The Damned Page 18

“Remember, this is for your own good,” she whispered, giggling.

  “To be taken as bitter medicine, then. I was far too tired to walk home, so I am too tired for this. It will kill me, certainly.”

  “A splendid death, alma de mi vida.”

  His hands found the well-learned warmness, found her body in the well-known way that soon made her breath deep with a tiny audible catch in it. She sighed and they were joined, and in the hut was the tiny rustle of the pallet, their mingled breathings.

  And afterward she held him, held his head against her breast, heard his breathing slow and soften into sleep. She held him and smiled into the night. He was a good man, and tender. He would never be much. Ambition was not in him, or any great imagination. But he was a husband to love dearly, because when he was in the house there was a warmth about it, a warmth and humor that departed when he went away. And that was a thing beyond price.

  She thought of the ferry and then of the extra pesos, and then of the turistas and how this place had been merely an annoyance to them. A little place on a river, and yet it was her life, and Manuel’s life and the lives of their children. They were always there, while the big cars whined through, carrying bright-faced people from incomprehensible places to unthinkable destinations. A little time by the river couldn’t hurt them. A little time to breathe in the midst of journeying.

  His sleeping weight had begun to make her uncomfortable. Gently she eased him away and into his proper place, cooing to him softly as to one of the children, covering him up against the night air.

  A man to love and a place to sleep and now, for a time, a few extra pesos. It should be enough. Enough for gods.

  All the weight of happiness seemed to come at once into her throat. She felt a quiver of superstition, that it was wrong to be this happy, that to be this happy courted misfortune. A car slipping on the ferry, crushing Manuel. The death of a child. An illness.

  But to think of such things did not, somehow, diminish the extent of her happiness. They merely salted it a bit and made it more flavorful. Life moved too quickly. Rosalita wanted five hundred more years of exactly what she had.