And while he’s dog-paddling, Paula reimagines her life with him. Even if she could get remarried, she doesn’t want to. Not again. It isn’t that she doesn’t love Jorge, but sometimes she feels like people aren’t meant to be together forever. Still, she knows theirs would be a good life. They’d keep busy with home improvements and gardening, fishing trips and camping and hiking with Lola. They’d have dinners for Jorge’s kids from his first marriage. There would be barbecues and birthday parties and football games. Graduations, weddings. Grandkids. And she would be tethered here, to these rocks and this sky, for the rest of her life.
When Jorge hauls himself back onto the pier, he opens the box up at last. The look on his face is triumphant, until he sees the look on Paula’s.
“Shit,” he says. “I’ve ruined it.”
“No,” she says. “No, it’s just—you know I can’t.”
He shakes his head. “Don’t you think it’s time you got a divorce?” He holds the box open with both hands, a sacred offering. His hair streams water into his eyes. A puddle forms around his feet.
“It’s not that simple,” she says.
He pulls the ring from the box, slips it onto her finger. “Sure it is,” he says. “We’ll go over Labor Day. We’ll get him to sign the papers.”
When she started dating Jorge, he seemed to be of the impression her husband had denied her a divorce. In truth, she’d never asked. The ring is wet and briefly cold on her finger. She looks at the way light blazes in it when it catches the sun.
* * *
• • •
They barely speak on the ride home. Her ring keeps twisting around so that the stone juts into her middle finger, her pinkie. It’s hard to watch the road; she keeps looking at the diamond.
“Let’s say we went to Michigan,” Paula says. “Let’s say he won’t sign the papers. What then?”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
My daughters, she thinks. But she shakes her head, looking at the ring.
Her husband had been good enough to marry her, to take care of Linda and Paige like they were his own, after her first husband left. When Skyla was born, he paraded her around town like she was heir to the throne. Skyla would be, what? Sixteen now? Which would make Paige nearly thirty, and Linda thirty-two. Almost the same age as Jorge. Oh Lord.
Paula feels her stomach drop, and she realizes she’s going about twenty over the speed limit. Her truck catches air as it crests a hill, and Lola stumbles in the back. The wobble she felt on the way to the reservoir is getting worse. She really needs to balance her tires when she gets home.
“You’re awful quiet,” Jorge says. He reaches over to take her hand, and Paula downshifts unnecessarily. He settles for resting his hand on top of hers. Out of the corner of her eye, she can tell he’s watching her. She takes his hand, gives it a little squeeze, and then adjusts the rearview mirror.
* * *
• • •
The sun slants through the hackberry trees in their yard. From the driveway, Paula can see Jorge along the side of the house, selecting the best pieces of lumber from the pile. Paula’s truck is up on blocks. Even though she’s getting dirt and tire grime on her hands, she still has on the ring. She doesn’t own a jewelry box, and she’s terrified of losing such a small, expensive object.
She knows her truck can wait, that she should help Jorge. She can hear him prying up the old porch. The sun isn’t so low that they can’t still salvage the day. Yet even as she tells herself this, she keeps balancing her tires. She has three of them done when she smells charcoal and lighter fluid. Soon, Jorge comes around the house with a plate for her.
They eat burgers, dry inside and charred on the outside, while sitting on the front steps. Paula tries to eat without tasting.
“I haven’t had a vacation in years, and business has been slow,” Jorge says. “I could probably take two weeks, no problem.”
“I can’t,” Paula says. “Not during peak season.”
“We’ll hire a lawyer, then.”
“We can’t afford that,” Paula says.
Jorge sets down his plate. He breathes audibly through his nose. “So, what? We just carry on like this forever?”
“What’s wrong with this?”
“We’re a little old to be playing house, Paula.”
“Who’s playing?”
“And I want to know you’re not going to run off on me.” As soon as he says it, he looks down at his plate. She leaves her half-eaten burger on the steps and goes back to her truck. Lola barks behind the fence, her nose whistling as she eyes Paula’s plate.
“I didn’t mean it,” Jorge calls after her.
She lifts a tire, heaves it onto the axle.
“At least let me help you,” Jorge says, coming up to the truck.
“I got it.”
“God, Paula. You’re going to throw your back out.”
“It’s my business. Why don’t you go fiddle with the porch?”
He circles around to the other side of the truck and lifts a tire onto its axle.
“Put that one on back,” Paula says. “You got to rotate them.”
He pulls the tire off, rolls it to the back of the truck, and lifts it on.
“Careful not to rock it,” Paula says.
“It’s stable,” Jorge says.
“I don’t want my truck falling.”
“It’s fine,” Jorge says, screwing the lug nuts on.
“Because if you break my daddy’s truck—”
“Jesus, Paula. I don’t give a shit about your truck.” He throws a lug nut into the grass. “I want to marry you. Stop. Talk to me.”
“You really need a piece of paper that says I love you?”
“It’s not—it’s just—no, I’m not saying I need a piece of paper.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m saying, why not make this legit?”
“Because my word isn’t enough?” She’s bent low to the ground, searching for the lug nut Jorge flung. “Because you think I’m just toying with you? How long have we been together?”
“It’s not that—Paula, stop.” He comes up behind her, places a hand on her back. “I want to build a life with you. I want to take care of you.”
“Do I look like I need to be taken care of?” She finally finds the lug nut. She straightens, faces him. He looks little standing before her. His shoulders hunched, his eyes darting away from her face every few seconds. “Because what you’re talking about is just some bureaucratic bullshit. It’s a way for the government to keep tabs on you, to make sure you settle down and take a job and be a good little capitalist. Is that what you want? A desk job? A bigger house? A new truck? Because what’s the point?”
“Marriage isn’t a fucking conspiracy, Paula.”
“We’re not twenty-year-olds with college degrees. We’re not starting a family.”
She turns from him again, finishes screwing on the lug nuts. From the corner of her eye, she can see she’s knocked the wind out of him. Good. Someone needs to bring him back down to earth. She begins jacking her truck down, removing cinder blocks, one corner at a time. Jorge just stands there. Watching her work. He doesn’t offer to help. She can feel him watching. It takes an enormous amount of concentration not to look back over her shoulder, to keep working. When she does glance at him, he keeps standing there, his eyes small and watery red, dark pouches under them like bruises. She should go to him, she knows, she should put her arms around him and apologize. But she can’t bring herself to do it.
“Why don’t you go get me my torque wrench?”
He huffs off to the garage. She can hear him slamming around in there. When he comes back, Paula is jacking down the last corner of her truck.
“It’s not in there,” he says.
“What do you mean it’s not there?”
; “I mean it’s not in there,” he says.
“You used it last week. Didn’t you put it back?”
“Will you wait a moment? Will you talk to me?” He stands behind her. “I want to spend my life with you.”
“Did you put it back or not?”
“I don’t know. It’s not in there.”
“Dammit,” she mutters. She goes into the garage herself. It’s not in the drawer, it’s not on her workbench. She settles for a long socket wrench.
“Marry me,” Jorge says when she comes back.
She tightens the lug nuts by hand as far as she can, then uses the socket wrench. “Because marriage worked so well for you last time?”
“Least I bothered to end it before I walked away.”
“The fuck’s that supposed to mean?” She’s balancing all of her weight on the wrench. Her knuckles are going white, but she keeps tightening.
“Be honest. You don’t want to get divorced, do you?”
“We’re not having this conversation again,” she says, snapping on a hubcap.
“I sent a postcard,” Jorge says. “To your girls.”
“You—what?”
“A couple weeks ago. I sent a postcard. I signed your name.”
Paula can’t even imagine Jorge meeting her family. She doesn’t think they would be inhospitable to him, but she doesn’t know. You never can be entirely sure about people these days. “Where do you get off?”
“It’s crazy that you’ve had no contact.”
Jorge comes around the truck, tries to wrap his arms around her. “I want to know your family, Paula. I want to be a part of their lives.”
“You had no goddamn right.” She wriggles out of his arms.
“I’m your family, too,” he says. “They’re my family by extension.”
“I need to test my tires.”
As she pulls out of the driveway, he calls after her, “Yeah, run away. It’s what you’re good at.”
* * *
• • •
Sunlight flares pink on the canyon walls. The air is already turning cool. A cloud of dust rises in Paula’s rearview mirror. Her tires are still off balance; she could have figured that out just by going around the block. But almost without realizing it, she found herself driving out of town, headed toward the mountains.
Why can’t Jorge be content with the way things are? She secretly believes that their relationship has lasted as long as it has because it hasn’t had to last. There’s no complication, nothing binding them together, so that each day they spend with each other is a choice. She wants to continue choosing him. She wants that freedom. But she knows that if she told him this, it wouldn’t make any sense. Shit, it doesn’t really make sense to her.
The truck bumps and rattles as she drives, and Paula realizes she’s on a seasonal road. When did that happen? The mountain falls sharply to her right, and she can see way out over the valley, all the way back to town. Green patches mark the river and the lawns watered by sprinklers. She imagines those yards, too distant to see clearly, are filled with play sets and bicycles. Her own neighborhood has a lot of young parents, people who don’t seem to want to bother getting to know Paula and Jorge, the only couple without young children. Deep down, she blames those parents for Jorge’s insistence on getting married. When they moved into their neighborhood, Jorge told her he’d always wanted to live in a place where people watered their lawns. Where children played outside. Where neighbors came over to grill out. No doubt Jorge assumed getting married would allow them fuller access to that community.
Paula’s truck pulls to the right, the tire wobble somehow worse now, making her steering wheel jump. Maybe the tire is going flat, or maybe she hadn’t tightened the lug nuts properly. She hopes the road will widen and she can find a good place to pull over, but as she drives, the steering wheel jerks even harder, and before Paula can stop, something gives way and the rear passenger’s side drops, pulling the truck sharply to the right. Paula stomps on the brake pedal, feeling something in her foot crack, a pain shooting up her leg. The cliff edge comes closer, a sheer drop into open air. Her mind stops, the air around her freezes for an instant, and then her heart is pounding in her head, her hands cold and damp on the steering wheel. There’s the sound of crunching gravel and scraping metal. A loud clunk, the rear tire slipping over the cliff. Then the truck plants itself into the ground.
She’s okay. Her truck is stopped, and she’s okay. In front of her she can see the open air, still and blue, the green lawns of her neighborhood in the distance. She wonders briefly whether the noise of her truck was loud enough that Jorge heard it, a distant wail telling him what he had to lose, what she was losing.
Her daughters. She has trained her brain to shy away from the family she left behind, but it occurs to her again that Linda and Paige are grown. They probably have children of their own. They probably have careers. Shit, Skyla would be driving by now; she, too, might have babies, if she’d gotten started as early as Paula had. That was the way with her husband’s family: Jared had his son, Derek, when he was seventeen; his sister, Deb, had her son, Layne, when she was nineteen. She’d had her kids with Steve Brody, too, a guy who’d been fired from every decent-paying job in town. Last Paula knew, Steve was working odd jobs, and although he was good at it, he was still a drunk and a womanizer. A lot of people in town didn’t want him in their houses. By getting knocked up by Steve, Deb had pretty much assured she’d be stuck in River Bend forever. That had shaken Paula.
The day Skyla was born, Paula was out working on her truck. Jared was forever on her case to take it easy, to stick to more domestic tasks, but Paula was never content to play housewife. She needed to be outdoors, needed to feel the sun on her face. She was in the driveway at the farm, the hood of her truck propped open. This truck had been her daddy’s, and she remembered him working on it when she was a teenager. He was a quiet man, like her husband, quiet and stoic as she’d always thought men were supposed to be—men and women, for he demanded she control her emotions, too. She had every intention of keeping his truck running long enough to pass it along to her daughter. Paula stood to the side of the truck, one hand on her aching back as she angled herself to lean inside. Her belly was huge, bigger than she thought possible, and yet she had another month to go.
Paula pulled the dipstick from the oil well. The levels were good. She wiped the dipstick and was hanging the cloth from the hammer loop on her overalls when she felt a kind of pulling inside her belly. It was like a tug-of-war deep in her core, a child’s game that she was losing. When she screwed the cap back on the oil well and lowered the hood, she felt it again, sharper, more urgent. And then she was doubled over, on the ground, her arms wrapped around her belly. Something, someone, was wrenching her baby from her. She knew what was happening, what needed to happen, and she worked herself out of her overalls, then nested on the fabric.
“What on earth are you doing?” Dinah said. Paula’s mother-in-law had ridden up on her tractor, and Paula had been so focused on the pain in her body, she didn’t even register the sound of the engine.
“This baby’s coming,” Paula said.
“Here? Like hell,” Dinah said, and, leaving her tractor in the driveway, hauled Paula up by her armpits and deposited her in the passenger’s seat of the truck. On the ten-minute drive to the hospital, Paula complained the entire time that they wouldn’t make it, and that Dinah was going to be the one to clean the mess out of Paula’s truck. But they did make it, with time to spare; Skyla was born after thirteen hours’ labor.
“Your problem,” Dinah said later, “is that you give up without really trying.”
* * *
• • •
Right now, Paula is okay. She checks herself; nothing broken, nothing bleeding. She’s okay. She clicks the door open and steps out of the truck, and as she places her right foot on the ground, her ankle gives
way. Shit, but it hurts. She sits down on the road, her back against her truck, and rolls up her pant leg. Already her ankle is swollen. She tries moving it; it doesn’t seem broken. Just twisted, maybe. Or fractured. She’s never broken a bone, so she doesn’t know. She pulls her cellphone out and holds it in her hand, and as she moves, her ring catches the sunlight. She doesn’t want to call Jorge, to have him come rescue her. She’s gotten herself into this mess; she should get herself out. She could wait here and hope someone comes by, but it might be days, weeks even, before someone passes on these roads. She could call a tow truck. And how much would that cost?
On hands and knees, she crawls around the back of the truck, hugging it as close as she can without touching it. She doesn’t want to push it over the edge, but she needs to know what went wrong. She has her body contorted around the wheel well, a circus-level balancing act, and she can see that one of her wheel bolts has been sheered off, like a weed plucked from its root. The bolts on either side of it, unable to support the load, have snapped, too. She should have taken the time to find the proper wrench. Or left the job for another day. She knows better than to work angry.
The sun dips behind the mountains, leaving Paula in shadow. She dials Jorge, tells him approximately where she is. After he hangs up, on his way to rescue her—and isn’t that some shit, her needing to be rescued?—she realizes she’s right by the antenna farm at the top of the mountains. She calls him back, to give him this landmark, but her call goes straight to voicemail. He must be up in the mountains already, where their cut-rate phone plan can be a bit dicey.
She waits on the road until the sky grows dark, the first stars piercing the night, until the sliver of a moon rises above the mountains. The land around her seems both crushingly close and infinitely expansive, darkness consuming the trees, the rocks, the road, smoothing the world into a wide expanse of night as soft as old suede. She’s dozing when her phone rings.
“Where are you?” Jorge says. He sounds frantic.
The House of Deep Water Page 6