“Right now I do. I’m studying to be a paramedic—applying to the Abilene Fire Department next month. And if I don’t get hired there, I’ve heard they’re hiring at Fort Worth.”
“So you want to stay close?”
“What good would life be without Murray’s chicken-fried steak? But I’ll go where I have to.”
“They’re not hiring in Ruby?”
He grunts. Question answered.
“I guess Ruby isn’t exactly the job capital of the world.”
“You like working at Murray’s?”
“What’s not to like? Good food, nice boss, and great customers who are big tippers.”
He laughs. “Pressure’s on now.”
“You got it.”
They walk to the coolers, and he takes a soda out for her. She holds the icy can to her cheek. They talk about Ruby, cars, music, and, finally, their names.
“How’d you get a name like Carlos O’Malley?”
“Same way everyone does. My parents. The O’Malley came without saying. My dad’s Irish, but my mom wanted some of her heritage in there, too—and my grandfather’s name is Carlos. So I got a little from both sides.” Both sides. Zoe wonders. Did she? She has Daddy’s dark looks, but is there anything in her like Mama? Did she get something from both of them? Or when she was that little unwanted peanut in Mama’s tummy, did she grow all on her own even then, without any help from Mama?
They walk together through the shadows, talking about the opportunities in Ruby. “When I turned twenty-one a few months ago, I knew I had to start looking beyond Ruby. I don’t want to spend my life dropping orange cones on the Texas road crew. My brother’s a fireman in Austin. Loves his job. Has a family. Two little kids. And that’s what—” He stops. “This is probably boring the hell out of you. You came to a party for more than an update on the job prospects of a cone dropper.” He sets his
beer on nearby fence post. “Want to dance?”
She nods and they step the few feet to the lighted arbor and squeeze onto the square of cement.
He stands close. They dance. They circle. But they keep some distance. I don’t need this, she thinks. My life’s too complicated already. But his eyes linger in hers, and she lets them. It spreads fire through her. Warmth she wants to settle into. But she is wary, too. She hasn’t judged well in the past. A complete failure, more like it. Maybe this time is different. She sways, draws closer, teeters near an edge no one else can see, but then another turn and she sees Reid watching from a distance. Reid. Leaning. Focused. Watching. The fire turns to shame. She is suddenly cold. Her thoughts jam up. No thinking. No talking. Just leaving. All she can think of is to leave and the words trip from her mouth. “I—I have to go.”
“I’ll walk you to your car,” Carlos answers, but she knows Reid would see that, too. Reid would think—she knows what he would think—and he probably wouldn’t be wrong.
“No,” she says, but a few feet away, she turns and sees Reid is blocked out again by the shifting mass of dancing bodies. It’s an opening, a brief secret exit, and she says, “Okay.” They walk and they talk and they lean against her car for another hour, but nothing happens because she is still afraid, and she senses he is, too. She reads his eyes and knows there has been trouble somewhere, sometime, and somehow she frightens him, which makes her want him that much more. Her insides burn, with need or fajitas, she isn’t sure. Maybe both.
“I have to go,” she finally says, and he nods like he knows the time is right.
She leaves, squeezing through narrow streets bulging with parked cars, down the glaring, lighted thoroughfare of Main, with the faint scent of the dahlias still lingering in the car and the stronger scent of solitude sweeping over her. Alone again.
The Thunderbird is a dark vacuum, an airless space light-years from everything. She fights an impulse to drive by her house and shake Mama, shake her over and over, shake her until a part of Zoe shakes right out and Zoe picks it up and runs. And the impulse shifts to a burning urge to drive to Grandma’s tiny apartment and bang on her cold, bolted heart, to go to Aunt Patsy’s and Uncle Clint’s and beg to be worthy like Kyle, to go back to the party and dance with Carlos even if Reid is watching, dance close and hot until their sweat runs together, because his eyes and his mouth and everything about him makes her burn, but instead she keeps her hands steady on the wheel, steady, all the way to her room on Lorelei Street. When she gets there she changes her clothes, turns out the light, and crawls between light sheets cooled by a thin breeze.
But still she burns. She is on fire with need. Burning that goes deeper than her skin, etched deeply, maybe in her soul, and there seems to be nothing for it, no balm, save inching her arms up to hold herself and wishing the arms weren’t her own.
Twenty
Sweat mingles with tears. Tiny tears. Tears that no one sees. No one knows. But Zoe. She feels each one. She feels them trickle like sweat, but different because they start in her heart, wind through her throat, and then spring from the corners of her eyes like birth. It feels like birth. New. She wipes them away, like sweat, and no one knows but her. She knows.
“Deuce!” She swings. Not just a swing. A death serve. The serve is missed, and a cheer and a bark roar from a tiny spot in the crowd that seems to Zoe to fill all of Ruby.
“Ad-in!” Her next serve slams into the corner but is returned. Her backhand hisses the ball back through the air, kissing the net. It is her last game. Singles. She won her doubles match. Singles are reserved for the strongest players. Sometimes she plays, sometimes not. Today she’s up against the number-two player at Cooper Springs High. Her next return is low—too low. It hits the net and falls back on her side. But still, another cheer and a long-tongued smile. And she swipes at the sweat-tears again.
“Deuce!” The ball slices the air and the green and the lines, and the Cooper Springs player shakes her head at a ball she hardly saw.
Another cheer, and Zoe fights to keep the tiny unnoticed tears from growing into a sob.
“Ad-in!” The serve bullets into the hot spot, and the ball is returned but sails out of court.