“Oh, you say that now, but trust me,” Larry chuckled. “You’ll go off to Michigan and the world will seem like a whole different place.”
“That’s not going to happen, either,” Carlos said. “I’m not going to Ann Arbor. I’m going to become a professional chef, and Marisol wants to be a professional pastry chef. We’re going to culinary school in Vermont. Both of us. Together.”
Larry pulled his SUV to the curb. “You’re what?”
“We’re going to culinary school, out East. Marisol and I.”
“Let me get this straight,” Larry began. “Instead of being an engineer or an educator—you could be an educator, or an administrator like your mom, there’s nothing wrong with that—you want to be a cook for the rest of your life?”
“No, Dad. I want to be a chef. You want me to be an engineer. You want me to go to Michigan. But that’s not what I want. I want to be with Marisol.”
Larry turned off the car. The longer he was quiet, the more anxious Carlos got. After a moment, Larry started the car again and began driving.
“We’ll talk about this with your mother when we get home.”
At least the subject was now out in the open, Carlos thought. He was relieved but disappointed. How could his father not see what he saw in Marisol?
When they pulled up to the house, Erasmo and Norma were getting into their truck and Tony was helping Elaine waddle down the drive toward their car.
“I just got the beer! You’re leaving already?” Larry asked with mock disappointment. He was happy to see them leave, even as he was unsure of what was waiting for him inside his house.
“We’ll be back!” Norma sang. “You can count on it. I’m not giving up that easy. This isn’t over yet.” Larry had no idea what she was talking about but smiled back at her.
“Ya, mujer,” Erasmo growled, slamming her door closed after she barely pulled her leg into the cab.
“Oye,” Erasmo called to Larry. The two men staked themselves on the curb. “Look,” Erasmo began in a low voice. “Norma has her ideas about what should happen to Celeste, and Beatriz has hers. Can you get Beatriz to, you know, see it our way?”
“And what’s that?” Larry asked.
“Norma wants the girl to stay with us.”
Larry couldn’t have asked for better news. Erasmo leaned in to speak to Larry conspiratorially.
“She’s lonely, and to tell you the truth, she’s driving me crazy. We have the room.”
“That’s what I thought,” Larry said with relief. “You know, I think that’s a great idea. But what about them?” he said, looking over at Tony and Elaine, who were watching Erasmo and Larry with curiosity. “What do they have to do with this?”
“Pobrecita,” Erasmo said, flashing a toothy smile and an upturn of his chin at Elaine. “She’s no match for our women, and Tony will do whatever we tell him. It’s up to us to get Beatriz and Norma on the same page, entiendes?”
Larry understood so well he almost danced a merry little jig.
“I got your back, so make Beatriz see it’s the best for everyone involved for Celeste to come live with us,” he said. The blare from Erasmo’s truck horn shook them from their deal making, and when they turned to look, Norma was leaning over from the passenger seat, ready to give it another blast.
“Ya, mujer! I’m coming!”
The two men shook hands and Larry stood on his lawn, watching Erasmo and Tony drive off with their wives, satisfied that things were going to work out just the way he wanted.
ELEVEN
As Larry walked back into the house, he inhaled the quiet. He was still worried about what was going on with his sister and his nephews, and he was definitely not thrilled about what Carlos just told him, but somehow, with Erasmo’s unexpected blessing, he felt as if he were all powerful, like all he had to do was flex his muscles, wave his hand, and stand extra tall, and things would work out the way he wanted, the way they were supposed to.
Beatriz was in the kitchen, wrapping up the leftover food while Carlos was putting the beer into the refrigerator. Larry took one of the beers from his son and opened it.
“I’ll take one,” Beatriz said. Carlos opened a bottle and poured it into a glass for her. “Thank you, son. Do you mind?” she said sweetly, nodding toward the door.
“But,” he began, “shouldn’t I stay?”
“No, no. I need to have a talk with your father.”
Carlos was out of the kitchen before the foam shrank in his mother’s beer glass. He was glad to be out of the line of fire. Marisol wouldn’t be happy that he scuttled out like a startled rabbit, but he knew that when his parents were going to have one of their talks, it was best to keep a distance until it was all over. It wasn’t the shouting that got to him or his brother. In fact, they rarely raised their voices. Instead, it was a peculiar tension that rang on a frequency that he was sure only they and dogs could hear. It made him and his brother squirm.
“Where’s Raúl?” Larry asked. Beatriz nodded out the patio door. When he looked out into the yard, he saw his son and Celeste lounging on a sleeping bag laid out on the riser, staring into his portable DVD player. “I told him not to take that thing outside. It can get water damaged.”
“It’s not raining, Larry.”
“But it’s not made for outdoor use. That’s how things get ruined.”
Beatriz grinned. Her husband could be chocante to a fault sometimes. His prudence was one of the traits she admired most of the time. She found it amusing when he got tied up in knots and felt driven to play fire marshal, but when he crossed the line and climbed up on his high horse, he needed to be helped back down to the ground. Because she loved him, she tried to ease him down gently, but it wasn’t beyond her ability to knock him down flat.
“Oh, Larry. Leave it alone.” She sat at the kitchen table so she could see the kids in the yard then turned toward her husband. “So, let’s talk.”
Larry was going to join her at the table but decided he would stand—a power position, standing over her. The man of the house, he thought. And because he was so full of himself, and the beer was so refreshing after a long day, and he had just gotten a hand up from his brother-in-law, he was feeling—how did his wife say it?—Todo chocante. Even when she was annoyed, she said it with such affection it sounded like pillow talk to him.
“What’s your concern with Celeste?” Beatriz began as if she were soliciting official testimony. “Do you think her papers aren’t real? You don’t think she’s who she says she is?”
“No, I already told you, the documents she came with look legit, but I’m kind of worried about some of the other papers she brought.”
“What papers?”
“A bunch of notes and photocopies about a bunch of women I never heard of and I doubt you’ve heard of, either.” Larry began to quickly edit in his head. He didn’t want Beatriz to know the grisly images he saw. He didn’t think she needed to know. “And a couple of those mini-drives—you know, the ones you plug into the computer?”
“Flash drives?”
“Yeah, those. I haven’t had a chance to see what’s on them. Have you?
Beatriz shook her head.
“It’s all very—makes me nervous. There’s something creepy about it. Why does she have this stuff? I mean, what does it have to do with her?” Larry said, looking outside at Celeste.
“That’s it?” Beatriz said. “Some papers and flash drives?”
“No. It’s more than that.”
What Larry refused to say was that he was afraid, plain and simple. He didn’t know what the connection was between Celeste and the Women of Juarez—or if there even was one. All he knew was that what he saw among Celeste’s papers disturbed him. She disturbed him, small and dark and quiet. Larry prided himself on being a good Texas liberal. Hadn’t he given money to all the right causes? Wasn’t he a lifetime subscriber to the Texas Observer? Hadn’t he publicly declared that if one of his sons admitted he was gay, he would love him just the
same—while being enormously relieved that Carlos liked girls? (He wasn’t sure about Raúl, but he refused to think about that until he needed to.)
He didn’t want to admit it, but when it came to Celeste, her unexpected appearance, the daughter of the black sheep of the family, who, like his own sister, Lucy, was a source of embarrassment and anxiety, Larry couldn’t help himself. There was just something dangerous and, well, too foreign about Celeste that he couldn’t shake. He could never admit that out loud, even if he had the words. In Larry’s mind, he was being protective of his family, nothing more, nothing less. He loved Beatriz with all his heart. Wasn’t it time he had her all to himself? Like it was in the beginning, when they were young?
“So, what is it, then?” Beatriz pressed.
“She can’t stay here, Beatriz.” He wanted his wife to burst into tears, to throw a tantrum. That wasn’t her style, but this was a new situation for them. He was hoping for a new response, one that he could deride for its rashness, its raw hysteria, so he could stake a claim for being the rational one, the one in control.
But Beatriz was as still and serene as glass.
“And why do you think that, sweetie?” She slowly took a sip of her beer, daintily placed the glass on the table, and turned to look at him squarely in the face. Larry was thrown. So this is what they mean, he realized, when her colleagues talked about his beautiful wife having nerves of steel.
“Because she can’t,” Larry declared. “We have a full house, and Norma and Erasmo have room. And they want to take her.”
“And I want her here,” Beatriz said plainly.
It rattled Larry that Beatriz was this calm, but he was not going to give in.
“This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be!” he finally blurted. He didn’t want to be the first to lose his cool, but it was too late. “We’re supposed to be getting used to each other again, getting used to our kids growing up and having their own lives, and then—and then, that’s not even working out right, either! Did you know that Carlos wants to go to culinary school?” He said it as if his son—his firstborn!—wanted to run off and join the circus or take up pole dancing.
“He and that girl have it all worked out, he says. He says he doesn’t want to go to college, to a good university where he can get a real education and make something of himself. He wants to be a cook! A cook! And then your niece comes out of the blue with her packet of papers and all her drama, and my sister is… and my nephews are…” Larry could hear himself faltering. “It’s not the way it’s supposed to be!”
Beatriz took another sip of her beer and looked at her husband.
“Are you done?”
“I guess,” he stammered.
“Are you done?” Beatriz asked more forcefully.
“Yes. For now.”
“Good.” She rested her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together. “No. I did not know about Carlos and Marisol, but I can’t say I’m surprised, and I can’t say I’m unhappy. He wants to do what he loves, Larry. Why not? He’s good at it. And they obviously love each other. What more can you ask for? And I bet he doesn’t want to ‘just be a cook.’ You know our son will do more than that.
“I love you, but you know what your problem is? You think there’s a script. You think it’s all supposed to go a certain way, and when it doesn’t, you try to make the pieces fit. You pound and pound and pound to make those pieces fit no matter how much they splinter.”
Larry swallowed hard, because he knew Beatriz was just getting warmed up.
“I love you, Larry. But if you make me choose between you or my kids, you’ll lose every time.”
“What did you say?”
“You heard me. You will lose.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because it’s true, Larry. You know it’s true! If you had to choose between me and the boys, you would choose them, wouldn’t you?”
“But she’s not ours, Beatriz!”
“She is now. She was sent to me. Not to Erasmo, or to Tony, or to the others, but to me.”
Larry looked into his beer and decided it was time for something stronger. He went to the cabinet over the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of whisky and two glasses and poured shots for each of them. If their kids were in the room, they would have found this gesture strange. It was a ritual only Beatriz and Larry understood. It marked the point where they had reached the crossroads in their low-intensity battle that required something to keep the centrifugal force from careening out of control, destroying everything in its way. It was a ritual created over time, without much talk, but deeply understood. They drank their shots together and Larry coughed. The liquor only seemed to make Beatriz’s backbone stronger.
“You don’t remember, do you?” Beatriz asked. “You don’t remember what happened when Perla came to me, when we lived in Ann Arbor? We had just finished our first year of grad school—how she came to me looking for help. She took a bus part of the way and hitchhiked the rest. She was in trouble, and desperate, and I should have helped her, but I didn’t. You know why? Because I chose you, I chose you over my own sister and sent her away.”
“I—I didn’t tell you to do that,” Larry said.
“I know. But you didn’t question it, either. Even when I gave her our last hundred dollars to put her on a bus back home. You didn’t argue. But if I told you I wanted to take in my sister, with all her problems, and all her drama, and all her bad choices, you would have left me.”
“That’s not true!” Larry said.
“It is true!” Beatriz said.
Larry didn’t respond. He knew, deep down, she was absolutely right.
“I chose you,” Beatriz said. “I sent Perla back home. But she didn’t come back here and instead ended up—God knows where! Who knows what kind of life she had, what kind of life Celeste had? But if I can fix it now, that’s what I’m going to do. You don’t have to be happy with this. I don’t even care if you like her. But what I want you to do now is to choose me. Choose me like I chose you. Support me. Let me do what I have to do. And if you can’t do that, then maybe…” Beatriz’s voice began to break. “I crazy-love you, but that girl you met in Ann Arbor, the one who turned her back on her sister? She’s not here anymore. I can’t do it again. I won’t.”
Beatriz couldn’t believe what she had said, but it felt right, it felt like the truth. But it burned. It burned both of them. And the look on Larry’s face—he looked as lost and panic-stricken and alone as Celeste did the night she arrived. He set his empty glass on the counter.
“Maybe I should go, then,” he said.
That was not the response Beatriz expected. “What? Go where?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to think. I’ll find a hotel,” he said. He knew he was acting like a kid who had lost the game and was going to take his toys and go home, but he couldn’t help himself.
“A hotel? Why?”
“I need to think about all this. I need to figure out where I belong in this new world of yours.” Larry was feeling small and petty and he hated it. Beatriz bit her lip and inhaled deeply.
“Do what you need to do,” she said. She didn’t want Larry to leave. She was dying for him to take her in his arms and hold her and tell her how sorry he was. That he didn’t understand before, but now he did and it would all be okay. How he should have said something back then—how she should have said something back then. She was waiting for him to hear how he sounded to her. But then a frightening thought came to her: How do I sound to him?
The idea that they were, after all these years, not operating on the same frequency, the one that had always drawn them together like homing pigeons meant for one another, made the ground shift. Beatriz accepted that life is full of the unexpected, but her connection with Larry—solid, comforting, and familiar—suddenly turned into a sinkhole beneath her.
“You don’t have to leave, Larry. I don’t want you to go.”
“Yeah, I know. But I think I better.”
“Larry…”
“Can we not argue about this one thing?” he snapped.
They both stayed where they were, unblinking, staring at one another.
“Fine. If you think you want to stay in a hotel, go stay in a hotel,” Beatriz said. She meant it, but it tore her apart.
Josie had already pulled into the downtown hotel where she knew she could get a good deal, but she still needed some smokes and couldn’t get “King William’s Columns” or “Milligan” out of her head. What the hell? she thought. The King William neighborhood was only a few blocks away from the hotel where she was going to stay. She drove out of the lot and headed south.
After a half hour of aimless driving, Josie’s resolve turned into skepticism. I’m not going to find King William’s Columns. I’d have better luck finding freaking Jimmy Hoffa, she thought.
She found herself driving up and down Flores Street, making note of landmarks, until the lack of nicotine poked at her nerves and she saw that her gas tank was near empty. The small gas station and convenience store she passed as she drove stood out among the Victorian-style houses but was a welcome sight. She pulled in, gassed up the car, and went inside.
“Do you have a phone book I could use?” she asked the man at the counter. The battery on her laptop was running low, and besides, Josie had stared at the screen for so long, running every Internet search she could think of, her drive was fading. Still, she couldn’t give up. He handed her the massive book and she began to leaf through the curled pages. She found a whole chunk of Milligans in the phone book—a list considerably shorter than the pages and pages of Sánchezes. She flipped to the business pages and looked up “King William’s Columns,” and when she couldn’t find that, she decided she had enough. She slapped the book closed and slid it back to the man behind the counter.
“Thanks,” she said, patting her pockets for the lighter she was always misplacing.
“Didn’t find what you were looking for?” he asked.
“No. I thought there was a place called King William’s Columns, but I couldn’t find it in the book. I’ve driven all around here, but I don’t see it,” she said, still thinking she was looking for a stone-carving shop.
Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over Page 14