The Water Keeper(23)

I had a feeling she was growing slightly more comfortable with me, so I let her talk.

“I can tell you from the first five minutes of the first lesson whether they will make it or not.”

“How do you know?”

“Not sure really. It’s an intuitive thing. How he treats her. How she responds to him. How they communicate. How his hands touch her says a lot about how his heart holds her.”

“You have a favorite type of student?”

“Older folks. Been married a long time. Their dancing is an expression of how they’ve lived.”

“I don’t know much about it.”

“What, dancing or being old?”

I laughed. “Both, but . . .”

She was warming up to me. “No offense, but I already figured that.”

You hang around people long enough and you learn their tells. Pain has a way of exiting the body, and most will let you know when it’s on its way out. Seldom do they know what their “tell” is telling you. Most often it’s silent. Sometimes it can be loud. However it comes out, it leaves a trail. Jittery fingers. Itchy skin. Headaches. Always tired. Always hungry. There are hundreds, I guess.

“How long you been clean?”

She bit her lip, tilted her head to one side, and looked at the floor. “Which time?”

“This time.”

“Ever since things started going sideways with Angel. Two months. Give or take.”

“What’s your poison?”

“This time or other times?”

“This time.”

“Opioids.”

“That explains why you didn’t touch the wine or pain pills.”

“I’ve dated them too.” She shook the memory. “I start swallowing stuff to numb my pain, and the next thing I know I’m chugging it like sweet tea or eating them like Skittles.” She had a beautiful way of poking fun at herself. A disarming honesty. “I had spread myself really thin—”

She was returning to her story. As if compelled to tell it. I interrupted her. “You don’t have to—”

“Feels good to hear myself say it.”

I waited.

“Between rent and my lease and Angel’s tuition and some debt, I was in over my head. Then I messed up some ligaments in my ankle when I got tangled up with a shopping cart in the grocery store parking lot. And then, because I needed the money, I made it worse trying to teach this idiot how to dance with a gimp ankle. Then one of my clients—”

I knew where this was going.

“—helped me out. Brought me whatever I needed. Said I could pay him later.”

“But black-market pills aren’t cheap.”

She shook her head, and her eyes darted to the floor again.

I continued, “And he was all too happy to keep supplying you.”

“My own private pharmacy.”

I’d heard this before.

“But,” she said with a shrug, “a few months passed. My ankle got better, and slowly, and not without difficulty, I weaned myself off the Skittles.”

This I had not heard before. “How?”

She laughed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Maybe sensing my skepticism.

“Try me.”

“I read.”

“You’re right, that is a new one.”

“Told you.”

“What’d you read?”

“At first, thrillers. Love stories. Anything from the bargain bin that would take me”—she waved her hand across the world before us—“out of here.”

“You unhinged your body from an opium addiction with a book?”

She smiled. “Not just any book. A series of thirteen books by one author. I’ve read them twenty or thirty times each.”

“You’ve read one book twenty or thirty times?”

“Actually, I’ve read thirteen books twenty-seven times.”

My face betrayed my questions. “Explain that to me.”

“Drugs medicated my pain. Books medicated my reality. The second lasted longer with less downside and helped lessen the craving for the first. So I replaced one drug with another.”

“Sounds like a good book.”

That piqued her curiosity. “You like to read?”

I laughed. “No. Not really.”





Chapter 8


I had opened Pandora’s box. Summer took a breath and talked nonstop while our food grew cold. “Well, David Bishop is the man. He’s written this impossible love story where his character, Bishop—a priest who’s taken a vow of celibacy and poverty—uses the confessional and the secrets people reveal to open the story and introduce the problem, or to explain who the bad guys are and who he needs to rescue. Problem is, he’s such a good priest and he’s so good at his job that the government comes to him and asks him to work for them, which he reluctantly does. So he lives all these fantastic adventures around the globe working for both the church and this secret government agency.

“And on top of that, and this is the cherry on the whipped cream, in order to complete his cover, the government makes him travel with this beautiful woman, but—wait for it—she’s a nun, and she was once beautiful but now she has this long scar across her face and a secret she won’t tell him ’cause she’s afraid if she does he won’t have anything to do with her. She secretly loves him, see, and he secretly loves her, but neither one will tell the other. It’s impossible all the way around.”