The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,5

eyes roved over my face as though he were studying a lab specimen. “Can you repeat that?”

I heard a screen door squeak on a spring and slam behind me. Then I realized he was no longer looking at me. Valerie Epstein had walked down her porch steps into the yard and was standing under the live oaks, on the edge of the sunlight, shading her eyes with one hand. “Is that you?” she said.

I didn’t know if she was talking to me or the greaser on the curb. I pointed at my chest. “You talking to me?”

“Aaron Holland? That’s your name, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, my throat catching.

“Were you looking for me?” she said.

“I wondered if you got home okay.”

The greaser got back in the Ford and shut the door. He looked up at me, holding my eyes. “You ought to play the slots. You got a lot of luck,” he said. “See you down the track, Jack.”

“Looking forward to it. Good to see you.”

He and his friends drove away. I looked at Valerie again. She was wearing a white sundress printed with flowers.

“I thought I was marmalade,” I said.

“Why?”

“Those hoods.”

“They’re not hoods.”

“How about greaseballs?”

“Sometimes they’re overly protective about the neighborhood, that’s all.”

The wind was flattening her dress against her hips and stomach and thighs. I was so nervous I had to fold my arms on my chest to keep my hands from shaking. I tried to clear my throat. “How’d you get home from Galveston?”

“The Greyhound. You thought you had to check on me?”

“Do you like miniature golf?”

“Miniature golf?”

“It’s a lot of fun,” I said. “I thought maybe you’d like to play a game or two. If you’re not doing anything.”

“Come inside. You look a little dehydrated.”

“You’re asking me in?”

“What did I just say?”

“You told me to come inside.”

“So?”

“Yes, I could use some ice water. I didn’t mean to call those guys greaseballs. Sometimes I say things I don’t mean.”

“They’ll survive. You coming?”

I would have dragged the Grand Canyon all the way to Texas to sit down with Valerie Epstein. “I hope I’m not disturbing y’all. My conscience bothered me. I didn’t go looking for you last night because I had to get my father’s car home.”

“I think you have a good heart.”

“Pardon?”

“You heard me.”

I could hear wind chimes tinkling and birds singing and perhaps strings of Chinese firecrackers popping, and I knew I would probably love Valerie Epstein for the rest of my life.

SHE WALKED AHEAD of me into the kitchen and took a pitcher of lemonade from the icebox. The kitchen was glossy and clean, the walls painted yellow and white. She put ice in two glasses and filled them up and slipped a sprig of mint in each and set them on paper napkins. “That’s my father in the backyard,” she said. “He’s a pipeline contractor.”

A muscular man wearing strap overalls without a shirt was working on the truck parked under the pecan tree. His skin was dark with tan, the gold curlicues of hair on his shoulders shiny with sweat, his profile cut out of tin.

“He looks like Alexander the Great. I mean the image on the coin,” I said.

“That’s a funny thing to say.”

“History is my favorite subject. I read all of it I can. My father does, too. He’s a natural-gas engineer.”

I waited for her to say something. She didn’t. Then I realized I had just told her my father was educated and her father probably was not. “What I mean is he works in the oil business, too.”

“Are you always this nervous?”

We were sitting at the table now, an electric fan oscillating on the counter. “I have a way of making words come out the wrong way. I was going to tell you how my father ended up in the oil patch, but I get to running on.”

“Go ahead and tell me.”

“He was a sugar chemist in Cuba. He quit after an incident on a ferryboat that sailed from New Orleans to Havana. Then he went to work on the pipeline and got caught by the Depression and never got to do the thing he wanted, which was to be a writer.”

“Why would he quit his job as a chemist because of something that happened on a passenger boat?”

“He was in World War One. The German artillery was knocking their trench to pieces. The German commander came out under a white flag and asked my father’s captain to surrender. He said the wounded would be taken care of and the