When she was in her mid-thirties, which can be a wonderful time for a woman, Claudia started dating an older man, Richard, who was in his late forties.
Richard had a bad back, it was hard for him to remain seated for any length of time, so he received a Social Security disability check each month. Each month he also got a long term disability check, because his injury occurred while he was employed. Between the two monthly checks, it was enough for him to get by, and even save some money.
He lived in a modest apartment in San Mateo, California, small front lawn, quiet side street that was a two-block walk to banks, restaurants, Vons supermarket.
She was a bank teller by then at California Mercantile, working the drive-up window.
Richard used to come by twice a month to cash his checks, in an old Ford station wagon, the back of the wagon piled high with newspapers and boxed files. He wrote a lot of letters to the editor. Occasionally, one would get published. The published ones he put in black frames, hung up in his living room.
Claudia liked him because he seemed intelligent, gentle.
They'd usually talk for a while each time he eased his station wagon alongside the drive-up window to deposit a check, first about weather and television, then about his letters to the editor, then about their lives so far.
He was shy, so Claudia was the one who suggested they have lunch together.
She took him to Christopher's, a restaurant across the wide street from her bank, specializing in seafood, especially Dungeness crab. He sat across from her at the small square table draped in white cloth, fidgeting, long black hair, black-rimmed glasses, bit of a beard.
By the end of lunch, he invited her to come to his home that Friday for dinner.
She showed up in a pink-flowered dress, which she bought the day before at a shop down the street, a camel-hair jacket thrown over the dress (the same camel hair jacket, in fact, she had worn a decade ago when her dad flew out to rescue her).
His apartment was cozy, safe, rooms rather dark, smelling musty like a grandparent's house. At her request, he led her on a museum tour from one black-framed, published letter to the editor to the next, at her instigation reading each out loud, which he did with his glasses unhinged from his nose, naked blue eyes leaning in towards the framed glass.
She watched his profile, his eye, pronouncing lips, while he read.
"You have a fireplace!"
He turned around, looking at the red brick alcove as if for the first time. "Yeah. I haven't had a fire in it for a long time, though."
"Do you have any firewood?"
He thought about it. "No. We could go out to Vons and get some."
She touched his forearm. "We could do that another time."
He brightened at the idea she'd be back. "I'll buy some tomorrow," he said, "for your next visit."
For their dinner, he prepared what he called his absolutely perfect spaghetti sauce, which he made from scratch. As it bubbled in a big stainless steel pot, red, pink, orange, he apologized it wasn't his original recipe. He had toned down, over the years, the spices.
They made love their eighth date, in his bed, him having trouble achieving an erection, black eyebrows furrowed, maybe because of his bad back, maybe his shyness, something else, she didn't ask, but she was able to get him off with a blow job.
A few weeks later, her dresses and jackets by then hanging in his closet, her pots and pans at a tilt against the rubber-coated upright blue prongs in his dishwasher, the beige clamshell hiding her diaphragm resting on top of his dark cherry bureau next to his safety-pinned name tag from the Pasadena Star Trek convention, she moved in.
She used a week of vacation time, bought new drapes with his and her money, repainted two rooms, pastel blues and yellows running down her right forearm, selected several dark emerald indoor ferns from the local nursery.
They were married that June, in a courthouse ceremony in Redwood City, the county seat.
She was really happy, and pregnant.
He was nervous in the delivery room, constantly having to move out of the way, elbows clamped against his ribs, diffident to the nurses and doctor. She had to call him over to sit by her when it was time to hold hands and start her breathing exercises. She made a point of not cursing at him, as she had heard a lot of delivering mothers do, as her vagina dilated, her womb started pushing down, and she experienced the worse pain of her life.
The nurses took the baby, umbilical cord cut, away from between her wet legs long enough to clean off the gluey mucous and blood; let the doctor quickly examine eyes, fingers, toes, then lay her baby down on her sweat-soaked pink and white checked hospital gown. She stroked its bald, bobbing head, its big blue eyes looking around in wonderment. Claudia started crying.
Richard leaned over, even with his bad back, held her shoulders. "Are you okay?"
She weakly punched his chest, pale face turning towards him, really bad hair day. "Yeah! I'm fine."
She took a leave of absence from the bank. They named the baby Kimberly, after Richard's mother.
Here's Kimberly standing up, left hand holding as always onto the side of her crib, toothless red mouth open, then letting go, tiny pink fingers leaving the painted wood, standing on her own, hairless eyebrows rising, for the first time ever.
They were a family.
These were the best years of her life. She didn't know it then, but may have suspected. They had over five thousand dollars in the bank for a down payment on a house. Claudia's tabletop village took up the entire space of their guest bedroom, with a full business district, side streets filled with houses with large backyards, tiny tires hanging off tiny tree limbs, and an outlying green area of gently rolling farms, pink plastic cows hewing close to Claudia's hand-constructed barns. Each evening, she and Richard would settle their asses down on the living room carpet, knees sticking out, around Kimberly's baby-babble constructions of castles made from lettered blocks, fireplace popping, sparking, Richard trying to catch their daughter's eye to show her a butterfly he had made that day out of purple and pink construction paper, tightly-wound rubber bands.
For Kimberly's third birthday, which happily fell on a Friday, Claudia baked a layered white cake, using the side of a supermarket knife to carefully smooth pink icing across the top, down the sides. "Once daddy gets home, we'll write Happy Birthday, Kimberly! across the top with these little tubes, and you, little peanut, will be in charge of sticking in the candleholders."
But one night five months later, daddy didn't come home from the store when he should have.
He didn't come home at four, he didn't come home at five after four, or fifteen after four, or four thirty, or five, or six.
Claudia called the police, but they couldn't do anything (wouldn't do anything) until forty-eight hours had passed.
She took off Kimberly's pajamas, little naked toddler on the living room carpet, dressed her in going-out clothes, quickly brushed her hair, carried her in her arms down the sidewalk, retracing the steps to Vons supermarket.
She didn't know what she was going to do if she got all the way to Vons, wandered down the brightly-lit aisles, one after the other, with their baby in her arms, trying not to look distressed, and still didn't find Richard.
But that's what happened. As she left the store, really scared by now, she had to hope against hope they'd get home and he'd be in the kitchen, groceries put away, stirring at the stove.
She found him halfway home, off the sidewalk, at the bottom of a slope, whimpering against the green base of someone's hedge.
She didn't want to leave him, blood on the face she kissed each night, but had to, to drive back home, to call for an ambulance.
She held Kimberly tightly against her, face red, praying to God, on one of the brown benches in the emergency room, fat Latina women on either side, until a nurse all dressed in white finally arrived from behind a swinging door, with a clipboard, called her name.
He had been attacked by two kids on his way to the stor
e, in broad daylight.
Because of his back, ill health, he couldn't defend himself from these two children. They knocked him over easily.
"It was like they didn't even care if I had money." He said that a lot in the weeks that followed, as if he said it often enough, he'd understand.
They kept kicking him once he was on the ground, even though he pleaded with them, begged them, to stop, he was ill, his back was bad.
They kept kicking him, laughing, looking around for cars.
He stayed in the hospital three days, was discharged.
Claudia took time off work, keeping him in bed, nursing him back to health.
Kimberly lay in bed next to her daddy, head propped on a small pillow of her own, like a little adult.
He eventually improved, to where he could walk to the bathroom on his own, without her shoulder.
Three months after the attack, he was sitting up at their kitchen table.
She cooked his special spaghetti sauce, leaving out all the spices.
She went back to work.
Six days later, coming home, Richard was pale, having trouble getting out of the chair in the living room in front of the TV.
"Are you okay?"
He made a face. His voice was quiet. "I threw up two pails of blood today."
She slipped off her sports jacket. "What?" Like he'd say something happier if he had to repeat it.
"I threw up two pails of blood." His weak, sad eyes looked up at her. "They're out in the garage."
Which they were, under the tool bench. She leaned over in her flowered dress. Two aluminum pails, both slopped full of blood.
The hospital ran tests.
There was a lot of internal bleeding, but he appeared stabilized, since he hadn't thrown up any additional blood in the past several hours. He'd need to come in for more tests tomorrow.
She sat on the side of his white hospital bed in the emergency room, tall pleated curtains drawn around them, a clear plastic tube inserted into his left forearm, with the down, then up curve of an elephant's tusk, giving him a blood transfusion from a plump bag hanging from a tall steel gurney.
He was discharged at eleven o'clock that night, after flattening five bags of brown blood.
Some color returned to his cheeks.
She helped him home, undressed him while he leaned against the painted wood of their bedroom dresser.
Pulling down his pants, she saw his white and purple drawers were soaked with blood.
She let out a moan, stickily tugging down the drawers she bought him, a gift from a young wife, blood sliding down his thighs, cock and black pubic hair caked red.
"I'm going to call the hospital," she said.
But looking up as she made that decision, she saw he was already dead, mouth slack, eyes fixed.
Her Dad arrived the next day, bumping down at Santa Barbara airport, helped down the steps extended from the plane to the tarmac, into the warm, dry air, the view of the blue Santa Ynez mountains, the mid-distance abundance of olive green palm trees.
Using his blue and silver credit card, he rented a mid-size cherry red Mercury to drive up Highway 101 to San Mateo.
A heavy-set woman answered the doorbell. "Hi, Dad!"
He covered up his surprise at her weight gain by hugging her, then holding her at shoulder's length, smiling, looking into her eyes, to make sure it really was her.
"Come on in!" She raised her double chin. "You've gotten really gray!"
He stepped into the house, closing the door behind him. "I'm in my sixties. Age happens."
She led him to the back of the house, Tom looking around at the modest furnishings, bright walls, to the kitchen, where a little girl sat in the sunlight at the table, white shoes swinging back and forth, delicately putting a piece of cereal into her mouth.
Claudia turned her wide face to him. "This is your granddaughter, Dad!" She turned to her daughter, who had stopped chewing, staring at Tom. "Kimberly, this is your granddad!"
Kimberly was shy. She stared at a spot on the wall while Tom awkwardly made his way around Claudia and the end of the table to sit down in a chair next to this small person who looked a little like Claudia, a little like someone he had never met. She had his dead wife's tilt of the head.
Kimberly stayed with a neighbor while Tom accompanied his daughter to the funeral parlor.
He was still trying to get used to his daughter being so heavy, a combination, he imagined, of marital happiness, pregnancy, age. He glanced at her as he drove, trying each time to find his daughter in this new, round face. They rode in silence. Realizing she hadn't immediately turned on the car radio, he finally thought of something to say. "You don't like listening to music anymore?"
She looked over at him, back at the car radio. "Not really. Music has gotten so sad the past decade. It used to be so joyous."
The funeral parlor was a few blocks from Claudia and Richard's house, fairly small, a converted one-story residence, but the director, whose name Tom didn't catch, seemed nice, tall and light-haired, with the quiet voice of a priest. Both he and Tom wore dark suits. Claudia had on one of her sports jacket and flowered dress combinations.
The man escorted them into what had probably been the dining room, sitting behind a large desk. He smiled at Tom. "Is this your first visit to San Mateo, Mr. Liddy?"
Tom thought about it. "I'm not sure. I've been to a lot of places."
"We like to call it the Biggest Little City in America."
"A lot of towns do that."
"We've already spoken with Claudia about some of the funeral arrangements, but she understandably wanted her dad here to look over the agreements we've reached." The man slid a stapled invoice across the desk to Tom. While Tom reviewed it, heart beating at the prices, and he hadn't even flipped over to the second page, the director asked Claudia, "Did you decide on the predominant flower we should use?"
On the second page of the invoice, at the bottom, there were two signature lines for the 'Guarantor(s)'. Claudia had already signed her line. Tom's line was blank.
There were a lot of questions Tom could have asked, a lot of objections he could have made, but he surprised himself by simply signing on the line.
After some pleasantries, he pulled his dark blue checkbook out of an inside jacket pocket, wrote a check for eight thousand dollars.
The wake was held at the apartment. Claudia baked lasagna the night before, while Tom, sitting on the living room floor, played with dolls, with Kimberly. He didn't want to drink around his granddaughter, even though Claudia was pouring one Coke and vodka after another, so he stuck to ice water. The past few years, he had begun to notice how much ice water tastes like milk.
The wake did not go well.
Richard's older sister, a heavy-set woman with long, black, unwashed hair and weird eyeglasses that tilted up at either side, who was apparently acting as a spokeswoman for the rest of Richard's family, accused Claudia of stealing her brother's money. "He wanted his estate to go to us, his blood, not you!"
Claudia explained to Tom in the kitchen, while she dished up more lasagna, licking spaghetti sauce off her left wrist, that there had always been bad feelings between her and Richard's siblings. Her wide face turned towards her dad. "They never accepted me. Richard was the baby brother. They were always very protective."
By the end of the evening, Claudia agreed to give the siblings Richard's boat, a modest speedboat with propeller engine dry-docked in the backyard on a steel-framed hitch which Tom, from what little he knew of Richard, who he had never met, could not imagine the man ever using. But giving up the boat seemed to placate the family members. The boat was, essentially, his estate.
"What are you going to do now? Are you staying here?"
Claudia sat on the sofa, hands in her round lap, looking around the empty one a.m. living room at all the spilled drinks, food, knocked over folding chairs.
"I honestly don't know. A lot of times, to avoid traffic on El Camino Real, I'd take the ba
ck roads through the neighborhood, and each time I did, I'd always pass across a side street called Texas Avenue. A lot of times I thought, Wouldn't that be great, to drive down that side road, and wind up in Texas?"
Tom shifted his weight in the chair. "Really? That's how you're going to decide what to do next in your life? Base it on your feelings about a street sign?"
Claudia's broad face looked tired. "Dad, come on. There's so much that's dull in life. The only exciting stuff, at my age, is ketchup and bacon."
He looked down at the cold, ice-beaded scotch and soda he was holding by his knees (he had had to go out and buy the scotch). "You've got a child now. That's a responsibility. You can't keep going through life, Claudia, just–"
"Enough! Okay? I buried my husband today."
He slept in the guest bedroom, so crowded with upside-down junk it was difficult to spot the bed until he was in the center of the room.
He roused himself out of bed at one point to urinate.
On his way back from the bathroom he saw the light was still on in the kitchen.
Claudia was sitting at the kitchen table, radio turned low, sad songs, her wide face flushed, eyes glassy. She took another long sip from her latest drink. Her legs were crossed, shoulders pulled in, head nodding slowly to herself, deep in that destructive self-examination alcohol can induce. She didn't see him. He could have walked in. He backed away.
He flew home the day after the wake. Before he left he gave this stout woman who had his thin daughter buried within her bulk a final hug. Kimberly, despite his best efforts at wooing her, wrinkled hands reaching down, did nothing more than stand behind her mother.
Claudia met Brian at a Home Depot in Dallas.
She was in the lawn mowers department, looking at the shiny red and green machines, smelling that engine oil smell she loved, when he walked past, holding a white plastic toilet seat.
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