Read If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go for Free Online

then Claudine would lay the cards in a semicircle on the kitchen table and tell me what I could expect when I finally saw Luke that night. But there really wasn’t any such thing as a quick visit to the Brennans’, even with Marcel gone, and I was supposed to pick Nanny up at her house by seven o’clock and it was already ten minutes after. So I hurried past, hoping Claudine hadn’t been lookingout the window and seen me hesitate. Part of me didn’t want to know what the cards had to say. Now that Luke was back for real, it was up to me to find my fortune.
    •   •   •
    N anny signaled me to step outside. We were in the lounge at The Starlight Hotel and I didn’t want to step outside, because Luke was finally here and I wanted to be wherever he was. When he walked into the lounge with Ray and Raven and Cha-Cha, it was like he was some kind of celebrity. “El Exigente,” Billy said, bowing in front of him, handing him a cold one. Christa Cutler, another of Nanny’s city cousins who no one liked because she thought who the hell she was, shimmied over and threw her arms around Luke, kissed him on the lips.
    Luke’s honey-colored hair was longer, shaggier, cut ragged across his forehead. His eyes looked tired and he was thinner than before he’d gone away and had lost his surfing muscles. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt over a white tee shirt and faded jeans and flip-flops. He was wearing what pretty much everyone wore but he looked more beautiful than anyone else. I was wondering whether I should go over and throw my arms around him and kiss him longer than Christa had. I was watching myself in my mind’s eye, wondering if my breath smelled good enough to do it. But right then Nanny came over and tugged at my arm and said, “Katie, man, come on, come out to the alley with me. I have to talk to you. I
need
to talk to you.”
    I began walking with her and turned back once to see Luke standing at the end of the bar near the patio, surrounded by people. It would have been easy enough to join the crowd, sidle toward the center at some point and catch his eye. I saw them all raise their mugs of beer and heard Raven say, “Welcome back, man. We missed the shit out of you.” Luke didn’t smile. He seemed wiry and edgy, like he was coiled inside himself, away from everyone. He raised his glass but didn’t drink.
    I followed Nanny into the alley between the hotel and the summer apartments on the corner. Over Nanny’s shoulder the moon hung low, slinging a white path across the ocean. Nanny put her hand on my arm and tried looking up at me. Whenever she was fucked up, her eyes looked like crooked stars.
    “I have to tell you something and you can’t tell anyone, not even Liz,” she said, her voice soft and slurry. “Especially not Liz.”
    “My sisters,” we heard, and there was Ginger, coming out of the alley.
    “Shit,” Nanny murmured.
    Ginger was wearing cutoffs and a tight tee shirt that hugged the weight she hadn’t lost since the baby. She smelled of stale smoke and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine.
    “I missed you guys so much,” she said, putting her arms around us. “Soooo much, man. Missed trucking with yas.” She backed up and looked at us, her eyes woozy. “I really love you guys,” she said. “You know, like when you came and visited me and the baby? That was, that was so far out, man. Like, far fucking out. I mean, I’m just glad it’s over, you know? I mean, dig it, can you picture me with a kid?”
    “Love you, too, Ginge,” I said, kissing her cheek, while Nanny swayed on her flip-flops, silent as stone.
    “What’s a matter, bitch, you don’t love me anymore?” Ginger turned to Nanny, who she’d known for the longest.
    “You know it,” Nanny said. “You know I do, man. I’m just, I’m really stoned, Ginge. Really, really stoned. Even my tongue’s like, tired, man.”
    Ginger laughed. “The tired tongue,” she said. “Outasight.” She kissed each of us wetly on the