“Wake up, open your eyes, Reuben. Come on, wake up.”
He opened his eyes. Immediately the burning pain in his hip flared like a bonfire. He didn’t move, though; he knew from experience that moving made everything much, much worse.
Grace swam into his line of vision. “You were dreaming,” she told him, as if he didn’t know that. Her anxious face was a powerful comfort, but he made himself close his eyes. Another thing he’d learned was that she would go back to her chair if she knew he was awake and all right. But if he feigned sleep or, even more, if he groaned out loud from the pain in his hip, she would sit on the bed next to him and touch him. Hold his hand, sometimes stroke his face or softly rub his scalp. So he kept his eyes closed. And sure enough, in a little while he felt her light, cool fingers on his forehead.
“Are you awake?”
“Mmm,” he answered, noncommittally.
He had only a vague memory of arriving— yesterday? the day before?—at a sprawling, two-story white clapboard house at the foot of an oak tree-covered hill. Everything since then had been pain and bad dreams. Sometimes Grace took care of him, sometimes a tiny Chinaman with a sonorous voice and gentle hands. Ah You, she called him. Ah You was the one who had sewn the endless miniature stitches in his hip, but it was Grace who had held his hand and talked to him all the while, telling him it would be over soon, telling him he was the bravest shtarker she knew.
He thought two days had passed, but he couldn’t be sure. His room had white walls, plain wooden furniture, bright red curtains on the window at the foot of his bed. He could see the sky through the window, star-flecked or a clear aching blue, and at dawn—or was it dusk?—the odor of sweet bay trees wafted into the room. The sun on his white coverlet warmed him; when he wasn’t dreaming of knives, he would watch it move slowly across the bed, and imagine the soft golden light was healing him.
His mind drifted. He felt Grace’s hand sliding gently out of his and he let it go, too weak to hold on.
“How is he?” A man’s voice. Not Ah You; the other one. Henry.
“He’s a little stronger, I think. Ah You says the wound is mending well.”
“Ah You would know.”
Reuben opened his eyes a crack and studied him through his lashes. Up close, Henry wasn’t as old as he’d thought, probably not even fifty. He was better-looking, too, if you liked that dapper, debonair style some men fell into in middle age. But he put oil on his mustache, and in Reuben’s book that meant he was vain. He didn’t like him.
He liked him even less when he took Grace’s hand and pulled her off the bed. “You’re exhausted,” he said in a deep, distinguished voice. “You’ve had no rest in two nights.”
“I nap while I sit here.”
“There’s nothing for you to do now.”
“I know, but—”
“Come to bed, Grace. Ah You will stay with him tonight.”
Reuben heard her sigh. “Okay,” she said, and he could hear the fatigue in her voice. He opened his eyes to see them leaving. They had their arms around each other’s waist.
Come to bed, Grace? His hip throbbed harder, hotter. He tried lying on his left side, but that made it worse. Sometimes Ah You gave him a sip of something nasty-tasting that took the pain away for a while, but he wasn’t allowed to have it very often.
Come to bed, Grace?
“Henry’s not my husband, we just live together,” she’d said. He had a sharp memory of when and where, and why, she’d told him that. At the time, the distinction had reassured him. It didn’t any longer.
Outside the window a cricket sang. The eerie hoo-hoo of an owl carried on the night air, softened by the scent of sweet bay. Reuben shut his eyes and dreamt of blades.
“We should talk,” Grace said, halting at the bottom of the stairs.
“You should sleep,” Henry countered, his hand on the banister.
“You wouldn’t be trying to avoid talking to me, would you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He looked offended. Nevertheless, she suspected the reason he hadn’t said a word to her since she’d come home about the house or the mortgage or the tax bill was because the situation had gotten worse, not better.
“Let’s sit outside,” she suggested peaceably.
He shrugged, and followed her through the living room to the wide screen doors that opened onto the veranda. “Drink?” he suggested, detouring at the liquor cabinet. She said no, and kept going. He joined her a minute later, brandy glass in hand, and sat beside her on the steps that led down to the garden.
“It’s so good to be home.” She sighed, drawing in a breath of the perfumed air. She couldn’t have put the night smell of Willow Pond into words; she only knew it was sweet, and there was nothing else like it anywhere in the world. How could she give it up? She’d come home a failure, though, and that was something neither she nor Henry, in their optimism or their stupidity, had ever foreseen. “Did you miss me?” she asked, resting her elbows on the step above.
He busied himself lighting his pipe, an affectation he’d acquired fairly recently, and grunted.
She smiled in the dark. She knew he’d missed her. “How’s your leg?”
“Nice of you to remember to ask. It’s fair,” he grumbled.
It was well, as far as she could tell; he wasn’t limping or using his cane anymore. She remembered how he’d broken his leg—by falling off the veranda steps on a dark, rainy night last May. He still claimed he wasn’t drunk, but he’d been drinking brandy that night, like tonight. “I told Reuben you had a bad heart,” she mentioned.
“Ha,” he said, puffing smoke. “Why?”
“To explain why we needed money, at first. And then to explain why you didn’t come with me when I was fleecing the dioceses. I thought it sounded better than a broken leg. More dramatic.” He made a sound of amused agreement, and she felt them falling back into their old, comfortable camaraderie. She really had missed him.
“What else did you tell Mr. Jones?” he wanted to know.
“Oh, I told him some awful lies.”
He nodded approvingly. “Tell me about him. Your letter was, how shall I say, cryptic. Tell me everything that happened, from the time you threw four thousand dollars away—”
“I threw—”
“—to the time you got home, and don’t leave anything out.”
She was familiar with his diversionary tactics. “I’ll tell you everything, because I’ve got nothing to hide. But first you have to tell me: exactly how much do we owe, and when do we owe it?”
Furious puffing. She’d hound him until he told her all of it, though, and he knew it. He took his pipe out of his mouth and confessed. “The bank wouldn’t agree to the extension. We’ve got till the fifteenth of August to come up with the money.”
“All of it?” she asked, aghast.
“All. They won’t mortgage again, and they won’t accept any more partial payments. If we can’t pay the whole six thousand by the fifteenth, they say they’ll foreclose.”
“Oh, no. Oh, no.” It was worse than she’d thought. “What about that man at the other bank, the one you thought might—”
“Don’t you think I’d have told you if that had worked?” he flared. “He turned me down flat, and that’s the end of it.”
He couldn’t stand to talk about it. It was even worse for him than her, because he thought it was his fault. In a way, at least technically, he was right: she’d advised him against getting involved in the complicated mineral rights scheme that had taken all their money and plunged them into debt. In particular, she’d warned him against remortgaging the house, which belonged to her, not him. But never, not once, not by so much as a sarcastic word, had she ever thrown that in his face. Oh, how had they come to this? How could they leave Willow Pond? Stupid, shiftless people got evicted, not people like them. They were too clever—weren’t they?
“Well? Go ahead, Grace, I’m waiting to hear all about your adventures.”
Sighing, s
he put her elbows on her knees, cupped her chin in her hands, and told him everything. Or almost everything. Henry was amazingly tolerant, and she’d never once known him to be remotely fatherly during their six-year acquaintance. Some things were private, though, so she glossed over the more unsavory particulars of her captivity at Wing’s house, and she left out completely what had happened afterward at the Bunyon Arms. When she finished, he was silent for a long time, puffing on his pipe.
She yawned. She was dying for bed. Maybe she ought to sleep in Ah You’s room tonight, though, which was across the hall from Reuben’s on the first floor. That way she’d be sure to hear him if he called out, whereas she wouldn’t in her second-floor bedroom at the other end of the house. Silly, she knew; there was nothing she could do for him if he did call out that Ah You couldn’t do much better. Still—
“Tell me about this Wing character again.”
“But I’ve told you—”
“Tell me again. Everything you know about him, every detail. Go ahead, Grace.”
She heard that tone in his voice, quiet, exaggeratedly calm, an unmistakable intonation she was probably the only person on earth who recognized. It raised the hairs on the back of her neck. It meant he was plotting something. He had an idea.
She wasn’t sleepy anymore. She told Henry everything she knew about Mark Wing.
The mission clock on Reuben’s bedside table chimed the half hour, nudging Grace out of a shallow doze. She rubbed the back of her stiff neck and flexed her shoulders, trying to shake off the muzzy fatigue. Except for a cricket outside and the faint rasp of Reuben’s breathing, the night was silent. Moving quietly, she got up and tiptoed closer to the bed.
His face was still as pale as the sheet under the dark stubble of his three-day beard. She oughtn’t to touch him; his sleep was restless enough these days without risking disturbing him. But she wanted to smooth away that line of pain that was always there between his eyebrows. She put her hand out and stroked him—softly, softly.
Without a warning, scalding tears filled her eyes and streamed down her cheeks. She brushed at them clumsily, feeling idiotic. Reuben wasn’t going to die; in fact, Ah You said he’d start getting stronger tomorrow, and in matters like that Ah You never erred. Relief was what was making her so teary and emotional, partly. The other part …
She didn’t want to think about the other part.
She sank down on the edge of the mattress, careful not to shake the bed. Reuben’s dark lashes fluttered once, then stilled. She was longing to touch him. In her mind, she slid her hands under his shoulders and pulled him close, holding him, and imagined him waking up and smiling at her. He’d call her Gus, say something to make her laugh. Just thinking about it made the damn tears start up again.
Ridiculous. She got out her handkerchief and blot-ted her face, calling herself a noodlehead. A tired noodlehead. She’d had about six hours’ sleep in two nights, and even less the night before that at the Bun-yon Arms. Weariness was the culprit, the only explanation for why it was hardly possible to look at Reuben or even think about him without the dismal certainty closing in on her that, as soon as he got strong again, he would go away.
Hadn’t he as good as told her so the night they’d shared their life goals? His dream was to keep moving, keep on circling the globe until he’d seen everything, and after that he wanted to loll around on a big cattle ranch like Edward Cordoba’s. Needless to say, a bankrupt female bunco artist with no prospects didn’t figure in his plans. Well, what had she expected? That he would fall in love with her? Marry her, settle down, and become a pillar of the community? Sometimes her secret, old-fashioned, absurdly conventional hopes embarrassed her so much she wanted to pull a blanket over her head. Reuben might want her, might even feel a moderate fondness for her from time to time, but lukewarm sentiments like those couldn’t turn him into a different kind of man.
She touched light fingertips to his wrist, which was resting on his stomach. Anyway, she didn’t want him any different. She liked him exactly the way he was—smart and funny, good-natured, resourceful, and extremely brave so long as there weren’t any knives around. She loved his slipperiness, the way his devious mind worked. Except for Henry, she’d never met anyone as deceitful and untrustworthy.
Just then he turned his hand over and curled his fingers around hers. “Hey, Gus,” he said in a gruff whisper.
Startled, she cleared her throat and gave her wet cheeks a swipe with her free hand. “I didn’t mean to wake you. Try to go back to sleep.”
“Don’t go.”
“It’s late, you need to rest.”
“Aw, Gus, just for a minute.”
“No, you really—”
“I’m dying of thirst. Can I have some water, please?”
“Oh, Sure.” She reached for the pitcher and refilled his empty glass. He struggled up onto his elbows; she slipped her arm behind his neck to help him and brought the glass to his lips. Holding him like this, even for a few seconds, was such a sweet, guilty delight. She let his upper arm press against the side of her breast, fighting the need to bury her face in his hair. Or blow in his ear.
When he finished drinking, he looked up at her; for once the pained furrow between his brows was gone, and the expression in his light brown eyes was clear and hopeful. He was so close, she could’ve dipped her head two inches and kissed him. With more will power than she knew she had, she lowered him gently to the pillow and straightened her back.
“Did Ah You give you your medicine tonight?” she asked, all business.
“Yeah. It tasted like buffalo dung tea.”
“It probably was.” He looked horrified. “Kidding,” she assured him—although nothing Ah You put in his medicinal concoctions surprised her anymore. “How do you feel?”
“Better when you’re here.”
She went all soft inside, like a crock of butter left out in the sun. She felt a big, stupid smile spreading across her face. “That’s nice.”
“But you look tired.”
The smile turned rueful. She’d seen what she looked like, in the mirror over his bureau: like a bag of dirty laundry somebody had flung down the basement steps and left to mildew. She made a move to get up, but Reuben reached over and pulled one of her hands out of her lap and held onto it. She stared down at his long, bony fingers and his clean white nails, comforted by the strength of his grasp. How she loved his hands. “I wish I’d shot Tom Fun sooner,” she murmured in a rush. “I’m so sorry you got hurt. It just—kills me.”
“I’m okay now, Gracie.”
“But if I’d pulled the trigger sooner, you wouldn’t be lying here. If I’d just—”
“You saved my life. I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.” He brought her hand to his pale lips and closed his eyes while he kissed it.
She held her breath, inexpressibly moved. “Reuben,” she whispered. “Oh, Reuben, I wish—”
At a noise behind her, she twisted around.
“Here you are. My God, Grace, it’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”
Henry’s voice sounded too loud after the soft, intimate words she and Reuben had exchanged. She dropped his hand and stood up, smoothing her skirts. “I’m coming to bed right now.”
“Good.” Henry came over and put his arm around her shoulders. Barefooted, he wore his plaid velveteen dressing gown over his yellow nightshirt.
She rested her temple on his shoulder tiredly. “I guess you two never met formally. Reuben, this is my friend, Henry. Henry Russell. And Henry, this is Reuben Jones.”
The two men looked at each other; after an odd moment they nodded, but neither made any move to shake hands. She listened to the rather awkward silence in dismay. Of all the men in her life—not that there were that many—these were the two she wanted to like each other. They didn’t seem to be getting off to a good start.
“Well,” Henry said, ending the peculiar pause. “Grace is exhausted, so we’ll say good night to you, Mr. Jones.”
&n
bsp; “Good night,” she echoed obediently. “Ah You’s across the hall if you want anything. Are you okay? Do you need to—”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Reuben snarled, pushing his fingers into his wild hair, making it stand on end. “What I’d really like is a little peace and quiet. Could you please turn out this light?” Grimacing, he twisted his body toward the wall, away from them, and slammed the extra pillow against the side of his head.
Grace frowned down at him, mystified, while Henry went to extinguish the lamp on the bedside table. They went out of the room quietly. “Night,” she said again, softly, in the doorway. Reuben must not have heard; he didn’t answer.
After that, everything got worse.
With Ah You taking care of him, Reuben’s hatchet wound healed quickly, and within a week he was out of bed and hobbling around the house, using a hickory stick for a cane. Grace was relieved, of course, but sometimes she had to wonder if all the medicines, poultices, and exercises Ah You prescribed for him were causing some kind of reaction, an adverse effect on his mental state. It was an understatement to say that she and Reuben had been through a lot together during their brief acquaintance; but even during the worst, the direst, the most inappropriate times, she’d never known him to be anything except jocular and lighthearted. So his surly, glowering, ungracious behavior now that he was practically all well was a mystery she couldn’t fathom, even though she pondered it about a hundred times a day. In fact, the healthier he got, the worse she felt.
Crooked Hearts Page 23
