“If anybody does.”
The fire had grown a foot tall now, and Roman had left off feeding it tinder and started putting in chunks of wood as big as his wrist.
Their eyes met over the flames. She felt his hands on her, his fingers in her hair, his mouth at her breast, drawing up her desire and focusing it to a point.
She felt the impossibility of it.
Some people could breathe fire to life, but she wasn’t one of them.
Focused on the flames again, Roman smiled at something Michael said. In his triumph, he smiled his real smile, easy and bright.
Stanley reached across the table and covered her hand with his. “Susan wasn’t the type to hide things. If she felt like he’d cheated her, she’d have said.”
Ashley looked at his hand, crooked knuckle joints and liver spots, heavy and warm.
When he took it away, she picked up a match from the kitty and scraped it over the rough edge of the concrete tabletop. She watched the flame burn down until heat pinched her fingers, and then she shook it out.
“I have to look, though,” she said. “Just in case.”
CHAPTER THREE
When it got to be 5:30 and Ashley still hadn’t come out of the trailer—much less asked him what he wanted for dinner, shopped for the groceries she’d need to make the dinner, or cooked the dinner—Roman knocked on the door of the Airstream.
“Go away.” A layer of aluminum and plastic muffled her voice, but he could hear the wrongness in it.
The fire popped and crackled. It was 80 degrees out and starting to cool off. The sky was clear, the breeze just right.
Ashley Bowman was sitting in a trailer with the door closed and her new drapes blocking out all the light.
“Open up.”
“I’ll come out in a while.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just going through these boxes.”
“It doesn’t take all afternoon to go through a dozen boxes.”
A soft scraping sound, and then she flung the door open, nearly catching him in the nose. “It does when you take a lot of breaks to sob uncontrollably, okay?” Her eyes looked too small in her puffy face. “I’ll be fine tomorrow. I just need you to leave me alone for a while.”
Leave her alone. Exactly what he should do.
If Heberto were here, he would be working. Cut off from cell access, he’d head for a bar in the closest town, tune the wall-mounted TV t
o CNN, and commandeer a landline and the fax machine.
If Heberto were here, he would tell Roman that what Ashley Bowman did alone in that trailer for hours on end was none of Roman’s goddamn business. Not unless he could figure out a way to turn it to his advantage, make a profit on it.
And if Roman protested that he was worried about Ashley—that he’d been trying for two hours but he couldn’t stop worrying about her—Heberto would start talking about Cuba. Because everything was about Cuba for Heberto.
“The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” Che said that. Che was full of shit. Heberto would clip the word short, tongue to palate. Sheet. Fool of it.
The Revolution put my brother up against a wall and shot him on television. You think the man who pulled the trigger had his heart full of love?
Roman had heard a dozen variants of the speech. Heberto took it out, polished it. It always had the same moral.
It’s dog eat dog in this world.