Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan Read Online Free Page A

staring at one of her
photos on the wall.
    She didn’t seem to hear me when I called. When I
came up behind her and put my arms around her shoulders, she
stiffened. Her eyes never left the photo.
    It was one of her early college pieces—a black and
white photo-collage of animals, human faces, insects, buildings, all
of it hand-tinted and merged into one surrealistic mass. I remembered
the December weekend when she’d been putting it together for her
end-of-term project. I’d done my best to distract her. We’d ended
up with photo scraps scattered all over the bed and clinging to our
sweaters.
    "Naive," she said, absently. "Beau
used to take me out into the country—we’d be shivering all night
in sleeping bags on some godforsaken hilltop in Blanco for one shot
of a meteor shower, or we’d trudge through twenty acres of pasture
outside Uvalde so we’d be in just the right position at dawn to
catch the light behind a windmill. He used to say that every picture
had to be I taken at the greatest possible expense. Then I’d look
back at my old collages like this one and think how easy they’d
been."
    "Maybe naive gets a bad rap, " I said.
    We stood there together and looked at it for a
minute.
    "It just feels strange," she said. “You
being here."
    "I know."
    She leaned her head against me. The tension in her
shoulders didn’t go away.
    "What else is it?" I said.
    She hesitated. “There are complications."
    I kissed her ear. "You asked for me to be here.
I’m here. There’s no complication."
    Until Lillian looked around at me I didn’t realize
her eyes were wet.
    “ When you left San Antonio, Tres, what were you
running from?"
    “ I told you. The rest of my life stuck in Texas,
the idea of marriage, the careers everybody else wanted me to take--"
    She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. Why
did you go when you did, right after your father’s death?"
    I hugged her from behind and held on tight, trying to
I get lost in the citrus smell of her hair. But when I closed my eyes
against her cheek, I still saw the old newspaper photo of my father,
the caption that I knew by heart.
    "Sheriff Jackson Navarre, gunned down brutally
on Thursday evening in front of his Olmos Park home. Deputy Sheriff
Kelley and Navarre’s son watched helplessly as the assassins sped
away."
    My father’s face in the photo just smiled at me
dryly, as if that caption was some private joke he was sharing.
    “ Maybe because when I looked around town," I
told Lillian, "all I saw was him dying. It was like a stain."
She nodded, looking back at her photo-collage. "The stain
doesn’t go away, Tres. Not even after all these years."
    Her tone was hitter, not like Lillian. I held her a
little tighter. After a while she turned around and folded herself
into my arms.
    "It doesn’t have to be a complication for us
now," I whispered.
    "Maybe not," she murmured. But I didn’t
need to see her face to see that she didn’t believe me.
    She didn’t let me say anything else, though. She
kissed me once, lightly, then more. Soon we were back in the linen
sheets. I wasn’t sleeping again until almost dawn, this time with
no dreams.
 

    6
    I was back at 90 Queen Amie at nine the next morning
to meet the movers. Robert Johnson gave me an evil look as I walked
in the door, but decided to call a truce when he heard the sound of
aluminum foil being peeled away from my leftovers.
    He has a system with enchiladas. He bats them with
his paw until the tortillas unroll. He eats the filling first, then
the tortillas. He saves the cheese for last. This kept him occupied
while I did the first hour of my tai chi set, at which point the moving truck gunned up the driveway and
scared him into the closet.
    Three guys wearing baseball caps and leather weight
belts were trying to figure out which way to fold my futon frame to
get it through the door when the phone rang. I pulled down the
ironing board and picked up the receiver.
    Maia Lee said: “Hey, Tex. Ridden