Valentine

by Elizabeth Wetmore

  Excuse me, Mary Rose, he says, but I don’t believe I will shut my mouth.

  He is still yapping when the phone starts ringing off the hook. Leave it, I tell him, there’s a salesman that won’t stop calling. The phone rings and rings, stops for a few seconds, and starts up again. Robert stands there looking at me like I have lost my everloving mind. Leave it, I yell when he moves toward the phone. It’s a goddamn salesman.

  After the phone goes quiet, he asks how long I’m going to keep Aimee under house arrest, and I lie and tell him she has made all kinds of new friends here on Larkspur Lane.

  When he sidles up to me at the kitchen sink and asks if I don’t miss him even just a little bit, I grab at my breast and tell him about my milk duct.

  Jackpot.

  I have watched my husband stick his arm up a cow all the way to the elbow to turn a breeched calf and then cry when neither the cow nor the calf survived the night, but one word about his wife’s nipple infection, and he can’t get out the door fast enough.

  He takes his canned goods and one of Suzanne’s frozen casseroles and pulls out of the driveway with a little honk to let me know he means it. I take some aspirin and redraw the dishwater. Across the street, Corrine Shepard is sitting on her front porch. I lift my hand from the soapy dish tub and hold it up to the window, and she lifts hers, cigarette held aloft, the small red cherry dancing merrily back and forth in the night. Hello, Mary Rose.

  When the phone starts ringing again, it takes every bit of my willpower not to run over and fetch it off the receiver. Well come on over, you bastard, I want to tell them. I’ll be standing on the front porch with my Winchester, waiting for you.

  Glory

  Six o’clock in the morning and Alma is tired, as always, after a night spent cleaning the administrative offices and safety department, the credit union and break shacks, the bathrooms where men sometimes piss on the floor next to the toilet and trash cans overflow with rotting food and empty aerosol cans of cleaning solvent. But it is Friday and she, along with the other six women on the crew, is looking forward to collecting her pay—money for rent and groceries, money for all the little things her daughter is always needing, money to send home and, if there are a few dollars left over, money enough to buy something small for herself—hand cream, a new rosary, a chocolate bar—and maybe knowing this makes Alma and the other women feel a little less tired than usual.

  The border patrol van is already parked outside the front gate, the sliding door already open and waiting for them, and because they are women, the youngest eighteen and the oldest nearly sixty with half a dozen grandchildren, and because the four agents who stand next to the vehicle are larger and stronger, and each man’s service pistol is prominently displayed on his right hip, taking the women into custody is a quick, mostly quiet affair. The women will be dropped off on the other side of the Zaragoza bridge before Alma can tell her brother about the spare money she has hidden in the bedroom closet, before she can grab an extra jug of water or a second pair of shoes for the long trip back to Puerto Ángel, before she can say goodbye to Glory. Alma speaks her daughter’s name awkwardly. Glory—the name she insists on. Glory, the extra beat that has been severed. She misses it.

  Word of the raid spreads quickly through the community, thanks to Sra. Domínguez, who, having gone back to retrieve her sweater from a break shack, watched from the small window as the other women were taken into custody. After the van drove away, she stood there for nearly an hour, as if her feet had been nailed to the concrete floor, and then slipped quietly through the front gate at shift change. For months, people will talk about the sad blessing of Lucha Domínguez forgetting her sweater, a lightweight cotton cardigan that she carries even in the spring and summer, not only because she is often cold but because the indigo cloth reminds her of the night sky back home in Oaxaca. Otherwise, it might have been weeks before husbands and children and sisters knew for sure what had happened to Alma Ramírez and Mary Vásquez, Juanita González, Celia Muñoz, and a sixteen-year-old girl who had joined the crew barely a week earlier, and who was known to the other women only as Ninfa, from Taxco, in the state of Guerrero.

  * * *

  Three days after the raid, Victor knocks on the door of Alma’s apartment. Don’t worry, I’m not giving up a room at the Ritz, he tells his niece as he sets two duffel bags and a sack of groceries on the carpet. The bunkhouse at the man camp in Big Lake has a leaky faucet and crickets the size of jalapeños. He holds up both index fingers and moves them gently apart, an inch, two inches, to show her how big they are, then looks around the apartment appreciatively, as if he hasn’t been there for dinner at least twice a week since he returned from the war. As if he doesn’t see the pockmarked and water-stained drywall, or the carpeting that curls up along the baseboards, or the window blinds so old the slats will crack in half if Glory does not open and close them with care. As if the faucet doesn’t leak here, too, the tap a steady drip that stinks like rotten eggs in the summer. As if crickets don’t swarm behind the walls here, too.

  Los grillos, Alma had called them a few weeks earlier, and Glory rolled her eyes. Jesus Christ, how hard is it to say cricket? Ay mija, no maldigas al Señor.

  Speak English, Glory said. Act like you belong here, for once in your life.

  Glory watches her uncle fetch the rest of his things off the sidewalk and then step over to the sofa bed where she sleeps. He sets down a third duffel bag, along with a small wooden crate that holds two books, a bag of potato chips, a carton of cereal, a gallon of milk, and two six-packs of Coors Light. This here’s nicer than my place, he says, you got covered parking here. Keep the hailstones off my El Camino, eh, Gloria?

  Glory claps her hands over her ears and walks backward toward her mother’s bedroom. When she reminds her uncle, he looks at her blankly. Call me anything, she has begged her mother and uncle, even the district attorney on the one occasion she sat for an interview, but not that. Now, Victor says, Why not, m’ija? It’s your name. Because every time I hear it, she wants to shout at him, I hear his voice.

  It is a few minutes past four o’clock and the apartment complex sings and sighs with the noise of little kids coming home from day-care centers and vacation Bible schools. Mothers and big sisters shout at them to hurry up and help with chores. Box fans hum in the open windows, pushing hot air into the small courtyard. Ranchera drifts across the parking lot, and Glory again fights the urge to go into her mother’s bedroom, climb into bed, and put all the pillows between her ears and the world. Out there in the oil patch, he played his music loud, stopping to switch the channel from one country and western station to another, once to a late-night punk show on the college radio station she used to love. And why wouldn’t he play the music loud? Who was out there to hear? Nobody is coming to help you, he told her, and he was right.

  Glory is still in her mother’s bedroom when the property manager, Mr. Navarro, knocks on the door. They cannot stay here, he tells Victor. Mr. Navarro has heard about the raid at the plant, and he doesn’t want illegals living in this complex. Victor tells the man that his niece, Glory, was born right here in Odessa, at the medical center.

  ¿Y tú? the old man says.

  Victor answers in Spanish, which Glory cannot understand. Here in Texas, her mother has always insisted, Spanish is the language of janitors and housekeepers, not her daughter, and kids who speak Spanish at school land in detention, or worse. Still, Glory knows the substance, if not the content, of Victor’s words. Like his niece, he is also an American, he tells the man. He earned his citizenship serving two tours of duty in Vietnam, cabrón.

  A few minutes later, her uncle knocks on the bedroom door and says he is going to find them a different place to live, a better place. So start packing, Glory.

  It doesn’t take long to gather up their lives. Four years earlier, Glory and Alma walked into the furnished apartment carrying three suitcases and a milk crate filled with kitchen items. Now, Glory lays her clothes in one suitcase, and
Alma’s in another. She folds her mother’s bedspread and strips the sheets off the bed, packing them, along with their pillows and her knife, into the third suitcase. There is a wooden cigar box that smells faintly of cedar and holds photos of family back home in Oaxaca. Where the sandy beaches are white as salt, Tío says, and the red snapper tastes like butter. Glory sets the box in her mother’s suitcase, nestling it between a pair of blue jeans and her mother’s favorite blouse.

  In the kitchen, she opens the cabinet next to the stove. Into the milk crate go Alma’s cooking pot, her tablespoons and coffee cups, the chipped plates they found in the church store, and the plain wooden cooking spoon Alma carried with her across the border eighteen years earlier. It stirred beans and stews when Alma shared a one-room apartment with half a dozen other women who were sending money back home. Glory sometimes felt that spoon swat her ass when she was little, and the year she turned ten, Alma threw it across the kitchen and asked Glory to stop once and for all asking about the father she had never known. Well, where is he? Glory asked. ¿Pues, quién sabe? Maybe California, maybe dead. ¿Y a mí qué me importa?

  And several years later, when Glory was taller and stronger than her mother, and Alma suspected she was skipping school, she pointed the spoon at Glory’s head and told Victor to translate as she begged her daughter to use the brains God gave her to do something more with her life than shoplift beer at Pinkie’s liquor store and go parking at the old buffalo wallow. It is this old wooden spoon that sends Glory to the small kitchen table in tears, where she sits cross-legged and rubs at the bright red scars on her feet and wonders how long it will be before Alma can gather up the money and nerve and opportunity to cross the river.

  * * *

  There are thirty-six rooms at the Jeronimo Motel, a U-shaped motor inn that sits near the intersection of Pearl and Petroleum, less than a mile from the refinery. On a hot night, if tenants blow a fuse running their air conditioners at the same time as their hot plates and televisions, they might step out of their rooms and lean on the iron railing and watch the blue-orange flames from the flare stacks. It’s not much cooler out there, but there’s usually a little wind blowing in their direction.

  Victor pulls his long, white El Camino—El Tiburón, he calls it—into a space facing the pool. Pues, you can float there all day long, he tells his niece, who leans against the passenger door with her cheek pressed against the warm glass. It is after ten and the lot is already filled with diesel trucks, pickups, a smattering of sedans and station wagons. A small camper is parked across two spots on the other side of the pool, its yellow porch light flickering gently against the water. A woman paddles across the pool, a small wake radiating from her head and hands. When she reaches the middle, she flips onto her back and drifts in the dark, her body exposed to the air, her yellow hair floating eel-like around her face. The woman wears cut-off jeans and a T-shirt, Glory sees now, and her thick arms and legs gleam in the dark like shark’s teeth.

  After Victor has helped Glory carry her things to the second floor, he hands her a room key on a plastic, Texas-shaped fob. Best thing about this place, it’s cheap enough that Glory can have her own room. Rooms cost twice as much at the Dixie Motel out on Andrews Highway. He gives her room 15. Which makes sense, he says, because she will turn fifteen in the fall. This year is gonna pass, mi vida, he says, and you’ll feel better soon. This isn’t your life.

  Room 15 smells of cigarettes and grease, but there are fresh vacuum cleaner lines on the carpet and the bathroom smells like lemon Pine-Sol. A television sits on a low brown dresser that is nearly as long as the room, and the double bed is covered with a carrot-colored polyester bedspread. While Victor looks for the Coke machine, Glory strips off the bedding. She makes the bed with Alma’s floral-scented sheets and the bedspread her mother bought last fall after working some extra shifts. It is covered with Texas bluebonnets, a flower Alma claims as her favorite, though she has never in her life seen a real one. Last fall Victor promised Alma and Glory that they would drive down to the Hill Country in April, and Alma could take a picture of her daughter sitting in a field that had been overtaken by the tiny purple flowers, then put it in a frame and hang it on the wall, like every other parent in the great state of Texas. Thanks, Glory told her uncle, but I’d rather stay home and read The Scarlet Letter. See how ungrateful she is, said Alma, and they stared at each other until Glory dropped her eyes. And now it’s June, Glory thinks. We missed it.

  Victor stops by with a bottle of cold Dr Pepper and a promise to bring her a doughnut before he leaves for work in the morning. When he steps back onto the landing that runs the entire length of the building, she closes the door and fastens the thin brass chain. There’s a door that connects their rooms, but he says it’s only for emergencies. He will knock on the front door, just like anybody else. For most of her life, Glory has dreamed of having her own room, her own door to lock, and she feels a little spark of pleasure, in spite of the horror that has brought them here.

  A thin rectangle of late-afternoon sun pushes through a narrow gap in the curtains, the light falling across the carpet and catching the dust motes that drift through the air. She pulls the curtains tight and the light disappears. The window is hardly bigger than a pizza box, impossible for even a small man to climb through. Still, Glory checks the metal clasp on the window, and the piece of broomstick that someone has wedged along the jamb between the upper and lower sash. The yellow-haired woman is out of the pool now. She sits on a lounge chair with a towel around her head and a cigarette in her hand, her wet clothes clinging to her large body. The other rooms are dark, the Jeronimo Motel quiet and still.

  The proprietor don’t put up with any silliness, Victor told her when they pulled into the parking lot and her eyes widened at the rows of work trucks. He only rents to working-men and families. You’ll be safe here—he reached over as if to pat his niece’s arm but stopped short of touching her—you’re gonna be okay.

  Maybe he’s right, but when Glory climbs into bed, she reaches under the pillow and runs her fingers across the folded pocketknife she has stashed there. If anybody comes through that door, or the window, she will be ready for him. Once, twice, three times, Glory runs her fingers across the knife’s smooth steel and leather handle. She is still holding it, still running through the steps—grab the knife, press the catch, slash at the air until the knife connects—when she falls asleep.

  In every dream, the desert is alive. She walks carefully, but the moon disappears behind a cloud and she doesn’t see the pile of rocks, or the nest of snakes on the other side of it. When she falls and rises shrieking from the ground, they are already on her, wrapping themselves around her ankles and legs, climbing toward her belly and breasts. One curls itself around her neck and Glory feels the quick, thin flick of a tongue against her eyelash. She stands perfectly still, waiting for them to move off her, to retreat back into the dark. Moonlight shines through the truck’s window. His pupils are black holes surrounded by blue sky. Time to pony up, Gloria, he says, time to pay for all my beer you drank, all this gas I used to get us here. Wait, she says. Wait! She reaches into the pocket of her jeans and wraps her fingers around the leather handle. The knife opens effortlessly and finds his gullet without fail.

  Awake now in the dark, Glory moves one finger up and down the raised skin on her belly. About the width of a dandelion stem, the scar begins just below her breasts and follows a meandering path down her torso, as if she has been cut in half and sewn back together. At her navel, it curves around her belly button and continues on, stopping just below her pubic line. When she woke up in the hospital, she had been shaved and her belly was held together with a long line of metal staples. Lacerated spleen, the surgeon told Victor, probably from one of the punches she took to the abdomen. She fought, she fought, she fought. Her feet and hands were wrapped in white bandages, and her hair had been cut to the scalp, a line of stitches wandering across the crown of her head. Victor leaned down and whispered that her mama
couldn’t come to the hospital—too many cops, too many questions—but she was waiting for Glory at home. Listen, he whispered to his niece, you survived this. He said something else then, but Glory was already sinking back into sleep and pain, and she couldn’t be sure what it was. She thought he said, This is a war story. Or maybe, this is yours.

  * * *

  When Victor knocks on the door at 4:30 every morning, he’s holding a chocolate doughnut and a carton of milk. Keep the door locked, he says. If you need help, dial zero for the motel office. After he leaves, Glory lies in bed and listens as the parking lot growls to life. Diesel engines and doors slam. Men, still half asleep, murmur outside her door. She hears the echo of work boots on the metal stairs, and the sudden blast of a car horn when one of the workers has overslept. And she hunkers down in her covers, fingers still wrapped around the knife handle. By five o’clock, the parking lot is mostly empty. Until the kids and wives and girlfriends wake up, the Jeronimo Motel will sit quiet as an abandoned church, and it is then that Glory is able to get her best sleep.

  By late morning, when kids start running up and down the stairs and doing cannonballs into the deep end of the pool, when girlfriends and wives are heading out to work the lunch shift or pick up some groceries at Strike-It-Rich, when the woman who tries to clean the room has knocked on the door and handed her a stack of clean towels—no thanks, she says when the woman tries to come in and change the sheets—Glory has had the television on for hours. The soap operas and detergent commercials drone constantly in the background as Glory sleeps and snacks, bathes and showers, peeks through the curtain, watches a shaft of sunlight move across the floor. A couple of times she picks up the phone and thinks about calling Sylvia, but she has not spoken to anyone from school since February. And what would she say? Hello, from the stupidest girl in the world, who climbed into a stranger’s truck and slammed the door shut, whose picture ended up in the paper, blowing any chance she had at getting past this.