(17)

The three of us were in the kitchen.

Moira announced, "I'm taking a quick shower." Her eyes swept past me and lingered on the stove. Gwen said, "I'll check the corn bread. You go ahead."

I turned to the sink before Moira could level her brief glance at me again and busied myself washing hands and arms like a surgeon prepping for an operation. Moira strode past me into the hall.

"She told me you two take showers together," Gwen said. I was reaching for one of the four towels hanging on a row of hooks. She observed my selection, then lit a thick squat candle on the oval table. "Just...thought I'd do something special," she remarked, gesturing at the candle. She seemed to be admiring its long quivering flame, but she was thinking of a different kind of fire. "Do you think she loves you?"

I wasn't surprised by the question. They were lined up at the windows. I said, "Hardly. She sees some value in me, but not that kind."

"Are you--" She faced me, her hands on the back of the chair behind her. "You going to take her around creation til she makes up her mind what she wants to do with herself?"

I shook my head resignedly. "I don't know. We get along all right. Look, Gwen, what are your plans?"

"To shoot Kenny if he shows up here drunk. But if he comes back sober I'll give him one more chance. If I'm still here. Uncle Steph lives in Corbin. He's been wanting to get me a place there and help me find a job. But I don't trust him. I trust Kenny more than him. At least I know where Kenny's coming from. I know what you're thinking, Hang. You think I want to go with you, go wherever,  just go and to hell with the dogs. Even though I know only what Reb has told me about you. Did he kill a man?"

That threw me a little. "Not for me to say."

"You were mixed up in it, he says. When I asked him straight up he said he'd killed a dozen men."

"Subtract eleven."

"I'm so--" She grabbed a pot glove and opened the oven door. The corn bread was more than ready to come out. She swore under her breath and set the pan on the stove top next to the simmering pot of beans and ham. "I'm so scatterbrained, living alone with nobody to slap some sense into me."

She stood looking at the burn holes in the glove and tracing the burnt circles with a fingertip. "I would make a good bitch for you," she said. I replied that she would. Then she looked up at the smoke-stained beams with bright glistening eyes and her shoulders shaking with what she tried to make into a laugh. "Always wishing you'd come by here and now I almost wish you hadn't. But how I do wish you had come with Reb and not some runaway."

I kept quiet. I hung the towel back on its hook. Gwen stirred the pot, a rictus smile on her sunbrowned face, nodding to herself. "I'm just a shameless cunt. I don't have any pride left in me at all. You can come into my bedroom tonight when you're done with her and I wouldn't put up a fight. I showed her the spare bedroom and put a second pillow on the bed. She turned her head to hide her smile but I could see it anyway."

We heard the shower turn off and the scrape of curtain rings on the crossbar. Gwen set the table while I took a seat with my back to the stove. She asked, "You talk to Reb lately?" I said that on my lunch break at a job site two days ago I had gotten hold of Johnny Bee, with whom Reb often rode, but that the Bee Man had not seen him in over a month and thought maybe Reb was in Tucson, where he knew a strip dancer.

"I heard about her," Gwen said absently. She was listening for the bathroom door to squeak open. Without turning her head her small golden eyes embraced me. I twiddled my fork at her. She smiled at me like a mother.