pressed against hers. She stood surprised for an instant by the warmth of his greeting, and gratified.
One of the dogs nosed her leg and she laughed and stepped back to smile up at Ricky. “They get jealous,” she said. “I have three visitors a year, and the dogs are jealous!”
“You look fit,” he remarked.
“It’s the appalling wasteland. It agrees with me.” She put her arm through his and walked him to the house. “I can’t offer you Nathan for a chat and a game of chess,” she added, getting this part over with right away. “He moved out three years ago. Nothing messy, we just came apart, that’s all. I hope you weren’t set on seeing him.”
“Nathan?” Ricky said. “No, not at all. I’m sorry to hear…and after he dragged you out here into the hinterlands!”
“That move was a joint project, Ricky, and I really do like it here. Otherwise I’d have gone back to New York when Nathan left.”
Which was not strictly true. She could no longer afford New York. She was not painting, let alone selling her work, and the investment income that provided simple comfort here in Taos could only buy a life of flophouse nights and dog-food dinners back east.
He stopped at the front door and faced her. “I ought to have phoned first. I have no business barging in like this —”
“Oh, nonsense, Ricky. Come in and have a drink.”
He held the door open for her on the relative dimness of the big front room. His knuckles stood under his skin like the bones of some other, larger animal.
“So,” she said, pouring him a gin and tonic as requested, “what brings you out this way? As I recall, you rarely travel in the US. Didn’t you once tell me you had enough of America everywhere else in the world as it was?”
“Yes, particularly that all-too-moveable feast, MacDonald’s,” he said with a grimace. “I thought I might as well give up and come to the source to make my formal surrender. You do have one of them here in town, don’t you?”
They sat in the shadowy, cool living room and talked about Nathan and her kids with their grown-up lives, about Ricky’s recent travels in Nigeria, and about people they had known in common back east. America per se Ricky had never explored, but New York he had always accounted one of his favorite cities.
He was not a handsome man, but oh how welcome she found his thin, homely face, with jaw and chin seeming to shrink back from the brash beak of his nose. He was a cartoon Englishman out of Ronald Searle, until you looked at his eyes. They were large — the irises an unfaded, startling blue — wide, candid eyes, as if unaffected by a lifetime of seeing what the wide world contained, best and worst.
How would he react to the wall? No, no, too soon to be thinking of that.
He had just said something chilly but true about her eldest son, Bill.
“Heartless Ricky. Bill’s not a bad guy, just —” She shrugged helplessly. “Dull. He seems so intent on hurrying along toward more money, more fancy possessions. I like him, in small doses, but I keep wondering what happened to the kid I raised.”
At that moment she saw what was wrong with Ricky. An explanation stared blindingly from the knobs of his knuckles, the steep angle of the jaw, and the creased and sunburnt neck; the delicate bowl-curve of the skull under his afterthought of weightless, colorless hair. The leather band of his watch had been replaced with an expanding metal one — or rather one that could contract to the shrunken circumference of his wrist.
He was being consumed alive. Dorothea knew what it was that ate people that way. Oh no, she cried silently. Not Ricky. Oh no.
“The kid you raised,” he was saying, “decided to become Bill, inexplicable as that decision may appear. These things will happen. How are you, Dorothea?”
“Drying up,” she said briskly. “Moving a little slower, getting more and more absent-minded —”
He hooted his too-loud, staccato guffaw.