The knocking at his door was very soft.
“Come in,” he said, knowing that it was Ahn.
The nanny-turned-housekeeper had on a boy’s blue jeans and T-shirt. She also wore round wire-rimmed spectacles.
Thomas glanced at the hem of the T-shirt to see if there were old bloodstains there, but all he saw was bright white cotton.
“Hello, Tommy,” she said, leaning forward slightly with just a hint of a bow.
Tommy moved toward the end of the bed, and she sat next to him.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m going to work for Mr. Fontanot. I’m gonna be a rib smoker.”
“Dr. Nolan and Eric tell me that you were shot one time before,” she said, frowning.
“A long time ago. I don’t hardly ever even think about that.”
“Was that before you called me?”
“No. I got shot later.”
“I could have saved you, maybe?”
“Prob’ly not, Ahn. I was in trouble, and nobody could have got me out. You know, it’s tough in the streets of L.A. I knew this guy once from down in Mexico, illegal, you know. And he told me that if he was sick he’d be better off at home because down there there was always somebody to give you some beans an’a tortilla, someplace to sleep at least.”
“But I could have fed you then. But I told you not to call.”
“It’s okay, Ahn. Really. I always remembered what you told me about running. No matter what happens you got to keep on movin’. You can’t stop to cry or wonder why or nuthin’. I got that from you, Ahn, and that’s why I stayed alive.”
The small woman and Thomas hugged there on his childhood bed. She was crying. Thomas remembered all the times that he and Eric had run to Ahn with cuts and scrapes and bruises. She would always be there, ready to take care of them.
“It’s okay, Ahn,” Thomas whispered. “We don’t have to run anymore.”
When Ahn left for her room, Thomas went down into the garden. He was barefoot and wore only his black jeans. In that way he remembered his mother and their nocturnal sojourns in the garden when Eric and Dr. Nolan were away. He expected to be alone, but he found Raela there, sitting on the stone bench.
“Hello,” the teenager said.
Thomas liked this girl. She seemed to him to hold herself like ballet dancers that performed in the park in the summer. It was the way she held her head high and how her eyes took a moment to settle on you. He grinned and sat down next to her.
“What are you doing down here?” he asked.
“When Eric falls to sleep sometimes I come down to sit with the flowers,” she said.
Thomas nodded.
“Eric told me that my stepfather wanted you to work for him but you said no.”
He nodded again, breathing in the strong scent of far-off night-blooming jasmine.
“Why did you say no?”
“Because...”
“What?”
“Because he made my eyes hurt when I looked at him.”
It was Raela’s turn to nod.
For long minutes they sat not talking. Now and then the flutter of a nightbird or some large moth broke the silence.
“He loves me too much,” the girl said after a while. “When I was a kid he’d come and watch me play. He would talk to me for hours but never even pay any attention to my brother at all.”
“I knew a woman once who told me that her father made her have sex with him,” Thomas said. “That’s why she ran away and lived in the street. He said he’d kill her if she even went out with a boy. He had killed another daughter and put her in the basement, but she never told no one except us in the street.”
“He never touched me,” Raela said. “And he never made threats. But I think he hates Eric — he hates him because we’re together.”
“Yeah,” Thomas said, nodding again. “Maybe that’s why he hurts my eyes.”
“I told Eric not to work for him. I told him that my stepfather is like a big old stone. He just falls on top of you and stays there until you’re crushed. When I was younger he would tell me about how he would sometimes just sit with a man at lunch, and by teatime the man would have lost everything it took him his whole life to make. I’d ask him why the man didn’t shoot him.”
“What did he say?” Thomas asked, scared as if he were being told a ghost story.
“That the way he got inside the man’s soul made the man happy to be losing just his business.”
Thomas thought about his lost cart then. He wondered if Kronin Stark had ever pushed anybody out of that fancy hotel and into the street.
“Do you love Eric?” Thomas asked, still thinking about pushing that cart.
Raela turned to Thomas, taking a moment for her eyes to settle. Then her brow furrowed.
Thomas liked the way she took her time. It was as if she knew there was no hurry. Sometimes it took a while to say something.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I mean, when I see him I think, ‘There’s Eric. I know him from inside his core to his skin.’ I think, ‘I need his warmth in my bed.’ Is that love?”
“Does he make you want to giggle and laugh out loud?”
“When I see him with you he does,” she said with no hesitation. “Seeing you and him together makes me happy.”
19
Working at the Rib Joint was a joy for Thomas Beerman. Minas gave him a ride to the restaurant every morning, and Thomas took the Wilshire bus back home at night.
Smoking the ribs, sausages, slabs of beef, and other exotic meats was a seven-man job (even though three of those men were women). They had to prepare the meat by cutting it into the proper portions, marinate it for twenty-four hours, and then smoke it in the twelve big metal cans out in the yard. They smoked beef, pork, and chicken, and wild game like venison and boar. They smoked homemade, hand-stuffed sausages. Miranda Braithwaite made the sauce and marinated the meats the way Ira had taught her. Ben Tallman and Parker Todd used brushes to baste the meat and turn it from time to time. Thomas Grant and Penelope Sargent prepared the orders and prepped for the others when they weren’t busy. There was a sixth man, Bishop Ladderman, who carved the meat and carried the orders into the kitchen for Ira to finish off and for the waitresses to deliver.
Three times a week Thomas talked on the phone to Clea in New York. He half expected her to start dating the law student Brad again. She did see him from time to time, she said, but only as a friend.
“He’s got another girlfriend now,” she said. “She’s preparing to study law like him, and they’re very happy.”
Love flourished in the long talks they had via cell phone.
“I never knew anybody who thinks as deeply as you,” she would say. “It’s like you were a thousand years old and had the time to wonder about everything in the world.”
Thomas liked having her to talk to. He even planned to take a flight to New York on his first three-day weekend, which would come in three months. By then he would have saved the money.
Clea had said that she loved him over the phone.
On his days off Thomas visited Raela and Eric at the Tennyson. They had moved in together, and he was back in school. Thomas babysat for Mona when Raela and his brother went out, and he talked late into the night with Eric when the two came home from their date.
“So you’re not gonna work for Stark?” Thomas asked Eric one such late evening.
Raela was asleep with Mona in her bed because the child still had bad dreams about her mother’s murder. That’s why Mona liked to have Thomas babysit for her — the child was convinced that he could always save her if something bad happened.
“No,” Eric said. “Raela doesn’t want me to. She doesn’t trust him, but I think he’s just trying to keep his family together. We go over there at least once a week for dinner.”