“Well, at least let me run in and introduce you,” said her mother.
“It’s only a half mile from the motel,” said Maria. “I can walk.”
“Okay,” said her mother, as if she remembered that she had promised to stay out of Maria’s way. “You just call me if you need me.”
But obviously her mother had called Bobby Kepler, who was deeply involved in a take-out feast of barbecued chicken, mac and cheese, and cole slaw when Maria walked into his tiny office. He knew exactly who she was. He stood up from his desk, barbecue sauce staining his fingers, and started right in on how well he’d known her father, played ball with him in high school, great guy, so sorely missed. Maria smiled and thanked him, said she did not want to disturb his lunch, and she was relieved—and a little surprised, for even though she had never bought a car before, she was aware of the stereotype of the officious and relentless used-car salesman—when Bobby Kepler said he’d be right out, feel free to look around and see if there’s anything out there you fall in love with. Then he mentioned names—Astro, Saturn, Corolla—that reminded her of class field trips to a star party up at the McDonald Observatory. She smiled as if she knew what he was talking about and headed out on the lot.
What a strange feeling it was to go shopping for something so huge and have no idea what she wanted. Looking at the rows of cars, she felt unprepared and ashamed of her lack of planning. If buying a car was her attempt to honor Randy’s passion, shouldn’t she have at least gotten on the Internet and googled “how to buy a car”? Surely there was some book you could purchase called Car Buying for Dummies? She tried to summon those endless conversations between Randy and her father; she tried to remember the Nova in the drive, its hood propped open, exposing its complicated system of belts and points and plugs. Maria smiled at her recall of these terms she’d long forgotten. That such detail was lurking in her psyche made her feel a little less helpless.
Still, none of the cars seemed right to her. Too big, too flimsy, too high up, too green, too sporty. Only one drew her interest. It was squat and boxy and the slightly washed-out blue of the wide sky above. Randy would never think to buy such a car for himself, but he would approve of it for her. He would want, above all, for her to be safe. This car was safe. Runaway grocery carts in the parking lot of the Thriftway would alter their course rather than collide with its fearsome grill. There were nicks in the paint and she noticed a slight dent below the gas tank, but in her mind the car could fend off a bulldozer, none the worse for wear.
She read the name: Buick, it said up front, and along the back, in chrome cursive. Was Buick good? Any minute now Bobby Kepler would have cleaned the chicken to the bone and would emerge from his tiny office reinvigorated and full of questions for her. Randy, tell me now, quick, is this the one?
And then she noticed the man standing on the other side of the car. How had she missed him? He must have been hiding from her. When he was pretending not to look at her, she looked at him. He was of medium height and solidly built—well fed, she’d have said had she cared to say one way or the other—and his brown hair was thinning and graying a bit at the temples. Around here, white men of his age were either ranchers or hippies. He wasn’t dressed like a hippie, really, nor did he look like a rancher, though it seemed from his skin that he was no stranger to the sun.
Even her notice of this stranger on the other side of the Buick threatened to keep Randy at bay. Yes, you loved cars, but I know you loved me more. So gone on her was he that she both feared his love and took it for granted. How is it even possible, she wondered now, to fear something you don’t appreciate, something you don’t even notice at times? He was kind to her father and she made him feel bad for that. He was passionate about his future and she ridiculed his passion. Even though she had only a vague idea of what she wanted to do with her life—a master’s in deaf ed seemed, now, a schoolgirl fantasy—privileging her future over his is what tore them apart. What killed him. He knew what he wanted. Who knew what they wanted? He knew things she did not and she thought she was smarter and less provincial and she let him know it. No, God, Maria, don’t think that way, especially here, now, in a place as sacred to him as an old-growth forest. Think of him now as he was so often in their Airstream: sweet tempered, big eared, vain about his hair. He always carried a tube of Chap Stick and applied it so liberally that when she poured him a Pepsi to go with his sandwiches, the rim of his glass would smudge with gloss. He loved Dwight Yoakam and he claimed to have a crush on Debra Winger based solely on one scene in the movie Urban Cowboy. She wished she could remember which scene, but she knew it had nothing to do with a mechanical bull, which Randy deemed ridiculous, suburban Texans getting thrown not from an animal riled up by their attempt to tame it but by a tangle of wires controlled by some wannabe cowboy with a lever.
Randy, do you know how sweet you were? How smart? It is so hard to know anything at all when you are that young, but it is far harder to look back on your youth and think you knew anything at all.
Maria looked up from the Buick. She saw the man looking at her and she saw him smile. To him it would appear, not that she was talking to her dead high school boyfriend, but that she was studying a car she was interested in buying. The man had a nice smile. His bottom lip was thinner than the top, which made his smile a little crooked and a lot nervous. For some reason his nervousness calmed her.
Over the hiss of cars on the boulevard she heard the door to the office slam. Maybe over time, Randy, you would have eased up or been ground down by my careless way of loving you back. And then I would have missed the way you always slipped your hand in the back pocket of my jeans when we were crossing the street, I would have missed the way you cared for me more than anyone I have let care for me since.
One of the Keplers, now she could not remember which one, would be upon her in seconds. How do you tell if a car is any good? Randy was not there and he was not coming.
Without even looking his way again, Maria said to the man on the other side of the car, “Excuse me, do you happen to know—I mean, I’m sorry to bother you, but is this a good car?”
“Looks decent from the outside,” he said.
“Will you test-drive it for me?” she asked.
Two
Pinto Canyon, Texas, 2004
Standing in the car lot, the woman’s question hovering unanswered in the space between them, Marcus remembered once having seen a man in a salvage yard where he had gone to buy a fuel pump for a tractor. The keeper of the salvage yard was mute, wiry, stingy with his gestures. He made Marcus wait while he stuck his head under the hood of a car, told a boy in the driver’s seat to hit the gas, and listened to the engine rev as if contemplating an aria. Then he disappeared into a shed and emerged in seconds holding a lone socket wrench so resolutely the right choice that it appeared to be an extension of his hand.
The tool for the job, the names of things, the aloof cool of the present-tense drifter—what was it about the question that struck Marcus with the sudden want of all of the above, and at once? Nothing abstract or ambiguous about it. A yes was required, or a no.
What sort of place was this, anyway? A lithe and lovely woman, blown up from nowhere, had just asked him to test-drive a car for her. It happened to be the car he wanted for himself. Where, in America, could you not walk into a used-car lot and purchase without impediment what looked to Marcus to be at least a twenty-year-old Buick?
So open was this place, so wide its sky, so looming were the craggy bluffs above town, so insanely tinted were they by light the likes of which he’d seen only in coffee-table photography books—more shades of brown, reddish brown, yellowish brown, blondish brown, greenish brown, than he’d ever thought possible—that Marcus worried his ability to reason was overwhelmed.
Prudence was called for. He must keep from her, at least for now, their mutual desire.
“Will I what?” he said, in a way that suggested he had not heard her correctly as much as that he didn’t understand.
“Well, see,” she said, “I don’t really know anything about cars.” She went on to explain that she had never owned one, that she had always been able to get by without one, but that now she needed a car because she had just started a new business.
“Even I know enough to know that you ought not to buy a car before you drive it,” she said.
“So you think there might be something wrong with it?” said Marcus.
His question put her on the defensive. “No,” she said. “I didn’t say that. But if you’re suggesting I should just go ask the guy whether there is anything wrong with the car, I mean . . .”
“I understand,” said Marcus, when she failed to finish her sentence. “I wouldn’t recommend you do that.”
“Not that he’s not an honest man,” she said.
“Right,” said Marcus. “So you need someone who’s more objective?”
“Impartial,” she said, as if she were correcting him. As if “objective” did not in this case imply “impartial.” Still, her word rankled. So she assumed he was impartial when she came upon him studying the same car? Did she think he was out for a stroll? Was she arrogant or just oblivious? People sometimes found him arrogant, Rebecca told him once, and when he asked why—because he was truly shocked by this, he always thought he came across as modest and accessible—she said it was because he often seemed “unto himself.” He had no idea what that meant—it did not sound bad to him or even noteworthy, for isn’t everyone finally “unto themselves”?—but he decided that she meant oblivious.
Maybe arrogance always contained a dose of oblivion. He had about decided that the woman was equally both when he noticed that her expression was so pained, and she seemed so depleted, that she was obviously embarrassed. Marcus felt a little bad for her, and a little guilty for deceiving her, but only for a minute.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ve owned a few cars in my time. I’ll be happy to take it for a spin and tell you what I think.”
The beginning of a lie is so sweetly delicious, for it seems not yet a lie but just a hidden desire, a secret rightfully kept. Though secrets can turn toxic, can thwart careers, ruin marriages, topple countries, there is such power in their incipient stage that the word secret is not yet applicable. For it is mostly just yearning; it has not yet taken the elevator up to the brain; it hovers somewhere between the heart and the groin.
Marcus was about to ask if he should go fetch the key when the salesman who earlier had come out of his tiny office to size Marcus up and within seconds had obviously deemed him not worth leaving the comfort of his air-conditioning for came loping through the lot.
“Find something to love?” he said to the woman.
“This one,” she said, pointing to the Buick between them, which elicited from the salesman such a hackneyed history—previous owner was an elderly lady, rancher’s widow who’d moved into town after he died, hardly ever drove it, church, beauty parlor, grocery store, kept it serviced regularly, clean as a whistle—that despite its familiarity was delivered so passionately that it brought to Marcus’s mind (even though he was sure it was a lie) a hunched-over grandma backing the car slowly down a driveway once or twice a week, on the seat beside her a shiny black patent-leather purse containing in a side pocket a folded plastic rain bonnet to protect her helmet of purplish hair.
“We’d like to test-drive it,” said the woman when he was done. Marcus had looked at her once during the salesman’s spiel and deduced from her frozen smile that she was not paying a bit of attention.
“We?” Only then did the salesman take note of him. Was Marcus, because he wasn’t native, invisible? She’d not seemed to notice him, either, for a few minutes. “Oh, how you doing?” the salesman said to Marcus, and then he turned back to the woman. “I didn’t realize y’all were together, your mama didn’t mention . . .”
“No problem,” said the woman, in a way that was sharp but not rude and that shut Mr. Fantastic Deals up and sent him off to fetch the key.
When he was gone, Marcus said his name was Marcus. She said her name was Maria. After which, silence. No “Nice to meet you,” no “Thank you for pretending to be my acquaintance if not something more than that.”
“Hi,” said Marcus, and when she smiled and looked away up the rows of cars, obviously impatient, he had a chance to study her a bit more closely. Her skin was unlined but there was something stark about her shoulder blades. Marcus was wearing sunglasses and she was not, but she did not blink in the full noon sun. Though the salesman was gone, there was still something formidable in her demeanor, which did not in fact make her less attractive to him, since he had not come to Kepler’s Fantastic Deals! seeking the company of a soul mate or even a warm and lively chat with a stranger. She seemed a worthy opponent. She wanted what he wanted, and that made him want it all the more.
A couple of minutes later they were pulling out of the lot. Indeed the engine did smoothly purr. Marcus adjusted the rearview and when he checked the side mirrors he noticed how the seat belt sliced across her chest. Only momentarily did he allow himself to entertain this image, for it occurred to him that she and the salesman knew each other, and had he asked first to test-drive the car the salesman would never have allowed him to do so alone, to prevent him from taking off to, God knows, Mexico.
He drove. She said that she didn’t want to drive, that she didn’t even know enough to be able to tell by driving the car the things she needed to know.
“Fine,” he said, “but I’m not really familiar with the area. Is there a specific route you had in mind?”
“No,” she said. He wondered if it was his slightly formal diction—“a specific route,” God, what a pretentious way to say it—or the notion that a specific route was necessary in this situation that made her sound clipped.
But once out of the lot and onto the boulevard, Marcus was happy not to have her issuing directions. It felt almost as if the car itself were choosing the turns: up the boulevard into town, hard right just past his hotel into a neighborhood backed up on a hill. Yards fenced with piecemeal plywood and sheet metal, small dogs wandering freely among chickens and a few goats tethered to trees, religious shrines elaborate and abundant and mostly devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, a tidiness even to the most weathered structures.
His passenger did not seem so enthralled by the world outside the windshield. She had made herself small against the door. From her backpack she had pulled a hooded sweatshirt. Her hands were swallowed by pocket. Marcus could tell by her shoulders, frozen in a shrug, that her fingers were balled into fists. Briefly he worried she’d grown scared of him, but later, much later, she would confess that she’d been freezing. Apparently Marcus had the AC blasting. He didn’t feel it. He was just driving. It was the discovery not only of a part of town unknown to him but of the Buick—its low carriage, the slinky way it bounced over potholes, the wideness of its turning, the sunken seats—that contained him entirely.
Marcus said nothing at all when they pulled into the lot. He parked the Buick in its spot between a Saturn and a green Dodge Neon. He got out, opened the hood, stood listening to the tick of the cooling engine. He pretended to know things.
“Well?” said the woman from across the still-warm engine.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “I’ll take it.”
THAT HE MADE NO effort at all to chat her up—that he barely even glanced at her during the entire ride—played a big part in Maria’s decision, though it wasn’t exactly a decision, since she never really decided as much as felt. And said what she felt.
It had been some time since she had said what she felt. Years. Who wanted to hear it? What value did it carry?
She had done so once, on a scenic overlook an hour or so from these very roads. A night so clear, a view so thrilling. “Crazy, right?” Randy had said when he parked the Nova and scooted closer to her and pointed to the valley twinkling and stretching away beneath them. He began to talk about what he wanted, as he often had, for he was a
boy with a plan. He loved to think and talk about his future, his vision of which was meticulously detailed, right down to the color they’d paint their house, the breed of dogs they’d own, probably even what they would eat for Sunday dinner. And then she’d interrupted him with her news, and though what she revealed was a part of his plan (times three or four or even more, in fact, and it was true that he loved children and was good with them, she’d seen him at play with his little cousins), she could tell it took him out of his idyllic scenario. But only briefly. A few minutes later he had not scrapped his plan but merely moved it around a bit, as if this were only a minor convenience, a slight problem with the sequence.
This made Maria furious. To Randy it was no more a trifle than if Rockfish needed a vocalist instead of a bass player. It was her life also, and her dreams had not been considered separate from his own. In fact, in his dream she was the lone aspect devoid of detail. Had it been a photograph she would have been blemished by shadow.
Thereafter she never much considered the future. Her menus were planned a day or two ahead. Perhaps this was why as a chef she’d gravitated toward all-local ingredients, for improvisation was the key; you made do not only with what was in season but with what was available in enough volume. Thereafter the very thought of frozen food—the staple of so many restaurants—reminded her of Randy’s Plan.
And so she had said what she felt. She told him of her desires and she tried to explain to him how having this child now would render those desires (and his, too—she’d been convinced then that his life, too, would have been ruined by his sweet, innocent, but entirely wrongheaded and stubborn insistence on slightly rearranging things to accommodate a baby in the lives of two not much more than babies) impossible; she tried to explain to him that the things she wanted were different from what he wanted, and she tried, she really did try, to do this in a way that did not denigrate his love of the valley stretching beneath them, his love of hunting antelope and loading up ATVs on his uncle’s trailer and heading down to Terlingua with his buddies to tear-ass around the sandy hills, his love of brisket and breakfast burritos, of Texas and Texan ways, all those things that her own father loved and that were probably what he loved about Randy.
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