by Don Lee
They didn’t see much of each other over the next few days, Étienne working overtime, Jeanette preparing for the El Comité protests. Finally, the first of the five days of rallies arrived, and Jeanette joined about ten other picketers in front of the Burger King on Main Street, holding up signs that read BURGER KING PIMPS FOR GRAND MET! SUPPORT WORKERS OF GREEN GIANT!
Étienne had promised to picket with her during his lunch break, but by two o’clock, he had yet to show up. Jeanette called Central Coast Legal from a pay phone. When she identified herself and asked for Étienne, the receptionist said, “Oh, oh,” and warbled out what sounded like a sob. She abruptly put Jeanette on hold. She waited at least five minutes, a Spanish-language radio station playing on the line. At last, she heard, “Jeanette, it is Mikhail. Jeanette, I am so sorry. Jeanette, I have terrible news for you.”
Étienne had been on his way to the courthouse to drop off some filings. He had tried to run a yellow light in his Alfa Romeo Spider, was too late, and had been broadsided by a flatbed truck. He hadn’t been wearing his seat belt and was thrown from the car, and had died before the EMTs could reach him.
Somehow Jeanette ended up in her bunk bed in the boardinghouse—she didn’t remember how. She only remembered keeling to the ground beside the pay phone. She stayed in bed, weeping, until the next morning, when she was able to gather herself enough to call Mikhail again. She needed to see Étienne. It seemed urgent and important, seeing him one last time. Mikhail told her that Étienne’s body was being held at the county coroner’s office, but since Jeanette wasn’t related to him, she wouldn’t be permitted inside. They would be transferring him to a funeral home soon, Mikhail said, and his parents were arriving the day after next from Brussels. They intended to fly his body home to Canada for burial.
His parents. Jeanette had not thought of his parents. Surely they would want to meet her, and learn that she was pregnant with Étienne’s child, that a part of him was living inside her. It would provide some consolation for them during this awful week, and later it’d give them joy, welcoming a grandchild and Jeanette into their lives.
For some reason, maybe the mania of mourning, Jeanette felt it paramount to buy a dress—or two dresses—before Étienne’s parents arrived. She didn’t think it right to meet them in her vintage hippie-dippy clothes. She needed to get something more reserved, dignified, grown-up. And she would need a black dress, too, for without question, his parents would ask Jeanette to attend the funeral.
The next morning, she went to Target, and as she was combing through the clearance racks, a teenage girl approached her. “Hey, you’re Jeanette, aren’t you?” she asked. “I’m Elizabeth. I used to volunteer at Central Coast. Do you remember me?”
She was wearing a black crochet tank top that exposed her bra underneath. Her midriff was bared. She had denim cutoff shorts with a thick silver-studded belt riding her hips. A pendant of a tribal god hung from a leather string between her breasts. She was brunette, with dark red lipstick and eyebrows plucked in straight narrow lines. She wasn’t exactly pretty—a pug nose and a downturned mouth marred what could have been a cute face—but she was undeniably sexy. Jeanette remembered her occasionally sitting at the receptionist’s desk.
“I saw you on the street and followed you in here,” the girl said. “I heard about Étienne. You were going out with him, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” Jeanette said, expecting words of commiseration—words she had already heard in the last two days from Mikhail, from Yolanda and Lauro and other members of El Comité and Local 912, from the manager of the boardinghouse and the girls who were rooming there, words that did nothing for her, that could not alleviate her grief or heartache the slightest bit and probably never would.
“I think I should tell you something,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve been going back and forth about it, whether to tell you, but decided if it was me, I’d want to know. You won’t believe this now, but I think it’ll help you down the road—help you get over things.”
She told Jeanette that throughout the summer, she had been having sex with Étienne. They had first met when he came down to Watsonville in April for the redistricting, and he’d sent her the same type of long, impassioned letters he had mailed to Jeanette—they might have been identical letters, copied and pasted. He’d seduced another receptionist, too—another high school student. Once Elizabeth found out, she had quit volunteering there. She hadn’t known that he was seeing Jeanette until last month. The other 1L intern, Mikhail, was a dog, too, Elizabeth said. He’d hit on her more than once, knowing full well she was sleeping with Étienne. Mikhail told her that Étienne had never wanted to come to Watsonville for the summer. He had wanted to go biglaw in New York, working at a corporate firm, but he had been in trouble at Boalt, brought before the dean on suspicion of cheating. Nothing could be proven, but the allegation had blown his chances for a prestigious internship.
Jeanette found Mikhail across the street from Central Coast Legal Aid, sitting in the diner where she and Étienne had first eaten lunch.
“Is it true?” Jeanette asked him. “Is it true?”
He looked frightened, rooted in his chair. They had spoken four times on the phone in the past three days but had not seen each other until now. “Yes, I am afraid it is true. Étienne has passed.”
“What?”
“He is gone from us, Jeanette. You must try to reconcile with this reality.”
It seemed he thought she was in a dissociative fugue, unable to accept Étienne’s death. “No, is what Elizabeth said true?”
“Who is Elizabeth?”
“The high school girl,” Jeanette said. “The receptionist. Was Étienne sleeping with her?”
“What are you talking about?” Mikhail asked.
“She said you were just as bad. What about the other girl? What about Étienne almost getting kicked out of Boalt? Is it all true?”
“What? Jeanette, whatever those girls told you is a fabrication. That girl, Elizabeth, she is crazy. She is being vindictive because Étienne got her fired. I know you are not thinking right. You are in grief, in shock. But Étienne is not even in his grave yet. Could we give him a modicum of respect and mourn his passing before questioning his honor?”
Not knowing was what would haunt Jeanette. She would never be able to find out for sure what was true. She believed Elizabeth at first, believed that Étienne had betrayed her. All of his talk about integrity, justice, becoming a human rights activist, had been bullshit. He had been no crusader. He had been a fraud, a phony. And of course Mikhail would defend his buddy, and lie.
But then, later, Jeanette would wonder: perhaps it was Elizabeth who had been lying, seeking revenge for being fired, as Mikhail said, and Jeanette had made a mistake. If only Étienne had let a courier take the court papers instead of going himself; if only he had joined the protest at Burger King earlier; if only he had braked and not accelerated at the light—he would still be alive. He could have explained. He could have refuted everything. Or confessed. If he had been contrite, pleaded for forgiveness, they might have been able to work things out. They might still be together, traveling the globe. They might have gotten married. She might have kept Étienne’s child, who’d be twenty years old now.
Then again, maybe not. He had wanted her to get an abortion, after all. Maybe to him it had just been another dalli ance, and it would have ended in another week. Jeanette might have been wounded and inconsolable for a while, but eventually would have moved on, just like all the other women who seemed able to forget their first loves, their first betrayals.
After talking to Mikhail in the diner, Jeanette had gone to Clínica Paloma and waited two hours for a doctor to give her an abortion, then had left Watsonville that evening. For a long time, she obsessed about the fetus she had aborted. She wanted to know what they did with the remains. Was the tissue buried? Incinerated? Or simply dumped in a landfill as medical waste, considered no different than soiled dressings, used syringes, and bloodied
gloves?
She called Central Coast Legal Aid once, several years ago. She wanted to get in touch with Elizabeth and Mikhail. She thought maybe now, after all this time, if she could contact them, they’d be more forthcoming, and she could at last arrive at the truth, know one way or the other if Étienne had cheated on her, and if he had ever truly loved her. But she didn’t know their last names or anything else about them, not nearly enough information to track them down, and, anyway, the archive for the legal clinic, she was told, had been destroyed in a fire a decade before.
Jeanette and Joe walked back to her car at the Golden Gate National Cemetery. Mike and Patsy had cut the picnic lunch relatively short. They had a long drive back to Modesto and were hoping to beat the holiday traffic.
As they were loading her trunk, Joe said to Jeanette, “You’re not going to call Yadin?”
“Why?” Her cellphone had been on mute when Yadin had left his voicemails and texts, saying he was hurrying to the cemetery. She chose not to reply. She hadn’t mentioned the messages to her father, and didn’t feel like doing so now.
Joe took off his suit jacket, and Jeanette noticed his white shirt had yellowed sweat stains in the armpits. “You should tell him we’re leaving,” he said. “He might be on his way here.”
“You said fat chance.”
“Still.”
She ignored her father. She had been worried about Yadin, worried he might be stranded somewhere on the highway, waiting for a tow, but once she knew that he was all right, she felt inexplicably angry with him, and wanted to punish him a little. She was irked that he hadn’t listened to her about the van, the noises it was making. It had been irresponsible of him. He’d let her down by not coming today, helping her deal with her aunt and uncle. Mainly, she wasn’t willing to dismiss Franklin’s suspicions so quickly anymore. Maybe Yadin was lying to her. He was hiding something, she was almost certain. A secret. She thought he should be the one to keep trying to call her, appease her, grovel, not the other way around.
She took her father back to Rosarita Bay, and from the Longfellow Elementary School parking lot, Joe hustled home in his van to watch the Giants on TV—an away game in St. Louis. Jeanette went to her bungalow to soak in a bath, change, and get the groceries from her refrigerator, and by the time she reached her father’s house, the game was in its final innings.
While Joe showered and napped, Jeanette prepared dinners for her father to microwave during the week. She always did this on Monday (every other Thursday, she cleaned the house for him). She assembled meals that her mother had made for the family: curry rice, breaded pork cutlets, thinly sliced barbecued beef, stir-fried noodles, and ginger pork. Jeanette had all of Jo’s original recipes, which her mother had typed neatly on index cards, sometimes annotating them by hand (“only 1 tsp sugar,” “touch more soy”). Jo had been a very serviceable cook, and she’d inspired Jeremy to become a chef. He made copies of the recipes, and then later enhanced them with French and Italian techniques he’d learned in culinary school.
His plan had been to open a restaurant specializing in haute stoner cuisine, with everything locally sourced, farm to table, his dishes imparting umami—a savory flavor—which was the last of the five tastes, rounding out salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. In some cultures, there was a sixth taste, piquant, and Jeremy wanted to infuse that into his menu, too, along with the option of having a fried egg on every item.
When he was released from Lompoc, Jeremy worked for their father for several years, learning to lay carpet for Wall to Wall. At one point, he considered starting a food truck, and he applied for a vendor permit and a business license in Rosarita Bay, yet was denied both. The applications required a criminal background check, and conspiracy to distribute drugs was regarded as a crime of moral turpitude.
For dinner tonight, Jeanette made teriyaki chicken thighs with sides of rice, broiled eggplant, and vinegared cucumber. She wished her father would at least attempt to learn how to cook for himself. Everything was spelled out in the recipes, and she offered time and again to go through them with him, but he always turned her down. When he ran out of the meals she’d stocked in Tupperware containers, he resorted to salami and cream cheese sandwiches. She wondered what he would do if she ever left town, how he’d manage without her attending to his every need. She supposed he would just microwave store-bought frozen dinners, like she did.
At the dining table, her father popped open another Anchor Steam. He was working on his second six-pack of the day. Not a good sign. On the other hand, Jeanette was drinking her third glass of wine.
“Here,” he said, sliding a check to her. He always asked Jeanette to have the clerks at Costco ring up his items separately so he would know the exact amount to reimburse her.
He cut up a piece of chicken and chewed it, sampled each of the sides. “Good,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Why didn’t you make this for the picnic?” Joe asked. “Maybe with wings? I thought you were going to bring something.”
“Didn’t have time.”
“I guess they had enough of a spread there.”
“Why was it so important to you for me to go today?” she asked. “They wouldn’t have missed me.”
“You can’t let bygones?” Joe said, his mouth full.
She disliked when her father talked without swallowing first—a habit of his. “Some things can never be bygone,” she said. “Mom would be disappointed if I ever let it be bygone.”
“You go to a church now. You’re the president of it.”
“There’s no comparison. I’m still an atheist.”
“Family’s important,” Joe told her. “It’s the most important thing in life.”
If he truly believed that, Jeanette thought, then why was he, for all intents and purposes, estranged from his only son? “They’re virtual strangers to me,” she said. “Might as well be to you, too. You never see them.”
“He’s my brother. He’ll always be my brother, and this twentieth anniversary was a big deal to him.”
They finished eating, and Joe helped her clear the table. As she was washing the dishes, she noticed that the edge of Joe’s plate was chipped. The dish was a thin square, very delicate. It was made from clay that had been rolled into a slab and then hand-shaped and glazed with bright colors in an abstract pattern of dots and triangles. The set of plates and bowls was the last ceramics project her mother had completed.
For much of her married life, Jo had had a part-time job at the Moonside Trading Post, a gallery and gift shop that was also, for a while, a video store. The shop went through many iterations, remarkable only for the dependable mediocrity of the artwork and wares for sale. At one point, Jo had said, “I could do better myself.” She began taking art classes at SVCC, first in drawing and painting, then in crafts, experimenting with various mediums, going from batik to decoupage to ceramics. Eventually the trading post put some of her work on display, and they sold respectably. She loved when tourists would point to one of her pieces and ask, “Who’s the artist?”
Much of her artwork was still in the house, though not her personal effects. It had been gut-wrenching, sorting through her clothes, jewelry, and other possessions after she’d died. Joe and Jeanette could not stop crying. “You want this?” he would ask her, sobbing, as they cleared out Jo’s drawers. “You should take this. It’s still good.”
She grabbed her father’s white shirt from his bedroom and went into the den, where Joe was watching the MLB Network, catching up on highlights of other games.
“What are you doing with my shirt?” he asked. At least he usually did his own laundry, and even his own ironing.
“I’m going to take it home and try to get rid of these stains.” She had several reliable methods—aspirin, hydrogen peroxide, vodka.
“I wonder if Alberto VO5 would work,” Joe said. “I still have an old tube.”
She laughed.
“What?”
“You ready?”
Joe aimed his remote at the TV and turned it off, stood up slowly from his Barcalounger, and followed Jeanette across the hall into the bathroom, where she had set up one of the dining chairs for his haircut. The bathroom had a tiled floor, which made it easier for her afterward to sweep, vacuum, and lint-roll his shorn hair.
Once her father was seated, she wrapped a sheet around his neck. After cinching the sheet with a clothespin, she plugged in the clippers, attached a #2 guide comb, and began at the nape.
Joe, his head bent forward, asked, “How’re you and Yadin doing?”
She heard an echo of Franklin’s query from the other night. Why was everyone asking? It was particularly odd coming from Joe. He never inquired about their relationship. “Good,” she said.
“Yeah?” her father said. “It was weird to me, the whole thing today about not calling. You guys don’t seem to talk a lot for a couple, or even see each other much.”
“We’re both busy. We work a lot. We have our own lives, and that suits us just fine.”
The thing was, she liked being alone. After living at home for so long, she had relished being alone, having her own place, the bungalow she had made beautiful. She had been fully absorbed with the church and working at city hall and decorating her little house, going to thrift stores and yard sales, crafting ornaments and knickknacks. The few times she had let Yadin spend the night, she had felt as if she were being crushed on the bed, not having space or air. As much as she tried, she couldn’t get rid of that sensation—being suffocated by him.