Night at the Fiestas: Stories

by Kirstin Valdez Quade

  Andrea tightened her hold on Parker’s arm. That’s not true, she wanted to say.

  Matty grabbed the edge of Andrea’s sleeve. “I think we should leave.”

  “Parker, I’m just trying to be nice.”

  “Let’s go, Andrea.” Matty put his arm around her, just as she’d always hoped he would, but she shook him off.

  And then, on the other side of the party, the door of the taco truck swung open and her father descended the steps, wiping his hands on a towel. He looked around, smiling absently, before his gaze snagged on Andrea. Suddenly a dreadful thought occurred to her. If Parker chose, she could have her father fired, all because Andrea came here today. Her blood became very still and very cold.

  He came toward them, smiling quizzically, head tilted. Andrea grinned, bright and tense, waved. She held the grin, looking, no doubt, maniacal, but she didn’t know what else to do. “I’m really sorry,” she told Parker. “This had nothing to do with my dad. He didn’t even know I was coming.”

  Parker looked slapped. “Fuck you, Andrea. I like your dad.”

  “I only wanted—”

  “Just shut up.” Matty’s tone was urgent, and it was this urgency, and the look of embarrassment on his face, that made her understand how far she’d gone.

  Andrea turned on him. “Where do you get off? You said Parker looked easy.”

  Parker’s expression was gratifyingly bruised. “What?”

  Her father sped up. He gripped Matty by the shoulder. “Is he bothering you?” he asked Parker.

  Matty widened his soft eyes in surprise.

  “God, no,” said Parker.

  Salvador searched Andrea’s face. “Is everything okay, mija?”

  Andrea averted her eyes from her father in time to see Parker and Matty exchange a look. She saw them decide to protect her.

  Parker smiled resolutely. “Everything’s fine, Salvador. Your tacos are amazing.”

  Her father wouldn’t be so easily reassured, Andrea knew, though he also wouldn’t argue with Parker. Still, Andrea didn’t stay to find out.

  She turned and ran into the trees. She slowed only when the mariachi music was faint at her back, then walked deeper down the rows. The branches were covered in tight green nectarines, hard and fierce. She ripped one off and threw it at the trunk, but it landed dully in the mulch.

  God, how she’d wanted to get together with Parker for that lunch last summer. How she’d wanted to sit in that kitchen, eating vanilla ice cream topped with blueberries from those fragile green bowls. Feet swinging from the bar stools, she and Parker would marvel at how much they had in common. Astonishing that they hadn’t been closer all these years!

  The real astonishment, when the invitation never came, was how surprised Andrea had been—though of course she should have known. She imagined how it went: William Lowell suggesting lunch and Parker dismissing the suggestion, horrified by the prospect of starting the school year saddled with Andrea.

  “You are the leaders of tomorrow,” the university president had told them in September at their freshman convocation. Even then Andrea had known that he hadn’t meant her. “Look around. Look at yourself. Every one of you has the unique talents that this world is waiting for.” Probably he even believed it. But Andrea knew that whatever she was granted in life would be granted as a result of her wheedling. She’d forever be checking ethnicity boxes, emphasizing her parents’ work: farm laborer, housekeeper. Trying to prove that she was smart enough, committed enough, pleasant enough, to be granted a trial period in their world. Sure, she’d make a success of herself, more or less, but her entire life would be spent gushing about gratitude and indebtedness and writing thank-you notes to alumni and rich benefactors and to the Lowells.

  Andrea cut across the rows, feeling the brush of the leaves against her arms. When she emerged from the orchard, she was at the far edge of the blueberry field. From here, she couldn’t see the party, but the music skimmed over the bushes, the violin’s manic dance softened by distance. The canes were taller than Andrea, and they bobbed in the breeze as if to the music, until, with a flourish of trumpet, the song ended. Brief, tepid applause, then the canes bobbed only for themselves. Her anger was gone now, and her shame, too. Andrea was left with just the sound of the wind in the leaves and a terrible sense of loss. This place had mattered to her, she realized—it still mattered to her—and now it was irretrievable. Never again would she be allowed to return.

  Mr. Lowell hadn’t actually yelled at her that day when she was nine. He’d called out, “Stop! Please stop!” as he jogged down the row toward her. Then he’d slowed and said more gently, as though approaching an escaped and not entirely tame pet, “Hi there, honey.” He’d taken the scratched five-gallon bucket from her hands and thanked her for her help, and he gave her the cold Coke from his lunch cooler, settling her on the tailgate of his truck until her father emerged from the trees.

  Before that, though, before Mr. Lowell found her, Andrea had been alone in the row of Jubilee blueberries, the leaves shining and swaying over her head.

  Seek, pluck, seek, pluck. The percussion of the berries as they dropped into the bucket. The berries firm and warm between her thumb and forefinger, their fragile dusty skin printed from her touch, the sweet burst on her tongue. The scent of the sun and soil and leaves.

  Her head was pleasantly hot and fuzzy with a soft sense of calm and focus, of complete absorption in her task. She was covering the entire bottom of the bucket, a single even layer, and then she’d form the next layer and the next until the entire bucket was filled with that fragrance and sweetness and heft.

  “Jubilee,” she said, the word as mild and sweet as the berry itself. “Jubilee, jubilee, jubilee.” Through the rows, she could hear the indistinct voices of the other pickers and the burble of the irrigation system.

  Now, ten years later, she picked another berry and then another. When her hands were full, she made a hammock of her skirt and filled it, not caring that now she’d never be able to return the dress. She picked and she picked until she forgot there were other people around, and as the leaves rustled and the light scattered over her, she forgot herself, too.

  ORDINARY SINS

  LAST NIGHT CRYSTAL DREAMED SHE WAS SITTING NAKED on the corduroy rectory couch next to Father Paul, who was snipping at her fingers with orange-handled scissors. In the dream she was holding a prayer card on which was printed, in place of a saint, a still from her sonogram. She felt stinging cuts on her knuckles and in the webbing between her fingers, saw the warm blood running down her wrists and beading on the laminated surface of the card, but she neither cried for help nor tried to get away; she was pinned to the couch by her pregnant belly.

  If the dream hadn’t been so unsettling, it might have been almost comical, Crystal thought now, Monday morning, as she updated the calendar of events for Our Lady of Seven Sorrows: Father Paul, so benign and solicitous and eager for approval in waking life, starring as the villain in her dream. She glanced down at her fingers typing, intact. If she were to tell Father Paul about her dream—though she wouldn’t tell him anything about her life ever again—he’d be concerned and apologetic, as if it weren’t Crystal’s own warped brain that had cast him in the scene. Even the thought of his concern irritated her. Any minute, Father Paul would walk into the office, and when he did, she’d smile as if everything were just fine, as if their conversation on Friday had never happened.

  Impressive, how efficiently her subconscious tallied, dismantled, and blended together her sins, molding them all into a tidy and disturbing little narrative as persistent and irksome as pine sap. First, on Friday, she’d been rude to Father Paul. Then, on Saturday, she’d gone to a party at a condo in a new development west of town with friends from Santa Fe High and had spent the evening sipping from other people’s drinks. That was bad enough. But she’d also left with someone, a friend of a friend, ridden back to his apartment in his truck, knowing full well that he was drunk but not feeling an ounce o
f concern for the babies or for herself. “I’ve never fucked a pregnant girl,” the guy had said softly, watching from the bed in his filthy bedroom as she pulled down her maternity jeans. He’d been cautious and attentive, and for as long as it lasted Crystal had felt deeply sexy and, for the first time in seven months, unburdened.

  Only at dawn, once she’d slipped out into the chill and was waiting for a cab on an unfamiliar street in a tired, trucks-on-blocks kind of neighborhood, did it occur to her to worry about the babies, that they’d been squished or knocked about, polluted by his fluids. And Crystal might have been murdered, too—strangled, shot, beaten beyond recognition. Wasn’t murder the leading cause of death for pregnant women?

  With a pang of dismay, she thought of her last checkup. She’d been given a 3-D ultrasound, the latest in prenatal imaging, the technician told her, which they were offering free because they were still training on the machine. The images were terrifying and unreal: boy and girl, fists and ears and pursed lips, bent legs stringy with tendons, alien eyes swollen shut. Everything looked yellow and cold and shiny, as if dipped in wax. “Say hello to your cuties,” the technician had said, and Crystal had watched in silence as they pulsed on the screen.

  But today the babies seemed great, kicking up a storm, and she hadn’t been murdered. Saturday had been nothing more than a last hurrah, Crystal reminded herself, a harmless attempt to pretend that her life was still her own, whatever Father Paul or her mother might say. Looked at another way, the dream was even reassuring: at least Crystal felt guilt. At least she might think twice next time. Yes, everything was fine, and it was even nice to be back at work, away from her weekend and her nightmare, in the close clutter of the parish office, where the day was predictable, the tasks manageable—where, in theory at any rate, earnest, hopeful work was taking place all around her.

  Meanwhile, the real Father Paul was late yet again, this time for his eight o’clock premarital-counseling appointment. A young couple sat on the couch facing Collette’s desk. The man plucked at one of his sideburns with sullen impatience; the girl sat upright and glanced nervously at him. Every few minutes, Collette looked up from folding the weekly bulletins and glared at them.

  From her desk in the corner, Crystal sipped her Diet Coke and watched. Collette’s bad temper was democratic in its reach and, when it wasn’t directed at Crystal, could be very entertaining. Once, when they were alone in the office, Collette had startled her by pausing at her desk and saying, darkly, that Crystal was an example to young women, choosing life. For a moment Crystal had seen herself as Collette might: a tragic figure, a fallen woman, but, when it came down to it, contrite and virtuous, taking responsibility for her mistake. But then Collette had elaborated: “If girls are going to run around like that, they should pay.”

  The young man opened his cell phone, then snapped it shut. “Eight fifty-seven,” he said. “Jesus. I got work to do.”

  “He’ll be here,” the girl said. She looked at Crystal and gave her a miserable, apologetic smile. She’d dressed for the appointment: black pants tight around the thighs, shirt made of a cheap stretchy satin. Her hair was down, sprayed into crispy waves around her face. A gold cross hung from her neck. Crystal imagined she’d dug it out so that Father Paul would think she was a virgin, which was what Crystal herself had done when she took the job two years ago.

  Since the arrival of Father Leon, the young Nigerian priest, three months before, Father Paul had been sleeping past his alarm. Crystal enjoyed the thought of the priests chattering away late into the night like girls at a sleepover—but the idea of humorless, aloof Father Leon saying anything that wasn’t strictly necessary defied imagination. Sometimes, to amuse herself, Crystal experimented by greeting him with wide-ranging degrees of enthusiasm, but Father Leon gave her the same solemn nod every time.

  More likely, Father Paul stayed up late reading. In the afternoons Crystal cleaned the rectory, and Father Paul’s study, with its crowded, dusty shelves and uneven stacks of books, was the most difficult of her jobs. Or it would have been, if she’d ever done it properly. Usually she swiped her paper towel along the edge of the shelves and vacuumed around the papers and wool cardigans and scattered shoes and books. Church histories, Pacific naval battles, CIA conspiracies. If she mentioned his books—how many he had or how busy they must keep him—Father Paul generally cracked some mild self-deprecating joke and changed the subject to television, as if out of consideration for Crystal. He loved crime shows, the same ones Crystal occasionally watched at night, in which naked young women showed up dead in hotel bathrooms. “My guilty pleasure,” Father Paul said, shrugging good-naturedly.

  Crystal didn’t like thinking about a priest’s guilty pleasures. But, actually, she couldn’t see Father Paul being truly guilty of anything. Even the crime shows were part of an act, she suspected, to prove that he was a little naughty. Human. During Lent he’d made a big show of sneaking handfuls of M&M’s from the glass bowl on Collette’s desk, the woman’s one concession to office niceties.

  “Oh, you know me,” Father Paul would say, jiggling the candy in his palm before tossing back a mouthful, and Crystal would smile gamely.

  “Guess he has to have something,” Collette said once after Father Paul left. “These alcoholics never get any better, just switch one thing for another. He better watch it.”

  Crystal had rolled her eyes. Twenty-eight years clean, Father Paul had announced last month, on his anniversary, and his air of celebration had seemed just as overblown as Collette’s cynicism.

  Father Paul would, as always, feel terrible about being late for the couple’s appointment. He’d take off his glasses and press his thumbs into his eyes, and his lapse would probably show up in his homily, as his lapses always did. His sins were so vanilla that you almost had to wonder whether he committed them just to have something to talk about on Sundays. Even his alcoholism and his journey to recovery had been wrung of any possible drama by how thoroughly and publicly he had examined them. In the next several days he’d repeatedly bring up this morning’s tardiness, and Crystal would have to tell him each time that it was an honest mistake, that everyone makes mistakes.

  The young man bounced his leg, and the heavy heel of his work boot thumped. Finally, he stood. He planted his fists on the cluttered edge of Collette’s desk and leaned in. “I’m not waiting around all day.”

  His fiancée widened her eyes. But, if he meant to intimidate, he’d picked the wrong person. Collette had worked in the parish office for years. Her tasks were menial and few, but she sat at her desk all day like a toad, grumbling in Spanish as she opened offertory envelopes and pasted labels. Though her desk was closest to the door, she did not greet people when they came in. If spoken to, she sighed, set down whatever she was working on, and looked so put-upon that, more often than not, people made hasty apologies and turned to Crystal for what they needed.

  Collette jerked her porous, wrinkled chin at the young man. “You got things to do? So get away with you, then.”

  When he looked at her in surprise, Collette held his gaze. “I mean it. Get out. We don’t want you here.”

  The man stepped back, glanced uncertainly at the door, then at Crystal.

  “Please,” the girl said, eyes filling, voice tragic. “We have to meet Father Paul. We’re not even done with the premarital questionnaire. The wedding’s on Saturday!”

  Collette turned to Crystal. “Go find him.”

  Crystal fixed her eyes on the screen and clattered away at the keyboard. “Actually, I’m in the middle of something.”

  “And if he’s not there, bring that Father Leon.” Collette snorted, as she always did when mentioning the new priest.

  The girl’s face registered dismay, because Father Paul was beloved and Father Leon was not, but what could you do? A priest was a priest, even if he was just a pastoral vicar newly arrived from Africa, and you had to act grateful.

  Now Collette said, “It’ll do that man good to socialize him. Y
ou hear me, Crystal? Go on.”

  Crystal pushed herself up from her desk, tugging her shirt over her belly. “Fine.”

  THE JOB WAS SUPPOSED to have been temporary, a pause before college, but here she still was, needing the money more than ever. When Crystal first started showing, she worried that she might have to leave, but to her relief her pregnancy had elicited surprisingly positive reactions, Collette notwithstanding. The ladies in the Altar Society had given her an array of miniature garments in pink and blue. Her mother, usually so needy and resentful, was pleased that Crystal had given up her apartment and moved back home. She talked incessantly about the babies, prepared plates of protein- and calcium-rich foods, loudly beseeched God to keep them healthy. Crystal was grateful—she was—but still hated that her mother had to be involved. “Where were you, staying out all hours?” her mother asked when Crystal got home Sunday morning. “You know better. And me home alone waiting.”

  But no one was as sympathetic as Father Paul. Perhaps because she was young and pregnant or because she cleaned the rectory, he was always reaching out, thanking Crystal for her hard work, taking an interest. “Anytime you need an ear or a hand,” he’d say as she Windexed the patio doors. He seemed eager for her good opinion, seemed to want her to confide in him.

  Once she had admitted that the babies’ father was out of the picture, though she hadn’t revealed how little she’d known him—another hookup, another party. She hadn’t revealed that whenever she was out, at the mall or the grocery store, she found herself looking more closely at a certain type of man—short, built, sandy-haired—despite the fact that he hadn’t even been from Santa Fe, had been visiting from California. She hadn’t revealed how often she wondered what traits in her children would bring the blurry, drunken memory of him more sharply into focus.

  “I’m so sorry,” Father Paul had said, his eyes soft and his voice rich with empathy. Then, after a moment, “You know, the sacrament of Reconciliation is such a gift.”