The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(80)

Jem and Michael had scored their first purchase from the sticker machine. Michael was prying open the plastic capsule while Jem watched impatiently. "You're pretty hard on yourself," I said.

Ines picked a toothpick from the dispenser, rolled it between her thumb and finger. "Sandra Mara couldn't have been a mother, Tres. Her idea of heaven was her grandmother's farm, where she and Hector moved when she was sixteen. No homeboys running through the house. No strung-out mother or drunk stepfather to avoid. Nothing to keep Sandra from losing herself in books. She even got a college scholarship her senior year. But you don't get away from the South Side without a fight. The same afternoon Sandra found out about the scholarship—"

"—was the afternoon Hector brought Zeta Sanchez out to visit," I said. "I read your journal."

Her mouth hardened with distaste. "When you dig into somebody's past, you really dig, don't you?"

"It wasn't hard to find."

Ines snapped her toothpick, flicked the pieces away. "If you read it, you know. Sandra and Zeta hadn't seen each other in two or three years, since back at the Courts, when Sandra hadn't been much to look at. But Zeta looked at her that afternoon, and you know what? Sandra couldn't fight it. Hector couldn't help her. She let herself get claimed. Zeta and Sandra got married two months later. A few months after that, Zeta said, 'You stop college.' Sandra went along with that, too."

"Zeta Sanchez wouldn't be an easy person to fight."

Ines stared at me as if her perspective were shifting, as if she were suddenly aware that I was much farther away than she'd thought. "Maldicion. Always an excuse, eh? Always a reason to give in. You and Sandra Mara would have gotten along fine, Tres. Sandra might've had five or six of Zeta's babies after quitting school, waited for Zeta to get tired of her and leave, or start using her as a punching bag. Sandra saw her mom go through all that. Would've been easy to follow tradition. But that fall while I was at Our Lady of the Lake, something happened that made me want to stop being Sandra Mara."

"You met Aaron," I said.

"I told you the truth. I was in his class that fall. I didn't know Aaron had any connection to Zeta's employer, Ride-Works. I don't think Zeta ever made the connection. He never realized Aaron had been one of my teachers. Aaron was..." She laughed frailly. "Aaron was a lousy lecturer. The other students used to gripe to each other before he came into class each day. Aaron's face would twitch whenever he talked about violent scenes in a book, which of course were the scenes he focused on most. So one time before class, this idiot P.E. major behind me joked that Professor Brandon must've been abused as a child. The other students just laughed. I didn't say anything, but I was furious. I promised myself that I was going to be on Dr. Brandon's side after that. I started going to his office hours, discussing books, having coffee with him in the cafeteria. We understood each other almost immediately. Aaron and I could finish each other's sentences from the first day we talked. By the end of the semester, we'd fallen in love. In the spring, after Zeta had forced me to quit school, Aaron and I still found excuses to cross paths a lot... Things just took their course."

"Aaron got you pregnant in April, and you had to make a choice. You chose to invent a new life."

There were color variations in the deep brown of her eyes that I'd never noticed before — jagged yellow and amber lines, as if her irises too had been fractured in the distant past.

"Sandra couldn't have broken away from Zeta," she said. "Sandra couldn't have protected her child. Weeks before Del ever arranged an ID for me that said I was Ines Garcia from Del Rio, I'd already started thinking of myself as that new person. And I promised myself Ines would do whatever she had to for her baby."

I studied the woman across from me — the fierce sincerity in her face, the disheveled hair, the little crumple of packing tape on her sleeve, and the incongruous explosion of colors on the front of her Fiesta T-shirt.

I tried to reinvoke the chill I'd felt a few minutes before, when she'd first referred to herself in the third person. I couldn't do it. The fact that I'd been accepting her story, starting to understand the way she described herself in two distinct layers, scared me.

"Del knew about you and Aaron," I said.

"Of course. He warned us our lives were in danger if Zeta or Jeremiah ever found out. He was probably right. He offered to arrange a new ID for me, a few other papers, and get me safely out of town. That was easy for Del — he'd done it often enough for his father's cronies. In return, Aaron was supposed to hand over his share of RideWorks when the time came to inherit. What did Aaron care about that damn company? He loved me and we wanted to be together. He agreed. He'd already lined up his Permian Basin job for the following fall, so I disappeared into West Texas to wait for him and have our baby."

"And you got married. Again."

"Fuck 'again.' That was Sandra. That wasn't a marriage." She spat the word.

"The law wouldn't see it that way. Del knew that — knew your secret could be used as leverage against you and Aaron in the future. You played into his hands."

Ines was silent.

"After you left," I said, "Del went to Zeta. Del convinced him you'd left town because you were having an affair with Jeremiah."