mug back on the counter. “I need to talk to you, Marisa.”
She heard a solemnity in his tone and felt a chill in the air that had nothing to do with air-conditioning. “You know me, sugar. I’m always up for good conversation.” She set the coffee carafe back oh its heating element, the news of the sale of the town forgotten for now.
He stared into his mug without saying anything, but in her head, Marisa heard Santa Anna’s trumpet blowing “Degüello.”
Finally he looked toward the front door. “I guess I’m getting married, Marisa.”
Marisa’s heart dropped to her shoes. On scattered occasions she and Woody Wood had skirted the edges of taking their relationship to the matrimony stage. She hadn’t imagined that the union would include him, but not her. She swallowed, but it didn’t help. Her tongue seemed to have stopped working. “Oh?” was all she could push from her mouth.
He looked up with an expression so aggrieved that uncertainty vanished. She had to glance away to keep from bursting into tears. “Well, uh,” she said, fighting for dignity when the very breath had been knocked from her lungs, “anybody I know?”
“You know Nikki Warner over at Wink?”
Wink, Texas. If God ever decided to give the earth an enema, if He missed Agua Dulce, He would stop at Wink. Until she graduated from high school, twice a day, five days a week, from September through May, for twelve long years, Marisa had ridden the school bus an hour between Agua Dulce and Wink, Texas.
But somehow, she had never met Nikki Warner. “Uh, no. Can’t say that I do.”
“She’s, uh...preg--expecting.”
Santa Anna’s trumpet blew louder in Marisa’s head. She stared at him, her eyeballs straining and gluing themselves to his. He was starting to seem more like a stranger with every passing minute. “And that’s your fault?”
He dodged her stare by looking at the front door again.
As his non-answer sawed its way through her heart, hot anger zoomed through her whole body. She wanted to slap his face, she wanted to grab up the carafe of hot coffee and dump it on his head, she wanted to dash into the kitchen, grab her sharpest knife and whack off his dick. “So? What?” she said, failing to control the tremble in her voice. “All this time you’ve been traveling up and down the highway providing stud service? Nikki in Wink on Tuesday, Marisa in Agua Dulce on Wednesday? Someone in Pecos on Thursday?”
“No! It’s not like that. I--”
“Really, Woody? If it’s not like that, then how the hell did Nikki in Wink get knocked up?”
“I don’t know.”
Marisa planted a fist on her hip. “Now that, trooper, I don’t believe.”
“You know how I feel about you, Marisa.”
“No, I don’t think I do.”
He rubbed his eyes with his hand. “I have to do my duty in this. We’re both Catholic. I don’t know what else to say.”
Catholic? Okay, she would give him that. With a Mexican mother, maybe he had been raised in that religion, but he hadn’t been in a church since she met him. Her innate good sense finally overcame paralyzing shock. “Well if you don’t know what to say, I do. I think the word is good-bye.”
His eyes locked on hers with an anguished expression. “Marisa—”
She stopped him by raising her palm and turning her head. “Don’t Marisa me. You’re right. There’s nothing more to say.” She spun on her heel, intending to walk away from the counter, needing to remove him from her sight before she sank into a hair-tearing, chest-beating fit.
“Marisa, I don’t want to lose our...our friendship.”
His voice, soft and deep, halted her. God, the afternoons and nights she had lain in bed and listened to that voice speaking of the future, of feelings, whispering lusty intentions in her ear.