But he wasn’t a Judas, a name synonymous with betrayal, a man who took his life outside Jerusalem. It just ended. He moved home to Oregon, and she stayed put.
Story of her dating life. And Sam’s, too, till Kevin. All these years down the line.
A priest walked into a bar, carrying a ceramic duck under his arm. It was late, near closing. He sat next to a woman who doodled on a bar napkin, who didn’t seem to notice him or his duck, which he clunked down on the bar when he ordered a pint from the bartender with the large forehead. He took a long drink. The carbonation made his nose tingle.
The woman, clenching the napkin, turned to the priest. Her eyes gleamed like an icy road at dawn. She said, “Father Tom, did you hear the one about the woman who dated all the apostles?”
The priest sighed. He was tired. His clerical collar was chafing, his socks slipping. The duck, a gift from a parishioner he’d been visiting with for the last four hours, was heavy and cumbersome. “Hi Esther,” he said.
“Hey yourself.”
He heard it then. A hairline crack in her voice. He had spent his life listening, and he knew that universal sound. Injured hearts, broken souls, lost faith. He shook his head. He said, “I haven’t heard that one.”
She peered at him through the dim haze of the Pickaxe. She leaned down and pulled up a sagging white sock, and the priest glanced away from her ample cleavage, the dimpled thigh exposed by a deep slit in her dress. She said, “It isn’t much of a joke, to tell you the truth. No punch line.” She stuffed the ink-covered napkin inside her highball.
The priest nodded, waiting. He had learned that over time: just wait.
She reached out absently and petted the duck, rested her thumb on its beak. She started to talk then, but not about the apostles.
“I used to write poetry,” she said. “It was terrible, but you know, I used to have that impulse. To notice things.” Her head bobbed, and she pulled her shoulders back. “I used to think, No apologies, no regrets. Leave a trail of wreckage, and so what? That was living. But then I never did, you know.”
“Leave a trail of wreckage?”
“Live.”
She pointed at the wadded-up napkin. “I was going to save the world. Who wasn’t? Like it needed my help.” She laughed, but her eyes welled. “That girl, Tom. That kid. In a wash. And Maud.” She stopped.
He folded his hands. “I know it, Esther. It’s awful news.”
“Sam’s gone.” She twisted all her rings, one by one. “And she’s found.”
He looked at the two glasses in front of her, one stuffed with a napkin, the other brimming with brown liquid. “We don’t know it’s her yet. And Sam is still your friend. You’ll still see him. I know you’re sad, Esther, but think how happy he is.”
“He is, isn’t he? I never saw him look quite like he did at the wedding, and I thought I knew him best.” She lifted the glass and sniffed it. She shook her head. “I don’t understand what I’m feeling. I am happy for him. Mostly. But I also feel like I’m going to die of grief. I don’t understand it. I have a wonderful life. It’s astonishing, really, how much I have. Most days, I look around, and I think, This is exactly right. This is my path, and it’s a goddamn good one. At the very least, I’m sitting here. Still here.”
He said, “It’s a big change. How long did he live at the house with you?”
She tilted her head. “Twenty-three years. I was twenty-five when he rolled into town and he was twenty-two. Babies.”
“Long time.” He sighed. Tics of exhaustion pulsed at the back of his eyes, and something else, too, a bright, tight ache of memory, his young past self fumbling with conviction, fumbling with a girl in the dark hallway of a dance hall, her braid in his hand like a rope to safety. Conflicted, he’d fled from his plans for priesthood to the secular life, to pharmacy school, to this town. But he’d returned to his faith. He’d found his way back on his own.
He turned to reflex and said what he always said. “Have faith. Lean on God.”
“Oh, come on, Tom. Give me something I can use.”
He took another swig of beer, and he thought again of that girl. Peppermint breath, pink-tipped fingers clutching his tweed lapels, tracing the crooked scar on his cheek he’d gotten from a childhood dog bite. She came to him on nights like these, when his guard was down, his faith a little frayed at the seams.
He set his glass down hard. “For shit’s sake,” he said. “Why does everyone think I have the answers?”
She smiled. “Isn’t that the deal? Straight line to God?”
He leaned close to her. “Go home, Esther,” he said. “The answers aren’t here.”
She pushed the glass away and raised her hand to the bartender. “A house is not a home, honey.” She nodded at his glass. “At least let me get you one.”
He clenched his hands in his lap. He tried a smile. “All right. Sure. One more.”
The bartender brought the priest a beer and slid the woman a glass of water. She smiled at the bartender, that boy turned man. “Beto Navarro,” she said. “You look great. You look like a million bucks.”
He smiled back. “Thanks. You too. It’s Roberto now.”
The woman said, “Roberto. Yes. Lovely.” She stared at him a moment longer. “You wrote so beautifully. About something in space, yes? I remember a ship sailing across the sky.”
“Yes,” he said. “Once.”
“Yes,” she said. “I remember it was beautiful.”
She turned to the priest and started to talk again. She said something about how she liked to watch sunlight, the way it filtered through dust in a window. She told him about her grandmother, how she wasn’t always so rotten but she’d had a hard life. Lost her daughter, inherited a five-year-old kid out of the blue. She said, “She was a good baker.” She asked, “Do you think she’d be proud of me now?” She told him about Judas’s hands. “Like kielbasas, seriously,” she said. She smiled, and then looked at the far wall, long into the middle distance. Those azalea bushes in her front yard—still there, still blooming like mad every spring. How was that possible? Such fragile blooms—one freeze, and it was sayonara, sweetheart.
The priest let her go on. He checked his watch once, feeling the lead of his limbs, the exhaustion rimming his eyes. He nodded and said “Um-hmm” and “Sure” and “I see,” his smile pinched. He thought of Stevie Prentiss, who’d come into the pharmacy all those years ago with her fake injuries. He’d tried to fix her anyway. He humored her as he humored the woman now because no matter the time of day or place, it was always someone’s dark hour.
She wiped under her eyes and said, “A priest, a rabbi, and a duck walk into a bar. Bartender says, ‘Hey, what is this, a joke?’ ” She laughed and slapped the bar.
The priest said, “Good one.”
She said, “And then he quacked up. No, no, he cried fowl!” She howled with laughter, loud enough that other patrons glanced their way. Then she placed her head down on the bar. Her back heaved, buckling with the force of her sob.
The priest put his hand on her shoulder. “Come on, Esther. Let’s get you home. Time to go home.”
She nodded, slipping off the stool, hiding her face in her hands.
A woman walked out of a bar, crying, holding the elbow of a priest, who left his duck behind. The handsome bartender with the broad forehead watched her go, a tightness in his chest. He remembered the story she’d mentioned, one he’d written in a frenzy at the kitchen table. He remembered how in high school, she would pace at the front of the classroom as if caged. He remembered how she said one of the great questions of literature was about knowledge, about how humans know one another. “Think about it,” she’d said. “Do we really know anyone? How?” She’d leaned over his desk, her face close enough he could see the faint blond fuzz over her lip. “You can’t see my thoughts. You can’t see my heart. My heart is an inferno,” she’d said, thumping her chest, “but how would you know?” The other students had laughed and rolled their eyes, at her o
ver-the-top, vein-in-the-throat passion, at her weirdness—and of course they’d snickered at him frozen in his seat, because people snickered at him then. But he hadn’t laughed. He hadn’t then, and he didn’t now as she slurred and stumbled out with the priest. As she opened the door into the warm night, he squeezed his hands into tight fists and lifted them to his face. Each the size of a heart. Beating. Ablaze.
Traces
June–August 1991
By June the scratched-glass skies in Sycamore seemed larger than oceans. Time, too, stretched wide. Unlike most kids from school, who went to Peck’s Lake with twelve-packs smuggled from the Circle K, Jess, Dani, and Paul spent their days off at a mellow river spot on the Overton property, a clearing under a giant sycamore with a rope swing hanging from one of its large limbs. They started calling themselves the Onlys—a club of only children, but only for the three of them, fuck you very much. They carried an assortment of sandwiches and chips, sodas they cooled in a shallow part of the river. They hauled along a crappy tape deck that sometimes ate their cassettes, making them cuss as they pulled out the shiny entrails and rewound them with pens and pinkies. When they got hot, they grabbed the rope swing, climbed to the top of a small hill, and hurled themselves over the bottle-green water, angling their bodies away from the submerged shin-breaking boulder.
The first time Jess did this, when she let go of the rope, she seemed to fly upward and hang suspended, a moment wholly wild and without name. She learned to leap midair, to slow time by kicking her feet up and arching her back. When she fell and hit the water, smacking the soft skin of her inner arms, the cold stole her breath. She swam with jerky strokes to the muddy shallows, the stones slick under her bare feet. She smelled of fish and moss, minerals and silt, her hair tipped the color of butter.
Dani and Paul would take their towels and sneak into the far end of the trees, and Jess would put on her headphones—it was bad enough to be a third wheel; she for sure didn’t want to hear any of it—and lie down with her eyes closed. The music pulsing in her ears, she would fall into a drowsy state, somewhere on the cusp of sleep, and in those moments, she understood what people meant about the golden haze of youth. Out here, drying off on a towel atop the warm dirt, she didn’t think about the divorce or her dad’s new life or her mom sleeping like the dead or the fast-fading Boy. She stopped worrying about what it meant to exist, about what awaited in the wide, wide world. Wrapped in that languid heat, she stopped thinking altogether. Here, she simply was.
At the orchard, Jess spent her days outside now too. The pecans were no longer the strange pods of earlier spring, with their furry sea-anemone tufts. Now the pods were round and green and soft, protecting the inner shell where the nut formed. Jess had learned from Iris that the outer shell, the husk, was called the pericarp, and the hard inner shell was the endocarp. Prefixes, again: peri, around, endo, internal. She loved learning that. She loved knowing how fierce and tough the pods were, how many layers grew to protect the tiny nut. Her new knowledge brought a rush of pleasure that reminded her of how it felt to skip a stone: a perfect flat rock bouncing across water, defying gravity.
Dani had gotten a job at the HealthCo as a cashier three days a week, and Paul worked with Jess at the orchard, though they were often on their own. Iris put Paul on larger maintenance tasks, such as painting the shed and repairing equipment, and he handled the riding mower and weekly supply runs to Flagstaff. Jess would catch glimpses of him up on a ladder, or in the rows of the orchard, an arm, a leg, a shaggy hank of hair. They’d wave at each other through the trees. Over lunch, they talked about the orchard or college—he wanted to go to Arizona State if he could get a track scholarship, or to California, where Dani wanted to go, though he wasn’t sure about his grades for Stanford. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to study. Journalism, maybe. He liked working on the school paper. Jess told him she hadn’t decided, either—if she even went, which her mother insisted she would. You’re not making my mistake, J-bird.
When Dani didn’t have to work, she’d come and hang out at the orchard with a book, lounging on the deck in a broad straw sun hat. When she could get it to start, she drove her Squareback, its paint the deep blue-green of an aloe vera stalk, its polished chrome bumpers and tire rims reflecting the sky. She gripped the wheel tight, a pillow tucked behind her hips. Driving made her nervous—all those morons out there, racing around, heads up their butts. Fixing up an old car had been her dad’s idea. He thought they’d work on it together, hoping she’d get more comfortable if she knew the car’s mechanics, but it ended up being just him, late at night or when he had time, and really, Mr. Juarez did most of the work at his shop. Her father tinkered, Dani said with a wry shrug. He was a mad genius with Turtle Wax. A car for Dani was matter-of-fact: As long as it worked. As long as it got her from point A to point B.
When Jess rode her bike home alone, the bleeding citrus sky at her back, she couldn’t decide what she envied Dani the most for: her nonchalance about having a car; a father, working on a project for her; a boyfriend who climbed inside with her, heading off together; or the car itself, its goofy, sweet shape, its rattle and hum, its stink of oil and gas. But her envy was brief, a quick sting, like lemon juice on chapped lips.
In mid-June Jess installed a line of irrigation at the orchard. She loved digging the trench, chipping away at the hard-packed dirt with the shovel, the impact sending a jolt into her arms. The only digging she’d done before was in garden pots with her mom or tunneling in the sand at the beach in Mexico. By the end of the day, she had sweated until her shirt and the brim of her canvas hat were soaked through, and she’d drunk a gallon of water straight from a jug. As she wound a garden hose to return to the shed, she could smell the must of dried sweat on her skin. Her stomach growled, and she remembered she’d be on her own for dinner. Her mother was going on a date—with Angie’s dad, Mr. Juarez, with his mop of white hair. When her mom had told her, Jess had hugged her hard, feeling protective, happy, and bereft all at once. But happy, mostly. What if this meant she and Angie could be friends again? (Or, oh my god, sisters!) At the very least, her mom deserved a night out. Jess’s stomach grumbled again. She would make herself a giant pile of egg noodles and butter, eat it straight from the pot.
Jess glanced up to see the Squareback coming up the driveway. She smiled, hefting the coiled hose to her shoulder. Dani must have gotten off work early.
But it was Mr. Newell who climbed out of the driver’s side.
“Hello!” he called to Jess. He wore a long-sleeved oxford shirt and tie and shiny black shoes. A yellow pencil stuck out from behind his right ear. “I’ve brought Dani her car. I’m a little early.”
Jess shook her head. “Dani’s not here. She’s at work today.”
He slapped his forehead. “That’s right. I’m supposed to meet her at the HealthCo. We’re meeting here tomorrow, for dinner with Paul and his mom. It’s been one of those weeks.” He shook his head, knocking loose the pencil, which bounced on the ground. He bent to pick it up and put it in his breast pocket. He smiled at her. “You’re working hard,” he said, nodding at her dirt-streaked clothes, at the hose on her shoulder.
She dusted at her shorts and shirt with her free hand. “I installed a line of irrigation today. All by myself.” The skipping stone feeling again, though this time it was her skidding on the water, sending ripples outward. She remembered her mother teasing her on the day they’d arrived: I had a thought. What if we like it here? She grinned and shrugged.
“That’s great,” Mr. Newell said. “A budding botanist, perhaps. Or horticulturist.”
Jess knew nothing about botany or horticulture; it was as if he’d suggested she become an astronaut. She stuck her thumb inside the metal end of the hose. “Maybe. I’ll have to look into it. Definitely.” She’d hit the encyclopedias when she got home.
“The Syc has a good reputation for agricultural science, actually. Because we’re so rural. But you probably don’t want to stay here.”
&nb
sp; “No,” she said. She thought of Dani’s map and pushpins, still unsure where she wanted to sink her own. “I don’t know yet where.”
“Don’t rush it. That’s the beauty of being young. You have time.” He laughed but looked away, staring at the trees in the orchard. “We tell Dani all the time she should look farther afield, even though she’d get a tuition break here. We want her to see the world. I don’t want her stuck.” He shook his head. “Not that people here see themselves as stuck. They’re not. They have all kinds of reasons for staying. A lot of people love it here.”
“Don’t you?”
“No.” He smiled. “Sometimes I do. I’ve made peace with it, I guess. It’s not easy, to be the spouse of an academic. I showed up here with no role to play. I had to let go of ideas of what my life would be. It’s stable here. Safe. Good for Dani. We’ve made it work. Of course, now she’ll be leaving.” He blinked behind his square glasses and then checked his watch. “Sorry. That was more than you needed to know. Are you done now? Do you need a ride home?”
“I’m good,” she said. “I have my bike.”
“It’s no trouble,” Mr. Newell said. “We can put it in the trunk again and drop you off before I scoot over to pick up Dani. We have time.”
“Oh. Okay, sure.” She put the hose away in the shed, said good-bye to Iris, and wheeled her bike to the car.
Once he loaded it in the hatchback, he held out the keys to her. “Want to drive?”
She grinned. “Really?”
“Sure. Do you know how to drive a stick?”
She nodded. “My mom taught me on hers.”
She slid in behind the wheel, and from the passenger seat he pointed out the gear lever and told her to be careful with the brakes—he had tweaked them for Dani but hadn’t gotten them quite right. He leaned close and turned the key in the ignition, and the engine rumbled to life under her hands and feet. Up close, she could see dark circles under his eyes, a patch of gray hair behind his left ear. The pencil slid out of his shirt pocket and rolled onto the seat.
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