The Book of Lost Friends(94)

Gar looks doubtful. “Hope your bread’s good,” he mutters, and shrugs, and then he’s gone.

Nathan watches him walk away. “Poor kid,” he says and looks at me in a way that silently adds, I don’t see how you can do this day in and day out.

“Yeah, I kind of know how he feels.” For some reason, maybe it’s the new revelation about Nathan and the Fishes, but more of the Mussolini rumors from my father’s family spill out. “It’s strange how you can feel guilty for a family history you didn’t have anything to do with, isn’t it? My folks finally divorced when I was four and a half, then my father moved back to New York City. We don’t keep in touch, but now I kind of wish I could ask him about it, find the truth.” I can’t believe I just said that, and to Nathan. With the Underground project invading so much of my mental space, family ties have been on my mind, I guess. The way Nathan’s sitting there listening, nodding attentively, makes it seem all right.

He hasn’t even touched the bread.

For an instant, I wonder if I could tell him the rest of it—everything. And if that wouldn’t matter, either. Just as quickly, shame rushes in, and I squelch the notion. It’ll change the way he thinks of me. Aside from that, we’re in a public place. I’m suddenly aware of how quiet the women at the table behind us are. I hope they haven’t been listening in.

Surely not. Why would they care?

I stretch upward a bit, and the blonde facing me lifts her menu, so that only her nicely highlighted hair is visible above the edge.

I push the bread toward Nathan. “Sorry. I don’t know how I got off on that topic. Dig in.”

“Ladies first.” He scoots the basket back, pinches the knife handle between a thumb and forefinger and offers it to me. “As long as you’re not a fiend on the jalape?o corn bread.”

I chuckle. “You know I’m not.” The corn bread is a takeout joke between us. I’ll get out the plain sixty-cents-a-loaf grocery store bread before I’ll eat corn bread. I know it’s a southern staple, but I haven’t acquired a taste for it. It’s like eating sawdust.

We settle into the bread plate. Corn bread for Nathan, breadsticks for me. We’ll split the rolls with our meal. It’s become our routine.

My gaze has drifted again to the women at the next table, when LaJuna comes by to take our order. She lingers afterward, the pencil dangling. “Miss Silva.” She’s one of the few who has not succumbed to calling me Miss Pooh. It’s her way of separating herself from the rest, I think. “Mama was supposed to come visit the other day and bring the little kids, so I could give my sister her birthday present and a cake Aunt Dicey and me made. But then we had to just talk on the phone, because Mama’s car has trouble sometimes.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I clench my fingers around the napkin in my lap, twist opposite ways and wring out my frustration. This is at least the fourth promised Mama visit that has fallen through. Every time it happens, LaJuna is bubbly with excitement during the anticipation phase, then retreats into herself when the plans end in disappointment. “Well, I’m glad you got to talk on the phone.”

“We couldn’t very long, on account of collect calls cost too much on Aunt Dicey’s phone bill. But I told Mama about my Underground project. She said when she was little, they used to say that way back, her great-great-great-grandmama had money and fancy clothes and she owned land and horses and stuff. Can I be her for my Underground project, so I can wear a pretty dress?”

“Well…” The rest of the sentence, I don’t see why not, never makes it out of my mouth. The bell chimes on the front door and there’s a sudden, palpable effect. The room feels as if the air has just been sucked out of it.

I see a woman nudge her husband and point surreptitiously toward the door. A man at another table stops chewing in the middle of a bite of brisket, sets down his fork, leans forward in his seat.

Across from me, Nathan’s face goes slack, then rigid. I glance over my shoulder, see two men at the hostess stand, their designer golf clothes out of place against the restaurant’s barn wood and tin interior. Will and Manford Gossett have aged since their portraits were hung at Goswood House, but even without the old photos and the family resemblance, I’d probably guess who they were, just by their demeanor. They move through the place like they own it, laughing, chatting, waving at people across the room, shaking hands.

They pointedly avoid looking our way as they breeze right past us and take their seats…with the women at the next booth.





CHAPTER 23


HANNIE GOSSETT—TEXAS, 1875

The rock bluffs, speckled with live oaks and cedar elms, and growed over in the valleys with pecans and cottonwoods, have turned to grass that rolls out, and out, and out. The hills stand yellow and barely green and hen-feather brown with soft pink tips. Stickery mesquites squat in lace-leaf patches. Flat padded cactus and limestone rock trouble the feet and legs of the horses, making us travel slow, even now that we’re through the top of the Hill Country, with its farm fields and white rock barns and German church houses. We’re gone on beyond all that. South past Llano town, out where there ain’t a thing but scrap trees squatted in the low places like green stitches puckering a brown-and-gold quilt.

Seen antelope and wild range cattle with spotted hides all different colors, their horns thick as wagon axles. Seen a creature they call the buffalo. We stood the freight wagons up above a river and watched the wooly beasts wander across. Long time ago, before the hide hunters got them, there’d be hundreds and hundreds in a herd, is what Penberthy said. Don’t anybody here call the freight boss Mister. Just Penberthy. That’s all.