Virgin Heat by Laurence Shames Read Free Book Online Page A

"but that was after ."
    "After what?" said Michael.
    Angelina put down her fork, drank some water. Food was settling her tummy; talk was easing her mind; she felt the fragile well-being of a second wind. "After I was already in love with him," she explained.
    Michael thought the comment over, watched a moonlit pelican do a brain-first dive into the shallows. Then he folded his hands, put his elbows on the table, and leaned close to his companion. "And once you were in love with him, it didn't matter what he did?"
    To Angelina the question seemed rhetorical, she didn't see the point of answering. Michael thrilled at the realization that he'd met someone even more desperately romantic than himself.
    "It didn't matter that he betrayed your father?" he pressed.
    Angelina said nothing, her expression didn't change.
    "It didn't matter that he abandoned you?"
    "What else could he do?" she said. "It was that, or die."
    "Die for love," Michael murmured.
    "If he loves me," Angelina said.
    "You don't know that he loves you?"
    "He did before. At least I think he did. The only thing I know for sure is I love him."
    "God almighty!" Michael said. "And what'll happen when you meet?"
    Angelina shrugged. "Maybe fireworks. Maybe nothing. Nothing at all. That's what I have to find out.
    Michael put his beer down, reached out with a cool damp hand and clutched his new friend's wrist. "Of course you have to, dear," he said. "Of course you do."

8
    Typically, Uncle Louie was the last to hear of Angelina's disappearance.
    Her mother and father, after a night bereft of both sleep and conversation, had set about contacting the people they looked to for help and solace, and Louie was on neither of their lists. Paul spoke to his other brothers, Joe and Al, grilled them as to whether they'd been party to anything that might end in a vendetta. He spoke with Funzie Gallo, he spoke with whatever members of his ragtag brugad he could roust from their slovenly beds. As for Maria, she called Angelina's girlfriends, she called her own relations; when there was no one else to call, she called her sisters-in-law. No one thought to call Louie, stuck in his plumbing supply store in East Harlem, armed with a claw-pole to grab toilet floats from upper shelves, as cut off from importance as a jellyfish cast out above the tide line.
    It was not till dinnertime the next evening that he heard a word about it.
    His wife Rose was frying pork chops. She was a lousy cook, all she did was salt the pan, put the flame on high, slap the chops in straight from the supermarket plastic so that they sizzled dryly like souls in hell. Fibers of meat always stuck to the pan, when she flipped the chops there were tears in them, pale places like still-knitting scars. Cooking, she smoked a cigarette and sipped a Manhattan with a cherry in the bottom of the glass.
    "Your niece Angelina," she said, as she stabbed the pork and tiny fat globules dotted the stove, "she flew the coop."
    "What?" said Louie. He was looking out the window. They lived in a big tall building in the Bronx, near the Westchester line but still the wrong side of it, and what he saw out the window were other big tall buildings in the Bronx.
    Rose said, "She didn't come home last night, didn't call. Maria's panicked."
    Louie scratched his head. His head was still peeling from vacation, shreds of weightless skin rolled up beneath his fingernails. Angelina was his favorite, he wanted all good things for her. "Maybe she eloped," he said.
    His wife sucked her cigarette, gave a short malicious laugh that ended in a cough. "Eloped with who? Who's she gonna 'lope with?" She sipped her cocktail, poked absently at the hissing meat. "Maybe she got picked up in a bar. That'd be a start at least."
    Louie kept looking out the window. There wasn't much to see, but the familiar geometry was soothing, there was a kind of peace in the shifting patterns of lights turned off and lights turned on, shades pulled up and shades pulled down.