Putting it on for the first time, I was amazed how well I filled it out. My chest and hips were as full and round as Jewel’s had always been until a few months before. Remembering a picture I’d seen of her, it crossed my mind that I was built rather like her except bigger. But the thought passed quickly and never for a moment in a self-congratulatory way. If I ever thought about my body at all, it was only when it wasn’t working right. If I couldn’t lift something, I’d wish my back was stronger; or if I couldn’t haul something, I’d wish my legs had more muscle. I never wondered if my arms and legs and hips and chest, and the way they came together, were pleasing to the eye. But as I sat in the rocking chair with my legs tucked up under me and Old Sam in his customary place beneath my chair, I wondered exactly that.
I leaned back in the shadows and listened to Old Sam snore. Until my untimely rising, he’d been asleep at the foot of my bed, but when I got up, so did he. That’s the wonderful thing about dogs. When you want to sleep, they sleep with you, and if you should want to get up, even if it’s one o’clock in the morning, they get up with you and follow wherever you like, even into Hades, judging from Old Sam. Thinking of his congeniality, I reached down to rub his ears. He was getting old now and not as alert as he’d been as a pup. So he didn’t even stir when Luca came up the stairs, making them creak.
From the recesses of the porch, I watched him in the moonlight. He looked haggard but not dirty, and it piqued me to know that wherever he’d been he’d taken off his clothes and had a bath. He didn’t notice me, and I could have let him pass unseeing, but it had been so long since he’d directed a word at me, even a hateful one, that I thought even mean words would be better than none at all.
“Through whoring for the evening, I see.” It was an observation sure to get the conversation started.
He gave a start, but if I’d hoped to arouse him, I was soon disappointed. He turned to me with tired eyes, and said simply, “It’s none of your business where I spend my nights or who I spend them with.”
His tiredness made me even angrier than knowing he’d taken a bath somewhere naked, and I said, “Listen, you foreign bastard!” So suddenly did I come to my feet that Old Sam was jolted awake and ran off howling. “You married me for your own rotten selfish reasons, and now you went off and made a fool of me with whores and sluts and all kinds of lowlife.”
“We had an agreement—” he began wearily.
“You’re damn right we had an agreement! You agreed to save up for a divorce and so far, I haven’t seen one red cent for divorce money. Now just when do you plan on getting that divorce you promised?” I stood before him with hands on hips, glad that I was tall enough to stare him down.
“Soon,” he answered with a reassurance that enraged me. “I’m tired and I’m going to bed.”
“Oh no, you’re not, damn you,” I said, blocking his path. “You used me and took advantage of me, and you married me just because Jolene and Caroline and Cathleen wouldn’t have you, and now you’re going to stay right there until I’ve finished telling you just what I think of you. Why are you looking at me like that?” I was put off by the way his gaze kept travelling up and down the length of me.
He gave me a half smile. “I was thinking that the next time you decide to play innocence wronged, you should choose a more appropriate costume.”
For the first time in my tirade, I was aware of the thin lace over the breast of the blue satin nightgown that Jewel had originally bought to thrill the justice. I was embarrassed. Hoping now to abandon the conversation and that he would continue on his way upstairs, I shrunk back into the darkest corner of the porch. But he did not leave, and his face seemed to change as he slowly came toward me, his lips parted but not in a smile, his eyes holding mine. My back touched the porch rail, preventing further retreat.
“And now you will listen to me,” he spoke with authority, in a voice that was at once soft and rough, like a cat’s tongue. “And you will not interrupt. The day I came here to the inn, yours was the first face I saw. Shy, I hid behind my father, but I was watching you all the time. You came around front, wiping your bloody hands on an apron. How fascinated I was with this girl with the bloodied hands. And then your sisters came out, too, and I looked at Caroline and saw how beautiful she was with her black hair and blue eyes. But when I looked from her to you, I was confused. The one is very beautiful, I thought. The other, less so. But what is it about the girl with bloody hands that makes the other seem so ordinary?”
My knees buckled a little because I was falling under the spell of his soft eyes, the lullaby in his voice, a voice ever-tinged with the music of the language he had first spoken. He touched my arm lightly, and even that slight touch seared down to my bones, so that I felt it in the core of me, something shifting and melting.
“…And later, after I had lived here a while, I was drawn to you. But I was just a boy and the things that a
