by Pamela Morsi
Instead, she sipped her coffee and speculated on the future, dismissing all rumors of change for the area. She foresaw the years ahead as not much different than here and now. She’d continue keeping her customers coming in. The younger bands would bring in younger patrons, and once they got accustomed to the place, they would gradually take their parents’ places in the booths and at the bar. Her absentee landlord had surprised her last year with a new lease at a higher price. She had put him off, refusing to sign anything and paying month to month. She was determined to extract some repairs for the higher price. The place looked okay at night, but in daytime, the building seemed neglected and almost sad. She really wanted to paint the exterior. How much could that cost him? Maybe they’d find a compromise. If he just bought the paint, she could get Cam to do the labor. It was her experience that musicians were always excellent and experienced housepainters. Of course, she didn’t know how long Cam would be around. But if she got the paint, a man couldn’t leave in the middle of a paint job, could he? Especially not a guy who played the fiddle.
Red was still pondering this question when her cell went off again. She straightened her legs in order to pull the phone out of her jeans pocket. It was the same strange number that had called before. With a sigh, she decided that they’d never stop calling until she told them she wasn’t interested.
“Hello,” she said.
“God, I thought you were never going to pick up,” a familiar voice on the other end of the line blurted out. “Hey, Red, it’s me.”
Immediately she sat up straight in her chair. “Bridge?” Just saying the name aloud gave her a strange buoyant feeling. “Are you back in town?”
“No, I’m calling from Kabul,” she answered. “I don’t expect to be back until Christmas. I told you that.”
“Yeah, yeah, you did,” Red agreed. “I just... I guess I just didn’t expect to hear from you. Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied. “But Mike’s mother isn’t. That’s why I called. She had a stroke last night.”
“Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. Is she going to be okay?”
“She’s pretty bad off,” Bridge said. “But she’s hanging in there. The report I got is that, assuming they get her stabilized, they’ll move her to a rehab facility for several weeks. They say you can’t tell at first who is really going to benefit from therapy and who isn’t. She’s pretty strong and only sixty-six, but, of course, her diabetes is a big complication.”
“Is Mike with her?”
“Mike’s in Korea, remember that?” She sounded half-annoyed that Red might not be keeping up.
“Oh yeah, of course I remember.”
“He’s working on getting a week of compassionate leave, but it may be a few days before he gets a hop to San Antonio.” “Well, do you want me to go by and see her?” Red asked. “I’m not exactly a friend, but I could sure put the fear of God in the nurses if it’s needed.”
“That would be nice, Red,” Bridge answered. “But what I really need for you to do is take the kids.”
“Take the kids?” She repeated the words as if their meaning was unclear. “Take them where?”
“Mike’s mom can’t really move or speak. She may fully recover, but it’ll be a long time before she can even care for herself, much less my two kids.”
“Who has them now?”
“They’re in the Family Services office at Fort Sam. I talked to Olivia about an hour ago. She and Daniel are pretty scared, but you know they’re like me, tough inside and out. Family Services can’t offer much in the way of temporary care for kids that age. They’re waiting for my backup custody to pick them up. That’s you.”
That reality hung out there in an instant of complete dumbfounded silence.
“It can’t be me,” Red insisted. “I don’t know anything about kids.”
“What’s to know? They practically raise themselves.”
“No, they don’t,” Red responded with certainty. “They’re just babies. There’s no way that I can take them in.”
“They are not babies,” Bridge argued. “Olivia is nine and Daniel is six. And you agreed.”
“You said I wouldn’t have to do anything but agree.” There was a heavy sigh at the other end of the line. “Well, I’m sorry about that. There are things beyond my control.”
Those words momentarily gave Red pause.
“That’s a rare admission for you,” Red pointed out.
“I suppose we all live and learn,” Bridge said. “Anyway, you have to do it.”
“Can’t you just come home?”
“The army doesn’t work that way.”
“Have you tried? I’m sure if they knew that the kids are on their own, they’d want to help.”
“Of course they’d want to help,” Bridge said. “But they can’t help. Everybody’s got problems. Before we deploy, families work out their own plan. This is our family plan.”
Red felt a desperate, sinking sense of unpleasant inevitability. “I’m not any good with kids,” she pleaded. “You, of all people, should know that.”
“I do know it, and if there was anyone else I could hand them off to, I would,” Bridge said. “There isn’t anybody else.”
“Can’t you send them to Korea to stay with Mike?”
“That’s possible,” she said. “But it’s not going to be easy. I’m army. Mike’s air force. That’s two different branches of the military. It’s not just that they don’t speak the same language, they each try to pretend that the other doesn’t exist.”
“But you can get them transferred to him.”
“Maybe, if he agrees, though I doubt he’ll be all that willing to give up his hard-won bachelor life. Even if he is, it’ll require a judge’s order to alter the custody agreement. And all the paperwork changing them from army dependents to air force dependents, that takes time,” Bridge said. “Somebody has to pick them up today. You have to pick them up. Today.”
Red glanced around her beloved patio bar with new eyes. “This is no place to raise kids,” she insisted.
“Mother!” Bridge said sharply. She never used the term except for the shock value of it. “I haven’t the time or inclination to argue. I’ve already been on this phone longer than I should be. These are your grandchildren. You are now responsible for them. They’re depending upon you. And you will not, under any circumstances, let any of us down. Do you understand?”
3
It was extremely curious that the one person in the world that Red should never have to take orders from—her daughter—was the only person who could consistently compel her to do anything.
Bridge’s forceful admonition, undoubtedly delivered in exactly the same tone that she utilized with the men and women under her command, had so spurred Red that she’d immediately hurried to do her duty.
Without a word to Cam, who was still in the shower, she locked up the bar and jumped into her seventeen-year-old primer-gray Honda CRX. The car made a definite whiny sound as she started it up, but the engine did turn over and within fifteen minutes she was at the guard gate of the nearby army base.
As soon as they stopped her, Red knew she should have thought this out more thoroughly.
“Are you aware that your inspection sticker is out of date?” a soldier, still so young he had peach fuzz on his cheeks, asked her.
“Yeah, I...uh...well, I just hadn’t gotten around to that,” she admitted.
He nodded gravely and made a slight sniffing sound.
“Have you been drinking this morning, ma’am?” he asked.
“Oh no,” Red insisted. “It’s my clothes. I work in a bar and everything I own has that sort of beer smell to it.”
“Please step out of the vehicle.”
His words weren’t merely a suggestion.
Red regretted her hasty departure from home now. Running around town without underwear was a definite no-no. Even if she was completely covered with jeans and T-shirt, she felt indecent, which made her
behave guiltily, which, reasonably, made the gate guards suspicious of her.
“What’s your purpose here today?” he asked her.
“I’m picking up my grandchildren.”
Red didn’t see any perceptible rise of the young soldier’s eyebrow, but she felt it.
“My daughter is overseas and...”
Her explanation was much longer and more detailed than she wanted it to be. Red just couldn’t stop expounding, clarifying, justifying. She heard herself talking, but she couldn’t shut herself up. She was out of place. Intent on a task unsuited to her. It was as if she needed to convince both of them that she belonged here.
The soldier directed her to an office. Inside, phone calls were made and her business there was verified. After only a few minutes she was given a paper pass that she carried back to the guard.
“Get that sticker up-to-date before you come in next time,” the young man told her.
Red hoped that, if she was lucky, she’d never have to come back here again.
After wandering through her directions and missing the turn twice, she finally parked in front of the Family Assistance Center. Flipping down the visor mirror, she gazed at herself in dismay. She combed through her wild hair with her fingers and pinched her cheeks to give them a little color. Then, taking a deep breath and placing what she hoped was a confident smile on her face, she walked inside.
The office was a square in pale neutral colors. Light poured in from the windows through utilitarian blinds. A large African-American woman was seated behind a desk, chatting on the phone. Red saw the children as soon as she walked through the door. They were sitting together in a secluded area visible from the main room, but separated from it. It was full of colorful furniture and toys that were being completely ignored. Daniel was stretched out on the chairs, his dark, curly head in the lap of his big sister. Olivia looked up and Red saw recognition in the young girl’s eyes, but she offered no greeting.
Red smiled at her and waved.
When there was no response from the children, Red turned to the woman at the desk. She mouthed, “Hi,” and then waited patiently until she’d hung up the phone.
“May I help you?”
“I’m Staff Sergeant Lujan’s mother. I’m here to pick up her children.”
The boy raised his head when he heard her words. He eyed Red suspiciously and then said something to his sister.
“Uh-huh,” the woman responded, and began sorting through the papers on her desk. “We tried to get you last night, but nobody answered and the children weren’t sure of your address.”
“I work nights,” Red explained simply. Her attention was still on the two youngsters whispering together across the room.
“I need to see your driver’s license.”
Red managed to fish it out of her purse again. At least this time it wasn’t stuck to anything. She was nervous, jittery. She bit her lip to keep herself from going on an explaining jag like she had at the gate. She would only answer questions that were asked. And she would only give as much information as was needed. That’s the way Bridge would have handled it.
Red’s comment to her daughter that she didn’t know anything about kids was more true than any outsider might imagine. Red had been a single, teenage mother, alone, scared and basically clueless. It seemed, in retrospect, that Bridge had raised herself. Everything she was, everything she’d achieved, she had managed all on her own. Her daughter’s childhood was a mysterious blur. Looking back, it seemed as if Bridge had always been a grown-up, responsible, dependable, unflappable. One minute Red was in a charity bed at Santa Rosa Hospital, being ordered to push. And the next, Bridge was marching out the front door in her military uniform.
“Just sign these papers and they are all yours,” the woman said.
Red felt only the very slightest hesitation before she sat in the seat offered and began plowing through the mountain of paperwork she’d been handed. The army, it seemed, wanted to know everything about her and the placement of the children.
Red tapped her pen nervously over some of the questions and even had to ask for help.
“I don’t know what school the children will attend,” she admitted. “I mean, I’m sure my neighborhood must have a school, I guess I just never noticed it.”
“You can write ‘summer recess’ in that blank now. You’ll have to come back with enrollment evidence later anyway.”
Red went back to the paperwork, but not before she caught sight of Olivia’s eyes. Her expression was condemning. Red could almost hear her thoughts. She hasn’t even thought about where we’ll go to school.
Red determinedly reminded herself that by then they’d be somebody else’s problem.
She signed the final page and pushed the paperwork across the desk. The woman thanked her and waved the kids over.
“Come on now,” she called out to them. “Your grandma’s come here to get you. Better run give her a big hello kiss.”
Big hello kisses were obviously not paramount in the minds of the two children who gathered up their suitcases and backpacks as if the weight of the world was on their young shoulders.
“I need to go to the library,” were Olivia’s first words to Red.
Daniel didn’t say anything. He just looked at her as if she were a strange alien creature, and a frightening one at that.
“Okay, maybe later,” Red answered. “Let’s go to my place and get you settled in first.”
It was hard to imagine how she could ever get these two settled into her apartment.
Red grabbed up Daniel’s book bag, which was almost as big as he was. He reacted as if she was trying to steal it and said something to his sister in Spanish.
“She’s just going to help you carry it,” Olivia answered the boy.
He didn’t seem happy about that, but as Red led them out the door, he reluctantly followed his sister.
She opened the back hatch of the CRX and began stowing the gear inside. Daniel was talking again, in Spanish, and this time his sister was answering in the same language.
“Doesn’t he speak English?” Red asked.
“Of course he does,” Olivia answered. “Right now, he just doesn’t want to.”1
Oh great! Red thought as she managed to keep from sighing or rolling her eyes.
When all the baggage was loaded, she urged the kids to the passenger door.
“I guess Daniel should go up in the back, since he’s smaller,” Red said.
Olivia peered inside the car and then gazed at Red in astonishment. “There isn’t anyplace to sit back there,” she pointed out.
Red shrugged. “The car’s a two-seater, but your brother can scoot in there cross-legged and he’ll be fine.”
“He needs a real place to sit and to be buckled in,” Olivia said.
She sounded so much like her mother, Red thought, such a little stickler for the rules.
“Don’t worry. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, it’s illegal,” Olivia pointed out. “And it’s unsafe. Nobody will let you drive us that way.”
“It will be fine,” Red assured her.
“I don’t think so,” Olivia said. “He needs to be sitting in a seat, with a seat belt.”
“We don’t have a seat with a seat belt, so we’ll make do with what we have.”
The little girl’s sigh was one of long-suffering before she complied.
Red’s plan to make do lasted all the way to the gate. The same grave-spoken young soldier who’d unhappily let her in was now unwilling to let her out.
“I chose to overlook an out-of-date inspection sticker,” he reminded her. “But I cannot allow you out on a public street with a child who is not properly or legally restrained.”
Red argued for several minutes. She’d drive slowly. She’d take only backstreets. She wasn’t going far. None of it made any difference.
Red moved the car into the small waiting lot and she and the children sat down on a bench.
“I to
ld you so,” Olivia said quietly, almost under her breath. Red didn’t even acknowledge hearing that. Instead, she snapped open her phone. She couldn’t think of who to call at first. It was Friday morning and everyone she knew was at work. Finally she called the only person she was sure would answer.
“Hey, Red,” Cam said as he picked up. “Where’d you run off to so quickly?”
His voice was languid and silky smooth.
“I need you to do me a favor,” she said, very matter-of-fact. “And I don’t want to play Twenty Questions about it, I just want you to do it.”
“Okay. What do you need?” he asked. His tone had changed completely from sweet-nothing whispers to all business.
“Bring your van and meet me at the Walters Avenue gate at Fort Sam Houston as soon as you can.”
There was a hesitation on the other end of the line. She was sure there were a thousand things that he wanted to ask, but she’d told him not to, and he didn’t.
“It may take me fifteen or twenty minutes,” he told her. “I’ll go as fast as I can.”
“Thanks.”
She hung up.
Red glanced over at the children. They were sitting close together at the far end of the bench, as if trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and this stranger who was, not very willingly or successfully, trying to take them home.
They had their father’s looks. Both had tan skin and brown eyes. Olivia’s long dark hair was thick and straight and pulled away from her face with a purple plastic headband. Daniel’s was curly and badly in need of a cut. The too-long curls gave his head an oversize appearance. They both had on shorts and flip-flops. Olivia’s shirt was decorated with tiny purple bows. Daniel’s advertised a pirate movie that he would not be old enough to see for a very long time. They were young and scared and very alone. Red could almost remember that feeling, and it generated an empathy for them that was genuine enough to be uncomfortable.
Daniel was still talking to his sister in a language Red didn’t understand. But she’d lived in San Antonio long enough that some of it sounded familiar. She immediately picked up on the word abuela—grandmother—and she wanted to reassure them.