Elizabeth Lowell - Always Time To Die

"You think Mom's back from the pueblo yet?" Dan asked.

John glanced at his watch. Two o'clock. "She should be. She teaches after the noon mass."

"Still doing English?"

"It's what the kids need most. She does some simple math, too."

Dan shook his head. "She never gives up, does she?"

"That's why I love her. Heart as big as the sky. You should get a good woman to make you happy."

"I'm already happy."

"Really? You better wear a sign. Otherwise your expression will scare small children."

"Yeah yeah yeah," Dan said without much heat. He knew his father was right, but that didn't change his memories of the past twelve years, the years when he'd experienced firsthand just how much of an animal man could be.

He shoved the memories away. They didn't have anything new to teach him. He didn't have anything new to bring to them. That was why he'd come home, hoping to find something new, something worth the pain of living for it.

John waited, hoped, but Dan didn't say another word. "You're like your mother. You keep it inside."

Dan didn't answer.

John didn't expect him to.

The back door opened before Dan put his foot on the first step up to the narrow porch. Diana's hair was short and dark black except for a wide streak of white at her left temple, legacy of a nameless ancestor. Her eyes were as dark and clear as ever, and her smile just as unexpected in her serious face. Gently rounded and as determined as any man, Dan's mother was the light of many lives, including her son's.

"That was certainly a long walk," she said, watching him climb the stairs. Though she didn't say anything, concern for his injury was in her eyes and in the troubled line of her mouth. "You must be freezing."

Dan scooped her up in a hug and set her down gently. "I'm too big to freeze." He sniffed the air that was rushing out of the kitchen. "What's that?"

Diana gave John a worried look. He shook his head slightly.

"Posole soup and fresh tortillas," she said, frowning. "I've got the woodstove going. Come in and warm your-Get warm," she corrected quickly. Dan didn't like discussing, or even acknowledging, his injured leg. Despite that, she couldn't help wanting to ease the pain she saw occasionally in his face. "And carnitas. You didn't eat much breakfast before you left."

Dan's gentle smile was at odds with the grim lines that usually bracketed his mouth. "I'm not a teenager anymore, Mamacita . I'm all grown up."

"But-" She bit back her worry. Her son wasn't a child to be fussed over, yet she had a lifetime of nurturing reflexes that made her want to coddle and cuddle him. "Coffee, too. Just the way you like it."

"Hot as hell and twice as bitter," John said unhappily. "Whoopee."

Diana stood on tiptoe and kissed her husband's mustache. "I made a second pot for you."

Dan heard his mother giggle like a teenager behind him and knew that his father was nibbling on her neck. Dan smiled slightly, almost sadly. The older he got, the more he wondered if he'd ever find a woman or if-as he suspected-he was better suited for living alone.

With a stifled groan, he eased himself into the chair that was pulled up close to the old woodburning stove. Pinon crackled and burned hotly, scenting the air almost as much as the food bubbling on the stove itself. He dragged off his coat and hung it over the back of the chair. The black turtleneck he wore under his denim shirt was made of a high-tech cloth that breathed when it was hot and held heat when it was cold. At least, that was the theory. There was always an uncomfortable time before the cloth decided what it should do.

Right now, he was hot enough to think about going back out to the garage.

"So, did you see Mrs. Rincon on your walk?" Diana asked John.

"Didn't go that way."

"Ah, then you saw Senor Montez. How is his gout?"

"Didn't go that way either," John said.

Diana paused in dishing up soup. "No? At least you saw the Millers. Is their newborn-"

"We didn't go there," John interrupted.

Dan waited tensely for his mother to ask where they had gone.

She didn't. Sometimes she could be just as tight-lipped with her family as she was with everyone else except children. She set the food out in front of her men and went to stir the fire.

Dan looked at the rigid line of his mother's back and sighed. She didn't have to ask where he'd been. She knew. He didn't understand how she knew, but he was used to that. He'd inherited her fey ability to take a few words here and an expression there and come up with a conclusion that left other people wondering how he'd seen what they hadn't. It was a gift associated with curandero blood, with natural healers, but Dan had never felt any call to herbs or potions.

"Mom," he began unhappily.

"No." Her voice was flat. She reached in her pocket for a tissue and held it to her nose. A spot of red appeared. Then another. The dry winter air always made her nose bleed. Not much, just enough to be annoying. She tipped her head back and pressed hard. "I will not hear the name of evil spoken in this house."

"He was just a-"

"He was evil," Diana cut in, crossing herself. "Do not say his name in my presence."

"He was your grandfather," Dan said.

She tilted her head forward, felt no more blood, and stuffed the tissue in her pocket. After she washed her hands, she picked up a plate of steaming tortillas and set them down in front of Dan with enough force to make them flutter.

Silence.

"Men do evil things," Dan said, "but they're still human."

Silence.

"He was my great-grandfather. I wanted to…" Dan's voice died. "I don't know what I wanted. I just knew I had to go."

"You did and it's done," Diana said. "Now eat."

Dan glanced at John. His father had a worn, unhappy look on his face, the same look that came every time the subject of the Senator arose.

How can Dad stand living with her pain, with the ingrained fear of the past that lives beneath her silence?

For some people, time healed. For his mother, time made everything worse.

Abruptly Dan stood up, tired of dodging around family taboos and ignoring the dark, bitter currents that flowed deep beneath his mother's quiet surface. His leg protested the sudden change of position, but held with little more than a sharp reminder of injury. The high, clean air of Taos was doing more to heal him than all the hospitals, surgeries, and medications had.

"Silence won't make it go away," Dan said in a level voice. "If it did, you'd be free. Why let a cruel old man ruin the rest of your life the same way he must have ruined your mother's?"

"What happened to sleeping dogs and land mines?" John asked his son roughly. "Eat or take a walk."

"Shit," Dan said under his breath.

"You'll not swear in your mother's presence."

"Sorry, Mother," Dan said neutrally. "I keep forgetting that reality isn't welcome here."

"Daniel." John's voice was a warning.

Dan lifted his coat off the back of the chair and said to his father, "Call me when you want to get that tractor running."

He closed the back door carefully and told himself he couldn't hear his mother weeping.

But he could.

QUINTRELL RANCH

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

ANDY QUINTRELL V REACHED FOR ANOTHER BEER, ONLY TO HAVE HIS FATHER TAKE the can away.

"You need to sober up," Josh said.

"Why?" Andy waved his hand casually. "Not a camera in sight."

"Winifred's pet historian has cameras and her digital recorder is always on."

"Who cares?"

Anne Quintrell walked into the kitchen. "I do. Your father does. You should ."

"Because you want me to be a senator when I'm thirty?" Andy belched richly, legacy of the two beers he'd drunk without a pause. "What about what I want, huh? What about that?"