“What does he want?” her mother said when Maria came back into the camper. Maria had seen her looking out the window.
“You said Randy did it to me. He didn’t do it to me. He did it because he could not see past his own hurt.”
Her mother had been looking out the window at Marcus. She said, still staring at him, or at the Buick, “Well then, you need to honor his memory by seeing past yours.”
“You make it sound so easy. You don’t think I’ve tried to get past it? How am I supposed to—”
“Not by buying a car with some man you’ve known all of five minutes. What does he want?”
“I don’t know what he wants. I told him I was in the middle of something, he’d have to wait.”
“You ought to just go out there and buy him out. Send him on to Mexico or wherever it is he was on his way to. I’ll loan you the money, I got plenty saved. What in the world was he wanting in Mexico, anyway?”
“We’re not talking about him. We’re talking about me. You were about to tell me how I am supposed to see past my hurt in order to honor Randy’s memory? Remember? We were talking about Randy?”
“You already said this business with the Buick had to do with what happened back then. I am just saying, I never even laid eyes on that man out there until now and I don’t like him sitting in my drive spewing exhaust all over the yard for Alberto’s cows to breathe. Why does he not just cut the car off ? If you ask me, it’s not a good sign that he just shows up without calling first. He’s probably wanting money. I don’t have any good reason to care one way or the other, but does he know why he’s even driving that car? Did you tell him?”
Maria said, “I don’t think any of this is any of your business, really, but yes, I did tell him.”
“When?”
“What does it matter when?”
“I’d say it matters a lot. I don’t guess you had time to tell him before you marched into Bobby Kepler’s office and paid for that car with half his money, did you?”
“No.”
“Well then, would you not say you are using him?”
Maria had her back to the window, but she saw the stricken expression Marcus wore when she left him to come back into the Airstream. Something was wrong with him, but she did not want to think about Marcus and what he was doing there on his day, in her drive, when she was trying to talk to her mother.
“Do you want me to go out there and tell him to get lost?” Maria said. “Take his keys away and pay him off and tell him to get off your property? Will that make you feel better?”
“We’re not talking about me feeling better.”
“Right. You were about to tell me what to do to make myself feel better and honor Randy’s memory in the process. So what is it, Mom?”
“Well, what is it you still feel bad about?”
Maria said, “You’re kidding, right? Have you even been listening?”
“I’m just saying, is it what you done in El Paso? Or what happened when you got home?”
Maria was quiet. It was so hot in the Airstream. I want this part to be over, they said in as many ways as they could think of; I want to move on to the next part. She tasted Pepsi. Seemed like she was always crying now.
“What I did in El Paso is what I had to do. But I never got to go to his funeral. And I know you thought I ought to go, I heard you tell Dad so, but I didn’t get to go and because I did not get to go to Randy’s funeral, I did not feel like I ought to go to Dad’s funeral.”
Maria’s mother sighed. “A funeral, Maria—I’ve been to quite a few in my time, I buried both Ray and your daddy within weeks of each other. A funeral, all it is, you sit on a hard chair up under a tent and some preacher says some words you can’t even hardly hear for the wind. They claim it’s about sending somebody off proper and letting everybody and their brother pay their respects, but some hymns on an organ isn’t about to heal how you hurt after somebody close to you’s gone.”
“Don’t you think that’s easy for you to say? Since nobody was telling you you could not go to one?”
Maria’s mother said, “You got a lot of your daddy in you, you know that?”
“Jesus, Mom.”
“What? I’m just saying, your daddy—”
“You mean I’m fragile? Isn’t that what you said he was? He was fragile for loving you, for not giving up hope that you’d fucking love him back?”
“You need to watch your mouth.”
“Let’s say I am like Dad. Why don’t you tell me how to be like you? Tell me how to do it.”
Her mother looked at her as if she were just now recognizing her. As if for all these weeks, since she met Maria in Baggage Claim, it had not been her daughter sharing this house with her but someone she could not quite place. Now she blinked and there was Maria, come back home. Maria was wondering what she had said to make her mother see her, when her mother said, “Come inside.”
“Why?”
“Just follow me,” she said, and she pushed past her, and Maria followed her mother inside without even looking at Marcus in the Buick. In the kitchen her mother already had the phone book out.
“What are you doing?” Maria asked as her mother paged through the thin book. Her mother picked up the phone and dialed. Maria said, “Who are you calling?”
Maria’s mother said Randy’s mother’s name.
Maria said, “Why?” and then, louder, “What are you doing?” She crossed the room and grabbed the phone out of her mother’s hand and hung it up.
“This has got to stop,” her mother said. “You said we have to quit acting like this, and there isn’t but one way for us and it won’t happen until you get on the phone and tell that woman you’re sorry you did not get to go to that boy’s funeral or whatever it is you have to tell her. And you can tell her you’re sorry her son’s dead even though you aren’t responsible for what happened to him, and when she tells you you’re going to burn in hell for what you done to her child and her grandchild, you hold on to that phone and say you’re sorry again and you say it louder. Don’t you dare ask for her forgiveness, for she won’t give it to you, just like your daddy would not ever forgive me. I know how they are. They aren’t going to give you what you want. You got to find your own way past it. You can’t have any say over how they take it but you still got to give it.”
Maria’s mother’s hand was on hers. They both shook. Marcus was waiting in the car. He was behind the wheel. If he drove her to Randy’s house he would wait for her in the car. I’ll just be a minute, she would say to him, and he would say, Okay, and he would not turn on the radio or get out and lean against the car and smoke. He would not pull out a cell phone and call someone and laugh and yell and curse in the manner of people who could not for one second be alone without distraction. He would watch to see she was inside Randy’s mother’s house and when she came back down the walk he would lean over and open the door for her. Then she would listen to whatever it was that had him in such a state. She hated to make him wait but she had faith in the chart she’d chosen. It was his day and then hers. They had made it work.
Maria said, pulling her mother into her embrace, “I can’t do that over the phone. It wouldn’t be right. And it wouldn’t accomplish anything. She’d just hang up on me.”
“You want me to go over there with you?” her mother said into her ear.
“No,” she said. “I want Marcus to take me.”
“You wait right here, baby,” said her mother. “I’m going to go ask him.”
MARCUS WAS IDLING HER Lowness in the drive, waiting for Maria to finish whatever she was in the middle of (and whatever it was, it had started inside the camper, which, had Marcus not been so desperate to keep dry, he might have taken as a sign that this was really not a good time for him to be coming around asking for whatever it was he was there to ask her, he wasn’t even sure what that was, he just knew he needed to see her, needed her to come out of that trailer and motion him over to the passenger side and drive them some
place safe from the coming tide), when the woman who minutes earlier had come out of the Airstream—busted out was more like it—walked out of the house and right up to the Buick.
Marcus had the window rolled up tight because he deserved to drown. He had seen, in the way that Maria had followed that woman, obviously her mother, into the house without looking his way, that only vanity and pride—those same failings that had delivered the farm and the center to the bank—had allowed him to hang up the phone with his sister feeling as if someone would bail him out. The water flooding the Buick had followed him from home, for it was tannin-laced, the color of whiskey, reeking of sulfur, black crappie, and catfish. There wasn’t any water anywhere around here that looked or smelled like that. Wasn’t hardly any water around here at all.
He had rolled up the window. Maria would find him afloat and bloated. She had given him this day. He thought it meant—
Here came Maria’s mother up to the car and he could not finish a thought. It had been this way since he’d gotten off the phone with Annie. Half thoughts abandoned like cars in a blizzard. Treadless tires spinning out into ditches. Nor could he gain traction on feeling. Soon as he felt he had some sense of what was in his heart, here came another wave, one atop the other. Maria had only been humoring him when she came out of the camper to tell him, “Can you give me a few minutes? I’m kind of in the middle of something.” So stuck in the middle was she that she’d forgotten about him idling just outside the Airstream. And now she had sent her mother to deal with him. Too timid herself to tell him to hand over the key and get lost, it was over, she could not help him, she never could.
Well, he wasn’t much better. He’d left her a letter. Dear Maria, take the car, it’s yours, see you later, I’m gone.
Maria’s mother stood by the car. She was thin in the manner of someone for whom food is consumed only as fuel for the task ahead. Maria, too, was thin, but not the same kind of thin. In no other way did she favor her mother, who was fair-skinned, sun-spotted. The sleeves of her shirt were rolled up past her elbows, and the knees of her jeans were dirty. Everything about the woman—especially the set of her mouth—said she meant business.
Carefully did Marcus roll the window down; mercifully did the tide refrain from slamming Maria’s mother into the camper.
“Maria needs to go somewhere,” she said. She was breathing heavy and talking fast. Her voice was just throaty enough to suggest she’d stuck a cigarette to her lips a time or two. Although Maria had no accent, there was a slight twang in the way the mother said “somewhar” that reminded Marcus of people from up in the Blue Ridge back home, though Maria’s mother clipped her words, as if she had too much to do to waste breath drawing them out.
“She’s getting ready. She’s got to go see somebody. Can you take her over there?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Marcus.
“This isn’t going to be anything easy. I mean, it’s, she’s got to do something and it’s going to be hard on her. She asked me to ask you to drive her over there and I just want to know she’s going to be safe.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “She’ll be safe.”
The woman studied him. She said, “You look to be about as old as I am. You can skip the ‘ma’am.’ ”
“You haven’t said your name.”
“That’s because it’s Harriet.”
“Oh, okay,” said Marcus, as if this were reason to withhold her name. Now she would hate him. He’d just met her and she hated him. But here she was trusting him, with an errand she said wasn’t going to be anything easy. She trusted him but he needed her to like him.
“What would you have chosen to go by, if it were up to you?”
The look on Maria’s mother’s face suggested she was appalled by his question, as if it were wholly inappropriate. Oh God, what have I gone and said now? For he did not plan on saying it; he would never have planned on saying such a thing to a woman asking him to perform an important task. They weren’t at a lawn party. Surely she was about to ask him to leave. But when he looked up at her she had started to blink. Her eyes grew wet, and he realized that she was crying. Very lightly at first, the way he imagined it rained sometimes in this place so unaccustomed to moisture, a soft and ephemeral tease of a rain. It seemed to Marcus that Maria’s mother had been holding off crying for a very long time.
“I guess Juice,” she said. “Like Juice Newton?”
Marcus didn’t say anything. He did not even nod. Maria’s mother’s face was soaked with her tears. Maria came out of the house. She had changed into a skirt and she carried a sweater. When she saw her mother crying she hurried over and pulled her close. They held each other. Maria looked at him over her mother’s shoulder. She did not want him to leave; she needed him to drive. While Maria and her mother sobbed into each other’s necks, the water drained away. The car dried out, but it didn’t make Marcus feel any better knowing that his pain had subsided only in the mounting presence of someone else’s.
The hugging and crying lasted for what felt to Marcus like five minutes until Maria’s mother pulled away from Maria and said, “I’m going to call her and tell her you’re coming and that you won’t take up more than a few minutes and will she please see you,” and Maria nodded and then she got into the car. Maria’s mother squatted beside Marcus. She held on to the door with both hands and said in a softer way than before, “Thank you. You just took me by surprise asking me that. You can call me Harriet.” Marcus said it was nice to meet her and said his name. Harriet nodded and stood and wrapped her arms around her rib cage as if she were alone now, walking through pasture into a frigid wind. “Bring her straight on back here,” she said, and he said he would.
He would not have disturbed Maria’s silence had he known where they were going, but on the way into town she said nothing at all. He put off asking as long as he could. “Take a right by the Thriftway,” Maria said, and then, “Go left here.” Two more turns before they were in a neighborhood over near the high school. She told him to pull up in front of a ranch house. A basketball hoop above a garage, a conversion van parked in the drive, a satellite dish titled skyward in the side yard.
Marcus switched off the Buick. They sat in its sanctuary. Maria did not move. He reached across her and rolled her window down. She said, “Now I don’t know why I’m doing this. What is it I am apologizing for, again? What am I doing in front of Randy’s house?”
“It’s going to be okay,” said Marcus.
“How do you know?”
Marcus did not know. He only really knew what he was in the middle of. But we’re always in the middle of something. Never does it begin the way we choose to isolate it in memory, and never, ever does it end with our actions. But he could not say this. She had asked him to drive her over here. In order to help, he had to lie.
“Why do you have to know what you’re sorry for? Can’t you just say you’re sorry and then come back to the Buick and we’ll leave?”
“Except she might think . . . I mean, I don’t want her to think I have spent all these years feeling guilty about what I did in El Paso.”
“She won’t think that.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know,” said Marcus. “I don’t know the lady. But from what you’ve said about her, it seems like if she thought you were capable of feeling guilty about the choice you made, wouldn’t that mean she’d have to forgive you? And isn’t it easier for her not to forgive you?”
“Why is it easier?”
“Just makes the world smaller. She can understand it better that way,” said Marcus.
Maria was quiet. She’d stopped crying but it felt to Marcus like the moment when a storm passed and the sun has not yet emerged to wash everything brilliant and clean. “You’re right,” she said. “She won’t forgive me.”
“Are you here for her forgiveness?” he asked, but he was thinking about his sister, of how he could never pay down her hate. A hundred dollars a month. His wages garnered until he k
eeled over making change at a Whataburger. The thought of money ushered in the tide.
“I want to come with you,” he said.
“What?” said Maria. “Why? No.”
“I’m not just being nice. I’m not all that nice. I need to.”
“But why?” she said. “Why do you need to go with me?”
It was not a competition, what each of them had lost; it wasn’t something to tally up on one of his little lists. Her losses were not quantifiable in the way of greenhouses, geodesic domes, slabs of limestone imported from Pennsylvania, tools he never learned to use. Even land, no matter its history or its mystical aura cultivated by sentimental agrarians, a club into which he had been born, was something you could auction off, a minimum bid firmly in mind.
She had started to cry again. She looked at the house and he looked also. A curtain parted behind a bay window.
“I’ll stay with the car, then,” he said. Not in the car but with it. As if it were more than vinyl and metal. Something to be minded, tended to, never left alone. His preposition rattled him. He remembered that look on Maria’s mother’s face when she said, “Juice,” as if she had been carrying this around for years and had never let herself think it, much less say it.
Maria did not appear to have heard. She’d gone off somewhere. Finally she said, “Randy used to do that. Leave me in the car. He’d say, ‘I’ve got to stop by Johnny’s house for a minute and pick something up, I’ll just be a sec,’ and he’d hop out and leave me in the car with the motor running. There was something so lonely about that. It made me so anxious sitting there, the car running but not moving. There was never the right song on the radio.”
She went away again. While she was gone, Marcus thought, You could have just switched the station. But then he remembered how it is when you are a teenager, especially one of a certain sensitive stripe, how there is only one station, and usually only one song. If he stayed with the car, he would only be able to tune in to the slosh and gurgle of rising water.
“I won’t say anything, I promise,” he said. “I’ll just stand beside you.”
All I Have in This World Page 24