Rust

by Julie Mars

  “Too late. We’re already involved.” He watched her grip on the wheel tighten noticeably. “But I can keep my hands off you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Obviously, that was what she was worried about. Yet his words, which should have calmed her, didn’t. Perhaps she wanted to protest the ease with which he said them, though that would hardly be wise.

  “Much as I might not want to,” he added. He had turned his head toward her, and when she glanced at him he saw the crescent moon, which was just rising over the top of the Sandias in the distance, reflected in her eyes.

  1990

  THERE IS something else between the pages of the book of short stories. It is Vincent’s most precious possession: a photobooth strip of Regina, his wife, and Margaret, their daughter. Margaret is only three years old in the picture. She is like a miniature Regina with her black hair and her green eyes, though they don’t show green, either of theirs, in the series of four pictures.

  The images have faded, but Vincent keeps them alive in his mind.

  After all the years here, where everything he knew has disappeared and his life is one that he could never have imagined and still can’t though he lives it every day, he still dreams of Margaret and Regina, still holds them in his arms each night, still begs God to keep them safe.

  Still loves them until it hurts.

  WHEN RICO pulled into his own driveway, he saw that the lights were still on in his mother’s casita, and he walked back there before he even checked in at his own house. As he approached her door, he heard the television, some crime show, no doubt. Elena liked to listen to the voices, though she could not see the faces of the actors with any clarity. She also missed the clues and the significant glances that were exchanged between pretty female cops with cleavage, not to mention the closeups of bloody corpses and the constant shots of autopsies in progress.

  “Hola, Elena, mi madre,” Rico called as he came in the kitchen door.

  “Hola, Rico,” she answered, not getting up. She was sitting on her old flowered couch, a cup of tea in her lap and her feet up on the coffee table. “You’re home late.”

  “Sí,” he said. “I’m going to heat up this water and make myself some tea and sit down with you for awhile.” The old Pyrex pot was still warm to the touch as he lit a match and turned on the gas. A box of Sleepytime tea was on the counter, and he opened it and dropped a teabag into a cup that was inscribed with the words “World’s Best Grandmother,” a gift from Lucy, he knew. He found the sugar bowl on the table and got a quart of milk out of the fridge in preparation.

  Waiting for water to boil was a chore that Rico found agreeable, especially when the water was in his mother’s old glass pot. He liked the way the blue flame from the gas stove was visible, spread out like thin watercolor paint on the bottom of the pot. He liked the moment when the water started to dance and then commence its churning. He liked the idea that the water became vapor, a mysterious transformation. Even the steam, rising like smoke from his tea cup, pleased him.

  “What are you watching?” he asked, as he entered the living room and sat down on the opposite end of the couch. A commercial for some anti-depressant drug was blaring away on the TV, so he knew they had at least thirty seconds to chat.

  “A murder mystery,” she answered. To Elena, there were only two types of television shows worth watching: love stories and murder mysteries.

  “You should have been a cop,” Rico said, “the way you love murder mysteries.”

  “They didn’t have lady cops in my time,” Elena said.

  “You know what one of my customers told me?” Rico said. “He used to be a cop in LA a long time ago, right? He told me when they first let women on the police force out there, they had to wear skirts and high heels and carry their guns in their purses. It was on the rule books, he said.”

  Elena turned to look at him. “Did you believe him?” she asked.

  “Why would he make up something like that?”

  “You never know about people,” she said. The show came back on and Rico was relegated to silence for the next ten minutes. He often wondered how his mother coped, living in the realm of blurs and shadows. He imagined her view of the world came in patches of color and movement, perhaps the kind the monsoon rains made running down a wavy windowpane. She always seemed to be trying to see more, he had noticed. Peering, as if there was something to see through. Even now, she stared at the TV screen as if she were intent on memorizing every detail, though Rico knew for a fact that she couldn’t even tell the men from the women. He sipped his tea quietly, as he was expected to do when her shows were on.

  When it ended, Elena reached for the remote and expertly cut the power.

  “Rosalita was here earlier,” she said. “She walked me back home after dinner.”

  Rico knew, just from the careful tone of her voice—from the way it did not make its way up and down the musical scale as it usually did—that Rosalita had probably told her everything. He could feel the space between them on the couch fill with words on their way. He waited.

  “Talk to me, mi hijo,” Elena said.

  He hesitated, trying to find the right place to begin.

  “This Anglo woman, do you love her?”

  Rico leaned forward and slammed his cup down on the coffee table. Some of the amber-colored liquid sloshed over the side onto the Mexican tiles he had set himself when he made this table as a birthday gift for Elena more than a decade ago. “Jesus, what was she doing talking to you about this?” he said, his voice exploding. Elena reached toward him, and the sight of her hand, hovering in the air as if she was trying to find his shoulder, or perhaps his face, and touch him—probably to calm him down—only made him more angry. He stood up. “Jesus,” he repeated.

  “Rico,” Elena began, “I—”

  “Give me some fucking room, Elena,” he yelled. “I need some fucking room.”

  She sat back against the couch, dropping her hands into her lap.

  “What the fuck did she drag you into this for?” He began to pace noisily, back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, as if by stamping his feet, like a bull in a pasture that’s too small for him, he could shake off the pressure of living in a world of women who rushed around behind his back and told each other his business before he had even sorted it out for himself. “What the fuck is the matter with her?” Even Rico was struck by the venom in his voice, not to mention the fact that he had said the word “fuck” at least four times when he usually tended to maintain decorum in front of his mother. Seeing her sitting there, tiny, with her eyes downcast and her hands folded in her lap as if she were a Catholic schoolgirl being forced to sit at attention by some nun, tore him up inside.

  “Listen, Elena, I have nothing to say about this right now. That’s it.” He stood stock-still, attempting to decide where to go and what to do next.

  “She was upset, Rico. She needed to pour her heart out to somebody,” Elena said calmly.

  “She shouldn’t have picked you.” Something in all of this, Rosalita’s breakdown in Elena’s casita, felt dirty to Rico. Sneaky. As if she were martialing the troops, lining up the female family forces of guilt and pressure against him. “If she told the girls, I swear to God, I’ll . . .”

  He truly had no idea how to finish the sentence.

  “I’m sure she didn’t tell the girls, mi hijo.” Now her voice was even softer. “She didn’t even mean to tell me. It just happened.” Elena was certain that that was an accurate statement. At dinner, she had noticed that Rosalita was far more quiet than usual, very preoccupied with whatever was going on in her mind.

  “Where’s Rico?” Elena had asked. It seemed so odd to sit down to a family dinner without him.

  “He’s coming home late,” Maribel said. “I forgot to ask him what he was doing when he called.”

  “He’s probably got a big job,” said Elena. Her son was so predictable that no other option came to her mind.

  “Yeah, pr
obably,” said Maribel. It was just by accident that Elena, who was sitting next to Rosalita, happened to hear a sharp intake of breath and a little bleat so soft it would have passed for silence in anyone but a blind person’s ears. Elena had cocked her head in Rosalita’s direction and heard it, even felt her efforts to return her breath to an even keel.

  When dinner was over, amidst the chaos of cleaning up, the screeching of Jessica, and the banter of the girls, Elena had asked Rosalita to walk her back to her casita. Rosalita had risen from the table and come to collect her, offering her mother-in-law her arm, leading her out the back door and along the worn path to Elena’s door.

  “You didn’t eat much,” Elena had said as a way of knifing open the membrane that Rosalita seemed to have sealed around herself.

  “I’m not too hungry, Mama. Rico and I had a big lunch today.”

  “You met for lunch?”

  “We went to the Barelas Coffee House.”

  She knew that her son and Rosalita were not in the habit of meeting in the middle of the day to go to a restaurant. Rosalita was working at that time, and Rico tended to stay in the garage, where he could listen to the radio while he ate the sack lunch Rosalita prepared for him. “That’s nice,” said Elena. “Very romantic.”

  “Not really,” Rosalita had said, and the tone of her voice was like a swinging door that could move in either direction: close down or open up. Then, just like that, she had said, “I think Rico has a girlfriend, Mama.”

  By that time, they were approaching Elena’s back door. “Come in, Rosalita. Come in,” Elena had said. And to her surprise, her daughter-in-law did come in, her daughter-in-law who was so very private, whom Elena felt she both knew and did not know, who, Elena knew instinctively, had not wanted her mother-in-law to come and live here in her domain, who had maintained her distance from the start.

  Elena had opened the door and Rosalita followed her in. They went straight to the living room and sat down together on the old flowered couch.

  “What makes you think this?” she asked.

  “It’s easy to think it when you’ve seen the woman, seen the two of them together like lovebirds.” Rosalita was remembering the way they looked, framed in the big window of Rico’s shop, that book spread out before them like a future together they were poised to step into.

  “You saw them? Where?”

  “At the garage. He says he’s teaching her to weld.”

  “Maybe he is,” Elena said, “but what kind of woman wants to learn to weld?”

  “An Anglo with hair to her ass and no hips,” Rosalita responded, and then she started to cry. “It’s my fault, Elena. I know that.”

  “Don’t talk about fault. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way things go sometimes.” As she’d gotten older, Elena had stopped looking at the world as a reasonable place where things added up. Now she thought of it as a place where things happened, good and bad, to random people. “But are you sure?”

  “I don’t know how far it’s gone,” Rosalita said.

  And then she had told Elena everything. Some of it Elena knew—such as the way Rosalita had turned off to Rico, though she surely did not know the cold spell had gone on so long. It was three years ago that Rico had told her about it. But the rest of it! Elena felt as if she had been swept into the television set, into one of those love stories she found so riveting.

  Rosalita had cried, which was rare for her, cried so much that the top of her blouse was wet, as if she’d just come inside from a rainstorm. When the story was over, she had sat on the couch in silence for a good twenty minutes while Elena made some calming tea and served it to her in an oversize cup. “I never stopped loving Rico,” Rosalita finally said. “Never, no matter what it looks like.”

  She had sipped her tea, slowly finishing it without either asking for advice or adding more details. Elena sat close to her on the couch and gently placed her hand on Rosalita’s shoulder. Together, they watched the darkness descend.

  After a while, Rosalita went home and Elena turned on her television show. Not much longer after that, Rico came in the door from who know where. Elena didn’t ask, though she noticed that he smelled fresh, like the mountains.

  “Rico,” she said, “Te quiero, mi hijo.”

  “Te quiero, también,” he replied, and then he took off into the dark night.

  MARGARET PEELED off her T-shirt and jeans, still slightly damp, and climbed into a warm bath into which she had dropped dried lavender. Little purple flecks floated in the water, releasing a scent so lovely that Margaret felt dizzy with sweetness. She closed her eyes and images flooded in: the spectacular jagged rocks of the Jemez Mountains, Magpie standing in the river drinking fresh cold water, she and Rico sprawled out on the rocks like lizards. She had never been in a more beautiful place, never even dreamed of one like that. Already she felt a longing to return, though the next time she would go by herself, just she and Magpie, so she could spend a whole day wandering.

  Not that she regretted Rico’s presence on her first venture into the mountains of northern New Mexico. Far from it. His heat, so steady and reliable, had warmed her every moment of their time together, made her feel safe and somehow free; and the things she had done, like immerse herself in the river, would probably not have happened without him. Margaret knew that, but she was certain that he didn’t. Rico saw her as a free spirit, and for some reason, when she was with him, she felt like one. That felt good, very good, to a woman who had been burdened with a sense of sadness her whole life, who had felt that even her skin tone was pasty gray with sadness and smoke. Perhaps Rico would weld a new image of her, one that had no relationship to the old one, and she could simply step into it. It was a possibility.

  The idea that an affair was not a possibility made it somehow perfect. She had been clear with him, and he had understood her. He had said he could keep his hands off her, and she believed him. But now, in the bath, her hands, all lathered up with soap that smelled like sagebrush, moved like Rico’s might, all over her body, and she felt the heat they left in their wake, warmer than the water in which she was buried up to her neck, warmer than the sun that had warmed them on the rocks in the last moments of sunlight.

  But for Margaret the best part of her day with Rico came later, on the way home, after they had pledged, for better or for worse, to lower the lid onto any possibility of a romance between them. This was new to Margaret, this mature sidestepping of a potential problem, erasing it without erasing the person who had brought it to her door. She had felt such a sense of space in her exhilaration that it was simple, even graceful, to segue into the subject of welding, which Rico more than anyone knew was her obsession.

  “I’ve been reading a lot about welding,” she began, “and I’m totally overwhelmed. Everything I read is so complicated. It’s like . . . Remember this?” She took both her hands off the wheel and began to pat the top of her head with one while making circles on her stomach with the other. Rico noticed that she steered the car quite skillfully with her knees during this little demonstration.

  “You shouldn’t read so much,” he said. “Just do it.”

  “I know you’re right,” she said, “but I’m addicted.”

  Margaret had worked seriously at her art life for eight intense childhood and adolescent years before she ever took a class or read one book that analyzed the hows and whys of oil paint. When she had finally signed up for a class, which happened to be the first one she took with Nick, she had worry and trepidation, even fear, that her experience of the paint, of the colors and the way they swept into each other, would be tainted by the shoulds, by what she should do. One benefit of being abandoned by her parents was that Margaret had grown up without the shoulds. Parents should stay with their children, but hers didn’t. Grandfathers should be home in the evening to take care of little girls, but hers often wasn’t. When Donny worked, Margaret stayed across the hall with a merry widow named Mrs. Sullivan who should not have let her watch television shows w
ith adult content until eleven at night, but she did. Nice Catholic girls should not roll up their uniform skirts to reveal several inches of schoolgirl thigh, but Margaret had. Even Donny had told her, when she was just thirteen, that a good policy was to run the other way when she heard the word ‘should.’ “If it’s got should in it,” he said, “you can be sure you won’t want to do it.” This was in response to the nun’s opinion that Margaret should enroll in some practical secretarial training courses, since it was obvious that she, with her tendency to daydream and her lack of interest in homework, was not college material.

  Rico had just told her she should quit reading, and for some reason she was tempted to listen to him. But the words captured in the books on welding were portals into a new world for her. Reading them was like having a good dream and then waking up to discover it was real.

  “There’s a lot of stuff in the books about color,” she said. “If you heat the metal to cherry red, this will happen. If you heat it to blood red, this will happen. To me, it seems like painting, except the emotions that the colors trigger happen in the metal instead of in the person looking at it.”

  Rico burst out laughing. “Jesus, girl, take it easy,” he said. “It’s just welding, It’s not rocket science.”

  “How do you know it’s not rocket science?” she countered. “Just because you can do it, it doesn’t mean it’s not complex, Rico. Probably a hundred years ago it was rocket science. Anyway, I’m not talking about science. I’m talking about art.” She glanced at him. He had shifted slightly in the seat, and his back now rested partially against the passenger door. She saw him full-on, in the headlights of a passing car, and the way the light flooded onto him and then retracted made him seem like a spirit who could incarnate or disappear at will. “Talk to me about the art of it, Rico. Tell me everything you know. You didn’t get to be ‘el rey’ for nothing.”