The next afternoon, David Tanner stopped by to check on Ruby.
“Madame Butterfly?” he asked as he was leaving.
Kate was preoccupied with a pot of Spanish lavender.
“Would you like to go?”
She looked up. “Where?”
“I’ll start over,” he smiled. His dating skills had not improved with age. “I have tickets to the opera.”
“I heard Madame Butterfly.” Kate locked the snips and slipped them into her apron.
“Would you care to join me?” he coaxed.
“I’m sure I would,” she said. Touched, flattered, embarrassed, it had been a long time since a man asked her to do something civilized.
“Then, shall we?”
“We shall,” she teased.
His eyes cleared with relief. “It’s gloomy to watch opera alone.”
Kate pressed the button of a portable tape deck beside the garden bench. The yard filled with Callas’s “Al dolce guidami castel natio.” She and David clung to the aria as if they were going to shipwreck.
“I didn’t know you liked opera,” he said.
Kate resented the remark. He didn’t know anything about her at all.
“Have you ever heard anyone discuss anything in Zamora except weather and cars?”
“Disease,” he laughed. “I assure you disease is a topic of great interest.”
Kate laughed too.
“Come to the clinic on Friday at six,” he blurted, backing away before Kate Ryan could change her mind.
As David Tanner disappeared, August jumped out of the back of a pickup and loped into the yard.
“How is she?” he cried, licking his furry upper lip.
“Better,” Kate said sharply. She still blamed August although she knew he was Ruby’s slave. “I’ll see if she wants company.”
Kate crossed to the house. Ruby’s door was shut.
“She’s sleeping,” Kate reported back.
August’s gray eyes blinked. He was hot and thirsty. He had hitched up the mountain. It had taken an hour for someone to stop.
“I brought her this.” He reached inside his backpack and pulled out an abalone shell, pitted and dull on one side, opalescent on the other.
“That’s kind, August,” Kate said.
She held the mollusk in her hand and stroked the nacre. A shell in the desert conjured an entire ocean, the mesas ancient shelves of an ancient sea. Scattered through the mountains were rocks encrusted with shells. Kate kept a collection of those she’d found hiking in the Sandias and Sangre de Cristo ranges.
“Can I wait until she wakes up?” he asked.
A shock ricocheted through Kate as she considered if August and Ruby were lovers.
“We better let her rest,” she said.
He sighed desperately. He wanted to know if Ruby blamed him too.
“Give her the shell for me, would you?”
“Of course, August.”
“I hope she doesn’t think it was my fault.”
“Was it?”
“No, the dope was here.”
“I believed you yesterday. I still believe you.” Kate couldn’t help but ask, “Did you tell your mother?”
“No,” he said. He told his mother something but it was a lie.