Rio Grande Wedding Part 6

"Buena,"he said, and took them.

She smiled. "Good night, Mr. Sosa."

"Wait!"

At the door already, she turned.

"I do not know your name,senora . The saint who rescued me."

"You can call me Saint Molly."

Molly. Satisfied, he settled back down, wincing at the pain in his ribs, and closed his eyes. Just before he fell asleep, he realized he had forgotten to ask about Josefina.

Chapter 3.

Josh couldn't sleep. He slid out of bed, careful not to wake his sleeping wife, and put on his robe, padding into the kitchen to get a drink of water. The buzz of the neon light overhead was the only noise, and somehow the silence exaggerated the noise of the

raid, in his mind.

The raid last night was what kept him awake. They'd been planning it for a week, timing it to hurt Wiley as much as possible, so that maybe he'd finally recognize he couldn't keep hiringillegals to work his land. Not that it did any good. Next week, there would be a whole new crew. But they raided him regularly anyway. It was soroutine as to be boring.

But last night, things had been off from the beginning. For one thing, there had been a lot more migrants than they'd antic.i.p.ated, and there were more women and youths with them than usual, which always complicated matters. The deputies had also surprised them in the middle of a party, and the younger men were inclined to argue and resist, creating a tense and panicked environment. One young man had panicked and punched an officer, which led to complete chaos. Workers had scattered in every direction, with officers chasing them into the dark fields and the vast peach orchard at the western end of the farms.

And that was when things went crazy. Josh kept seeing it, over and over, in his mind.

Lifting his weapon, firing. Once, twice, the gun making a light in the darkness. He heard the man fall, and ran after him, but although he'd walked back and forth, side to side, for well over an hour, Josh had never found him.

It made Josh sick. He'd not breathed a word of it to anyone. No one had said a word to him, either, although someone must have heard the shots. It wasn't the first time.

Technically, they weren't supposed to use their weapons in such raids unless they were in physical danger. Realistically, the job was so frustrating, it had happened many times.

Until now, Josh had been a model deputy, but lately, as he struggled with his bills particularly the high price of medical insurance for his family his resentment grew.

He bought groceries with hard-earned cash, and burned when someone presented food stamps. He was furious that the county was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to cover the costs of the illegal immigrants in town from March to October, jail costs, housing costs, welfare and medical care, when the same county could barely afford his subsistence-level salary.

He was barely surviving. Some months it was a choice between paying twenty on the electric billor letting the long-distance portion of his phone get cut off. His new truck was a ten-year-old model that he'd had to have to get around this winter.

He just didn't understand why he had to suffer, and yet hundreds and hundreds of people who weren't even citizens got taken care of. It wasn't fair.

But it had been wrong to let his sense of outrage infect his job. He winced again,

remembering. G.o.d, he hoped he hadn't killed anyone.

Molly moved quietly around the house the next morning. She had not awakened at her usual 5:00 a.m., but slept in until six-thirty, and light was pouring through the kitchen windows, splas.h.i.+ng into the sink and across the terra-cotta counters and glazing the fas.h.i.+onably distressed cabinets. She'd done all the work herself, and the room was her favorite.

The house, built in the twenties, had come with the land, which was about the only good thing Molly could have said about it those first few years. Not a single thing in it had been changed or updated in the intervening decades, and her husband had tackled each room one by one.

Most of his time had been spent between his regular carpentry job and on the land itself, which had been his pa.s.sion, so the interior work had gone slowly. When he was killed by a lightning strike, the kitchen had still been a nightmare tin cabinets covered with peeling pine-style Contact paper, peeling linoleum, a stove with only two working burners.

A few weeks after Tim was buried, the stove had caught fire. The resulting smoke damage and need for a working stove had been a blessing in disguise. Night after sleepless night, weekend after lonely weekend, Molly had expended her grief and loneliness on the kitchen.

As she measured coffee into the automatic coffeemaker, she admired the baskets lined up on top of the cupboards, the African violets blooming in the wide greenhouse window and the display of her herb and rose gardens beyond the project she'd taken up after the kitchen.

She needed a new project, she supposed. Heaven knew,there was always something waiting in a house this old.

Finally, having delayed long enough, she tiptoed down the short hall to the back bedroom and peeked in on her patient. Morning sunlight poured through the row of white eyelet curtains, and onto the man still asleep in the small double bed.

She'd been hoping he might be a little less ... overwhelming by daylight. No such luck.

She paused in the doorway, admiring the smooth copper angle of his elbow, the breadth of his wrists and the fine, large hand cast loosely over his waist. Nearby the pillow, Leo was curled comfortably, his tail covering his eyes.

As if her gaze awakened him, the man stirred, legs s.h.i.+fting below the blankets until the remembrance of pain in one of them stopped him. He went still again, and only turned his head, shaking hair from his face. He opened his eyes.

Molly felt a hitch in her throat. Stunning eyes, startlingly dark irises against whites as clear as a child's. For a moment, he stared at her, perplexed, then lifted that big dark hand and brushed his hair all the way out of his face. "I thought I dreamed you,"

he said.

Oh, my. His voice, till now, had been rough with pain, his words broken. After sleep and antibiotics, the voice was as rich as Mexican coffee, the accent lacing through it like cinnamon, a delicious and surprising stroke. "I'm real," she said, crossing her arms. "How are you feeling?"

He inclined his head, as if listening to his body. "Not bad."

She smiled. "Notbad, or just better than yesterday?"

He raised his eyebrows, a faint smile of agreement turning up his wide mouth. "Not great."

"I'm going to make some scrambled eggs for breakfast. And there's coffee. Can you eat?"

"Oh, yes." It was heartfelt.

Abruptly, he sat up and Molly flew to his side when the stabbing pain of broken ribs made him put both hands to his chest with a strangled groan. His hair fell in his face.

"Take it easy," she said.

Leonardo, disturbed, made a plaintive noise of complaint and sat up by the pillows, but he didn't run this time. Interesting, Molly thought.

The man's breath stuttered,then settled, and he raised his head. "Did you find my niece?"

"Not yet."

Despair flickered over his face and he closed his eyes. "I have to find her."

"Senor, you are not able. Don't worry I haven't stopped looking." She put a hand on his arm. "Let me get us both some breakfast, and give you some more medicine, and I'm going over to the orchard to see if Wiley has found her."

"Wiley." He nodded very seriously, put a hand on her shoulder, patting. "Yeah. That's good."

"Need some help up?"

"Si."He said it with resignation, and Molly chuckled.

"You'll be better in just a day or two, I promise." He nodded. "I do not like this-"

his dark hand swept out, as if to fling the weakness away "-fault."

"I know." With practiced gestures, she indicated he should put his arm around her shoulders and they stood up together. She glanced up to his face, and saw his jaw set very tightly, that licorice hair hiding everything else. The pain had to be intense, but he bore it fairly well.