Woman of Light (40)

* * *



—

A singing ensemble finished their set as Avel waited in the darkness to the left. Luz read tea leaves for the young woman, then three sisters, and quickly for a husband who was certainly lying to himself and his wife about his bedroom needs. Luz stared into the atrium. String lights crisscrossed the room, as if God had wrangled the stars inside. Avel was called to play as Luz made herself a cup of tea.

“I said ‘Don’t work too hard.’?” It was David, standing before her. “And here you are, working some more.”

“I didn’t know you come here,” said Luz coolly, masking her surprise.

“I don’t,” said David. “My date does, who has currently been in the ladies’ a very long time.” He edged back in his shiny shoes, searching the barroom.

“Maybe she skipped out,” Luz said.

“Occupational hazard.” David winked. “My yaya used to do this.” He pointed to her tea leaves and kettle. “She read spoons, too.”

Luz smiled and looked past David, where Avel was taking his position center stage beneath a blue light. He made eye contact with her through the crowd, beamed as he held his horn. There was an angel’s halo of light inside the instrument’s bell.

“My name’s Avel,” he said, “and I’ve just come here from California.” The first notes of his breath moaned like the trumpet itself was crying.

“David,” Luz said, glancing upward slowly.

“No,” he said, “I don’t want a fortune reading.”

Luz shot him a bored look. She took the opportunity to bring up what had been gnawing at her. “Today in the ledger, I saw that girl named Eleanor Anne visited you, but you didn’t charge her anything. Why?”

David peered downward, scratched his head. His curly hair fell into his eyes. “Luz. Sweet Luz. I can’t tell you that.”

Luz looked to Avel then, his cheeks inflated like balloons. She couldn’t hear his song very well and with David standing beside her, Luz felt torn for her attention. “Does it have to do with Diego?”

The vacant echoes of Avel’s horn moved around, distant and low. There was a moment between them where nothing was said. David smiled in an ineffectual way. He asked if he could sip her tea, and Luz considered saying no before sliding over the cup. David drank once and set the porcelain cup down. She wondered about his mouth, and where it had been.

“I helped her with an arrangement, housing,” he said. “You should pity her, really.”

“Pity her?” Luz said. “My brother isn’t here anymore because of that girl.”

“There’s more to it.”

“They attacked Diego.”

“Imagine the worst men in the world,” he said. “Men who hate anyone different from themselves. Now imagine that’s your whole family.”

“Then I imagine I’d be just like them.”

Avel returned to the booth then, and Luz hadn’t realized his song had ended. He was wiping sweat from his face with the same cloth he had used to shine his horn. He stepped beside David and asked Luz what she thought of his song. Ashamed of herself, Luz had barely heard a thing. “Beautiful,” she said, breathless in her lie.

“Wonderful job,” said David, removing a dime from his pocket and leaving it on the table. He waved across the room, seemingly to his date. “Thank you for the reading, Luz. You always have such clear sight.”

After David walked away, Luz watched as the room swelled with movement, the chatter of a silver tray, a drunk woman’s laugh, the bartender’s shout. More than once, musicians approached Avel. “Take my name,” said a few. “We can always use another horn player.”

Avel talked and music blared and the Emerald Room faded into blackness between acts. Luz looked through the dark until in the distance of her mind she saw a figure slowly coming into view, skin smoothed over bone, eyes shadowed by a felt hat, a face she knew anywhere. A pristine moon, Luz realized, floated in her cup.





EIGHTEEN




The Love Story of Eleanor Anne

Denver, Summer 1933





Diego waited in the courtyard of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral. It was summertime at night. Streetlamps shined honey-hued between cottonwood trees, their long yellow lines falling at his feet. The air smelled of jasmine. Cicadas pulsated. A warm breeze brushed through his hair, raised his skin. As Eleanor Anne approached on her silver bicycle, the wheels churning a rusted rhythm, Diego finished his cigarette and hung his head in grief. He stood to greet her and she kicked off the bike, her legs long under a pink-lace dress, her strawberry hair newly bobbed and framing her green eyes.

“Are you ready?” She stepped toward him, her cheeks flushed, as though she’d been crying.

Diego placed his palm along her damp neck, kissed her forehead, inhaled her rosy scent. Sometimes, when he looked at Eleanor Anne, Diego felt like an old man traveling along a seemingly endless mountain road, one eventually ending in her, a warm winter cabin, a smoking chimney, a pretty wildflower yard. He said, “We don’t have to do it, you know. We can go away tonight. Never come back here.”

Eleanor Anne shook herself free of his arms. With her right foot, she tucked away the kickstand on her bicycle and guided the handlebars as they walked. “You know my family won’t let that happen. Let’s get it over with.”