Maybe I had known it all along and maybe that was the reason I’d despised him right off. Maybe he had known it, too, and dreading it, had reconciled himself, nevertheless. That would be like him, always facing up to things no matter how terrible. And how terrible the prospect of marrying me must have been. How he must have shuddered to think of it, for surely, I was not what he’d hoped for in his schoolboy dreams.
Pretty people should marry other pretty people. It’s better for everybody that way, and Luca should have married Caroline, or someone else as pretty as himself. Still, I was shortchanging him. For all his beauty, his aristocratic nose, clear blue eyes, and perfectly aligned teeth, Luca was not a Caroline. There was more to him than that.
I hadn’t wanted to notice anything nice about Luca before. I’d been too busy thinking up ways to torture him and put as great a distance as possible between us. How very successful I had been. It was too late now to call to him. He would be too far away ever to hear me again. All this, I’d done by myself, and I took a twisted pride in having been able to ruin things so thoroughly without any help. Now, we hardly ever spoke at all. Yet in the widening silence, I saw for the first time how it really was with him.
He’d been a proud boy who had grown into a proud man, but one who had been forced to swallow that pride so often that it had choked off something inside him. Humility did not become him, and I could not stand to see him humbled. It was like seeing royalty dethroned, or a mountain lion made docile. He should have been cocky and conceited. He should have been bold and unafraid. But he was none of those things. When Luca raised a fork to eat, his hands shook, and I knew that something at the core of him was shaking, too, its foundation soon to rent asunder.
There was one thing more I found out about Luca in those days of silence, and that was that he cared for me. Not loved. He did not love me. But he cared for me, and believing I had no right to expect more, it would have been enough, if I had not known the reasons for his care. It was in Luca’s nature to always take the part of the weak, the homely, the outcast. And while I didn’t mind him thinking me homely and outcast, I couldn’t bear knowing that at some time, when I was unaware, he had seen me weak, and moved by the sight, had come to care for me. I could stand to be hated, taunted, shunned, but not this, this terrible compassion.
Luca. I can hardly stand to tell of him during those two years. He changed so much that it was as if we hardly knew him. While I blamed myself for the change, it was the mines, I knew, that really did him in.
After we came back from New Jersey, Luca started working in the mines, the only work he could find, despite knowing five languages. There was no demand for linguists in Galen.
Jewel begged him not to do it. She said it wasn’t natural for men to work in dark little holes in the ground. She said it would break his back and his spirit and he’d be old before his time. She said that with his cleverness and knowledge of five languages, he should be a diplomat or an ambassador or something important. She begged me to talk to him. She said that working in the mines would keep him from ever reaching his potential. But I knew it was useless, and all I could say was, “How many of us will reach our potential, Jewel? Will I? Did you?”
All of us noticed the change in him. I can’t remember him ever smiling in those years, so that everybody almost forgot what nice teeth and dimples he had. Except me. I never forgot how he looked when he smiled, and I watched and waited but I wouldn’t see it again for a long time. He seldom spoke to me, and even when he did, it was never a word more than necessary. He didn’t talk much to Caroline or Jolene either, and when they talked, he seemed to begrudge them an answer. Only with Jewel, he never changed. Only with her was he unfailingly patient and kind.
Every week he insisted on turning his pay over to her, and I wondered how he could be saving for our divorce if he gave all his money away like that. But I never got the chance to ask him, because we were never alone together, and I sensed that that was as he wanted it. Every night, he’d come home all full of soot and coughing up dust, and after he’d wash up, Jewel would serve him dinner, and after he’d
