“Maria?” her mother called. Had she said, instead of Maria’s name, “balloon” or “pencil,” her voice would have registered the same amount of shock and confusion. How had Maria not heard the Cherokee in the drive? Where had she been?
Her mother stood in the tight hallway. Maria wiped her nose. It ran when she cried.
“Maria?”
“I saw Manny.”
“You went there? I thought you said you were in San Antonio.”
“Manny said you never call him. He said you never talk on the phone.”
“Seems like Manny has taken up more with his father’s side.”
“What does that mean?”
“If he wants to be Mexican I can’t stop him. He’s half me, though. There was nothing wrong with my people.”
“I think Manny just fell in love, Mom.”
“Both of them Mexicans.”
“You married a Mexican.”
“Not because he was Mexican.”
She wanted to know why her parents got married and she wanted to know why her parents stayed married, and yet instead of asking, she said, “I want this camper.”
“You want what with it?”
“I want to live in it.”
“This nasty thing?”
“I can clean it up.”
Her mother crossed her arms. She tightened her jaw. She said something Maria knew it nearly killed her to say. She said, “You’re mad about that note I left you. You’re mad I said that about the restaurant.”
“Actually I’m not. You were right. People want blooming onions. If the restaurant didn’t make it, I’d just go back to Oregon and work for Beverly, and business-wise, as you keep on saying, it would hurt you more than me.”
“You don’t want to live in this camper. It’s not even hooked up.”
“I want to move it.”
“Where to?”
“It was Dad’s, right?”
“Your father bought it without asking me. But you know when you’re married your money all comes out of the same pot.”
“You never liked it.”
Her mother looked around as if seeing the place for the first time. The look she gave it seemed to Maria the look she probably gave it when her father brought it home. She bet her father was crushed. He had so wanted his bride to feel, stepping up into the camper, something she had gone past ever feeling again.
“Too small,” said her mother.
It was easier to take her father’s side because he was dead. It was easier to take Randy’s side because he was dead. The child was not dead because it was never born. But that did not mean that it did not have a side.
“I want it. I want something of him. Daddy would have wanted me to have it.”
“Well. Maria. I did not mean when I wrote that note that you—”
“I’m not leaving. But I am too old to live with my mother in my old bedroom. We’re too old to act like we’re acting.”
“How are we acting?” her mother said, but Maria ignored the spin she put on the word “we.”
“Like I am still in high school. Like I just went away for the weekend. Like I haven’t been gone so long. Like I haven’t changed and you haven’t changed.”
“Well, I know you’re grown,” her mother said. “I said when I wrote you the first time I would stay out of your way. I just didn’t see why you would go and do a thing like that with someone you don’t know from Adam. I just did not want you to get cheated. I do not want to see you get hurt.”
Maria started to say, You’re worried about someone hurting because they got cheated? But she stopped herself because she had changed even if her mother had not. If she moved into the Airstream, would it honor Randy’s memory, or would it desecrate all that had happened here? Marcus had built a shrine. “History is always skewed,” he had said about the Alamo, but he had also said that hagiography was the modus operandi of shrines. About his own shrine he claimed it was not possible to revise history. Because it was a plant he idolized, not a person. Yet sometimes he spoke of the plant as if it were someone he could never quite get over.
What was the Airstream? Alamo or flytrap? It stayed and it went. Randy loved it because it had wheels. But it never went anywhere. It would have been easy enough for her mother to call one of those Keplers and tell them to come get it, but she did not. She let it sit.
She ran her finger along a windowsill and wondered how much of the dust she picked up had accumulated since she’d been back home. “There’s just not as much time as I thought there was,” said Maria.
“It never is, is it,” said her mother.
PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE IN town knew where Bobby and Pete Kepler got the brunt of their cars. Drive by the lot on any given day, and chances were high a good 60 percent of the vehicles would have come through the Border Patrol. Kepler’s kept them whistle-clean, but those cars had some history. Secret stash in tire well, double gas tanks stuffed with drugs. Best if they were hauling bodies over drugs or money, because there would be no factory upholstery to try and match, no danger to the undercarriage caused by agents with welding torches gone greedy for a find by the boredom of stop, ask, look, stop, ask, look, all day long. Bobby himself did a stint with Border Patrol when he was younger, but they tried to transfer him to McAllen and he told them, “No, sir, no farther than Del Rio, no, thank you,” and that was when he went in with Pete on the lot.
Had it not been for his time with the agency, though, the lot would not be half what it was. He was always telling Pete it was owing to his connections they got the vehicles they did. Anybody could show up at auction and buy a seized vehicle, but some dealers got a preview, and having friends to tell you what was coming up meant saving a whole lot of sitting around listening to some auctioneer stutter. Sometimes you got lucky and got an early trip, beat the vehicle to the auction. Pete wouldn’t listen to any of it. Since he was the older brother, to him it was his lot and would always be, though half the time he did not even show up. He had another lot up in Monahans and he pretended like he was needed up there three or four days a week, but Bobby knew he hardly moved anything off that lot, he was shacking up with some bank teller from Pecos.
Bobby wasn’t all that upset about Pete not being around. He guessed Pete, being his brother, being family, ought to have been somebody he didn’t need to think about how he felt about, but when his brother was around, telling him what to do and how to do it, asking for stuff Bobby would have had a chance to get around to had he not been the only one moving any vehicles, all Bobby felt was like he wanted to hit his brother in the neck. Then he had to think about why he felt such a thing. Go away, Big Brother, and let me peddle my cars in peace. Bobby could hardly even eat when his brother was around, or that was about all he could focus on, where he was going to get lunch at that day.
Bobby had a lot of peace most days his brother was gone, for other than washing the vehicles and keeping the little strip of grass by the street mowed, there wasn’t much to do. Some days he did not have a customer at all. Back a few weeks ago he had had two people show up on the lot at the same time. That was like Black Friday for Kepler’s Fantastic Deals! Or would have been, had not one of them been Harriet’s—Harriett who ran the Mountain View, took up with Ray Menton, used to be married to Luis who Bobby had gone to school with—daughter. Harriet had called ahead and said that the girl was on her way and that she did not have a clue what she needed and that she hadn’t even ever owned a vehicle before, and Bobby had said, “Well, I’m pretty stocked right now, so she’s got a decent choice at least,” and Harriet said for him to call her and run it by her what vehicle the girl chose, and Bobby thought back to when all that had happened with that boy who killed himself behind their camper when the daughter was in high school, and he decided that was the last time he had seen that girl, Maria was her name, she’d took off and been God knows where for God knows how long.
“You’re wanting me to call you while she’s here?” said Bobby. He did not understand what
Harriet was asking, nor did he care for it. If Harriet cared so much what kind of vehicle the girl purchased, why didn’t Harriet come to the lot with her?
“Not so she’ll know it,” said Harriet. “Can’t you just, after she picks one out, sneak off and call me up? Let me know what the situation is?”
“I guess,” said Bobby.
“What all have you got out there, anyway?” said Harriet.
Good God, woman, I have not got time to go through my whole inventory for you on the telephone right now. He had just gotten back from May’s Place and his lunch was getting cold and Pete had taken the microwave up to Monahans or to his girlfriend’s house one. But Bobby was a little scared of Harriet. He had always been. He liked her well enough and remembered when she showed up in town from up around Van Horn. She was a pretty girl and at that time a lot of people wondered why she married a Mexican, but it was into the seventies then and she wasn’t the only white girl mixing it up. Besides, it was Luis she took up with, and Bobby didn’t know a soul who would have held being Mexican against Luis. Not out loud, anyway. Laid-Back Luis, they called him. He was about as easygoing as they come. Bobby could see why Luis went with Harriet, but as pretty as she’d been back then, there was always something thorny about her. She didn’t laugh much or even smile. Bobby remembered thinking whoever had named her either pegged or cursed her. She sure wasn’t a Luanne. She wasn’t even a Hilary.
Bobby went through about half the lot for Harriet on the phone. Harriet hummed if he mentioned something might work for her girl. She hummed twice—Honda Civic and Ford Ranger—but the Civic hum might have been something on the line, it was so faint, nothing like the Ranger hum. The pickup Bobby figured out she wanted for herself. He’d sold her a Cherokee a year earlier and she’d said when she bought it that what she really wanted was a four-wheel-drive Silverado. “Didn’t anybody anymore run drugs with a Chevy?” she asked and Bobby said, “Well, it’s not all these cars have been involved in illegal activities,” and Harriet laughed in his face and said, “Bobby Kepler, who do you think you are talking to?”
Later Bobby would wonder why she did not hum at the mention of Miss Evelyn’s Buick. Maybe because she was thinking she wanted something she could drive some, and Harriet was not a Buick-driving type of woman.
But the Buick was the only one her girl even acted interested in. The other person on the lot that crowded day was interested in it, too, turned out. Bobby did not recognize the man. Later when Harriet asked what he looked like, all Bobby could remember was how in-between he was. He wasn’t skinny and he was not fat. He wasn’t young but he wasn’t all that old. He wasn’t bald but he didn’t have the hair he probably had once. Because it was lunch time and because Bobby knew that Harriet’s daughter was on her way and that he had a car sold, all he had to do was let Harriet know which car and type up the paperwork, and because it had been a year at least since he had moved more than one car in a day, and because he did not particularly care for it when the man said, “Any Fantastic Deals to be had today?” acting like he was the first one clever enough to say that or something like it, Bobby did not fool with that fellow. “Let me know if you see something you want to test out,” he said, and that was it, he went back to his chicken.
And then it turned out the guy was with Harriet’s daughter. Or so Bobby thought. Actually he did not know what to think. It didn’t seem like he ought to think too much about it. Either way, whether this Maria was with him or not, Bobby had a sale.
“Find something to love?” he asked Maria later when he found her out by Miss Evelyn’s Buick. He did not see the man at first until she said, “This one. We’d like to test-drive it,” and Bobby meant to think, We? but instead he said, “We,” like “We?” And then he saw the fellow standing on the other side of the vehicle and he went to apologizing, “I didn’t realize y’all were together,” and then he screwed up and said, “Your mama didn’t mention . . . ,” and then Maria cut him off. “No problem,” she said, and he decided it damn sure wasn’t a problem because what was the point in worrying over it? He was getting ready to sell a car. He let the two of them take the Buick out alone because truth be told, he had his doubts about that vehicle. The mileage was just too low, given the age on it, even if Miss Evelyn had let it sit up under her carport for over ten years. He had known Miss Evelyn’s late husband, Cord, and not to speak ill, but Cord was one hard-bargain crusty old fucker and tight as a tick and he would not put it past the man to—well, Bobby didn’t need to worry about it because he had the paperwork on it and he had in his day sold worse.
When Maria came into the office and said she wanted the Buick, she was alone. He sold her the car for two grand even though he had put twenty-five hundred on it. He didn’t have all that much in it because Miss Evelyn, he guess because she had done so well selling off the ranch, didn’t care much what he gave her for it. Bobby, though, figured he gave her a fair deal, given her husband and his overall shadiness and the fact that she seemed to want that car out of her drive that very day.
Every time Bobby Kepler sold a car he would knock off early and go home and wait for Sherry to get off work. He’d stop by the store and buy her some flowers and some wine and him some scotch or beer and they would grill steaks. Last time, when he’d sold that Winnebago, they were in bed ten minutes after she got home. She still had her hose on, pulled down to her knees. She pinched his big stomach and said, “You only want to do it when you’re flush, buster,” and he said, “Bulge in the wallet equals a bulge in—” and she cut right in and beat him to his punch line, squeezed what she called old Belly Roll Morton again, and both of them laughing crazy naked in the daylight and right on since high school still in love.
It was a week after he sold that vehicle that Harriet came storming into his office. He happened to, thank God, see her Cherokee tear into the lot spraying dust all over the vehicles he had just hosed off. He saw her little stick figure hop out. What in the world does she want? He pictured that Buick hood up on the side of the highway, but it wasn’t anything as simple as that.
“How come you let her buy that car with him?”
“Harriet, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Buy that car with who?”
“That’s what I want to know. Who was he?”
“I just got through telling you I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“You never seen him before?”
“You mean the fellow was up here the day your daughter bought the Buick?”
“Mexican?”
“No,” he said. “White guy.”
“So you do know who I mean.”
“I do now. I didn’t when you came dusting my fresh-washed cars and asking me all kinds of questions before you even said good evening.”
“She said he wasn’t Mexican but I didn’t know.”
“He wasn’t Mexican,” said Bobby, thinking, What does Harriet care? Last time I checked she married a Mexican. “Unless he’s one of those Mennonites. He didn’t sound Mexican.”
“She said his truck got stolen down along the river somewhere.”
“I don’t know the first thing about any of this.”
“You got the paperwork?”
“I sent it to the DMV, Harriet. It’s in the pipe. She ought to be getting her registration this week.”
“His name’s not on it?”
“Hers is.”
“Not his?”
“I would not know his name if you said it.”
“How am I going to say his name? I don’t even know what the man looks like, you haven’t even said yet what he looks like.” Harriet was breathing big and she was trembling. She was wearing a Spurs T-shirt that was too big for her and jeans from the Dollar General, he knew the brand, his sister-in-law wore them, they came up to your rib cage. Also she was wearing a red visor that made her hair bush out below her ears.
“She told me she had never even laid eyes on him before,” she said.
Then Bobby saw in her eyes and in
the twitch of every nerve in her body that she had said something she did not want to have said. She looked around the office and saw the desk chair and she took it. Bobby got some SunnyD out of the fridge and poured her a cup. She drank some of it and he watched her stare at the floor. They said she was happy with Ray. Bobby felt bad for Harriet but he did not understand her. Why did she care what he or anyone else thought about her daughter buying a car with some man when she carried on with that Ray for years living at home with Luis, who half the time was dying of cancer? Then Ray died of Alzheimer’s back-to-back, and on top of that what happened years ago with her daughter and that boy behind the camper. It was a lot for a person. But he still did not understand her because she acted like none of it ever happened. She got up in the morning and pulled her jeans on up to her ribs and went out into the world expecting everything would be just so, even though, how could she?
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