But of course he felt judged. How could he not?
And so, after Randy died, she left off saying what she felt. She put more stock in the notion of considered decisions. Rather than offer her feelings to the world, she did her homework. She presented facts. It will work better for me this way and here are the reasons why. That her facts were often feelings manipulated or pitched in a way that appeared factual was not lost on those, mostly lovers, to whom these facts were presented. But she wasn’t trying to fool her audience as much as she was trying to fool herself.
So when the man said to her over the heat of the ticking engine of the Buick, “It’s perfect. I’ll take it,” she did not make a decision so much as entertain a feeling. Earlier, Randy’s presence, his sweetness seeping through her rigid carriage, warming and maybe even melting her bones a little, softening her usual standoffishness, had led her to pretend to Bobby Kepler that she was with this guy and then to get in the car with him. She could have ended up murdered in the backcountry, her body discovered by Border Patrol in some gulch. But Randy whispered, Go with this guy. You can trust him. He’s had hard times for sure. You can see it in his eyes and in his shoulders. Whatever he had, it ain’t his anymore. Or he don’t know how to get it back but he’s not yet given up on the getting back.
In the car she felt Randy on the seat between them. He drives good, Randy said, got an easy way behind the wheel. And it felt after a time that the stranger was not in the car at all. She and Randy used to spend hours just riding around talking and looking at things. On weekends they’d head up to Balmorhea to spend the afternoon lying in the sun, their matching Budweiser beach towels coated with coconut tanning oil. Driving home still smelling of the sweet spring that fed the pool and slightly of algae and of the fish that pooled fearlessly just under the surface, they would watch the sun begin its slide down behind the mountains and the rock faces she’d seen so many times before, and the cottonwoods hugging the creek bank, the tassels topping the creosote—all would seem, in the newness of that particular sunset, painted by her and Randy’s passage. For years when she wanted to calm her troubled mind, wanted sleep or even waking solace, she put herself in Randy’s car, and in his hands, in his care.
So this man wanted the car and so did she. The woman who got out of her husband’s shiny vehicle and unbuckled a half-asleep toddler from the backseat and took her to the bathroom while her husband, handsome even under the ratty baseball cap he liked to wear on road trips, took the boys inside the store for a healthy snack: Maria was not and would never be that woman. When the stranger said the car was perfect and he would take it, she honored what she felt, which was that she might just be able to pull off some risky but—if it worked—mutually satisfying arrangement. And it was worth the risk because Randy, who was there—she felt his sweet breath on her neck—approved.
“Well,” she said, playing it cool, not acknowledging his vow to buy the car out from under her, “how much do you think it’s worth?”
“How much do you think it’s worth?”
“I don’t know. If I knew these things I would not have asked you to test-drive it.”
“I think we better find out what he wants for it.”
“And then what?”
“And then I make him an offer,” he said.
“And then I make him a better offer?”
“That’s usually the way it goes.”
“And you think he’ll sell to the highest bidder?”
“I imagine he will.”
“And that’s how you want this to go?” Maria said.
“What other way might it go?”
“You strike me as a man with some imagination.”
“And you’re basing this on what, exactly? You don’t know me. All you know is my name.”
“I know that I got in a car with you three minutes after meeting you and you barely even looked at me. That tells me a lot.”
“That tells you that I have some imagination?”
“Among other things,” Maria said, though she had not bothered to consider what those other things might be.
“It seems if I had an imagination I might imagine that you and I could become friendly.”
“Friendly? If ‘friendly’ means what I think you mean by it, I don’t get the sense you’re looking for a friend right now. Seemed more like you were so busy imagining yourself as sole owner of this car that you did not even notice my presence.”
“Oh, I noticed your presence,” he said. “I believe it was I who was invisible to you when you first walked up to this car.”
“It’s true I didn’t see you, but in my defense I am a little intimidated by buying something I know absolutely nothing about. I’m a little distracted. So forgive me if I came across as rude.”
“I don’t know—I mean, rude? Isn’t it rude of me to announce that I’m about to buy this car when you asked me to test-drive it for you?”
“Yes,” said Maria. “I’d say it was a little rude.”
“And yet you seem to trust me?”
“Who says I trust you?”
“Okay, so you don’t trust me. Why are you standing here talking to me? Why don’t you go get the salesman and tell him what you want to pay for the car? He knows you, he mentioned your mother, so I am assuming you are a family friend, which suggests that he’ll take your bid over mine no matter what I offer him.”
“You think that’s how small towns work?” Maria said.
“I know that’s how they work, having spent the last ten years in one.”
“Where?”
“North Carolina.”
“On the ocean, right?”
“I lived less than an hour away.”
“I lived on the coast for the last ten years myself. The Oregon coast.”
“Yeah, well, I have nothing against sea otters and rocks and tide pools, but I’m a little spoiled by the Atlantic. What good is an ocean if you can’t swim in it?”
“Maybe you don’t have much of an imagination,” she said.
“Let me guess. You like to sit around and look at it?”
“People pull fish out of it. They surf it.”
“Wearing wet suits.”
“It’s just a thicker bathing suit.”
He laughed. “A thicker bathing suit?”
“Let me guess. Everyone in South Carolina swims in the buff.”
“North Carolina.”
“Pardon?”
“You said ‘South Carolina.’ I’m from North Carolina.”
“I assume from your tone there’s a difference.”
“Is West Texas the same as East Texas?”
“Actually they are in the same state,” Maria said.
“Right, but are they the same place?”
“Not at all. East Texas is the South. West Texas is the West. I suppose North Carolina is not the South? Is that the North?”
“Have you ever been to the East Coast?”
“I’ve been to Washington, DC.”
“What did you do there?”
“What you do there. Museums. Monuments. The Capitol. I saw a film shot from the cockpit of a glider.”
“To Fly! National Air and Space Museum.”
“It made me sick to my stomach,” she said. “Ever since, I’ve hated to fly.”
“How did you get here from Oregon? Surely you flew. You said you have never owned a car before. Do you even know how to drive?”
“Yes, I know how. I’ve driven a car. I just haven’t owned one.”
“How do you get around?”
“I walk. I have a bike.”
“I had a bike. It was in my truck. It got stolen,” the man said.
“Around here?”
“South of here. Down along the border.”
“What were you doing down there?”
“Hiking.”
“And someone stole your truck?”
“Yes. And everything I own except for what is in my hotel room.”
“So you need a
car,” Maria said.
“I need this car, in fact.”
“Where are you going?”
“I was going to Mexico.”
“Were?”
“I like it here. I’m thinking I’ll stay, for a while at least. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need a car.”
“You need a car around here, it’s true. People think nothing of driving three hours to get dental floss or a chaise longue.”
“Not much out here in the way of goods and sundries,” the man said.
“But you like it?”
“I do. Maybe because this landscape is the opposite of what I’m used to.”
“In Carolina?”
“People don’t say ‘Carolina.’ Well, people from there don’t say that.”
“I’m not from there.”
“Okay, say it if you want. I’m just warning you, it makes you sound like a tourist.”
“I don’t have a problem with being a tourist,” Maria said, “but you must.”
“If I had a problem with it I would work harder to disguise the fact. So that you might have noticed me when you walked up to this car.”
“You wanted me to see you? I thought you were my competition.”
“I would like to be recognized as such.”
“And yet you assume that Bobby Kepler will favor me in this deal?”
“I do assume that. I assume it even more now that I hear his name out of your mouth. I was just referring to him in my head as Mr. Fantastic Deals.”
“Exclamation point,” added Maria.
“Right. And I guess one of us should go fetch him?”
“And say what?”
“Find out how much he wants for this Buick.”
“How much do you think it’s worth?” she asked.
“WE’RE GOING IN CIRCLES,” he said, and as he said it, he was damn near crippled by the truth of it, the repetitiousness of his life. For Marcus had failed at other things before he lost the farm. He had dropped out of college twice. When he finally finished, he decided to get his MA in history, but it took nearly five years to finish his thesis, since he resorted while writing it to low-paying and onerous jobs like delivering newspapers and grading standardized test essays for gas and rent money rather than teaching intro-level sections in his discipline to bored and increasingly insolent if not entitled undergraduates. He’d tried for a semester, but he was so transparently annoyed by the sorts of questions the students asked, which rarely had a thing to do with the content of the day’s lecture—questions like “Are you going to curve the midterm?” and “Is this going to be on the final?” and “Is it okay if we share textbooks?”—that he himself came across in class as addled, insolent, detached, outright rude, as his mother would have said had she seen him shaking slightly behind the podium. He could not teach. He would not teach. It had not yet occurred to him to retreat to the family farm to raise flytraps, so he drifted for a few years. He sold time-shares for condos on the Outer Banks. He was an abysmal and abject wreck of a person during those days, the lone period of his life when he could honestly admit to drinking too much. He babysat a friend’s art gallery in Richmond’s Shockoe Slip, a job so low paying that he slept on a couch in the back room of the gallery and cooked ramen and chicken broth on a hot plate.
Then there were women. With them he had not only made the same mistakes but indulged in the same fantasies that disguised those mistakes. Central to the fantasy was that this time he might overcome whatever was within him that had led him to be described by one lover as a “split risk.” Though he blamed Rebecca for packing up her Honda and disappearing down the canopied drive the last time he’d seen her, he knew that it was he who’d left by virtue of never fully showing up in the first place.
Here he was, still going in circles. Maybe losing his farm, Rebecca, his truck, maybe ending up marooned here, standing with this woman beside this Buick, was his last chance. Maybe he should make it his last chance. The nearby border might separate one country from another, but he did not need to go to Mexico in order to cross it.
“HOW MUCH DO YOU think it’s worth?” she asked—of herself more than of the man who had so readily won Randy’s approval.
She’d never sought Randy’s approval of any man before, maybe because she had not found anyone she would open herself up to. Trust no one. You cannot fully trust yourself, either, for the last time you did so, the last time you honored and even insisted on carrying out what you felt, a boy died. A baby died, too. The baby would have been so beautiful. It would have been small. The town was small and so was the boy. Lying atop her, the crown of his head to the bottom of his feet, every inch of him covered every inch of her, a custom blanket of flesh, blood, bone, sweetness, Chap Stick. Why did this even matter, that Randy’s dimensions were hers also? In the years since, she had dated men absurdly taller, men she’d comfortably made love to sitting in their laps. It had not destroyed or even dismayed her. But she did not trust them.
What if the baby had been born as small as those incubated children she’d seen pictures of, dangerously premature, dwarfed by a nurse’s finger? Baby into infant, infant to toddler, toddler to preschooler, preschooler so comically stunted, picked last for dodgeball, given the part of a mouse in the third-grade play about Benjamin Franklin. No, its smallness would not diminish the precision of its features, the way it arrived in this world a melding of Randy and Maria. Its smallness would have become over the years unnoticeable. She supported the right of women to choose, she detested the sanctimony of those hateful zealots picketing clinics, and yet the beauty of that child, the undeniable fact that it would have carried forth none of her insecurities and all of Randy’s decency, was undeniable. How could she forget his kindness to her father, her lonely father, abandoned by her mother, so lonely he sat out under the carport in a lawn chair waiting for the arrival of her high school boyfriend, who would announce his arrival by downshifting his souped-up Nova, which both Maria and her father would already have heard, so distinctive was its throaty rumble and the eventual cough of its muffler when Randy let off the gas, as if its speed was so precious that slacking off made the engine sick. Randy would pull into the drive and hop right out and talk cars with her daddy, or anything, it didn’t have to be cars—the Cowboys, the Spurs, deer hunting, the burn ban in effect—it did not matter, Randy gave her father and everyone else he ever met the time of day, he was just that sweet, and their baby would grow into a child whose smile lit the waiting rooms of doctors’ offices, whose attentiveness in class convinced student teachers that majoring in elementary ed instead of marketing was in fact the right choice.
Small beauty is bountiful. It blooms and spreads. Such deep inner sweetness as Randy possessed transcends scale. The town is small and it, too, is beautiful. Nature might have prescribed its smallness by positioning behind it a ridge of granite and on the other side high, grassy pasture and desert, but it was Maria’s perception of it now that truly cherished its smallness. What was it worth to come back to this town and allow it, this time, to be real?
Tassels of roadside grasses blown in autumn breezes across the highway end up tufted in the fencing. What is it worth to be a witness to such wonder, to view the beauty of thatched fence in the last buttery light? To remember this about her small, lovely town instead of to see it colored by shame, not over what she had done so much as what it had led Randy to do—what was that worth to her?
But what he had done caused her to see what she had done as beyond shameful. It was worth everything to see it, and him, and her home, anew. He’s had hard times for sure. Whatever he had, it ain’t his anymore. Or he don’t know how to get it back but he’s not yet given up on the getting back.
“How much do you think it’s worth?” she asked.
“We’re going in circles,” he said.
“Should I just go ask him?”
“It’s a little weird that he’s not out here trying to sell you this car. I mean, usually they’re hounding you, you know?”
<
br /> “No. I wouldn’t know.”
“Right. I forgot. Maybe he doesn’t think we’re going to buy it.”
“We?”
“What?”
“You said we’re going to buy it.”
“As in either you or me.”
“How about both of us?”
Now it was out there, in the world. In the car lot, at least. In the space between them.
MARCUS WASN’T SURE HE understood her at first. It caused him to sputter.
“I don’t . . . what?”
“How about we go in on it? Buy it together and share it?”
“And why would we do such a thing?”
“Because we both like it and we both need it and because I have other reasons and something tells me you do, too.”
“Something tells you? You mean something besides me tells you things about me?”
“You haven’t told me very much. Where you come from, where you’re going.”
“But what besides me—something I said or didn’t say, or the way I said something or the way I drove, whatever—could tell you something about me?”
“Do you really want to have a conversation like this in a used-car lot?” said Maria.
“I don’t have certain places where and only where certain things can be talked about. And I don’t go in on cars with women I meet in used-car lots in Texas.”
“You mean as a rule you don’t.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
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