Barbara Samuel Read Online Free PDF Page A

very
present.
His presence colored the air, made it almost shimmer.
    Truth be told, she’d had a distant sort of crush on him for months. It was a small town, and there weren’t that many eligible men past a certain age. Too many
artistes
in Taos—writers and photographers and painters, all who took themselves so seriously that a woman was an afterthought, a convenience. Thomas was … not ordinary, never that … but
real.
She saw him around a lot, at the Dairy Queen on hot nights, in a café, eating dinner by himself as he read the newspapers from Albuquerque and Denver. Mainly, she saw him at the grocery store where she worked as a florist. He bought Tide detergent and a lot of Chef Boyardee canned ravioli and frozen corn on the cob.
    Silence stretched, longer and thicker with every second. Tucking a lock of wild hair behind her ear like it might help, Luna managed a question. “How’s your grandma?”
    “Seems to be fine. She’s sleeping this morning.” He lifted his chin toward the window. “How’s it look in there?”
    “Not good.”
    He came up the steps and Luna instinctively kept a wide circle of empty space between them, watching as he repeated her gesture of a few minutes earlier, wiping the glass as if to get rid of the soot that was on the inside. She stood back safely, noticing that his hair, braided tightly into a single rope that fitted into the hollow of his spine almost to his waist, was still wet. It dampened the fabric of his blue-and-white striped shirt, a shirt that was tucked neatly into his jeans, the sleeves rolled up on powerful-looking forearms tanned the color of cinnamon.
    Now he turned. “It looks worse than bad,” he said gruffly, and shook his head. “I can’t imagine what she was up to.” From his pocket, he took a set of keys and unlocked the front door. “You want to hang around a second in case I go through the floor or something?”
    “Sure.”
    “Stay,” he said when the dog would have followed him into the house. The dog whined, but obeyed, all but sitting on Luna’s foot. Thomas raised an eyebrow. “You, too.”
    She smiled a little, looking beyond him toward the burned kitchen. “I don’t know that you ought to chance going in the kitchen. Those beams look pretty bad.”
    “Yeah.” He walked slowly, looking up at the ceilings covered with black swirls. He stopped on the threshold to the kitchen. Without stepping on the charred floor, hebent and picked something up, then dropped it with a yelp, shaking his fingers. He looked over his shoulder at her.
    “Hot?”
    He made a rueful face. “Not the smartest thing I ever did.” From his back pocket, he took a folded white handkerchief—how many men in the world still carried handkerchiefs?—and picked up what he’d dropped, carrying it back to where she stood. “Look.”
    It was a heavy metal candlestick holder. “Why would she be burning candles in the middle of the night?”
    “A ritual, prayers of some kind.” He turned it over, but it was the same all the way around. “Guess I’ll take it to her.”
    Luna’s eye caught on a curve of black hair against his brow, and she backed away a little jerkily. It was slightly humiliating to have to admit the whole crush business to herself and she really hoped he didn’t pick up on it. “Good idea,” she said.
    Then she turned and went back out to the porch and opened her water bottle to take a long drink. He came outside, too, and she didn’t look at him, choosing instead to focus on the blue rounds of mountains all around them. “Guess I’d better get going,” she said.
    “How’s that scratch?” he asked.
    She touched it. “A little raw, but nothing important.”
    “Do me a favor.” He took a small notebook out of his pocket, along with a stub of a pencil and a pair of reading glasses, which he perched on his nose before he scribbled something on the paper. “My phone number,” he said, “in case you need to see a doctor.”
    With the glasses