Free Barbara Samuel by A Piece of Heaven Page A

more freedom, since there was a door right between the counters and the big metal sink.
    She kept thinking it would get easier. In some ways, it was getting harder. She was discovering all the ways she’d used cigarettes in her life. At work, she’d used them a lot—as a reward and a retreat, to give herself a break or get away from an annoying or difficult situation, or—well, a million reasons. Get the bouquets finished, go outside. Get through a meeting with her control-freak boss, have a cigarette.
    She also used the breaks as an escape, usually when her assistant was going on too long about her latest love affair—of which she had many. Jean, twenty-three and pretty, with trendy clothes and hair that came down over her forehead in a plastered, plastic kind of way, came in at ten. Before she even had her apron tied, she started talking. “I met the most
amazing
guy last night,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed pink. “We sat there and talked, you know, like we’d known each other forever, I swear.” She paused to wash her hands, scrubbing at a mark from a nightclub. “We talked movies and work and then”—she shook her hands and took a paper towel from the white metal dispenser on the wall—“we talked art. Art with a capital
A
.”
    Jean had come west from some grimy town in the northeast, studying art at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque before fleeing to Taos, where she spent her days at the store, her nights alternating between painting oils of coyote skulls and drinking heavily with other aspirants to the O’Keeffe crown. She didn’t evennotice that Luna had said not a single word to her. “He just had such deep eyes, you know?”
    “Mmm.”
    “We drank until three, can you imagine? I almost couldn’t get up this morning.”
    In spite of herself, Luna smiled. Those were the good old days—party all night, sleep three or four hours, work all day and be ready to do it all again the next night. “Sounds interesting,” she said, muting Jean’s voice as she trimmed the stems of some aging chrysanthemums. Needed to put them on special today, she thought, running her index finger along the deep rust-red flowers, getting lost a little in the shape, the color, the tiny, tiny curls of the petals.
    “So,” Jean said behind her, “you think I should see him again?”
    “Mmm.” Luna glanced at the clock: 10:15. Usually, she’d gone out for a cigarette at this time, both to escape Jean and to breathe some fresh air on the patio that overlooked the Sangre de Cristos. “Why wouldn’t you?”
    “Well, I just told you, there is a little bit of something weird about him. Maybe he’s like a serial killer or something.” She crossed her arms. “Or maybe he’s just creative, right? Like me.”
    A sensation like someone snapping a rubber band across her forehead made Luna turn from the sink almost violently. “I’m going outside for a few minutes. If Josh comes by, tell him I’ll be back in twenty.”
    “You aren’t smoking are you?” Jean smoked, but she was—as she’d told Luna often enough—young enough to get away with it.
    “No,” she said, and almost ran for the door.
    Outside, she sucked in big lungfuls of air. It smelled of someone else’s recent cigarette, and she forced herself towalk away from the patio, out to the road beyond. She’d walk ten minutes out and turn around. Maybe work off some of the tension.
    One of the books she’d read on the process of quitting had suggested that cigarettes were a way for some people to avoid saying things they were afraid to utter, and the urge to smoke was a signal to pay attention to what you were trying not to say. So as she stomped down the road under the hot, midday sun, she thought about it. What would she say to Jean, beside the obvious:
Leave me alone, will you?
    Thinking that eased a little of the pressure. Hmmm. She tried it again.
Stop talking so much. I took the job to have silence, not this endless, mindless