Free Break the Skin by Lee Martin Page B

said with a laugh.
    Then he left my shop and I spit the taste from my mouth.
    Pablo was lucky that he was one step ahead of Slam, and I was lucky that it was a house with Pablo’s things in it, but no Pablo, that Donnie and I walked into the evening I brought him to live with me.
    I switched on a tea lamp just inside the door, and Donnie stood in the middle of my living room blinking his eyes. I tried to imagine what it would be like to see everything in my house for the first time and what someone would think of a woman who collected what I did: fairy figurines, some of them made from crystal, others from porcelain or ceramic, all of them as dear as the day they gave babies away with a half a pound of tea, which was something Mami used to say when Pablo and I asked who our father was. “I went down to the baby patch,” she said. “Oh, that was the best day—the day they gave babies away—and that’s how I got you both, and tea to boot, what a steal.”
    That’s the way we came to think of any day, long coming, that finally arrived—the day they gave babies away—and here I was on one of those days, a man in my house, a man I’d latched on to and named.
    I was glad I’d put on just a touch of lavender eye shadow that morning, that I’d had some auburn highlights added to my hair a few days before, that I was wearing the new purple Tommy Bahama halter top that made me feel sexy.
    “This is something.” Donnie looked all around him, and his voice was hushed. “It’s like the Otherworld.”
    It touched me, the fact that he knew the name for the land of the fairies, and I took it as a sign that he and I were meant to find each other. I slipped my arm around his and let my hand come to rest on his so we were touching, palm to palm. For a good while, neither of us spoke. We just stood there, and I laid my head on his shoulder. The fairies were all around us in the dim, soft light: fairies on toadstools, on tree limbs, withunicorns, in snow globes; winged fairies with flowers wreathing their heads, sprites who could shake the human world in the most magical and mischievous ways. In the old stories, they could cast love spells or turn people into donkeys. Sometimes, like now, I could look around at all the figurines on my bookshelves, my television, my tables, and I could believe that nearly anything was possible.
    “We’ve always loved them,” I finally said.
    Donnie laced his fingers through mine and squeezed my hand. “Yes,” he said, and I knew then that he was buying what I was selling. Don’t think it’s so far-fetched, the fact that he could believe that he was in the right place. Maybe it’s as simple as this: Maybe, no matter what had happened to throw him off his pins, to leave him mixed up and searching for someone who knew his name, he wanted, like we all do, to be home. “Yes, Betty. We have.”
    He believed—I wasn’t about to question why or how because I wanted to believe, too. If I’ve done anything wrong, it was only that. I wanted him to believe in the two of us and the life we were going to have.
    Oh, I know it was crazy, but I suppose I was like my mami , looking for the next good thing, ready to seize the day my life turned around and I stepped into a world where my brother wasn’t on the run, and his ex-wife wasn’t phoning to call me a hootchie bitch, where I could be who I knew I was: Betty Ruiz, Miss Baby, tender in the heart and eager for love.
    I could have stopped it then and there. I know that now. All right, I suppose I knew it even then. But he kissed me. He took his time. A sweet, soft kiss, his hand a light touch against my cheek, and I let him. I kissed him back, and when we were done we held on to each other. I heard his heart beating, and I’m not ashamed now, no matter all that’s gone on, to say I couldn’t have let him go to save my life.
    “Betty?” He kissed the top of my head. He rocked me in his arms. “Betty, I’m so sleepy.”
    I led him into the