Found: One Son

by Judith Arnold

  One last, lingering assessment and she said, “All right.”

  “Eight o’clock?”

  “All right.” She gave him a final smile, this one warm enough to melt a polar ice cap, then turned and walked down the street, as regal and graceful as a ballerina.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” he called after her, but she didn’t stop, didn’t acknowledge hearing him. He grinned. She’d said “All right”; she’d be there.

  He took a hearty bite of his peach and felt his mouth fill with its sweet flavor. Emmie Kenyon’s lips would taste even sweeter, he suspected. Maybe tonight he would find out for sure.

  In the meantime, he’d have to scrounge up a mechanic.

  WHATEVER HAD MADE HER AGREE to meet a stranger for supper?

  Emmie was smart and self-protective. She didn’t court trouble or take unnecessary risks. But for some reason, she had decided Michael Molina was safe.

  Well, not really safe. He had a wicked gleam in his eyes, a charisma that could test the willpower of even a smart, self-protective woman. He had the kind of lean, athletic build that could inspire a prude to fantasize, and Emmie was no prude.

  But she believed she could trust him, at least out in public on a Saturday night. She’d been in San Pablo long enough to know a fair number of locals, and she had Rosita’s daughter in her class, so if Michael started any trouble at the restaurant, she would holler for Rosita and her husband.

  Michael Molina was an American. A college professor. His smile seemed honest. Even the mischief in his eyes seemed honest. She truly didn’t think she would have to holler for help tonight.

  She was going to be in San Pablo only one more month. In June she would be returning to Richmond, her grand adventure over. She’d loved every minute she’d spent in the country, loved working with her students and her fellow faculty members at the rustic village schoolhouse, wiring the building for an Internet connection and then linking the tiny educational outpost to the rest of the planet. She’d loved living with the Cesares, becoming an honorary member of their family, honing her fluency in Spanish and absorbing a culture that was in some ways utterly alien to her but in others—the claim of tradition, the deep family roots and loyalties—nearly identical to her own. She’d loved learning how to haggle with merchants, how to use the local currency and navigate around town on the local buses, how to view life from a different perspective.

  But she’d been here nearly a year, and not once had she sensed even a glimmer of romance in the air.

  Until now. Until Michael Molina, his seductive grin and his seductive eyes, had entered her world.

  She wandered down the street, passing the rest of the food vendors but pausing at a table arrayed with painted pottery. She wanted to bring her mother a gift from San Pablo, but she hadn’t yet found a souvenir she thought her mother would appreciate. Not that there was anything wrong with the pottery—the terra-cotta bowls, fat and round and decorated with geometric slashes of black and white paint, were actually quite beautiful—but the ceramics wouldn’t be to her mother’s taste. Her mother liked things that were classy and pricy and...well, American. The local crafts enthralled Emmie. She’d already bought a woven blanket for herself, and a pair of festive beaded earrings. But her parents were conservative and terribly limited in their tastes.

  Sighing, she abandoned the potter’s table and strolled down the street to the block where the Cesares lived. Their house was a modest stucco structure, but the plumbing worked and she had her own room. More than that she didn’t need.

  She entered the house and carried the peaches into the kitchen, where she found Sefiora Cesare scrubbing dishes. She placed the peaches in a bowl and carried them to the sink to wash. “They look ripe,” Senora Cesare said in the San Pablo-accented Spanish Emmie had come close to mastering this year.

  She pictured Michael Molina taking a peach from her. She imagined him biting into it. She imagined juice dribbling down his chin, and his eyes brightening in delight at the wonderful flavor. “I’m not going to be here for supper tonight,” she said to alert Senora Cesare. The afternoon meal was the major one of the day, and the evening meal usually entailed a light stack. But Emmie owed it to her hostess to let her know she’d be out. “I’m meeting friends in town,” she explained, reassuring herself that it was only a small lie. If she’d said she would be meeting a friend, Senora Cesare would want to know who the friend was. And if considering Michael Molina a friend was stretching reality, Emmie hoped it wasn’t an outright falsehood.

  “When will you be home?” Senora Cesare wanted to know.

  Feeling like a teenage girl negotiating a curfew with her mother, Emmie smiled tolerantly. “Not too late,” she promised. “Before midnight.”

  “I’ll start worrying at a minute past midnight,” Senora Cesare declared, flashing an answering smile Emmie’s way. Emmie stood a good six inches taller than the short, plump woman, but despite her superior height, she looked up to Senora Cesare. The woman’s ash-gray hair and weary eyes hinted at how many years she had overseen the courting rituals of her own three daughters, keeping each one on a short rein until she settled on an eligible man and got married. When Emmie had moved in with the Cesares, they had all discussed the fact that she would be a rent-paying boarder, not another daughter in need of mothering. But Senora Cesare couldn’t fight her ingrained habits, and Emmie couldn’t resent her for it.

  She spent the hottest part of the afternoon in her room, sipping glasses of lemon-laced iced tea and reviewing her students’ math work sheets. She let one of the other teachers at the school work with her children on language skills, but Emmie taught math, science and computer science. Although her Spanish was strong enough for her to communicate with her pupils, her spelling wasn’t much better than theirs.

  The schoolwork helped to distract her from thoughts of her impending date. But Michael Molina managed to sneak into her mind every now and then. Checking the row of multiplication problems on a work sheet, she found herself distracted by a vision of him standing on the walk beside her, the sun lending his skin a coppery glow. Correcting a borrowing error on a long-division problem, she recalled his voice, low and husky, as if a laugh were threatening to break through. Circling an illegible answer on a work sheet, she recalled the warmth of his smile, and her memory ignited a matching warmth inside her.

  She mustn’t allow herself to think of him in terms of warmth. He was a near stranger, a handsome question mark. She shouldn’t let down her guard.

  But as the afternoon heat seeped out of the air with the fading sunlight, she filled the tub with cool water and splashed a few drops of cologne into it, because even if Michael turned out to fall far short of her expectations, she wanted to smell nice. She wanted to look and feel fresh. She wanted to remember that she was an attractive woman, entitled to risk a little hope on the possibility that an evening spent with Michael Molina would turn out to be a lovely thing.

  MICHAEL STUDIED His reflection in the mirror above the dresser. The warped glass presented him with a shivery image of himself. In the thirty-six hours he and Gallard had been here, he’d grown used to the mirror’s distortions, the scratched and chipped chest of drawers, the narrow beds and the smothering, stagnant air of the small room tucked behind a far-macia in an alley a block from the town’s main plaza. As accommodations went, he’d had better, but the room had been available, and he and Gallard had been happy to get it. San Pablo wasn’t the sort of place where the Four Seasons would choose to erect one of its luxury hotels.

  His reflection might be wavering, but he wasn’t. In ten minutes, he was going to be in the company of a gorgeous woman who had more class in her left eyebrow than he had in his entire family tree. A blond Southern belle teaching school under the auspices of a church group? Talk about being out of his element!

  But Michael had always enjoyed mixing elements and watching them react. If he’d let nonsense like class distinctions get in his way, he would never have wound up on a full scholarsh
ip at U.C.-Berkeley, earning a Ph.D. The greatest thing about America, his immigrant father always used to tell him, was that class didn’t matter.

  What mattered now was that Michael would be spending the evening with Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon.

  It had been a good day all around. He’d found a mechanic that afternoon, down in the neighborhood of shanties south of town. The man’s front yard had been cluttered with cars and trucks in various states of disrepair, with chunks of engine and detached doors and piles of tires scattered around the tiny yard and scrawny chickens pecking in the dirt be-tween the heaps of junk. He’d looked at the Jeep, said he could fix the clutch next week and cited a price that seemed remarkably cheap to Michael, although it would probably buy a month’s worth of groceries in San Pablo.

  If he and Gallard had been in Mexico City, they could have rented a car from Hertz or Avis and not worried about getting it repaired. But things were done differently in San Pablo. So he’d agreed to bring the Jeep back the following Wednesday.

  Gallard hadn’t been pleased. “Wednesday? That’s four days from now! Why can’t he do it sooner?”

  Michael had pictured the fellow’s chaotic yard, the rusting trucks with their hoods raised, the stripped-down Camaro on blocks, the Volkswagen van without an engine. “He’s got other jobs ahead of us,” Michael had explained, not the least bit annoyed at having to kill four days waiting for the Jeep to be made reliable before they attempted to do anything that might require a quick getaway. Four days in San Pablo meant four days he could be getting closer to Emmie. “Besides,” he’d added to mollify Gallard, “the mechanic had information.”

  Gallard’s expression had remained impassive. “What information?” he asked.

  “We got to talking,” Michael had told him. It was exactly what Gallard had brought him along to do: get to talking. Michael moved easily within San Pablo. He glided from English to San Pablo-Spanish slang and back again without missing a beat He knew these people, knew how to befriend them, how to get them to fix a clutch or reveal some important fact.

  With the mechanic, he’d mentioned, in the oblique way San Pabloans preferred to discuss subjects of great importance, that he and a friend had come to town on business, that they were looking for a specific businessman by the name of Edouardo Cortez and were having a bit of difficulty locating him, although they’d heard he was in the vicinity. The mechanic had stiffened and sworn. “That bastardo,” he’d muttered. “Nobody knows him, but everybody hates him around here.” A few more minutes of circular dialogue, and Michael had learned that Cortez was holed up in the hills somewhere outside town, that everyone despised him because he’d hurt a young señorita, a good sweet girl who would have made a man a fine bride but for what Cortez had done to her. Everyone in town wanted him dead, but he had too many guns and a few henchmen who knew how to use them, and the policía were scared to confront him.

  “Nobody’s going to stop us if we take him in,” Michael had told Gallard.

  “Forget the ‘we,’” Gallard had scolded. “I’ll take him in. You don’t have the training. You just keep finding out stuff like this, and when the time comes, I’ll take him in. And these folks’ll probably have a fiesta when I do. They’ll probably stand in line for a chance to kick him in the cojones.” It figured that that was one of the few Spanish words Gallard knew.

  Michael didn’t want to think about Cortez tonight, or about Gallard, who’d gone off for an evening at a local establishment staffed with sweet young senoritas whose work did not qualify them to become any man’s fine bride but who were paid handsomely for their services. Gallard had invited Michael to join him, but Michael had better plans for his Saturday night.

  Emmie Kenyon. Mary-Elizabeth, with eyes like flawless turquoise and skin like ivory, and a smile that could light up the sky.

  He pocketed his wallet and left the room. Gallard had the Jeep with its tricky clutch. Michael didn’t need it. He could walk to Casa Rosita’s, which sat on a corner near the village center just a few blocks down from the farmacia.

  He arrived five minutes early. She was already there, waiting for him.

  He tried not to smile too broadly at the realization that she was eager enough to come early. For all he knew, she’d come early to tell him she’d decided not to spend the evening with him after all. Pessimism wasn’t his style, though. Ignoring Rosita’s stocky husband, who lurked in the doorway of the cozy cantina, he strode over to the table near one of the arched, unscreened windows overlooking the town’s plaza. The table was round, lit by the flame of a waxy red candle that cast her face in a golden glow.

  Emmie Kenyon was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

  “Hi,” he said, suffering an uncharacteristic twinge of shyness as he pulled out the chair across the table from her.

  She smiled slightly. “Hello.”

  “Did you wait long? I’m sorry.”

  “Not a problem,” she said.

  He relaxed. This was going to go well. Emmie might be gorgeous, she might be a cultivated and elegant Southern belle, but if his arriving after her for their rendezvous was not a problem, he doubted anything else would be.

  Rosita’s husband materialized at their table with bottles of beer. Had Emmie already ordered it? Apparently it didn’t matter. Emmie simply gave him a smile of thanks when he filled her glass for her.

  Michael and Emmie didn’t talk much until they’d ordered some food. Once they were alone, Michael lifted his glass to her. “Here’s to strangers in a strange land,” he toasted.

  Her smile warmed him. “Here’s to someone who speaks English.”

  They drank. Michael relaxed some more. He would have been satisfied just to while away a night gazing at her and imagining sharing more than gazes with her, but the possibility that she had wit and intelligence and was good company delighted him.

  “I’m picturing you as the mistress of a plantation, in a huge, pillared mansion,” he told her. “Is that what you’re like at home?”

  She threw back her head and laughed. Her neck was pale and slender, and a tiny gold locket on a chain dipped toward the shadow between her breasts. He liked the loosely draped neckline of her dress, the slim strong muscles of her arms, the elegant angle of her chin. He especially liked the locket, a filigreed heart of gold resting against skin he wanted to kiss.

  “I’m not Scarlett O’Hara,” she said. “I grew up in a nice house, but I assure you there are no slave quarters on the premises.” She sipped her beer and he decided he was in love with her fingers. He remembered how her hand had felt within his when they’d introduced themselves that afternoon. Her fingers were long and tapered, the nails filed smooth and layered with a clear polish that glinted in the candlelight. Fingernails like hers could scrape down a man’s naked back, leaving heat in their wake.

  “Why did you come to San Pablo? You mentioned that you’re with a church group, but I’m sure your church could have found a position for you stateside if you’d wanted to do good deeds there.”

  She held her answer while their food was delivered: a plate of steaming corn tortillas; a plate of spiced, shredded beef; a plate of grilled vegetables chopped into small pieces to be rolled with the beef inside the tortillas. Once they were alone again, she sent Michael a playful smile. “My parents wanted me to find a position back home. That seemed like a good enough reason to come here.”

  “Ah, so you’re a rebel.” For some reason, he hadn’t expected her to be one. He knew plenty of rebels, even beautiful blond ones. College campuses were full of them, and he’d lived the past twelve years of his life on college campuses, as an undergraduate, a grad student and now as a junior faculty member. He knew that lovely young women could rebel against their parents, against their teachers, against any damned thing that rubbed them wrong on a given day. But their rebellions were usually the result of boredom or bitterness and didn’t carry them all the way to an underdeveloped town in Central America.

  “My parents want me to be safe.
They want to protect me, and I appreciate that. But I don’t want to be protected. I don’t want to be complacent. There’s more to life than belonging to the right country club and wearing the right shoes with the right dress.”

  As far as Michael was concerned, everything was right about her. “I wasn’t aware some country clubs were more right than others,” he joked.

  She chuckled. “My parents are very aware that some are. They’re a bit bigoted, I’m afraid. They say they’re open-minded, but they really like to surround themselves with people just like themselves. I think it’s a stifling way to live.” She lifted a tortilla off the serving plate and onto her own dish. “I take it you don’t belong to a country club?”

  “The only club I ever belonged to was a Boy’s Club, when I was a kid,” he told her. “They’d corral us barrio kids on a basketball court and tell us to have fun so we wouldn’t be tempted to join gangs.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Sometimes.” His smile faded as he thought about his brother. “Not often enough.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Bakersfield. Not really a barrio town,” he added. “My father thought he’d found the American dream. He married a woman whose great-grandparents were born in this country, and they moved out of East L.A. But it was a pretty rough neighborhood we lived in. We used to call ourselves ‘barrio kids.’ We knew where we’d come from.”

  “And now you’re a professor,” she observed. “That’s remarkable.”

  He shrugged. He hated being viewed as a model minority. “I liked to read,” he explained. “I liked to think. And I didn’t want to wind up dead from a drive-by.”

  They ate, they drank, they talked. He told her about his thesis, a comparative analysis of the political structures of three Central American countries, and about the occasional papers he was asked to write for foreign policy experts in Washington. He told her about the many visits he had made to San Pablo over the years, his most recent while he was still in graduate school, and about his love of the place. “It can drive you crazy,” he said. “There’s so much we take for granted in the U.S.—like public water fountains or easy modern hookups. You have to function at a different speed here. Life moves slower, and it takes patience to get things done.” More patience than Max Gallard had, he thought to himself. “But you can’t get spiced beef like this anywhere else in the world. And the people are great, most of them.”