by Lou Cadle
“’K,” she said. “I’m ready.”
“One-two-three,” he said, and this time she matched his rhythm and stepped back at the right time. They did their six steps and came to a stop. “And that’s basically it.”
“Except the turning. How do you do that?”
“Well, there’s a leader and a follower, and the leader decides and indicates.”
“How?”
“My arms will tell you.”
“So you kind of push me around?”
“You’re a lousy follower, you know that?” But he smiled as he said it. “It’s more subtle than that. Stay aware of the pressure. I’ll guide you.”
“Go on then. I’m ready.”
“Try to make it sound less like we’re marching into battle.”
And yet there was something of that to the moment. She felt she was in a war with him for something—for intimacy? And she’d won a battle with getting him to dance at all. “I want you to lead.”
His expression said he doubted it, but he said only, “Ready? We’ll go four times, twelve steps.” Then he counted again and they began to move.
It really wasn’t that hard to feel where he wanted her to go. They turned toward her right, just a little each time, and at the end of the twelve steps, she was back in almost the same spot she had started from.
“Of course, the better you are, the more you turn. Good dancers can cover a huge ballroom in a minute.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It is, once you have the steps down automatic. And this is a pretty easy step.”
“I think I have it. So, will you sing?”
“I’ll hum.” He dropped her hand, wiped his hands on his jeans again, and then stood and took the ready position again. He hummed some minor-key song, softly, but it was the only sound she could hear, so it was loud enough, and three beats in, he started to move.
When he started to turn her more, she looked down at their feet and felt his hand tighten on hers.
“Look at me,” he said.
So she did, and tried to let go and allow her body, not her brain, to make sense of the dance. In a minute, she felt herself relax, and he must have felt it too, for he began to turn her more enthusiastically.
They moved through the clearing they’d created with their own muscles and sweat, somehow avoiding tripping on any of the jutting bits of limbs or rocks, until she started to feel the dance, become part of the music, even though it was only Curt humming. She began to smile at him, and then the smile faded as she saw his own face change, as if something was trying to move out, past his control.
She knew, with instincts she hadn’t known she possessed, that this was her moment. If she wanted to become lovers with Curt, she had a chance right now. But what little experience she had at seduction was that of a child, and any clever words someone else might have found for this moment escaped her. Instead of saying something, she used her body, bridging the distance between them until her breasts grazed his chest.
He stopped humming, but he turned her in the dance, and after another few steps, they stopped. She moved her hand on his neck, encouraging him to come closer. Their eyes were still locked on one another’s, and she could see him fighting a battle with himself. She pressed closer, closed her eyes, and tilted her head back a fraction, afraid to use clumsy words that would drive him off.
When he bent to her and kissed her, she didn’t feel it as a victory. Oddly, she felt fragile, vulnerable, like crying at the unexpected intrusion of not another human body but a human soul somehow reaching hers after a long, cold isolated time.
He kept it gentle, and she let him lead, as with the dance, but he was trembling a little, as if holding back from doing what he wanted.
When he broke the kiss, she kept her eyes closed and answered the question he hadn’t asked, in a whisper. “Yes,” she said. She disengaged the hand that was holding his and rested it just above his collarbone, moving it ever so slightly across his dusty skin, in toward his neck.
His own hands dropped to her waist, and he pulled her in, and she could feel his erection.
It was all she could do to keep herself from wrapping a leg around him to get closer to it. She was aware of the strange disconnect of her upper body, which was all emotion and tenderness and fear, and her lower body, which was all brave lust. Her brain—well, that wasn’t working so well right now.
He muttered something she couldn’t catch, but then he kissed her again, and less gently, and she was lost in it.
A branch snapped and barely registered. But then a voice, a shy clearing of a throat, made her eyes pop open.
Curt stepped away as Sierra turned and saw her daughter, staring at them, looking surprised and embarrassed and unsure of what to do.
“Zoe,” she said. And she had no more words than that one.
“Grandma wants you to know the pregnant lady is going to have her baby. She wants to talk to you now.”
Chapter 16
“Honey,” Sierra said, but that’s all she said, for she had no idea what to say next. And then Zoe turned and ran away. In an instant, she was out of sight.
“And that’s why we shouldn’t do this,” Curt said. “One of many reasons.”
“What?” Sierra was caught in such a whirlwind of emotions, she couldn’t quite make sense of the words. There was frustrated lust, and guilt that she didn’t understand, and worry about Zoe, and now she was irritated at Curt for saying that. “What reasons would those be?”
He dismissed the question—and her—with a wave of his hand, and then he bent to pick up his shirt. “You need to go after your daughter. And see what Kelly needs from you.”
“I know I do!” she said, snapping at him. “I know that!” But she didn’t know what she was going to say when she caught up with Zoe. “We didn’t do anything wrong, you and me. She needs to learn that her mother is a person with a life. Such as it is.”
“Such as it is,” he said, his tone flat. He used his shirt to sop up sweat on his face.
What she felt mostly, right now, was the return of that sense of isolation she always felt, like there was that big icy bubble between her and everyone else. For a moment—an all too brief moment—Curt had reached past it and into her. The moment was gone, but she wanted it back. She figured anything she could say right now would push him away, but she had to try. “There’s no good reason you and I can’t be lovers.”
“I’ll clean up here,” he said. “Go on over to the Quinn place. Hope everything goes okay with the delivery. Tell Dev to come get me if they need me for anything.” His back was turned to her as he began to wrestle with the chains of the come-along.
She stood for a second, torn between duty and desire. Duty won.
She snatched up her own shirt and pulled it on without buttoning it. She ran straight up the road to the Quinn house. Dev was outside on the porch. “Is Zoe here?” she asked him.
“No. She went to find you.”
“She did. I guess she’s back with Pilar.” She’d deal with that later, and maybe by the time she did, she’d know the right thing to say. “I need to wash my hands. My everything, actually, but my hands would be a good start.”
“Mom says it won’t happen for some time, more than likely. But she wants to talk to you.”
“That, I can do without a shower. Can I go inside?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Sierra went in and Becca was in the kitchen, pacing. “You okay?”
“I’m not the one who’s in labor,” she said.
“It’ll be fine,” Sierra said, not really thinking about what she was saying.
Becca stopped her pacing. “How do you know that?”
She felt chagrined. “I don’t. It was just—you look so upset, and I was trying to make it better.”
“No one can make it better. Maybe Kelly, but I don’t know.”
“She’s with Janine?”
“Examining her, yeah.”
“She didn’t chase you
out,” Sierra said, making it not quite a question.
“A matter of space, not of privacy. I’ve seen everything there is to see of my wife.” Her voice broke on the last word. “Shit.”
“You’re worried. I know. But Kelly has doctored a lot of hurt people. Here, in Payson, in our friend Wes’s neighborhood. She even sewed a severed fingertip back on one of Wes’s people.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I am. She delivered my baby. I mean, I didn’t have problems like Janine, but Kelly was great.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust her. Or you. Or anyone here. I can see you’re not bad people.”
“We want Janine to be okay. Not as much as you, of course, but we really do.”
“Too bad wishes can’t make things so. I’d wish for none of this to ever have happened—back up ten years and make history work differently.”
“I don’t know that we could have,” Sierra said. She didn’t think about old-style politics. Really never had, except in her high school class in current affairs. “We just have to deal with whatever comes our way.”
“Then I’d have prepared like you all did. I wish we would have. Would have moved somewhere else, gotten a place in the country like this, had a better chance of making it on our own.”
“You might get that chance.”
Becca had been standing on the other side of the table, and now she dropped into a chair. “I’m so worried,” she said, as if to herself, staring at the table.
“I know. I don’t mean to be rude, but I want to wash my hands in case Kelly wants me to touch Janine. I’ve been working.”
Becca gave no response.
Sierra went into the hall bathroom and looked in the mirror. Her hair still had bits of twigs and dead leaves in it. She pulled them out, then leaned over the toilet and took it out of its ponytail and shook her hair, running her fingers through so that any more leaves would fall in there. She put the ponytail back together, turned on the hot water, and washed first her hands, and then her face, and then her hands again up to the elbow. By the time she turned off the tap, the water was running painfully hot.
She emerged from the bathroom as Kelly came from the bedroom. Kelly held up a finger, went into the kitchen and said something quiet to Becca, and then she pointed Sierra into the living room.
The sofa was made up as a bed, but the chairs were still available to sit in. The fabric was worn on one chair, and faded along the arms. Kelly sat heavily in that chair.
Instead of taking a chair herself, Sierra knelt in front of Kelly. “You’re worried,” she said.
“I don’t know how much I can do. But I wanted you to know the plan.”
“Okay. I’ll do whatever you need me to do. But would Joan be better at this? Or Misha?”
“Misha will be helping a lot. But I need a second person. You’re tougher than Joan,” Kelly said. “And I think you have a stronger stomach.”
“Janine is going to bleed, you think?”
“She already is, and there’s really nothing I can do to stop it. The baby has to come first. Then, if she hasn’t lost too much blood, I might be able to stop it.”
“How?”
“I have tea that might work, and I’m already getting her to drink that. And after the delivery, I’m going to try to pack her vagina with clean cloth, try to get some pressure on it. Massage her uterus, hope that the natural processes happen and the blood vessels close quickly.”
“I didn’t bleed much, did I?”
“No. Your childbirth was easy. You have a good body for it, wide hips. You could probably have six babies without a hitch.”
If Sierra knew some hand symbol to ward off a curse, she’d make it. “One is enough.”
Kelly might have caught the odd tone in her voice on another day. Right now, she was frowning in concentration, staring across the room at the sofa without really seeing it. “I’ve been over it in my mind for days. I can’t think of anything else.”
“What do you need me for?”
She looked up and the frown eased. “I might need you to spell me. If this lasts all night, I might run out of energy. I hate that, but I might.”
“Of course. Now? I mean, do you want a nap now, while it’s easier? I’ll sit with her if you’d like.”
“I’m okay for now. You go home and eat and feed your child, and come back in a couple hours and check. I might let you have a shift then. Dev will run and get you if there’s an emergency. Are you willing?”
“Of course. I’ll do whatever I can. Whatever you tell me to do.”
“Okay. I wanted to ask. And to warn you not to wander away from the house.”
“Not sure where I’d wander to, but I won’t today. I’ll be at home. House, hen house, garden, or maybe the barn. Yelling distance from the back deck, for sure. If Dev can’t find me immediately, have him give a holler.”
“Good. Okay. We’ll do the best we can.”
“We always do,” Sierra said, but then she felt a twinge of guilt. Some better mother—Kelly, or Joan—would have known just what to do with Zoe a few minutes ago, what to say. Sierra had stood there like an idiot.
She still didn’t know what to say to Zoe, but she knew enough to know she had to talk with her about what she’d seen. She didn’t feel like sharing the incident with anyone else. She was going to have to work it out on her own.
Dev had returned to working in the garden, and he didn’t even see her pass. Sierra went back to her home—her father’s home—and found him on the back deck in the shade, sharpening knives. “Is Zoe inside?” she asked.
“No. Haven’t seen her in a half-hour or so. She’s over at the Quinn house, in the orchard maybe.”
“Okay, I’ll check for her there in a second. The woman—Janine—is in labor.”
“Oh?” He looked up. “Is everything okay?”
“Not entirely. I might need to help tonight.”
“Anything I can do, just say the word.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m going to grab a quick shower and then find Zoe. Everything else okay? Need me to get eggs?”
“Garden and hens are all taken care of. You have enough to do with clearing the new field, so don’t worry about that. Supper won’t be much though—salad with boiled eggs. I want to use up the eggs first with the refrigerator broken.”
“That sounds great. I appreciate it. And you.” She picked up a pair of the solar showers, lifting them carefully. They were made of plastic and spent a good deal of time in the sun. They wouldn’t last forever. Plastic might take ten thousand years to break down entirely, but as they’d discovered the past ten years, it broke beyond usefulness much faster than that. One of the bags had already split at the seams. They treated the remaining ones with care.
“Be careful,” Pilar said. “Those are hot.”
Once a father, always a father, Sierra thought, finding a reason to smile at something for the first time since Zoe had interrupted the moment with Curt. In the shower, she wanted to linger on the memory of that, the feelings that it had stirred in her, too often ignored. But her duty as a mother superseded her duty to herself, and after she had topped off the bags of scalding water with enough cool water from the tap, she spent the time in the shower trying to figure out what to say to Zoe.
Maybe it was best to say nothing? Let her work it out for herself. But no, the look on Zoe’s face, and her strangled voice, and the way she’d run were all evidence that the easy way out was not an option. “Mommy has needs,” Sierra tried in her own mind, and shook her head at that. Apologize? But for what? She wasn’t sorry. The only thing she was sorry about was that Zoe had come across them and stopped what Sierra had been thinking about for a very long time.
She feared she’d never have that moment with Curt again—never have any such moment with any man ever again. No—don’t think of that. That’s a worry for another day. Think of Zoe and how she must be feeling.
Sierra tried to think through how much physical affe
ction her daughter saw between men and women. Sierra had grown up with a single father, and over the years he’d had three serious girlfriends who’d stayed over more than once, including Lisette, who’d been living with them for a year when oil ran out. Sierra had seen enough—had heard enough—to be aware that her father was a sexual being who slept with people other than her mother, and she knew her mother had sex with men in Asia.
Of course, her mother hadn’t lived next door to her. She tried to imagine a different childhood, where her mother had lived in Phoenix, maybe, and she visited, and there were boyfriends around. She didn’t think she’d have been bothered. Or maybe she would have, thinking, This guy is no Pilar. Why do you prefer him?
That might be part of what she needed to say to Zoe. Your father and I are very happy we had you. And Dev is a fantastic guy, a good father, and a good friend. But we’re not a couple like your grandparents. And Curt’s a good guy too. And she could say something about liking people in different ways. For grownups to want to kiss, they had to like someone in a special way—not better, not worse than other kinds of liking. Just different.
She might have an easier time explaining how grownups did things if she felt like more of a grownup. She did in some ways. There was nothing around the house she couldn’t do herself, and if Pilar were laid up with a long illness or injury, everything would still get done. Emily and Misha and Rod reminded her that she wasn’t that young—though they were older and harder-working at twenty than people had been at that age before the crash. So if they seemed sober and mature, she must be more so.
But when it came to sex and love and all that, she was only the product of her experiences. And her experiences were about what she’d have had at age nineteen, had nothing changed, and oil had kept flowing, and she’d gone off to some apprenticeship training program and moved out of her father’s house.
Sierra had emptied the first bag of water and was using the second with a scrub brush to get her hands and arms as clean as possible. Janine’s health was in jeopardy as it was; Sierra wasn’t going to add to her troubles by introducing filthy hands into the process. She focused on that, on scrubbing until her fingertips were pink and her palms showed no dark lines of embedded dirt. Soap stung in the dozens of small scratches she’d gotten by wrestling felled branches around. Lye made from wood ash plus rendered animal fat made their soap, and this particular batch was quite heavy on the lye.
