Echo Burning

a second and then turned away and led Carmen to a booth at the far end of the room. He slid across sticky vinyl and tilted his head back into a jet of cold air coming down from a vent in the ceiling. Carmen sat opposite and raised her head and he looked at her face-on for the first time.
    “My daughter looks nothing at all like me,” she said. “Sometimes I think that’s the cruelest irony in this whole situation. Those big old Greer genes just about steamrollered mine, that’s for sure.”
    She had spectacular dark eyes with long lashes and a slight tilt to them, and a straight nose that made an open Y-shape against her brows. High cheekbones framed by thick black hair that shone navy in the light. A rosebud of a mouth with a subtle trace of red lipstick. Her skin was smooth and clear, the color of weak tea or dark honey, and it had a translucent glow behind it. It was actually a whole lot lighter in color than Reacher’s own sunburned forearms, and he was white and she wasn’t.
    “So who does Ellie look like?” he asked.
    “Them,” she said.
    The waitress brought ice water and a pad and a pencil and an upturned chin and no conversation. Carmen ordered iced coffee and Reacher ordered his hot and black.
    “She doesn’t look like she’s mine at all,” Carmen said. “Pink skin, yellow hair, a little chubby. But she’s got my eyes.”
    “Lucky Ellie,” Reacher said.
    She smiled briefly. “Thank you. Plan is she should stay lucky.”
    She held the water glass flat against her face. Then she used a napkin to wipe the dew away. The waitress brought their drinks. The iced coffee was in a tall glass, and she spilled some of it as she put it down. Reacher’s was in an insulated plastic carafe, and she shoved an empty china mug across the table next to it. She left the check facedown halfway between the two drinks, and walked away without saying anything at all.
    “You need to understand I loved Sloop once,” Carmen said.
    Reacher made no reply, and she looked straight at him.
    “Does it bother you to hear this kind of stuff?” she asked.
    He shook his head, although the truth was it did bother him, a little. Loners aren’t necessarily too comfortable with a stranger’s intimacies.
    “You told me to start at the beginning,” she said.
    “Yes,” he said. “I did.”
    “So I will,” she said. “I loved him once. You need to understand that. And you need to understand that wasn’t hard to do. He was big, and he was handsome, and he smiled a lot, and he was casual, and he was relaxed. And we were in school and we were young, and L.A. is a very special place, where anything seems possible and nothing seems to matter very much.”
    She took a drinking straw from the canister on the table and unwrapped it.
    “And you need to know where I was coming from,” she said. “Truth is, I had it all completely backward. I wasn’t some Mexican worrying about whether the white family would accept me. I was worrying about my family accepting this gringo boy. That’s how it seemed to me. I come from a thousand acres in Napa, we’ve been there forever, we were always the richest people I knew. And the most cultured. We had the art, and the history, and the music. We gave to museums. We employed white people. So I spent my time worrying about what my folks would say about me marrying out.”
    He sipped his coffee. It was stewed and old, but it would do.
    “And what did they say?” he asked.
    “They went insane. I thought they were being foolish. Now I understand they weren’t.”
    “So what happened?”
    She sipped her drink through the straw. Took a napkin from a canister and dabbed her lips. It came away marked with her lipstick.
    “Well, I was pregnant,” she said. “And that made everything a million times worse, of course. My parents are very devout, and they’re very traditional, and basically they cut me off, I guess. They disowned me. It was like the whole Victorian thing, expelled from the snowy doorstep with a bundle of rags, except it wasn’t snowing, of course, and the bundle of rags was really a Louis Vuitton valise.”
    “So what did you do?”
    “We got married. Nobody came, just a few friends from school. We lived a few months in L.A., we graduated, we stayed there until the baby was a month away. It was fun, actually. We were young and in love.”
    He poured himself a second cup of coffee.
    “But?” he asked.
    “But Sloop couldn’t find a job. I began to realize he wasn’t