Free Dust Devil by Rebecca Brandewyne Page B

and
the poetry of Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and Wordsworth. In this
way, Renzo had taught Sarah to love words as much as he himself did
and had shown her how her imaginary worlds could be made real.
    Sometimes
she had taken her watercolors and brushes and paper to the meadow and
had painted, while Renzo had read aloud or had sat quietly beside
her, writing in the spiral-bound notebooks he had filled with
thoughts and words of his own. Or he had wailed the blues on the
saxophone he had taken up playing when he was thirteen. Or, in the
cast-iron skillet Sarah had brought from home to the tree house, he
had fried up the catfish they had caught that day. At other
times, the two
of them had done their homework together, then leafed through Renzo’s
collection of comic books, arguing over the virtues of Batman,
Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman, and which comics were more likely
to escalate in value over the years. There had been long, lazy
afternoons when they had waded in the shallow, pebble-bottomed creeks
of the woods and meadows, too, or had gone swimming in the deep
quarry that was the local swimming hole, or had run through the tall
grass and wildflowers, laughing and chasing butterflies.
    Sarah
had flown upon the back of the Harley, too, along dusty country roads
and across sweeping fields, her arms locked tightly around Renzo’s
hard waist, the rough grain of his black leather jacket and its
silver studs pressing against her cheek, her dark brown hair
streaming in the wind. And she had laughed aloud in sheer delight
when they had sailed over hummocks and dashed through the woods,
grass and creeks, shady water spraying coldly against her skin, the
motorcycle engine revving and roaring.
    Those
were some of the happiest days of her life, she was to think years
later, so much a part of her and of her youth that she was never able
afterward to thrust them wholly from her mind, not even when Renzo
was long gone and she was alone—and heavy with his child.
    For
it was inevitable that as the two of them grew up, they should turn
to each other. Somehow they had always been destined for each other,
Sarah thought that afternoon of her seventeenth birthday, as she sat
with Renzo in the tree house and blew out all the candles on the
chocolate cake he had bought for her at the Farmers’ Market
grocery store.
    “ So,
tell me, what did you wish for, Sary?” he asked as he watched
her slowly remove the still-smoking candles one by one from the gaily
decorated cake, then, with the plastic knife he had also brought with
him that day, slice two generous wedges from it.
    Earlier
that morning, Sarah had gone into town, to the Shear Style beauty
salon, and had had more than a foot of her hair cut off, much to his
anger and disgust. It was still long, falling below her shoulders.
But this new hairstyle made her look different somehow—older, a
young woman instead of just a child. She’d had her nails done,
too; they were polished a pale shade of pink that matched the powdery
blush on her cheeks and the gloss on her mouth. At her newly pierced
ears, tiny gold studs glinted. They were her mama and daddy’s
birthday present to her. She was never going to be stunningly
gorgeous, as Eveline Holbrooke was, but there was a quiet, arresting
beauty about Sarah all the same. Renzo thought he had not misnamed
her that long-ago day when he had called her “sweet Sarah.”
    As
a result of all this, he was finding himself uncomfortably aware of
the now cramped quarters of the tree house built for a child, of the
softness and creaminess of Sarah’s skin and of the delicate,
honeysuckle fragrance of the perfume that drifted from it, of the way
one strap of the blue gingham sundress she wore that warm spring
afternoon had slipped from her shoulder and of her full, ripe, round
breasts, which strained against the checked cotton.
    “ If
I tell you what I wished for, then my wish won’t come true,”
she replied lightly as she handed him a paper