Thicker Than Blood Read Online Free PDF Page A

head to Bruno until she was sure the worst of the shock had faded from her face. Then she laughed lightly. “You been fooling around with a controlled substance?”
    “Nope. I’m dead serious.”
    “But….” She pulled on the hem of her bright green tee shirt. “Why?” She finished weakly.
    “Is that the only teapot you got?”
    “It makes perfectly good tea.”
    “We oughta get married because your family’s mostly gone, except for your Pa, bless his heart, but I bet dollars to doughnuts he’s usually asking for help instead of givin’ it.”
    Rachel lifted one shoulder and let it drop.
    Bruno went on, “I got no wife, and you got no china.”
    “China? What does china have to do with anything?”
    “You think china don’t have to do with anything? It has everything to do with it. What are you doing standing there? Make the tea. I tell you a story.” Bruno paced, waving his hands as he talked.
    “I was eleven years old when my Mama shook me awake and told me to get dressed. That was in the old country, Italy. We got packs strapped to our backs, and we walk, all the way up the mountains, then down. Now me, I was always short, and I didn’t have much muscle yet, and my pack, I didn’t know what was in it, but it was damn heavy. Mama had food in hers and Papa had clothes and tools, so I figured mine had to be real valuable. Lira maybe. Silver, gold. Even when that pack rubbed blisters, I was proud they trusted me to carry it.”
    Rachel set water to boiling, listening intently, partly because she’d never heard this story, partly it kept her face busy lest the shock still show.
    “We go clear over the mountains to Genoa and get on a ship. I was still carrying that pack around every day because we didn’t have anything grand, like a cabin. We were on that ship a lot of days, and then more days on a train. Finally, Papa said we were in California and this was home. That was okay by me. I was plenty tired of carrying that pack. That night I found out what was in it.”
    Rachel handed Bruno a mug of tea and he looked into it as if reading the leaves.
    “That was just about the biggest little bombshell of my life,” he mused.
    “What was in it?”
    “My grandmama’s china. Not lira, not silver, not gold, not even food. China.”
    “You’re joking! They made you carry dishes halfway around the world?”
    “That’s what I thought. But I was a kid. I was wrong. That china was just as important as food and clothes, maybe more important than lira.”
    Rachel stared at him. “Excuse me! I don’t think so. I’ve never known anyone who couldn’t eat off a paper plate.”
    “That china was all we had of our old home, our past. What I carried in that pack was tradition. It’s why I’m a farmer. Old Enrique, he understood that. His own father, his grandfather—farmers, like mine. He must be spinning in his grave to think you been thrown off his land. Come back. If you can’t go to his farm, come to mine.”
    Looking at the cup, not at her, he ran his finger around the edge, then held it up. “This cup, it’s heavy, made of mud. You got no china.”
    Rachel blinked. For a moment, no words came. She owed him too much to be flippant. She couldn’t tell him she felt no loss of tradition, that for that matter, her mother had come from a Jewish family in San Francisco.
    But he’s a good-hearted, decent guy. He knows me. Even the worst of me. I’d be taken care of. I’d be rich.
    She peered over the rim of her mug and smiled gently. “Let me think about it.”
    “Sure. You think on it.”
    Bruno drank his tea and changed the subject to his favorite complaint, environmentalists. “We give them land for wetlands. We give them water. What more do they want? My arm? My leg? No, they want to put us out of business.”
    He peered at her and stopped. “Rachel, sweetie, you look tired.”
    “I am. It hasn’t been a terrific day. I saw Pop. He looks awful. He hit me up for some money.”
    “Son of a gun.