“Of course I’m okay, dear. Haven’t you ever seen a grown woman cry before?” She’s earned these tears. She stands up proudly.
* * *
For lunch, Kenny has reserved a table for them at a large Mexican restaurant on Broadway. Cheerful approximations of southwestern life hang on the ceilings and walls: brightly colored sombreros and ponchos, brilliantly red plastic chili peppers. A waitress, noting Kenny’s cap and gown, congratulates him, then reels off the day’s specials like a train barreling through a tunnel.
Everything seems to happen quickly in New York City. Pedestrians walk quickly; even the squirrels dart around like their tails are on fire.
“It’s not fancy, but I thought the theme would make you feel at home,” Kenny says. “And Jennifer loves southwestern cuisine. She can’t wait to try the real thing.”
So Kenny is planning to bring Jennifer out to Arizona, at least for a visit. “It’s a perfect choice for lunch,” she says. “Best of all, I won’t have to pretend to know how to speak Spanish.”
“Your Spanish is not so bad, Grandma.”
“When I went to buy my new purse”—she lifts it up for them to see—“the salesgirl kept showing me bags made from canvas. She was very pretty but not very good at speaking English. I kept telling her, ‘No, no, I only want to see leather.’ Finally I lost my patience and said, loudly and firmly: ¡Basta! Lo que necesito es de Cuervo.”
Kenny breaks out laughing. “Cuero is leather,” he explains to Jennifer. “My grandmother was announcing that what she needed was some tequila.”
“By then, I did need a shot of tequila.” She takes a gulp of her margarita, delivered already by the waitress. Fast, fast, fast—New York City. The margarita isn’t quite right, though. Ronnie became a real expert at them, mixing them every Friday evening. After Luke died, Ronnie never made a daiquiri again. He understood she’d always associate the taste with life before.
Life before, life after. She’s had a few of those.
“Did you know that tequila can be used in the treatment of colds, irritable bowel syndrome, and even colon cancer?” Kenny says, sipping from his Diet Coke. “Seriously—it’s the cactus it’s made from, the blue agave. It helps deliver medicines to the intestinal tract and can kill toxins.”
“Seriously—we’re going to talk about bowels at the lunch table?” she says, raising her eyebrows at him, taking another sip. It may not be the best margarita ever, but it’s cold, and she hadn’t realized how hot and thirsty she got out there during the ceremony. New York has its own kind of heat.
Kenny looks chastened. “I just thought it was interesting. The Mexicans have used it medicinally for centuries.”
“Kenny just can’t stop practicing medicine,” Jennifer says, smiling. “Even while having lunch. He was born to be a doctor.”
She licks her lips, sweet and salty. “Then why doesn’t he practice?”
Kenny frowns. “I will be practicing medicine, Grandma.”
That’s another thing margaritas can do—make one’s tongue slippery. “Well, whatever you do, I’m sure you’ll do it well.”
She looks around brightly. But Kenny—dear, earnest Kenny—is not going to be put off so easily. She’s stepped right into the den of snakes, and there’s no escaping. It’s almost as though Kenny has been waiting for a chance to talk about this with her. Probably he has. God knows she’s done her best to avoid it.
“My own father,” he says, “last time I saw him, he hit me up for fifty dollars. I was nineteen. I didn’t let him know I’m graduating from medical school today. I’m not sure even where I’d reach him. But Ronnie was always there for me. He always had my back; he was better than a father. Certainly better than my father.”
She really wishes she hadn’t brought this up.
Kenny takes a breath. “I want to give something back. I won’t be able to help Ronnie, but maybe I can help others who have AIDS, in his honor.”
Although she knew it was coming, it hurts, hearing her grandson put it out there like that. She sets her drink down. “Now, hold on just one minute, mister. Your step-grandfather died from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That was the official cause of death. You know that.”
“Yes, but—” Jennifer starts, then stops and fingers a tortilla chip.
She shoves the salsa dip toward her.
“Grandma,” Kenny says.
The waitress returns, balancing three heavy plates on her arms—“Here we are!”—and doles them out, giving her Kenny’s fish and Kenny her steak.
“Here we are, indeed,” she says. She switches the filet of fish for the sizzling strips of sirloin, picks up her knife, and carves into it. Charred on the outside, the inner flesh is pink and tender. Her and Ronnie’s relations, such as they were, always were swift and in the dark. So different from…Oh, my God—Michael. She didn’t know bodies could feel the way he made hers feel; so many years ago, and still, when she closes her eyes, she can almost feel him. But who’s to say her experience with Ronnie wasn’t the more normal one? And they did have relations. It happened.
And yet. The sudden string of illnesses, the cancer. The doctor treating Ronnie didn’t ask her—her, a lady in her sixties—to be tested for HIV for no reason. She’s not an idiot. Something happened, sometime, somewhere behind her back. And it probably didn’t happen with another woman. She knows that. The truth is she knew all along, like it was a pact she and Ronnie had. A pact of silence. Ronnie was different. Patty Ann said so from the start. But she needed him, and, in his way, he needed her. And in the end, they did love each other. Not in the same way as she loved Michael, but in their own way.
She can’t fault him when she willingly signed on for that silence. She’s glad he never told her what he was doing, if he was doing something. If he had, she would have had to leave him. How stupid that would have been. They were happy.
“Your step-grandfather and I were married longer than me and your grandfather. We had a real marriage,” she says. “I don’t appreciate anyone suggesting otherwise, especially not my own grandson. Ronnie was a good man and a good husband.” She gives him that look, the one that over the years has told him there will not be a second piece of cake or another half hour of television. “Kennedy. We’re going to leave this subject now. If Ronnie chose to take something private to his grave, we can give him that much.”
She’s had almost seven years to think about this. Ronnie can lie peacefully in the cemetery in Scottsdale. She’s not going to remember him for something she never knew. She’s going to remember what she did know.
“So Jennifer,” she says, “Kenny says you are from here.”
Jennifer doesn’t miss a beat, just smiles and nods, as though they hadn’t just aired their dirty laundry in front of her. The girl will make a good social worker.
“Right here, in Manhattan.”
“And your father was a dentist.”
“Orthodontist. How’d you know?”
“Hmm,” she says. “Just a lucky guess.”
Jennifer flashes those perfect teeth again. “My parents would love to meet you while you are here. If you can find the time, I mean.”
“Of course,” she says, and smiles back. The conversation about Ronnie is over.
Jennifer swallows a forkful of lettuce. “Kenny told me he doesn’t look like you, but when you smile I see a resemblance.”
“Kenny is tall like his grandpa and has the same hair color as his father. But he looks most like my side of the family.” Those misty mornings in San Francisco so many years ago, her father and brother fishing from the pier while she wandered along the shore looking for clams or saltwort. Many a time, a wave would get the best of her, knocking her down—Papa, she would cry, her mouth full of salty water, her freshly washed and ironed dress ruined, knowing a slap on the rear awaited her at home. Her father and brother would turn to look, and she can see her brother still, fishing line in his hand, grinning down at her. “He looks like his great-uncle Tomas. Or how I think Tom woul
d have looked, had he lived to be a man.”
“That was my grandmother’s brother,” Kenny explains. “He died during World War II, in France.”
“I’m sorry,” Jennifer says.
“A lot of boys died,” she says.
“Well, hello, Aunt Barbara!” And there is Molly, as tall and cheerful as ever, wearing a navy blue tailored suit with leather sneakers, making her way through the restaurant to their table, then bestowing hugs on everyone. “Congratulations, Kenny! Nice to see you again, Jennifer. Ugh, I’m so sorry I couldn’t get out of this deposition any earlier.”
“We started without you,” Kenny says. “Jennifer was famished.”
Jennifer shakes her head and smiles.
It is love between these two. Something tells her she is going to get to know Jennifer much better.
Molly pulls out the fourth chair. “Tell me everything!”
After Molly has ordered, Kenny and Jennifer describe the ceremony step by step, reliving each speech and each stride toward the podium. She interjects “It was wonderful” or “So exciting” every once in a while, and Kenny beams in response. Any earlier disagreement seems to have been forgotten. Molly smiles and nods good-naturedly to everything in between bites of her tacos.
Suddenly Kenny stops talking. He holds up a finger. “Hey, listen. There’s Uncle Francis’s song, in Spanish.”
Wafting over the din of the restaurant: Y sobre los mares ondulados, nos alcanzamos. Y sobre la tierra quemada…
She may never have really mastered Spanish, but she understands each word perfectly: And across the rolling seas, we reach our hands. And across the scorched earth…After all, she’s heard the original enough times in English. And not just on the cassette she’s kept in her car for something like eight years now—for a while, it was impossible to enter the grocery store without hearing it. Or to turn on the television once they used it for that commercial. Funny to think that of all her children, quiet, reclusive Francis would end up being the famous one.
“He seems happy on his farm,” she says. “He and Georgina. I don’t think he’s even interested in making a second album.”
“He never enjoyed performing,” Molly says, shrugging. “He had a tale to tell, and he told it. It wasn’t ever about the money.”
Molly probably knows better than she what goes on with Francis. Always so simpatico, those two, and then Molly became his lawyer. But at least she has a phone number she can call on his birthday now, an address to which she can send a Christmas card or present for little Mia. At least she knows he is safe. For a long time, even after he reappeared, she wondered what she could possibly have done to Francis to make him disappear for so long. One day she realized it was he who’d done something to himself. Things have been easier since.
“How are you, Aunt Barbara? Keeping out of trouble?”
She drinks the last of her margarita. “Why would I want to keep out of trouble?”
Molly laughs. “Have you been to visit Mike recently?”
“Hmm. You know, although Mike is staying on the base now, he’s still working some mighty long hours. And Holly has her ladies’ clubs, and Mike the third’s getting ready for his last year of high school. And the two younger kids—Bradley has football, and Melissa is very involved with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. They’re busy.”
“Aw, not too busy for you, I’m sure. They love when you visit.”
She sets her fork and knife down neatly on the right side of her plate and folds her napkin in her lap. “To tell the truth, Molly, I don’t really like Fort Bliss. I don’t like to be there.”
Kenny and Jennifer exchange glances, swiftly, but not so fast that she doesn’t see them. Apparently Kenny has told his girlfriend everything about everything in their family. Ronnie, Francis, and Luke. Well, never mind. From what she’s observed so far today, they’ll be married once Jennifer graduates.
Molly nods. “And Patty Ann? Do you visit her in LA often?”
“Sometimes.”
“And Sissy? Any plans for her to come home for a visit in the near future? God, I feel as though I haven’t seen her in ages. Maybe a decade! Not since…I don’t know when. What is she now? Thirty-five?”
“Thirty-four.” She’s going to ignore the temptation to say the obvious, the thing that’s on her mind more and more nowadays—if Sissy doesn’t find someone soon, it’ll be too late for her to have a family. By the time she was thirty-four she had four kids already. But Sissy doesn’t seem to have the slightest interest in settling down. Sissy doesn’t seem to have the slightest interest in coming home to live, either. “It’s a far way to travel from Africa, and her job there keeps her very busy. Lots of conflicts to resolve! I don’t see her much myself, either.”
“Well, it’s nice Kenny will be back in Arizona.”
Molly adjusts the shell on a chain around her freckled neck—it looks strikingly like one of those made by Patty Ann, and her diamond solitaire engagement ring and pavé-diamond wedding ring flash a little under the lights of the restaurant. Molly’s husband is also a lawyer, a tall man with a receding hairline and an unexpected sense of humor. Kenny and Jennifer are, she’s pretty sure, holding hands beneath the table. Maybe they’ve interlaced their fingers. Everyone so happily married or happily unmarried or happily soon to be married. Everyone so busy. Back in Scottsdale, two widowers are courting her. It’s nice to get the flowers, but neither of the men actually interests her.
“I’m planning to offer to head the library angels,” she announces. “You know, the volunteer staff at the library.” In fact she had no such plan until this very moment. But as soon as she says it, she knows that’s exactly what she’s going to do once she’s back in Scottsdale. “The woman doing it before has decided to go back to school and get a degree in library science.”
“Have you ever thought about that yourself? I mean, going back to school and getting a college degree? People do it at all ages. That’s what the School of General Studies is at Columbia,” Kenny says.
“Are you going to be a snob, Kenny, now that you have all these fancy degrees behind you?”
Molly nods. “I’d say your grandmother has gotten more than her share of education just by living through this last century.”
Kenny looks mortified. She pats his hand. “Jennifer,” she says. “I just want you to know that Kenny and I don’t usually argue this much.”
“I know,” Jennifer says. “Kenny has had too much cola.”
They all laugh. Jennifer will be a good addition to their family.
She motions to the waitress and pays the bill while Jennifer visits the restroom and Molly and Kenny discuss plans for tomorrow. Molly has invited them all to her house for lunch, with her husband and two little daughters.
“The girls are excited to see you!” Molly says once they are out on Broadway. The sidewalk swarms with other graduates and their families. A speck of dust flies onto her eyelid. She rubs it away, resting her hand against a makeshift table by the curb, piled high with paperbacks. Another table next to it has a selection of sunglasses and sun hats. The man and woman behind the tables are laughing about something. So much life teeming on the streets. New York really isn’t like Scottsdale.
“I packed some prickly-pear jam,” she tells Molly. “I’ll bring it tomorrow.”
“Great! Prickly-pear jam on bagels!” And then her niece has disappeared into a taxi and down the broad avenue.
“Should we find a taxi, too?” Kenny says, taking her arm. The private ceremony is at the Columbia University Medical Center, even farther uptown. “Or brave the subway? The subway is a little faster, and it goes straight there. And cheaper, of course. But it’ll be hot and noisy.”
She smiles up at him. “The subway, obviously.”
Hot, humid air slams them as they descend the subway steps. A piece of newspaper attaches itself to one of her kitten heels. She brushes it off and hurries to board the arriving train close behind Kenny, slipping into a seat across from
him and Jennifer. With a screech, the subway sets off, propelling them uptown under the streets of New York City. Kenny and Jennifer touch hands just briefly. A very young woman next to them fusses with a baby girl in a stroller, all pink baubles in her hair and half-toothed smiles. One of those smiles lands in her direction, and she smiles in return. Her reward is a burble and an even bigger smile. The mother looks up and smiles at her also.
A strange sensation, like she’s hurtling through life itself, comes over her. She sees herself at about Kenny’s age back in Southern California many years ago, Michael alive and well by her side, all the kids asleep in their beds. Everything on earth just as it should be. She could never have imagined life would go so off course, become so complicated. Why can’t life just run like minnows through one’s fingers, moving fast but bright and tickling? Why does it have to be so full of darkness and shadows?
She shakes the thought away.
When she gets home, she will step up to take over the volunteer program at the library, just as she said she would. She’ll introduce some new events, too. Book groups—maybe two, one for adults and one for children. She could find a teenager, someone fun, for the kids and find someone lively for the older group also. She’s not suddenly going to pretend she herself is much of a reader. Luke was the reader in the family, and Sissy is. Patty Ann, when circumstances have allowed it. Michael liked to read, too, especially poetry. That’s how they met, after all—she offered him reading material. And Ronnie! He just tore through magazines: National Geographic, Scientific American. Life, when they still published it. Both Time and Newsweek. She still gets some of the magazines, with his name on the labels. Every two years, she finds herself writing a check to renew the subscriptions.
“Next stop,” Kenny mouths over the roar of the subway.
“Already?”
A cookbook book group, though—that’s something she could do. That would be fun, even. She could choose a different cookbook each month and, at the meeting, members of the group would all bring in something they’d made from it. It wouldn’t have to be just women, either. Lots of men like to cook. They’d probably think it a good way to meet the ladies. But would it be okay to have food in the library? She’d have to—
Shining Sea Page 23