“Oh, yeah. That was dumb. If it means anything, I was thinking of you at the time.”
“Baloney.”
Jesús had been polite if tenacious about her sleeping with him. She held him off because she didn’t want to end up like her best friend, Juanita, pregnant and uneducated. She wanted children someday, but not to conceive them in his Ford truck. Still, he could be hard to resist, and at times she’d had to fight back her temptation with a two-by-four.
Jesús kissed her on the cheek. “Maybe I’ll call you anyway, okay, Toni?”
“Maybe I’ll answer,” she called to him as he walked away. Toni did not notice Francisco coming out of the tunnel, lunch pail in hand and exhausted.
“Toni, who’s sick? What’s wrong?” he said.
“I wanted to walk you home, that’s all.”
“Thank the Lord. ¿Cómo estás, hija?”
“Bien, Papá, and you?”
“Not bad, but I’m getting too old for all this.” Francisco waved to Jesús as he drove off in his brand new Ford pickup. “Well?”
“Well, what?” Toni said.
“You know, getting married.”
“I have to fall in love first.”
“Oh, is that all?”
Toni took her father’s lunch pail to carry, and they headed home. “Sorry about this morning, Pops.”
“I don’t hold grudges.”
“That’s what I love about you. Now, me, I’m like Mom. I hold onto grudges like they were gold.”
“How’s your court job, hija?”
“Doesn’t pay well, but it’s interesting.”
“Will that lady get the gas chamber?”
“She’s got an excellent lawyer.” She felt her cheeks warm for some reason. “I mean, he’s one of the top lawyers in Borden, and I think he really cares about her.”
“Rich?”
“As a king.”
“And he still works hard for that lady?”
“Yup.”
“Then he sounds like a good man.”
“Yes, he does. How was work?”
“Busy.” Pride in his job made him forget the smoldering fire in his chest and soreness in his bones. “Our steel built this country.”
“That means you helped build this country.”
Francisco lowered his head a bit. “Sorry you didn’t get that teaching job. Next year might be better.”
“I didn’t even get the chance, Pops.” Toni spoke in Spanish. The language created an intimacy between them. “It’s hard not to … ” She stopped.
“What? Hate, get mad? You can’t keep that up every day, Antonia. It hurts you more than them. Besides, getting mad isn’t going to change somebody who can only see you’re Mexican and nothing more than that.”
Francisco’s thumb pointed back at the mill. “We got the worst jobs at first, but we worked hard and earned their respect. I made enough money to buy a house and support a beautiful wife and two beautiful daughters. That’s not too bad for someone who can’t read or write a lick.”
“Not bad at all.”
“The best you can do in this life is work hard and love God and your family.”
She took his hand. “And don’t stand for too much shit from people.”
“I’m glad your mother didn’t hear you cuss.”
“Why? Mom always said ‘shit.’”
As soon as they entered the house, Toni rushed to check the pot. The cooking beans smelled of earth and salt and had boiled to a fine light brown tinged in pink. She checked the flame on the gas stove, but the heat from the pot made her instantly weary because the house was already sweltering. Although she had opened all the windows before she left for the mill, the temperature refused to budge, not even for the fan she had bought.
Francisco went to the bathroom. Soon Toni heard the shower running. Wiping sweat from her forehead, she stirred the beans. Her hand brushed the pot. “Dammit.”
“What happened?” her father called from the other room.
“I wasn’t paying attention and burned myself.”
Toni placed her hand under the cold water and enjoyed the cool stream of relief.
As soon as Francisco had toweled off and dressed, he emerged from his bedroom and was gripped by a coughing spell.
Toni rushed to him to him with a glass. “Here, sip this.”
The coughing subsided after a while, but his eyes became bloodshot, and his chest rose and fell in quick movements.
“You’re going to see a doctor. I can be as stubborn as you. I’ll carry you there if I have to.”
“Stop,” he managed to yell.
Her eyes blinked.
“Sit down, Antonia.” His voice barely reached above shallow gasps.
Toni knelt down beside him.
“I did go see a doctor.”
“And?”
“My lungs are filled with metal dust from the mill. It’s tearing my lungs apart bit by bit until they won’t be able to hold any air.”
“Can the doctor cure you?” She choked on the words.
“No. You can ask him for yourself. He’s a nice man.”
Toni began to cry.
“My lungs probably look like little ingots.” He gave a smile.
“Don’t joke about it!”
“I’m sorry, hijita. Sit next to me.” Francisco explained as if Toni were a child: “We all are heading to death, Antonia. You know that. There’s nothing else to do about it but live a good life.”
“We have to get you to a specialist.”
“Unless they have a miracle in their pocket, what can they do? Just pray for me.”
“You should have told me sooner.” She hugged him hard until he gently pushed her away.
“If I had, then you would have wanted to come home. I wanted you to finish your schooling.”
“That doesn’t matter.” She wiped at the tears.
Her father took her shaking hands in his. How rough they were from calluses, like the cracked desert. His fingernails were bruised and multicolored from years of hard work. Toni never realized how small they were.
“See, no matter how many times I wash them, I can’t get the dirt from under my nails. I’m not complaining, because that’s how I earned my living. But I did all that so your hands, and Carmen’s hands, won’t be like these.” The coughing made his voice gruff and low. “I think the beans are burning.”
Tears blurred her eyes as she lowered the gas flame and stirred the beans.
“Antonia.” Her father stood beside her. “The beans are salty enough.” He took his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped her cheeks. “If we eat them, we’ll all feel like crying.”
She washed her face in the sink and went into the living room. Sitting down in his chair, Francisco held out the newspaper to her.
“Now, read me the paper, por favor. I want to see what that Eisenhower is up to.”
After her father fell asleep in his room, Toni cleaned the house and checked him every twenty minutes. On his high chest of drawers was a shrine with jar candles decorated with Jesus unveiling his Immaculate Heart. Next to those was the foot-tall statue of the Santo Niño de Atocha, the Holy Infant, wearing finery and a plumed hat and carrying a basket and staff. The outstretched arms of a taller statue of the Virgin Mary held rosaries, medals and scapulars. Whenever she and Carmen passed the dresser, they would cross themselves, which they had learned to do from their mother. Toni lit one of the candles and prayed for a miracle.
Once before Toni had asked for divine help, when her mother lay in a room at St. John’s Hospital. Her mother’s once-beautiful black curls had been transformed into gray and brittle strands, as if life had already deserted them. Wracked with pain, her mother wailed until nurses gave her shots of morphine. In the few moments of her mother’s lucidity, Toni recognized the feisty, loving woman who had played dolls with her and Carmen and sung Frank Sinatra songs as she cleaned the house. How easily she had laughed. How she had loved to dance. Mama’s kiss on her chee
k forever sweet and soft as she bid them good night.
During catechism, the nuns had taught Toni about the black mark marring every baby’s soul as a reminder of man’s ejection from paradise for disobeying God and how baptism washed away the original sin. When her mother died, Toni swore that black, ravenous mark had returned and expanded within her because of another sin. Namely, her anger at God for taking her mother away from them.
A little after four in the afternoon, Toni checked on her father, who still slept. She went outside to wait for Carmen to come home from her job as a hairdresser at the Moreno Beauty Shop on Grant Street. Toni paced and smoked.
“He told you, didn’t he?” Carmen said as soon as she saw her sister.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“He said he’d tell you in his own time.”
“Oh God, Carmen.” She threw down her cigarette.
Carmen put her arms around Toni. Sitting on the curb in front of their house, the sisters held each other, sobbing as quietly as possible so as not to wake their father.
Love and prayers were never enough to keep death away, Toni knew. It would come as surely as man had lost paradise.
13
MICHAEL HATED SURPRISES, especially when they made him late to dinner at his father’s house. He didn’t want a lecture on punctuality, because it gave him indigestion. Ignoring his complaints, Jenny continued to guide him down a street of well-set homes. The neighborhood reminded Michael of a cheerful Norman Rockwell artwork with pink-cheeked, happy people. He disliked those paintings because they hid the true state of the world.
“We won’t be long.” Jenny sat half off the car seat. “Wait, pull over here.”
Michael glided to a stop in front a two-story white house with columns and a FOR SALE sign. Fat pink flamingos stood guard in a flower bed. Jenny jumped out of the car in her pretty cocktail dress, the pearls bouncing on her chest.
“It won’t hurt you to have a quick look at it,” she called. “Isn’t it perfect? Janie Hitchcock told me about it at lunch, and I rushed over to see it. The pink flamingos match the pink kitchen, and one of the bathrooms is pink, too.”
“Who lived here? The Easter Bunny?”
Jenny pulled him along as she peeked into the front window of the empty house. She dug into her purse. “I’ve got the key.”
“How the hell did you get that?”
“I have my ways, Mr. Nosey.”
Her flirtations tired him. “Jenny, we can do this another day.”
She had unlatched the door. Michael smelled dust and saw mouse prints.
Jenny swept up the large stairs, then slowly down, arms open to welcome guests. “Don’t I remind you of Loretta Young? There’s three bedrooms, two baths and a rec room. And a big fireplace in the living room and master bedroom.” She turned and sprinted the rest of the way up the stairs.
Michael followed. “For God’s sake.”
“In here.”
Jenny stood in the middle of a spacious room with white carpeting and floor-to-ceiling windows. “This is the master bedroom. Isn’t it gorgeous?”
“Right out of Life magazine. Can we go now?”
She took his hand. “I know I promised not to pester you about buying a house, but this is what I call perfection.”
She led him to a smaller room across the hall. “This could be a nursery. In yellow, I think. Then we could paint it blue if it’s a boy.” Suddenly she headed back down the stairs. “Come on, Michael. I have to show you the kitchen.”
Opening cabinets and rubbing her hand over the counter tops, Jenny coughed a little at the dust, though even that held a charm for her. “All modern appliances. You’ve got to see the yard.” She opened the back door and almost skipped along the manicured lawn and garden.
“We’re going to be late for dinner.” Hearing his father whine over their tardiness didn’t scare him at all. But he wanted to avoid talk about buying a house because his excuses began to reflect a lack of substance.
While Jenny inspected the patio and barbecue pit, Michael strolled to a square hole in the back of the yard. The hole must have measured about twenty feet square and about fifteen feet down. “What the hell is this?”
“Oh, that was going to be a fallout shelter.” Scrunching her nose, she glanced into the hole. “The owner said he didn’t really need one anymore because nothing will save us if the Russians dropped the bomb. But he had a great idea for what we could do with it.”
“What?”
“Turn it into a swimming pool.”
“Great.”
“The owner also says he’ll let us have a generator and all the dried food we’d ever want for a bargain price.”
She hugged herself and spun in a full circle to appreciate the whole property. “Perfection.”
As they drove to his father’s house, Jenny pretended to read Photoplay but kept looking up at Michael. “Well?” she said from behind the magazine. “The house? Isn’t it gorgeous?”
“Very nice, Jenny.”
“You promised we’d talk about a house and children after we got settled.”
“Did I?”
“It’s almost three years now, Michael. How much more settled can we get? I could be the happiest woman on earth with a house and a baby.”
Michael tensed behind the wheel.
“I know you want to wait. But your career is going great, and I’m not getting any younger. I’m twenty-three years old. It’s time we had a family.”
“You talk like we’re on a damn time schedule. Life’s not like that. You can’t plan anything.”
She squeezed his leg. “We are on a schedule. A lovely house. An adorable baby. It’s something we can count on for the future.”
Michael tried on Jenny’s vision. Him in a ridiculous velvet smoking jacket in that monstrosity of a house with dusted furniture and dusted lives. He’d be marking time in a place with pink flamingos, which just made him all the thirstier for a drink. Jenny kept reading her magazine and smiling at the image of happiness he had a hard time keeping in his head. He might have loved her once, but now he couldn’t remember why.
At a country club dance he had complimented her dress. When she admitted she had the dress copied from one Audrey Hepburn wore in Roman Holiday, he should have realized she didn’t have an original bone in that voluptuous body. He thought she might help his loneliness, but unfortunately he mistook her vivaciousness for spirit and became all the more isolated. Then again, her willingness not to make demands had attracted him the most. Although lately, that was all she did.
“We can talk later, Jen.”
“It won’t be on the market forever.”
“Then we weren’t meant to have it.”
They drove for miles without more words, a space as dry as the land they passed. Concentrating on her magazine, Jenny refused to talk in order to show her irritation with Michael. She would do whatever it took to make him see her dream for that house. She began to sing “Bali Ha’i.”
Up ahead, Michael noticed two Mexican men repairing the fence surrounding his father’s vast ranch. Their hats were down over their eyes, and their backs were curved. “That’s back breaking work,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” Jenny said.
“When I worked on the ranch a few summers during college, it damned near killed me.”
Jenny didn’t bother to look up from the magazine.
“Come to think of it, those people really run the farm and ranch, not us.”
“Michael, you say the weirdest things.” Licking a finger, she turned the page. “Besides, lover, they were made for hard work.”
14
PABLO FLORES LIKED TO WATCH MICHELLE GÓMEZ wash dishes. How she shifted her weight from one leg, then back again, while scrubbing pans in the kitchen. If the radio was playing, it could be a dance. Wouldn’t that beat all? Dancing and carrying on in old man Shaw’s kitchen? The place could use a little dancing. It was like a big, fancy graveyard. Pablo scratched
his head. He couldn’t understand how Michelle could resist him after the six long months they had worked together. He had nice clothes and a Chevy with tuck-and-roll upholstery. Lots of other girls swept their heads in his direction when he entered a bar.
“When you going out with me, Michelle?” he asked again.
“When you stop working in this kitchen.” She didn’t turn away from washing the pots.
He leaned on his broom and pointed a thumb his way. “I got plans.”
“What you gonna do? Become a butler?”
“I ain’t breaking my back at the mill or on some stinking ranch. I don’t want to be an old man by the time I’m thirty, like my father. Hell no, woman.” He picked up a silver pot and smoothed his hair. “Come on, Michelle. We’ll go driving and dancing. We’ll howl at the moon like a pair of wolves.”
He howled.
Michelle laughed. “No wonder us Mexicans can’t get anywhere.”
Pablo pointed to the dining room where the Shaw family was working on the first dinner course of mushroom soup. “That bright-future stuff only works for people who came over on the Cauliflower and those other ships.”
“Ay, that’s Mayflower, dummy.”
“I don’t care if it’s the Sunflower.”
Michelle put her hands on her hips, despite their dripping soapy water. “I’m going to finish high school and go to college. We have to depend on ourselves, on our own people.”
Pablo laughed. “What people? A bunch of Mexicans?”
Jim Jordan, the Negro cook, prepared the chicken cordon bleu at the counter. He rubbed his white whiskers in aggravation at Pablo’s constant play for the pretty girl.
Josita entered carrying a silver soup tureen and chided them in Spanish. “Shut up, you two. I could hear you in the hallway. All you do is talk and talk and play around. The young want too much, too fast.”
Jim, the cook, bobbed his head in agreement.
Pablo and Michelle took up their work again. Pablo inhaled with satisfaction because he just knew he was wearing Michelle down.
Jim spooned the chicken onto the china dishes, which Josita placed on another tray. He added green beans and mashed potatoes.
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