Cargo of Orchids by Susan Musgrave Read Free Book Online Page B

chuckling. “That whoever has given you the ring must trust you very much to let you come alone to visit a place full of men who have been deprived of the company of women, some of them for a long time.” I told Gustavo my husband had every reason to trust me.
    Angel turned the ring again, so the heart was no longer visible.
    “My brother’s wife trusts him,” Gustavo went on. “If she didn’t, you can be sure he would have been dead a long time ago.”
    Carmen had said nothing about Angel having a wife. I didn’t know why it bothered me.
    “She must miss you,” I said. I looked away from him to the gymnasium doors.
    “She hasn’t had much of a husband to miss,” he said. “I worry about her. Some nights.” He must have felt my whole body pulling away, because he let go of my hand. I hadn’t even realized he was still holding it.
    He moved his chair in close, edged his hand around the back of my chair and rested his thumb on my shoulder blade.
    “And you, you have how many children?” The question slammed into me.
    “Oh, no. None. I mean, a dog is all. He’s like a child; he’s like ten children, sometimes. Only I doubt he’ll ever grow up. He’s my husband’s dog, actually. My husband sleeps with him. I mean, he sleeps with him on the futon.”
    I felt embarrassed to be babbling on about Vernal like this, painting a sorry picture of my married life, but the way Angel looked at me he didn’t have to say what kind of a man would sleep with a dog when he had a woman like you waiting for him in bed?
    “I hope you never regret coming to visit me today” is what he
did
say, after a bit.
    I stared at the Mount Joy Mountain range, a deep sea green in the late-afternoon light, which I could still glimpse through the gymnasium doors, then at the clockon the wall. I had less than an hour left. I didn’t want to leave. Part of me, at least, wished all of me could stay here with Angel.
    “I like it here,” I said.
    Angel reached for my hand again. My palm felt sweaty. I had seen Bonnie and Little Shit Shit, and presumably the father whom Baby missed—a small, muscular man with a tense face, wearing a red bandanna, and a black T-shirt with the words “Narrow Gauge Posse” on the back—going outside; I said I’d like to go for a walk, too.
    Angel stayed close beside me as we made our way around the tables towards the gymnasium doors. Every time we brushed against one another, I felt a shiver of something lost stirring inside.
    We walked in the same direction, around and around the yard. He said he’d never wanted children, but since coming to prison this time he had changed his mind. “It’s easy to think you don’t want a family until you know you are not having one,” he said.
    I remember listening to him, thinking finally I had found a man, the right man for what I wanted—which was to have a child—and where did I find him? In a maximum-security penitentiary.
    We made five circuits of the yard before the cold wind sent us scurrying back inside. Angel returned to our table. Carmen, who had been to the chapel, the only room off the gymnasium that wasn’t kept locked during a prison social, steered me towards the washroom. We had to squeeze past Bonnie and another woman, who were trying to reapply their makeup in the chrome of the condom machine, fromwhich a sign hung saying, “Sorry. Out of Order.” (The word
sorry
had been crossed out.) The other woman, wearing a red leather mini-skirt the size of a heating pad and a T-Shirt with two fried eggs on the front, tried to wipe the smudged mascara off Bonnie’s face.
    “If you’re going to hang around a man who makes you cry, you should at least buy waterproof mascara,” Carmen told her.
    She ran a comb through her hair. “So,” she said, turning back to me, “what do you think of my brother?”
    “He’s nothing like I expected,” I said. That was a lie. He was everything I’d imagined him to be, and more.
    Carmen turned to me. “Spit on