Barbara Samuel Read Online Free PDF Page B

a hand to her chest. There were things a person didn’t get over. No amount of therapy, journals, art, or rituals could take away the pain of some wounds. Period. Some of them lived on forever in big messy scars that were so tender they could bleed without much provocation at all. Luna’s father leaving home left a scar like that. On Luna, on her sister Elaine, on her mother.
    Standing in the courtyard of Kitty’s luxurious home on a Saturday morning, Luna said, “Give me a minute, Mom.”
    Kitty cocked her head, but then she nodded. “Come in when you’re ready.”
    Luna moved away from the door, pacing ten steps out and ten steps back. One of the things she learned in recovery was to acknowledge emotions as they arose, instead of trying to stuff them behind a wall. Not that she was always particularly good at it.
    The dream hadn’t been notable. Just her father and her, just before he left, in a tourist shop in Albuquerque, where he’d bought her a copper bracelet machine-stamped with thunderbirds.
    Go with it
, Therapist Barbie said.
    Jesse Esquivel had left home one morning wearing a hard hat covered with football decals and a white T-shirt tucked into his jeans, and never came back. Luna remembered his arms, dark brown and bulging from hiswork, so strong that the sisters had swung on them like they were iron bars. He had loved them, their father. It was that fact that had made her wait, night after night, knees in the back of the couch so she could stare out the window, trusting that the smell of supper and her mother’s perfume would bring him home. She waited in perfect expectation, every night for what seemed like years but her mother said was only a couple of months, for him to come back through that front door.
    And she knew just how it would happen, too. He’d just show up some evening, maybe one of those back-to-school nights when the dark was starting to swallow up playtime in nibbles. He’d come in at the usual time, and the girls would leap up from their play and screech, “Daddy!” like they always did, and barrel into his sturdy legs, and he’d roar and laugh and let them swing on his arms. And then, drawn by the excitement, Kitty would come out, wiping her hands on a cup towel. She’d be wearing the nubby blue dress he liked so much and she’d kiss him on the lips and then the whole family would go sit down to the supper Kitty had made, and it would never be spoken of again.
    The fantasy had never come true.
    Standing in the courtyard of her mother’s elegant home some thirty years later, remembering, Luna could still ache for that little girl. Luna had worn the copper bracelet for three years, never taking it off. Once a week, Kitty took a toothbrush to the green staining her wrist from it, but never insisted Luna remove it.
    One early morning in the third grade, Luna slipped off the merry-go-round before class, and the bracelet caught on a screw that was just a tiny bit loose. It nearly wrenched her hand from her arm before the metal gave way in a twist. She still had the scar beneath her thumb.The bracelet was not repairable, but somehow, she’d managed to keep the pieces all this time.
    “Luna, sweetie, are you okay?” Kitty said from the door.
    “Fine.” She smiled to show she meant it. “I dreamed about Daddy last night. Made me a little sad, I guess.”
    A flicker of something went over Kitty’s face, but she never spoke of Jesse, and she didn’t now. With a little smile, she came over and hugged Luna in a breathless whirl of perfume and cosmetics, then pulled her inside with one arm because she had a shoe in the other. “I’m almost ready to go. Made some sweet rolls, so have one before we get out of here.” She limped into the kitchen on one turquoise sandal, and waved toward the coffeemaker as she leaned on the counter. “Help yourself. Caramel, just the way you like them.”
    “You are so evil,” Luna said, knowing the last thing she should indulge in was a caramel