by Liza Nelson
“So does he know you’re looking for him?” the woman named Margie asks. Her freckled redhead’s complexion and loose sloppy ponytail remind Dylan just slightly of Godiva.
“My father does not know I was born,” she answers with more force than she intends. Everyone stops eating and stares at her. In the suddenly tense quiet, the only sound is the tck tck tck of the man at the counter chopping vegetables on a wooden board with machinelike speed. Instinctively, Crescent shifts her sturdy little body into a protective curve against Dylan’s chest.
“Why don’t you eat something first?” Iris passes Dylan a plate of glistening vegetables slashed with grill marks.
“No, thank you. I don’t think I can.”
“Eat.” The man at the chopping block speaks for the first time. It is the kind of low, quiet command you do not argue with. Dylan picks up a miniature carrot.
Iris stiffens slightly and turns toward the counter.
“David, you don’t remember anyone who could be this man, do you?” There is a tentative undercurrent of something Dylan cannot put her finger on, a stickiness she has not heard in Iris before. “You’re the one who’d know if anyone would.”
“Iris Morales O’Neill, you can’t help getting yourself involved, can you?” He is almost chuckling, and Iris blushes. Then Dylan understands: Obviously they are boyfriend and girlfriend. Dylan can see that whatever they are talking about doesn’t have to do with her.
The man turns to smile at Iris, pushing his bottle-thick glasses up on his high creased forehead. He has an old-fashioned handlebar mustache, salt-and-pepper gray like his hair, what little there is of it. The white T-shirt under a stained white buttonless jacket is too tight and shows a soft ridge of fat above the belt of his pants. Dylan finds it a little pathetic how he is trying to look hip, with black high-top sneakers and a turquoise earring dangling from one ear. Why would someone as young and pretty as Iris mess with such a weird old guy? Iris gets up from the table to stand near him. She reminds Dylan of the actress Cher, willowy and exotic. She has to be at least twenty years younger than he is.
“Dylly wants her poppa,” Crescent murmurs in a sleepy singsong.
“David, you’re a jerk, but I forgive you,” Iris says under her breath, almost whispers really, obviously hoping no one else hears. Her gums show pink above her teeth and her lips curl into creases as she tries not to smile too broadly. Dylan knows that feeling.
David shrugs and grins back, cutting his gaze away from Iris just long enough to take Dylan in.
“I’m sorry, kid, I don’t remember anyone named Fierstein.” He cocks his head slightly, whether apologetically or ironically Dylan never decides.
She bites on her lip so hard she tastes blood. His face. There is no cut-and-dry similarity. But she sees something, something an inch past comprehension, half an inch, not quite familiar, a shift of eye and muscle.
“Dylly wants her poppy.” Crescent sings again louder. A sketch, half-remembered, swims up to the shore of conscious thought like a snatch of melody she cannot quite hum. A rough crayon sketch like so many Godiva did over the years, scrapbook after scrapbook Dylan flipped through randomly to entertain herself on rainy days. Faces her mother found interesting in one way or another, some she’d known long and well, others she’d seen once but memorized. Something in the narrow bumped nose, the calm, controlled gaze, the set of the jaw. Sad and knowing.
A steely rod of light shoots up through Dylan’s chest and flames across her horizons.
It is him.
Nineteen
APPROACHING AWARENESS, Dylan hears nearby murmuring, water over smooth pebbles. She opens her eyes to face an endless blue, the pale, pale blue of mid-morning’s horizon across the Gulf from the flat rocks on the Point. Then her head clears and it is a blue wall she sees, and she is lying on a bed, the crisp starchiness of a fresh pillowcase under her cheek, the murmur not running water but conversation somewhere behind her, too far away or low to catch its particulars.
Slowly, deliciously, it comes to her, the fact of where she is. She almost laughs out loud with the pure wondrousness of it all, savoring her anticipation, how when she rolls over she will meet her father’s welcoming arms.
“Dylan, are you all right?”
A woman’s voice. The girlfriend. She has forgotten about Iris. They like each other, she and Iris, so that is something. She starts to sit up, to reach for her father, but her head is heavy on her neck and her arms tingle.
“You really scared us.” Iris touches Dylan’s forehead. “You fainted, you know.”
Dylan does not care about that. Seeing him standing beside Iris, she shakes her head carefully and wills Iris to leave now. Doesn’t she see she is extraneous? But Iris shows no sign of leaving. She keeps chatting and fiddling around with the blankets.
Meanwhile, why doesn’t he say something instead of pulling at his crazy mustache? Dylan tries to read concern into his expression, but he is looking at the bedpost as much as at her. She has to concentrate. He takes a glass off the small table and fills it. For me, she thinks. First food, now drink. He is giving her a sign, that must be it. But why is he so distracted, so distant?
She remembers them all together in the kitchen, what she said, and is mortified. What was she thinking? How could she have been so stupid? No wonder he is upset. To toss out his real name in front of all those people had been dumb, possibly dangerous even. He is on the lam, after all. He cannot risk giving himself away.
What does he call himself now? Dylan reaches back into the welter of names batting around the kitchen—David, David Balboa is how she will think of him from now on. Even this girlfriend Iris probably has no idea about his true identity. Dylan will have to wait until they are alone, that is it.
The water has a mineral taste, but Dylan drinks it down greedily. He has taken off his jacket. His bare arm touches Iris’s at the elbow as if they’ve been folded and cut from paper. Both of them dark and long limbed, they could be brother and sister except he is so much older; father and daughter, then. Iris her sister, that is a spooky thought.
What is he like? Dylan shivers at a quick cold gust of worry that all her fantasies have been just that, fantasies.
“We wondered,” Iris begins slowly, carefully picking up and laying down each word like a precious stone, “about your parents, your mother. If you want us to contact her or something.”
“My mother, Godiva Blue, or Judy Blitch, depending when you knew her, can be a crazy woman,” Dylan begins, watching for a sign of recognition that does not come. Immediately, she wishes she had described Godiva with a more positive adjective. He might remember Godiva differently. “I mean, she’s probably no crazier than most mothers. It’s okay between us. I sent her a postcard and all a few days ago.”
“So she knows where you are?” It is the first time he’s spoken to her directly since she woke up. His tone is colder than she expected. Tears gather in her throat but she wills them away.
“Not exactly.”
“Well, then, you need to let her know.”
“We’ll deal with it later,” Iris breaks in, protecting Dylan again, as if Dylan needed her protection. “Meanwhile, David and I have talked and decided to let you stay here for a few days.”
“Here?”
“Above the restaurant,” he says. “My apartment.”
“They let you live at the restaurant?”
“I own the restaurant.” Dylan could swear he almost smiles.
“You do? Really?” Her father is no longer Henry Fierstein, the fugitive Weatherman, a communist, an anarchist, or whatever he was. He is David Balboa, restaurant owner. A new future begins to spin itself out in her head.
Iris puts an arm around David’s waist and crooks a witchy finger in his belt loop as if she owns him, then clears her throat.
“About Crescent,” she begins.
“Crescent!” Tears of panic rise in her throat. “Where is she? What have you done with her?”
“He
y, your sister’s fine.” David speaks more kindly this time. “She’s eating nacho chips in the bar with Orey.” He has a way of pulling his mustache and winking that reminds Dylan involuntarily of an old Groucho Marx movie she saw once with Godiva. “She’s so busy flirting, she’s forgotten you completely already.”
Dylan begins to sob and cannot stop. The most important day of her life and, though she knows he is kidding, she feels suddenly bereft.
Twenty
IRIS AND DAVID stand in the doorway of David’s study where the girls lie sleeping on a fold-out sofa bed.
“Dylan’s obviously a runaway, poor kid,” Iris whispers, as David turns away. “But the little one, for her mother to palm her off on a stranger, a kid. What kind of monster is she? We’ll need to notify the police.”
“Give them one night,” he says grimly over his shoulder. “Recovery time. They’ll need at least one.”
“Oh sure, one night won’t matter.” Iris follows him down the hall to the bedroom. “I feel bad for Dylan, too, all this way for nothing.” From that first moment in the parking lot, when the half-frozen girl spoke out so proudly, Iris has felt a kinship. “I like her. She has some grit.”
“Like you did at sixteen, maybe.” David pulls her against him in a light half-hug. Iris sighs and leans into him. Apparently David is as willing as she to forget last night, their first serious argument in three months of being together. It came out of nowhere. They’d been sitting in the pantry office at midnight, snacking on the day’s leftovers and flat champagne, a ritual they’ve evolved for when they are feeling particularly tired and close.
“I don’t want a damn restaurant to be the rest of my life,” she’d blurted out half-kidding and then realized she meant it.
“No one’s asking you to.” He laughed, scooping up a spoonful of zabaglione to wave temptingly in front of her. When he touched her bottom lip with the tip of his spoon, a metallic taste, longing and anger in equal overlapping measures, filled her mouth.
“Why not?”
“Iris Morales O’Neill.” He likes to call her by her full name when they make love. “I have traveled alone for a long time, and I doubt I could change now even if I wanted to.”
“Even if.” The strength of her fury brought tears to her eyes. “Which means you do not want to. Well, I never said I wanted you to.”
He did not move to soothe her or seduce her back although she’d have been willing enough for either. He merely sat there, his head tilted back, his mouth gone crooked, as if the sweet cream of the zabaglione were souring on his tongue. She ran out of the room and out of the restaurant, ran the three blocks to her cousin Connie’s, where she spent the rest of the night keeping Connie awake with her pacing. It served Connie right, since she was the one who suggested the job at Los Combientes in the first place when Iris moved back to Velasquez in September. If it weren’t for Connie, Iris would never have met David.
This morning she went through her routine chores at the restaurant without seeing David, wondering nervously just where she stood with him, aware that her outburst had given away how dependent on him she’d become. When he finally made his appearance in the kitchen, they avoided actually speaking, and throughout the busy prep and lunch they circled wary as cats.
Then these girls showed up, and in the general excitement, David and Iris forgot they’d been holding their breath around each other and started to breathe together again. It might only be a respite, not a resolution, but Iris is not ready to push beyond the unspoken understanding of David’s arm around her shoulder, leading her to his bed.
WITHIN THE next twenty-four hours, it is clear to everyone at Los Combientes, whether David chooses to acknowledge it or not, that Dylan has decided David is going to be her father. She does not say the word “father” again, but she watches David constantly. She is filled with questions about his life, where he grew up, where he went to college, where he was in December of 1968 or August of 1969 or May of 1970. He always has an answer, but Dylan keeps asking. She’d make a good lawyer, Iris jokes to David, but privately she finds it painful to witness.
David is clever in deflecting Dylan’s questions, switching the spotlight back on the girl to get her talking. He is trying to weasel out enough information to contact her family and send her home. The first morning, he gets her going on about her mother. For a girl who’s run away, Dylan seems to love and admire her mother greatly. But she catches herself when he pushes too hard. She will not say the name of the town, or even the state where she’s from, although from bits and pieces it is evidently somewhere warm and near water.
“We need to call the police,” Iris keeps insisting, but David wants to wait.
“Just another day or two. Maybe she’ll drop this delusion and decide to go home on her own. Wouldn’t that be better than dragging in the authorities? All that trauma?”
Iris knows the ramifications if they don’t contact legal authorities soon. She has already explained them to David several times. But she understands his hesitation. He’s formed an attachment to the little girl, Crescent, and hates to think what lies in store for her once she leaves Los Combientes. Crescent has no mother waiting. She’ll become a ward of the state, possibly for good. Iris finds his protective concern endearing.
“Maybe you could adopt her,” she suggests, attempting to lighten the issue. “Adopt them both?”
“Do I look like a father?”
“No, but Dylan’s so desperate, she seems willing to take you as a last resort.”
“I’m taken.”
He gives Iris a kiss that surprises her with its intensity, and Iris, stroking his cheek, finds herself bemused that the two girls’ predicament has drawn David closer to her. Whether it is having a problem to solve together, or an awakening of parental instincts, or their helplessness before the kids’ needs, whatever it is, the relationship seems to be turning a corner.
Rather, David seems to be. It’s a corner Iris turned months ago. Barely two weeks after David Balboa hired her last October. The night she stayed after closing time to celebrate the restaurant’s third anniversary. Until then, she’d avoided socializing with the staff, not out of a sense of superiority, although she imagined that’s what the others thought, but because she intuited that she was at risk, because nothing about David Balboa would let her relax.
Everyone was drinking tequila that night. Acutely aware of the symmetry of blue glass and yellow and pale-green rinds on the white linen cloth, Iris was alive to the sexual tension everywhere around her. How Orey the bartender flicked cigarette ash in Manuel’s direction with a short dangerous snap of the wrist. How Rolf and Estelle accidentally touched their glasses at the same instant every time they drank, while Estelle’s husband sitting between them winced. How David’s eyes followed Iris whenever she laughed—she laughed a great deal that night—and how the women, especially Margie, narrowed their smiles in her direction. Sucking a wedge of lemon, Iris speculated briefly and distantly which, if not all these women, had slept with David, but she put the lemon down and let the question float away as she imagined, knew, really, as if it were already memory, the weight of his hand cupping a heel, a shoulder, a breast.
“Free-spirited” Iris, according to her grandfather. “Clever” Iris, according to her high school principal. The first woman in her family, or man for that matter, to attend college, let alone graduate third in her law-school class, only to disappear from Albuquerque on the eve of the bar exam to escape certain emotional entanglements she had decided were suffocating her. That same independent-minded young woman has not been able to avoid the obvious since the first night she made tequila-drenched love in his bed: that she has become totally absorbed in David Balboa and his world.
All along she has recognized an imbalance between them. Even in their most intimate moments, he remains, not remote exactly, more like a room she cannot quite see into all the way. She has to remind herself that no one is completely open or honest, but the shadowy corners she senses in h
im both worry and titillate her. It’s been a turning of the tables. In the past, she was always the one not quite knowable. At the end of previous relationships, the men she was invariably rejecting would accuse her of having pretended the whole time that she was someone she was not. Someone who loved them or might someday, someone pliable and ready for commitment. She’d declare that she never lied. And she hadn’t, not technically. But now, given how she is with David, she admits that what she did with those others was not lie but omit. She had always been herself, but less, holding back in a way she cannot with David. With David she exposes every inch of herself and all her raw hungers.
So she understands that this girl Dylan cannot help herself. It doesn’t matter whether Dylan wants David to be her father for reasons that, as far as Iris can see, make very little sense. Dylan’s desperation is palpable. It makes her claim. Like Iris, she is not about to relinquish David Balboa without a fight.
Twenty-One
THE TRUTH: THINGS are not working out the way Dylan hoped. Once the first opportunity passed, pride has kept her from saying more until her father does. She keeps waiting for a sign from him, but it does not come. She feels sure it will, if she could catch him alone, but he never is alone. When he’s not in the kitchen sorting out the day’s supply of produce with Iris and Manuel, he’s cooking, or he’s working the front rooms, gossiping with stern-faced old ladies and getting his back slapped by heavyset men in cowboy boots and string ties.
The boots remind Dylan of Spider. It is hard to believe that less than two weeks ago she was sitting next to him on a bus in South Carolina, his feet in those smelly socks crossed at the ankles, and the boots stuck halfway under the seat in front. Maybe he was from New Mexico. Wouldn’t that be ironic?
As for her father, or David Balboa as he calls himself now, when he isn’t tied up with the restaurant duties, which is most of the time, he allows that stupid Iris to attach herself to him like a safety pin. Really. Dylan was mistaken to think, when they first met, that Iris would be an ally. She is pretty much the opposite. She cannot keep her hands off David Balboa. It would disgust Dylan even if it didn’t infuriate her, how Iris will not get out of the way. Dylan is positive David Balboa must want to talk to her as much as she wants to talk to him. Why doesn’t he just tell Iris to get lost? The situation would be unbearable, but one thing Dylan has learned since she found the poster three months ago is patience; the other is to keep her own counsel, except perhaps with Crescent. Crescent is so little that she doesn’t count.