Summer's Freedom Page 23

  * * *

  Ramón stirred sugar into his coffee and watched Tanya carefully tear the wrapping from a straw. From the speakers in the ceiling came a soft Spanish ballad, mournful with strummed guitars and flutes. For a moment, he was transported to another day, another time, when he’d danced with this woman, when she had been a sweet, pretty young girl. . . and he’d fallen in love.

  In those days, he’d often fallen in love. More often than not, his passion had gone unrequited. Upon meeting Tanya for the first time, so many years ago, he’d thought his infatuation was like all the others.

  But in Tanya’s beautiful dark blue eyes there had been an almost painful yearning for things unnamable and unattainable. It had struck him deeply. As he’d held her loosely, her blond hair spilling over her shoulders, her youthful eighteen-year-old body swelling just slightly with the baby in her tummy, she’d told him about a book she was reading, Tortilla Flat. She’d said the name as if it were new, as if no one had ever discovered it before, and there had been magic and wonder in her tone, in her sweet innocence.

  That she had reached the age of eighteen without knowing such a work existed, that she could find it on her own and love it with such passion, had touched Ramón in some quiet place. Until that day, he’d been too enmeshed in his anger to see what was plain if only he looked around him—a person didn’t have to be brown or black or red to suffer the indignities of ignorance and poverty. The realization that social class, not race, was the great deciding factor in American society had changed his life.

  They had talked all afternoon, while Victor—Tanya’s husband and Ramón’s cousin—drank in the bar with the wedding party. They talked about books and movies, about ideas and hopes and plans. As he listened to her sweet, soft voice, and watched her eyes shine with excitement, Ramón had fallen in love.

  And when Victor, drunk and evil-tempered, broke Ramón’s cheekbone, Ramón had almost felt it was deserved. Tanya was Victor’s wife, after all.

  Ramón had gone back to Albuquerque, to his Latin-American studies, and had tried to wipe the beautiful young girl from his mind. He hadn’t known until almost a year later that Tanya, too, had paid for that golden afternoon. Victor had beaten her senseless and she’d landed in the hospital with seven broken bones, including ribs and wrist. By some miracle, the baby had survived. Tanya briefly left her husband after the hospital had released her, but Victor promised to give up drinking. Tanya had returned to him, and Victor kept his promise.

  For a little while, anyway.

  Looking now at the woman the girl had become, Ramón felt a little dizzy with lost chances and lost hopes and ruined dreams. She was not the softly round girl he’d been smitten with that day so long ago. Her hair was not curled and wispy, but cut straight across so it hung like a gleaming golden brown curtain at her shoulders. Her face and body were thinner and harder, lean as a coyote’s. She had a long, ropy kind of muscle in her upper arms, the kind that came from sustained hard work.

  Her exotically beautiful blue eyes were wary as they met his. “Do I have something on my chin?” she asked.

  He shook his head, smiling. “Sorry. I was just remembering the last time I saw you.”

  The faintest hint of a smile curved her pretty mouth. “Boy, that was forever ago. Another lifetime.”

  “It was.” He took a breath, trying to think of a way to pick his way through the minefield of memories. He opted for flattery. “You were so pretty I couldn’t believe you danced with me.”

  A small wash of rose touched her cheeks. She glanced out the window, then back to him. “What I remember is how smart you were. You talked to me like I was smart, too. It meant a lot to me.”

  Ramón smiled at her, feeling a warmth he’d thought far beyond his reach. “Me, too.”

  At that moment, the waitress brought their food. Ramón leaned back and let go of a breath as the waitress put his plate down. Things would be all right. He hadn’t been sure.

  * * *

  Once she got some hot food inside her hollow stomach, Tanya felt stronger. The stamina and common strength she’d worked to build for eleven years seeped back, and with it, a sense of normalcy.

  With a sigh, she leaned back in the turquoise vinyl booth. “Much better.”

  “Good.”

  The waitress came by with a steel coffeepot, topped their cups, and whisked away Tanya’s empty bowl. “I’m sorry I seemed so strange back at the station,” Tanya said. “It’s just a little overwhelming.”

  “Don’t apologize. I’m sorry I startled you.” He finished the last bites of an enormous smothered burrito and pushed the plate to one side. “Let’s start fresh.”

  “Okay.” She attempted a smile, and felt the unused muscles in her face creak only a little. “Didn’t you wear glasses?”

  “Yeah.” His grin was wry. “I’m blind as a bat, but glasses aren’t real practical on a ranch.” He touched his lips with his napkin. “Weren’t you blonde?”

  “Sort of,” she said with a shrug. “Victor liked my hair light, so I dyed it for him. This is the natural color.”

  “I like it.” His gaze lingered, and Tanya saw a shimmer of sexual approval in those unrelentingly black irises.

  An answering spark lit somewhere deep and cold within her, and Tanya found herself noticing again his mouth—full-lipped and sensual. On another man, it would have seemed too lush, but amid the savagely beautiful planes and angles of his face, it seemed only to promise pleasure beyond all imagining.

  The cinders of burned-out feelings within her flared a little brighter, stirring a soft, tiny flame of awareness she’d not known in a long, long time.

  Abruptly she quenched it, stamping hard at the spark to kill it. She tore her gaze away and poked her soda with the straw. “Why don’t you tell me about my job?”

  As if he understood the reason for the abrupt change of subject, Ramón replied in an impersonal tone. “You’ll be cooking. Desmary has needed someone for quite some time, but it’s hard to find someone with institutional experience in such an under populated area.”

  Tanya couldn’t resist a small, wry dig at her own background. “If it’s institutional food you want, I’m a master.”

  He chuckled. “Good. Desmary, the head cook, can’t move around as well as she used to, but there’s no place else for her to go. You’re going to be her feet and her helper.” He paused to dip a chip in salsa. “She’s pretty independent, so if you can be discreet about helping her, I’d appreciate it.”

  “No problem.”

  “We’ve got a full house at the moment, twenty-five boys. They all have KP, so basically you’re in charge of just getting them fed, and they clean up. Anybody who wants to cook can sign up to help, and you’ll usually have a couple of boys every day.”

  “How old are the kids?”

  “The youngest right now is eight. They don’t often get into serious trouble much earlier than that. The oldest is seventeen. Most of them are twelve to fifteen.”

  Tanya half smiled. “It’s going to be quite a switch for me to go from an almost completely female environment to one dominated by males.”

  “And teenage boys are more male than they’ll ever be again.” Ramón shook his head. “There are few women out there. I’m trying to change that, so the boys can learn to treat women with respect.” He lifted one shoulder. “You may not always get it.”

  “I can handle that.”

  “You’ll have to.”

  That sounded a little intimidating. Tanya lifted her eyebrows in question.

  “There are rules to create discipline and order, to teach the boys how to behave themselves. If one of them is disrespectful, you’ll be expected to manage the situation.”

  Tanya frowned. “What constitutes disrespectful?”

  He grinned. “If it wouldn’t have gone over in 1920, it won’t go over now.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not at all.” His face was sober, but the dark eyes shone with intense passio
n. “Some of these boys are like animals when they come to me. They don’t know how to eat at the table, or how to dress for regular society. They treat women and girls like sluts or possessions, like a pair of shoes.”

  Like a possession. Tanya felt the tightness in her chest again. That was the way Victor had treated her. And she’d allowed it for a long time. She looked away, to the calm scene beyond the windows.

  “I’m trying to give them dignity, Tanya,” he said. “I think you can help me.”

  Dignity. What dignity had she had, all these years? Had she ever known it? “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all I ask of anyone,” he said, and picked up the check. “Are you ready?”

  A swift wave of nerves and anticipation washed through her. “Yes.”

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  A MINUTE

  TO SMILE

  (Excerpt)

  by

  Barbara Samuel

  Prologue

  From the window seat in his tiny office, Alexander Stone could see a great portion of the university campus. The big, multi-paned window was the one redeeming feature of the stuffy room, located high in a tower, and today the view acted as a balm on his aching heart. Trees branched out in feathery green, waving their slender topmost branches into a vivid Colorado sky. Beyond the sprawling campus, dusty blue foothills surrounded the city of Boulder like brawny sentinels.

  Alexander’s gaze was focused below, upon the whirling reds and russets and wines of a festival sponsored by the history club each year. The sound of medieval flutes and harps floated through his open window, mingled with the laughter and catcalls of the students below.

  He watched the quadrangle for a long time. As usual, everyone had thrown themselves into the preparations for the fair—a great many of them his students. He had been among them until an hour ago, when the sense of his own isolation had driven him upstairs to this quiet room. Once, he had enjoyed the bustle and noise, but that had been back in the days when he’d had someone to share it with. Now the fair seemed like just another obligation to fulfill.

  Obligations. He eyed the stack of final exams on his desk, but the thought of wading through them held absolutely no appeal.

  Picking up a pair of binoculars he kept in the office to examine the birds that often sang outside the window, he scanned the high branches and was rewarded with the sight of a shiny black crow alighting briefly on a branch before it swooped down toward a knot of discarded food on the sidewalk. Alexander watched the bird descend almost dizzily, snag the food and sail away.

  Through the binoculars, he caught sight of a group of his students who were singing a rousing—and no doubt bawdy—song in front of a hedge. He smiled to himself. Farther on was a fellow professor, sprawled against a tree, eating chicken. A pair of dark-haired children chased one another in the grass. Handsome lads, he thought distractedly, moving his binoculars a little farther.

  He paused as a woman came into view, no doubt the mother of the two little boys. The vivid yellow of her blouse caught his eye, a yellow impossibly at odds with the cloud of pale red hair skimming her bared shoulders. Those colors should never have worked together, he thought.

  But they did. He admired the bold combination for a moment, and found his eyes sweeping the flawless, milk white of the woman’s skin. Generous breasts and hips balanced the roundness of her arms. As he watched, she laughed robustly, then reached out to snag one of the children, affectionately tumbling him into her lap to nibble his neck and tickle his ribs. There was a vividness about the woman, about the vibrant love spilling out from her that stirred Alexander deeply.

  As the small boy giggled helplessly against his mother, Alexander felt a wistfulness move through him, a pinch of hunger he’d not felt in a long time. He watched the woman kiss her child almost reverently, then hold out an arm to the other boy, who sank next to her, his face flushed.

  All three of them simply sat there for a moment, spent with the festival, dappled by the speckled shade that fell through the branches of an oak tree. Alexander felt the restless stirring within him grow and ache for an instant before he could push it away. He threw down his glasses and turned away from the window, shedding the mantle he’d worn for the festival in favor of his street clothes. There was no restlessness, no pain that a good round of combat in the dojo couldn’t cure.

  One

  Esther Lucas was running late. As usual. This afternoon, it was for a typical reason. She’d been unable to find the boys’ gis, which turned out to be exactly where she’d put them—folded in a neat stack on the dryer. It was the towels folded on top of them that had thrown her off.

  Now she checked her watch and hurried the boys along. “Come on, guys. This isn’t a city hike. We have to get to the dojo.”

  “Sensei said it’s important to be on time,” Jeremy, her youngest reminded her.

  “I know.” Sensei said had preceded a solid third of his sentences in the past few weeks. Most of them were the kinds of things a mother loved to hear her children mouth, but they all mainly revolved around a sense of orderliness and balance that Esther had never mastered.

  “We’re almost there,” she said. “See?” She pointed to a small, unassuming building sandwiched between a photographer’s studio and a quilting shop. A sign in the window announced the form taught, Shotokan Karate, and the instructor’s name, Ryohe Kobayashi, in Roman letters. The lovely calligraphy of Japan followed, presumably announcing the same information.

  The boys slowed as they reached the door and entered the dojo with a dignity and hush that always surprised her. Esther tagged behind, scowling at the bank of heavy clouds that hung over the mountains. Ordinarily the precious hour the children spent at their lessons was the only time she had to herself in a day. She used it to stroll along the streets nearby, sometimes stopping for a cup of tea or a sweet while she waited.

  Today, the impending rain made that impossible.

  Just inside the doors of the studio was a bank of chairs and Esther settled in one, desultorily taking out a book to read while she waited, thinking with longing of the piece of pie she’d intended to treat herself to before the clouds had ruined her plan.

  A pretty Asian girl sat behind a low counter to Esther’s right, tallying numbers on an adding machine. She smiled at Esther’s sigh.

  Off to the left through an archway, was the main room. Long and wide, it consumed the rest of the space in the dojo except for a few smaller rooms toward the back.

  Her wandering gaze caught on the figure of a man at her end of the dojo going through elaborate, stylized exercises. It was tai chi, Esther realized after a moment; the same form her friend Abe practiced.

  But Abe had never looked like this.

  The man wore only a loose pair of trousers, leaving his chest and feet bare. Tall and lean, with thick, unruly dark hair and a beard, his movements sent the long muscles in his arms and back rippling with the sleek grace of a jungle cat. His skin was tawny, his nose blunt and broad, and his hair curled over his well-shaped head like a mane.

  A mane, Esther thought. Yes. He was no ordinary jungle cat. A quickening shivered through her middle. He looked like a lion—king of all the lesser beasts, master of jaguars and tigers and foolish monkeys. It was in the arrogant tilt of his proud head, in the intelligence of his wide brow.

  The quickening rippled outward from her belly, into her limbs. Who was he? She knew she had never seen him here before.

  As he shifted once more, the light from a window high on the wall spilled over him, showing tiny strands of silver in the glossy mahogany hair. He wore a neatly trimmed beard, and it had been heavily painted with the same silver. Esther inclined her head with a small frown, sure he’d not yet seen forty. She wondered if genetics or tragedy had given him that early frost.

  Absently she thought she should quit staring. But somehow it seemed as silly to turn her eyes away fr
om the natural splendor of his male form as it would be to turn away from the brawny shoulders of the mountains. She let herself admire him until his set was complete. He paused, shaking his hands loosely. The heavy canvas trousers rode his hipbones, showing a lean, tanned stomach with a line of dark hair running over the muscles as if for emphasis. Another quiver ran over her nerves.

  Then he met her gaze and for an instant, she was riveted. It was an unflinchingly masculine face, rendered in clean, bold strokes. But she was snared less by the face itself than by something strangely compelling in his unsmiling expression. There was incandescence in his eyes, and a definite sense of recognition.

  As she watched, a strange flash of bleakness bled everything else from his eyes, giving Esther a fleeting glimpse of a hopelessness so vast she could barely fathom it.

  Abruptly he bent down to pick up a short canvas robe. As he walked toward the back of the room, carefully skirting the mat where the children were practicing, he shrugged into the robe. He didn’t look back.

  Esther touched her breastbone, feeling her heart threading below. A blast of rain struck the window behind her and she started, whirling to look at the gray sheeting into the glass. The bleakness in the man’s eyes had looked just that color, she thought, and decided that tragedy had silvered his beard.

  * * *

  Several days later, Esther washed shelves in the organic and natural foods shop she ran from the front of her old home. The alternative radio station was playing a Jelly Roll Morton tune and the fragrance of a freshly brewed pot of her special herb tea wafted through the sunny, plant-filled room. Expertly she analyzed the scent as she dusted antique tins that held plastic bags of the same mixture of rose hips, hibiscus, chamomile and various other beneficial herbs.

  “Too much hibiscus this time,” she told the Victorian face on the ornate box.