Sweet Water Read Online Free Page B

Marisa left home. Many times, Marisa and Woody heated up the apartment bedroom that had been Mama’s.
    “Don’t I know it,” he said with a crooked grin.
    She could see in his eyes he wanted to follow her back there. But she could also see it wasn’t going to happen today. Something was really bothering him. She touched his lower lip with her finger. “What is it, sugar?”
    He lifted off his hat and set it on the counter. “You got just a plain old-fashioned cup of coffee?”
    She tucked back her chin and widened her eyes in a display of mock surprise. “What, no French-Columbian-Traditional-Campfire blend flavored with vanilla?”
    He snickered and she stepped away and poured him a cup from the carafe labeled REGULAR.
    “Smells good in here,” he said. “What’s cooking?”
    “Bread pudding. Comfort food. Be done in a few minutes. Want some?”
    He shook his head and lifted the mug to his lips. After a long sip, he set the mug back on the counter. “I need to talk to you, Marisa.”
    She heard a solemnity in his tone and felt a chill in the air that had nothing to do with air-conditioning. “You know me, sugar. I’m always up for good conversation.” She set the coffee carafe back oh its heating element, the news of the sale of the town forgotten for now.
    He stared into his mug without saying anything, but in her head, Marisa heard Santa Anna’s trumpet blowing “Degüello.”
    Finally he looked toward the front door. “I guess I’m getting married, Marisa.”
    Marisa’s heart dropped to her shoes. On scattered occasions she and Woody Wood had skirted the edges of taking their relationship to the matrimony stage. She hadn’t imagined that the union would include him, but not her. She swallowed, but it didn’t help. Her tongue seemed to have stopped working. “Oh?” was all she could push from her mouth.
    He looked up with an expression so aggrieved that uncertainty vanished. She had to glance away to keep from bursting into tears. “Well, uh,” she said, fighting for dignity when the very breath had been knocked from her lungs, “anybody I know?”
    “You know Nikki Warner over at Wink?”
    Wink, Texas. If God ever decided to give the earth an enema, if He missed Agua Dulce, He would stop at Wink. Until she graduated from high school, twice a day, five days a week, from September through May, for twelve long years, Marisa had ridden the school bus an hour between Agua Dulce and Wink, Texas.
    But somehow, she had never met Nikki Warner. “Uh, no. Can’t say that I do.”
    “She’s, uh...preg--expecting.”
    Santa Anna’s trumpet blew louder in Marisa’s head. She stared at him, her eyeballs straining and gluing themselves to his. He was starting to seem more like a stranger with every passing minute. “And that’s your fault?”
    He dodged her stare by looking at the front door again.
    As his non-answer sawed its way through her heart, hot anger zoomed through her whole body. She wanted to slap his face, she wanted to grab up the carafe of hot coffee and dump it on his head, she wanted to dash into the kitchen, grab her sharpest knife and whack off his dick. “So? What?” she said, failing to control the tremble in her voice. “All this time you’ve been traveling up and down the highway providing stud service? Nikki in Wink on Tuesday, Marisa in Agua Dulce on Wednesday? Someone in Pecos on Thursday?”
    “No! It’s not like that. I--”
    “Really, Woody? If it’s not like that, then how the hell did Nikki in Wink get knocked up?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Marisa planted a fist on her hip. “Now that, trooper, I don’t believe.”
    “You know how I feel about you, Marisa.”
    “No, I don’t think I do.”
    He rubbed his eyes with his hand. “I have to do my duty in this. We’re both Catholic. I don’t know what else to say.”
    Catholic? Okay, she would give him that. With a Mexican mother, maybe he had been raised in that religion, but he hadn’t been in a church since