Riversong

by Hardwick, Tess

  Lee nodded, thinking of the baby growing inside her.

  Tommy glanced at her, taking his eyes off the road for a split second. “You look sleepy. Am I boring you?”

  “No, it's your voice. It relaxes me.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  She yawned and nestled further into the seat. “Can't be bad. Nothing else seems to work. Keep talking so we can test the theory.”

  He was the second in a line of six children, the oldest now his brother was gone. His parents were married for fifty years and died within months of each other three years ago. His four siblings were all girls and he loved growing up surrounded by all those women. When the girls talked, which they did constantly, he learned a lot of useful information. Their house was bilingual and you never heard such a racket as four girls talking, bickering, and laughing, two languages intermixed into a sort of music.

  He missed his mother. Before her death he talked to her twice a week over the telephone. Sometimes he still picked up the receiver to call her before remembering. The loss was fresh each time, like an empty spot in his heart. “After she died I realized no one will ever know me, understand me, or love me as much. She was interested in every small and large accomplishment, the details of what I ate for breakfast, even the process of every song I wrote.”

  “You were lucky.”

  He looked over at her and she dismissed her comment with a wave of her hand. “Never mind, we're talking about you, not me.”

  He went on to tell her about a time when he was five years old and was up on top of a ladder picking apples. There was a kind of seat on one of the branches, so he straddled it and watched a cloud that looked like an elephant drift by until his eyes got sleepy. The next thing he knew he jerked awake as he fell out of the tree, hitting the ground hard but unhurt. His mother screamed from where she was across the orchard. She ran to him and felt his legs. Then she smacked him with a stick twice on his bottom hard enough that it stung. “I said to her, ‘Why are you beating me?’ and she said, ‘Because you scared me.’” He glanced at Lee and laughed. “I made sure never to fall asleep in a tree again.”

  “My sisters are like my papi, cerebral, mathematical,” he said, keeping his eyes on the highway. “They're practical about life instead of thinking in emotion and metaphor like I do. I'm like my mother, emotional and artistic. After my brother's death, we fell into the pain. The girls analyzed it to try and make sense of it. Grief catches up with you eventually and when it does it's more painful, like an earthquake that shakes with more and more ferocity. Anyway, life isn't understandable. Only God understands and we have to wait until the end, where I imagine I'll see my questions answered, spread out across the heavens in waves of clarity.”

  xThe highway forked, one way to the California Redwoods, the other to Brookings, the first coastal town in Oregon when traveling north on Highway 101. “We're heading up to Brookings,” he said. “My friends own a Mexican restaurant north of town.”

  She was sleepy, murmured a response, and closed her eyes. She felt his hand touch the side of her face. And then she was asleep.

  She awakened when Tommy braked for a red light and sat up in the seat, looking out the window at the gray, soggy town. “Sorry, I fell asleep.”

  “No problem. I have that effect on women.” He grinned and braked for another light.

  “I'm just so tired lately.”

  “My sisters say the first trimester's like that.”

  She wiped the side of her mouth, hoping she hadn't drooled in her sleep and reached for her purse at her feet. She ran a comb through her hair and swiped her nose and forehead with a powder compact. She coated her lips with a smear of peachy lipstick. “Do you know a lot about women because of your sisters?”

  “Not as much as I need to.” He laughed.

  It was cloudy and sixty-two degrees according to Tommy's temperature gauge when they pulled into the parking lot of a run-down strip mall and parked in front of a Mexican restaurant. “This is where we're eating?” she said. She looked up and saw a neon twirling sign reading, ‘Los Gatos’.

  Tommy laughed as he pulled the parking break. “Don't be such a snob. Best Mexican food in Oregon.” He reached across her, brushing her leg and pulled a bottle of wine from underneath her seat. “Terrible wine though, so I always bring my own.”

  “No ocean view?”

  He put his arm on the back of her seat and kissed her neck, sending a shiver up her spine. “Wouldn't that be kind of predictable?” he asked, his eyes on her mouth.

  “I guess,” she began to answer but he covered her mouth with his in a gentle kiss that made her heart pound.

  He grinned, pulling back and grazing his finger along her bottom lip. “Sorry, I had to do that before we went in or I wouldn't have been able to focus on my dinner. Stay where you are. I'll get your door”

  The air smelled of salt, seaweed and fish. As was her habit now in any public place, she scanned the parking lot for Von. It was empty except for several teenagers clothed in black, smoking cigarettes. He escorted her inside with his hand on the palm of her back. The restaurant was small, with an orange and yellow patterned linoleum floor, grease stains on the dingy walls and cheap prints of Mexican art on the walls.

  A round, gray haired Mexican woman with a heavy accent greeted them. “Tomas, so good to see you.” They embraced, lingering for a moment, her soft short frame next to his tall, lean one. Maria turned to Lee. She enfolded Lee's chilled fingers into her plump warm hands. “I'm Maria. Welcome.” She tweaked underneath Lee's chin. “So beautiful. Come sit.” Mexican music played overhead. Laughter and voices in Spanish came from the kitchen.

  They slid into a booth with shiny green rubber, cracked in places and the stuffing exposed. Maria set two plastic menus and two glasses of ice water in red plastic cups on the table. They were the only people in the dining area except for a middle aged couple in a back booth. She wagged her finger at Tommy. “Nothing too spicy for the Senorita.” She turned to Lee. “He order everything fire hot.”

  “Whatever Lee wants.” He handed Maria the bottle of wine, which she tucked under her arm.

  Maria put a hand on the top of Tommy's head. “He so fancy after he come back from Nashville has to bring his own wine.” She fluffed his hair. “I remember him so little, picking apples from a ladder.” She took her hand off his head and pulled out a small pad from the front of her apron. “He sing all the time so we always knew where he was. Up in trees, singing and singing.”

  “Now don't tell all my secrets.” He winked at Lee. “I knew I shouldn't bring you here.”

  Maria left with the wine, promising chips and salsa when she returned. Tommy pointed to the kitchen. “Maria and her husband were friends of my parents, before we moved to Bellingham. We all picked fruit back then.”

  Maria dropped off their chips, the bottle of wine and took their dinner order. Tommy poured Lee a half glass of wine and a generous one for himself.

  She pushed the glass away from her. “I don't drink.”

  “All the time or because of the baby?”

  “All the time.”

  He looked like he might ask a question but thought better of it and moved the glass closer to him. “Sorry, I should've asked before I poured.” He watched her. She could see the clicking of his thoughts as he figured and wondered about her.

  “You drink a lot?” She tried to sound light but even to herself she sounded anxious for the answer to be no.

  “Not enough to be a problem. Ed, from the band, we're always on the lookout for a good ten dollar bottle of wine. We enjoy it, but for fun, not survival.” He thumped on the table with his fingers and scooped salsa on a chip. “To that end, I have a little something to celebrate tonight.” He popped the whole chip in his mouth and chewed.

  She looked around the place and lowered her voice, teasing him. “I'd hate to see where you'd take me if it was just a regular night”

  He put his hand on his heart and laughed. “That hur
ts.” He scooped more salsa onto a chip and waved it in the air as he talked. “Actually, I sold a song to a fairly major recording artist in Nashville. Just found out this morning.”

  He ate another chip, wiped a stray diced tomato off the side of his mouth and pulled a thin paper napkin out of the dispenser next to the salt and cleaned his finger. “The weird thing is, I never thought of myself as a country songwriter, but there you go. I mean, whoever heard of a Mexican country singer?” He smiled and looked to the ceiling. “But who am I to question God?”

  Her voice was teasing but even she heard the bitterness at the edges of her tone. “I'd like to ask God a few questions.”

  He looked amused and swirled his wine. “What would you ask him, or her?”

  The question surprised her. “I was teasing. I'm not used to people talking so freely about God as if He really exists. My friends in Seattle never talk about this kind of thing – they're too busy being smart.”

  “I remember that from my Nashville days.” He cocked his head, serious now. “Really, what would you ask God if you could?”

  She spoke quietly. “Why does he hate me?”

  His eyes filled with tears. “Lee.” He reached for her hand but she withdrew it from the table's surface, resting it on her lap. They sat like that for a few moments, the weight of her comment between them. She stared at the salsa bowl, empty except for flecks of cilantro and spices stuck to the insides of the curved ceramic. “Lee,” he repeated her name, this time so tenderly that she lifted her face to look at him. “God doesn't hate you and both He and I wish we could take away your pain.”

  She felt the tears start and reached for his hand. “I'm sorry. I'm a terrible date.”

  “No, you're perfect.”

  “Thank you. Thank you for taking me out.” She pulled her hand away and fiddled with her hair, suddenly self-conscious. “You a recovering Catholic then or you still with the church?”

  He smiled. “Recovered. The Catholic Church is not for the free spirited. Oh, I shudder when I think what my mother would think if she heard me say that. She'd yell at me in rapid Spanish. She might even try to beat me with a stick.” He paused and they both chuckled, the tension gone. He twisted in the booth, one of his feet brushing against her crossed ankles. A shot of energy ran through her. “As a kid I kept looking for God in the midst of all that ritual but found him inside my own heart after my brother died.”

  “I'd think that would make you doubt God, not get closer to him.”

  “I hit so low the only thing I could find was God, way down deep inside me.” He blinked and ran his hand through his hair. “Am I scaring you off with all this religious talk?” He held his lip between his thumb and his index finger, studied a chip and said under his breath, “That's part of my problem with women.”

  “You talk too much?”

  His brown eyes were sincere. “Yeah and about all the wrong things.”

  Maria set steaming plates of enchiladas, tamales, and refried beans on the table. “Enjoy, mi amor.” She patted Tommy's shoulder and he rested the side of his head for the briefest of moments on her fleshy shoulder, the familiarity between them of people who've known and loved each other for a lifetime. Lee felt a rush of envy and like an outsider. She ate a small bite of enchilada, detecting a slight smoky flavor from the sauce. “Delicious.”

  “Best Mexican you'll ever have,” he said.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes and Lee was surprised to see Tommy's meal almost gone when she looked up from her plate. She put down her fork, her appetite suddenly replaced with the familiar guilty feeling in the pit of her stomach. How could she be enjoying herself this much?

  As if he read her thoughts, he said softly, “It's just dinner.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “After my first divorce-", he said.

  She interrupted. “First divorce?”

  “Uh, yeah. I've been married twice. Didn't I mention that?”

  “No. No, you didn't.” She sat with this new knowledge for a moment. Strangely, it made him more appealing. Maybe she wasn't the only one with some history. She felt relieved. Two divorces was a kind of failure that he must feel deeply. He wasn't perfect after all and he might understand how another person was flawed, how they might have a trunk full of baggage. Yes, she thought, I could live with that. But then she remembered she had a cold blooded killer looking for her. Not exactly the same, she thought, as two benign ex-wives. She wasn't free to fall in love with this man. She knew she should tell him the truth before it was too late. But she remained silent, pushing aside the thoughts.

  Tommy was looking at her now, trying to read whether his past was some kind of stop sign or not. She went on, casually, trying to put him at ease. “Have you dated much since your last divorce?”

  “I don't think I should answer that.”

  She laughed. “Oh, God, how many girlfriends has it been? A dozen? Two dozen?”

  His face was somber. “This is my first serious date since my second divorce.”

  She felt a shot of ice go through her. “That's impossible. I see how the women look at you.”

  He cleared his throat. “Look, I'm not a saint. There have been a few women I've spent time with over the years, so to speak, in a casual way. But they knew the score going in – nothing serious. I learned a lot from my marriages but they were so difficult to get over I haven't wanted to risk getting my heart broken again.” He paused and she could see him weighing whether or not to say it. “Until now.”

  She changed the subject, fast. “Tell me about your marriages. What happened?”

  The first marriage was to Sherri, the piano player in his band when he was just out of college. She was this willow branch of a girl, tall, pale blond, with long fingers that whipped up and down the piano keyboard with such grace that it mesmerized him. But there was this part of her that craved attention from other men. He wanted to extinguish it by making her belong to him and talked her into getting married. It was a mistake to try and cage something that wanted to be free, but he was young, romantic, in love. She had this need to be desired by men as a validation that she was worth something, combined with a compulsive attraction towards older men. All of which made him worried all the time that she would cheat on him. He was suspicious and jealous, never able to relax into the relationship because of it. He was only happy at the end of the night when she was tucked next to him on their lumpy mattress in their cramped apartment. He knew in those moments that she was his for at least the next seven hours.

  One day after his afternoon shift at a coffee house, he came home early. He opened the door, quiet, in case she was napping. Their band played late into the night and she was pale all the time, like she was tired and malnourished. He worried about her and wished he made enough money that she wouldn't have to work at the diner in the mornings as a waitress. For all these reasons he tiptoed over the hallway's musty green carpet to their front door and made sure his keys didn't rattle and twisted the doorknob so it wouldn't make a clicking sound when he closed it. So he didn't actually see them, he heard them. There was a soft moan, one he knew like it was eternally etched into his heart, and the creak of the bedsprings, then the man's voice.

  The voice belonged to their next door neighbor, who was fifty if he was a day. Tommy stood rooted in the doorway, unable to move or think. After a moment he turned and walked out the door, as soundlessly as he entered. He sat in his ‘82 blue Honda Civic, watching the window of their bedroom. After awhile, the curtains moved and he saw her open the window a crack and then move away from view. After a few seconds she stepped back into the frame of the window and looked towards his car. She flinched when she saw him sitting in his car, a small movement illustrating guilt. Then he saw her understand that he knew. She stood in the window for a long moment as if considering what to do next and then she turned, disappearing from sight. A few minutes later the door to the apartment building opened and she came out with his light blue suitcase, her mouth se
t and determined. She walked to his car, opening the passenger door with her long beautiful fingers and then shoved the suitcase onto the floor mat over the coffee stain from her spilled coffee cup months before. She said, “You can get the rest of your stuff later. I'm sorry, but I don't want to be married. I'm too young and the way you are, well, it makes me feel like I'm suffocating.”

  He concluded his story by saying, “It took me eight years before I was willing to try again.

  Lee pushed her plate aside and wiped her mouth with the napkin. “But you did.”

  “I did. Blindly too. Without reserve.” He was twenty-nine the year he met Heather, and thirty when they were married. She was the daughter of a Dallas doctor, a debutant, with an art history degree and a job in a modern art gallery in Nashville. She was spoiled but intelligent, feisty, funny, the life of every party. Her father threw them a huge wedding, the kind that is written about in the society section of the newspaper. He remembered standing in one of the upstairs bedrooms of her parents’palatial Dallas home before the ceremony, wondering if this was the right thing. He was a poor musician, still trying to make it as a singer, and she was the daughter of sophisticated white Texans. Heather's mother watched him and he imagined her calculating how dark their children would be once he broke into their blond, blue-eyed gene pool. He knew she hated him and wondered if that hatred would spill over into their marriage. He worried that one day Heather might wake up and see his dark skin, his depleted bank account and his crazy loud Mexican family as a liability instead of a quirky, interesting novelty. But as he stood that day looking into the garden of her parent's house, he couldn't imagine she could ever change and he married her because he loved her. He quit the band and went back to school to become an EMT. He got a job with the fire department and they decided to try for a baby. They tried and tried, and she did change, with each day that passed without a pregnancy. She got this hard quality, fed by her obsession, taking her temperature twice a day and plotting ovulation, calling him at work to tell him to come home, that it was time to make a baby. Their intimate life became more and more forced and he began to feel depressed and isolated. He spent more time away from their home, away from her, because he could see how she watched him, blaming him for their lack of children. After a year she insisted he get tested and it turned out it was him, just as she suspected. The doctor thought it might have something to do with the pesticides when he was a child, but really they couldn't know why. They had been married for four years and although she said she didn't blame him, it all fell apart after that. They lived together like hostile roommates for another year. He could feel her seething with anger and blame, hating him for who he was, an immigrant's son poisoned by a rich man's orchards. He started going to therapy. He tried to get her to go with him but she wouldn't, saying no one in her family was ever crazy and that she didn't need to be cross examined by some shrink. He tried to explain to her that the therapist wasn't an attorney and that they help you work through issues and it wasn't about being crazy or not. But she was gone, the fun-loving open girl he married. After another year he left. They were divorced six months later. Six months after that she married the young, blond doctor at her father's practice. He heard they had four children now.