Kermit walked back to the car in front of me. When we were inside, I said, “I missed you when you got married and moved away.”
“Sherry was pregnant, and then had an abortion. I married her anyway. We got right to work on Tommy, to make that up.”
“She’s awfully nice, Kermit.”
“Oh, she’s better than that. She’s the best. I don’t know how I lucked out.”
I knew there were oceans of words unsaid. I didn’t care to know anything about it.
The next day Kermit got out of bed at noon, came into the kitchen where I was feeding Tommy and visiting with Ann and my mother. He made himself an egg, ate it out of the skillet, and then went back to bed. When Sherry came home from work she looked around; Lenore, my mother, saw and pointed a thumb in the general direction of the hall. Sherry’s face fell for a moment and then she started moving around in double time. She made me nervous. There was the undercurrent of ritual in all this, something my brother did that set off certain motions. I didn’t like it. We heard Kermit going in to take a bath, doors opening and shutting, water running. He came out at 6:30, with his books. He gave us all, in a general sort of way, a smile, and he went off to class. Sherry sat down at the table and crumpled over chicken-fried cutlets.
“He’s just like his dad, secretive and anxious, stuffing everything that bothers him down in his pockets—” We all looked at Lenore, even Tommy, who had finished his milk and had turned his glass upside down on his plate into a pile of mashed potatoes. Lenore was wearing an old familiar face, the family assayer. She started clearing dishes, banging things around. Sherry looked to Ann for advice; Ann raised her mouth in perplexity. Lenore, at the sink, went on muttering for four or five minutes. “Hiding their feelings, taking off when it suits them—” on and on she went, a litany of barbs, she sounded more muddled than angry. Finally she turned around, drying her hands on a towel.
“He doesn’t drink?” she said to Sherry. Sherry said no, he never did. “And he doesn’t chew toothpicks,” Lenore added, breathing deeply, lifting her rib cage, going back to her newer self. “I have a friend coming up in a day or two to get me.” She said this to no one of us in particular. “Carl Matthews, Matthews Appliances.” We all lurched toward smiles, then held them back, uncertain; she gave us permission with her sudden sunny face. “I went in to buy a television. I said I wanted the best.” Suddenly self-conscious, she sat down. She put her hands over mine, a move that surprised me so much I stiffened. “If your daddy had ever got something going—” She trailed away. I understood. “I don’t know if I ever could have divorced him,” she said softly. “I meant to talk to him about it, but I kept putting it off. He jumped off that rig, you know he did—”
I knew no such thing. Ann went to turn on the television. Sherry took Tommy to the bathroom. Lenore sat with her palms on the table, like a woman waiting for a fortune-teller.
“I can’t get her out of my mind,” Sherry said to me as we were going through Bud’s clothes. We had found his checkbook, with a check written to cash for three hundred dollars, the apparent balance of his account, but the check was still on the pad. He had signed it on the day he died. We found the title to the trailer, also signed.
Sherry’s face grew puffy with grief. She had taken it the hardest, I realized guiltily. She had been through this before. “He was doing some sort of accounting, getting ready—” she said.
“Oh Sherry, if he meant to jump, why not finish all this stuff? Don’t make too much of it.” We sat side by side on the bed. “Let’s ask the neighbors what they know. And I’m going to cash this check.” I had decided to go back to Mexico by bus. What hurry was there?
The neighbors were cool to us. I had the idea they knew a lot about my father and weren’t going to tell any of it to us. Vexed, we packed the last of Bud’s things in boxes, for a flophouse downtown. I was emptying a drawer in the cramped little hall when it hit me that there had been empty drawers. “Why didn’t I notice it before? It isn’t like he ran out of things to put in them, he had these others stuffed. But there are empty drawers here, and there were some in the bedroom. Would you put your stuff away like that?”
“You think somebody else was living here?” Sherry pulled out a drawer to see for herself.
In the bathroom we found a tube of Desitin. That was the only thing that didn’t seem to belong in a man’s bathroom. The rush I had felt earlier faded. I hadn’t known I was so romantic. Then, as we left the trailer, I saw, in the dirt at the corner of the step, a baby’s pacifier. I felt exhilarated. What I wanted to find out was that my dad had been something besides a weary old man. Ballsy. God, I’d have loved it. His neighbors were old retired people. It wasn’t their pacifier.
We went out with my mother’s friend Carl Matthews. I could hardly eat, I wanted so much to lie down somewhere and make up scenarios about my father and the mysterious woman. Carl talked all through dinner about the improvements in color televisions. Lenore was flushed, happy. When he ran down, like a battery, and looked at Lenore, she patted him on the chest.
Sunday morning Sherry and I went back to the trailer to sweep and close it up. I was washing at the sink when someone knocked at the rattly door. It was a young woman we hadn’t seen the day before.
“I heard you were asking about Mr. Painter,” she said in a Texas twang so pronounced it made me smile. She didn’t seem to notice. “There was a woman living with him last year. Real funny name. Ophelia.”
“Mexican? Long hair, plump?” Sherry stood on springs.
“Yeah. Wore ribbons braided in her hair. Funny.” The girl’s own hair was teased and anchored into place. She was a thin young thing, in a short skirt, tights, and a pullover. “There was a baby, five, six months old. Getting too big to carry, but not walking yet. I’ve got a baby that age, and a two-year-old. I came over once to see if she wanted to get the babies together, or trade baby-sitting once in a while. She was real unfriendly.”
“And she lived here?” A baby. I felt funny about that.
“Sometimes she went away for a couple days. But she lived here. They had a little playpen they’d set out by the step. Felia sat on a chair right by it, always touching the baby. Mr. Painter sat on the step. And there was another thing. She always played the radio real loud, Meskin music.” The girl wiped her hands on her skirt as if she had been scrubbing something. “I gotta go. I know nobody said nothing to you, but I figgered you got a right to know. Felia cleared out in a hurry.”
“How? She wasn’t here when my brother came over.”
“Her brother came and got her. He came real early in the morning. I was awake with one of my kids. My husband came down to see. They was gone in fifteen minutes, boxes, play pen, everything. Listen, you can’t find her. Some people—those people—they all look alike.”
“What kind of car?” I asked.
The girl screwed up her face, thinking hard. “Yellow. With real fancy black doo dads all over it. Sharp. My husband says he runs a night club.”
“Their last name? Do you know that?”
“I gotta go. I told you all I know!” The girl ran the length of two trailers and disappeared around a corner.
“Oh Abby.” Sherry looked ready to cry again. “Does it upset you?”
“The woman? No.”
“The baby? Could it have been his?”
“Heavens. How would I know. Maybe. Or he could have met her when she was pregnant. Anything could be true.”
Sherry sighed. “Let’s not talk about this around Kermit yet. I want to find out more first. He would discourage me. That girl was right. It sounds awful, but they do all look alike. There are what, sixty, seventy thousand people in town. A third of them are Mexican. We’ll never find her without a name.”
“I don’t understand why she ran away.”
“If they weren’t married—I don’t know. Don’t you think he was going to give her the
check, the title?”
“So why didn’t he!” I sank into silence like a stone.
When we got back to the house we found Carl ready to take Lenore home. Kermit was in bed. It was awkward, pushing Bud aside to recognize this courting. I followed my mother out to Carl’s car. The sky had turned to slate, the sun was as dull as a moon in a daytime sky. “It does look like it might snow, or sleet,” Lenore said. Carl revved the engine.
“We’ll be home before it starts,” he said.
The window on Lenore’s side went up, zip! when Carl pushed a button. Lenore put her hands in her lap and stared straight ahead.
Inside the house, Kermit was up.
“You bum, not saying good-bye,” I said.
Kermit pulled the short curtain aside at the window behind the table. “What’d I tell you?” he said. Huge wet flakes had begun to fall. I took the newspaper to the couch and spread it around me like a moat. So Dad had had a mistress. Peculiar word. It was a surprise, with something bittersweet to it.
Ann had a friend whose daughter was married to a Mexican who ran a restaurant. She made some calls and came up with a name for us.
The friend’s son-in-law was expecting us. He came out of the kitchen, dressed in an expensive suit, wiping his hands delicately on a clean white towel. He led Sherry and me past cases of Dos Equis, into his office, where chairs were arranged like still life. He said his name was Renaldo—he didn’t give us his last name—and a young man in a white shirt and black creased trousers brought in glasses of beer and a plate of tortilla chips. “This isn’t necessary!” Sherry exclaimed. I nudged her with my knee.
“This is generous of you, to take your time for us,” I said. I leaned toward Renaldo. “We want to find my father’s friend. All we know is that her name is Ophelia, that she has a baby, and that her brother has a yellow car and maybe runs a night club. What does that tell you?”
He took his time answering. He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk. “We are good citizens in this community.”
“Por supuesto,” I said, hoping I did not sound condescending. In Mexico, it is always right to attempt Spanish; in Texas, I wasn’t so sure. But I wanted him to know I wasn’t naive.
“What makes you think there is such a woman? Who gave you her name?”
Sherry told him about the woman at the funeral home, and what the girl in the trailer court had said. Renaldo pulled his arms back and folded his hands calmly.
“I may know this family. I can’t yet be certain. I will take your message to them, if you tell me what it is. In this way, they may decide if it is something they wish to know.”
“We want to see her ourselves!” I recognized that Renaldo had control of the conversation, and I knew that it came not just from knowing something we did not, but from his sense of superiority. He was the one who condescended. “We have money for her,” I said sharply, trying to curb my anger, reaching for the formal courtesy that I knew would work best. “We think my father may have intended to give her his home. We are prepared to do as my father wished, but we have to talk to her, we have to know her name. And the child—it may be my father’s child.” To my surprise, I was choking up. Sherry took my hand and clasped it tightly. I was grateful.
“I will look into it,” Renaldo said. “I will see if I can find her, if the family I am thinking of is the right one. I will tell her what you have told me. That is all I can do for you.”
“But you have to tell us her last name!” Sherry exclaimed.
Renaldo smiled. “Hernandez, I believe. There is another club owner with the name Garcia.”
I stood up, furious.
“Sir.” The bastard had withheld his formal name, leaving me with nothing to use against him. I was hot with indignation. “I have great respect for the memory of my father. You can understand this.” How was I to appeal to him? He was so cold! “I’ve lived away from my father for a long time. I need to go back to Mexico. But it is important that I first see to it that my father’s friend has what is hers.” I sat back down, now embarrassed. Renaldo had shown not the slightest reaction to my display of temper.
“Is it very much?” he asked.
“It is very little. But it is what my father had, and we are willing to give it away.”
“Miss Painter. If, as you say, there is a child, your father’s friend has something already.”
“Perhaps a burden we could ease.” I was promising more than I could ever hope to deliver.
“In our families, a child is never a burden. A child is a great gift.”
“You see! You see!” Sherry wailed in the car. “I knew they’d shut her off from us. We’ll never find her!” She drove round and round, down long blocks where the stores advertised in Spanish, past cheap clubs with neon signs. “Watch for the damned yellow car,” she said, biting her lip. She was half-wrapped around the steering wheel in her intensity. It was no use. We didn’t know where to look. “Out by the UPS!” Sherry said. “It’s all Mexican out there.” She shot out onto one of the frightening arteries of the city, sped on for five miles, and then turned into a neighborhood of cheap frame houses. Some yards had been tidied. In others, pickups sat with their front ends up on blocks. It was getting quite cold, snow was starting to stick, making the streets slick. In the cold dusk, everyone was indoors, all the Hernandez Garcia Santos Rodriguez families—
Sherry turned a corner and skidded. The car swerved into a sharp turn and the front wheels jumped the curb. The car died.
“Damn damn damn,” Sherry murmured. “That bastard had us on a string.” She rearranged herself on the seat, brisk now, and capable. “Maybe I could put a notice in the personals.”
“Oh yeah, she’ll read that. Think about it.”
“I’ll think of something!” She drove more cautiously. “He thought we wouldn’t accept her. He never even mentioned her to us. He could have brought her to our house. Was it that she was Mexican? That they weren’t married? Was it us? What was the damned secrecy all about?”
“Maybe it was just an instinct for privacy.” I knew that might be hard for Sherry. She was married to Bud’s son.
When we got home Ann looked up from her reading and asked us how it had gone. Sherry burst into tears and ran to her room. I put together some supper and ate it with Tommy and Ann. I was grateful when Ann took the child to bathe, and left me alone.
I was the only one awake when Kermit came home at ten o’clock. I was sitting at the table, working on a list of things I might do other than go back to the ranch. I had written:
1. school
2. find a job.
I’m glad I didn’t pay for this advice! I thought. The words didn’t mean anything. I was so weary, I was seeing things, quick scraps of pictures: Tonio scratching one of his hounds behind the ears. My mother on the couch with her feet out. My dad cutting cheese with a pocket knife. Men—men and boys, lines of them.
Kermit stood at the refrigerator and drank milk from the carton. He cut off a hunk of cheese with his pocket knife and ate it, still standing with the refrigerator door open.
When he had closed it, he said, “You made it out, you runt. You really did, good for you.” I took a moment to realize that what I saw in his eyes was awe, simple as that. He had bought the picture I had willed his way, of a good life, some kind of love, tender mercies. Things Bud had wanted, and Lenore, still.
“How does he do it, little sister?”
For a moment I didn’t know what he meant. My mind skipped around and landed on Tonio. I saw him in his aviary, a foot-long parakeet on his arm.
“He’s brave and smart,” I said. It probably didn’t answer Kermit’s question, but what I said was important, was true.
“Talk to Sherry before you go,” Kermit said. I looked at him carefully, trying to guess what he meant. He had an ugly smile now. “I’d appreciate it a lot,” he said. “You
can teach her what you know.”
I had felt such a stranger, coming back. The mystery about the woman had enthralled me; Sherry had taken me in. I had felt like something mattered. Now I saw that Kermit knew me best.
“I can’t imagine why they let you stay,” I said.
As I left the room, I heard him say, “It’s my potential!”
As I fell toward sleep, I saw the line again, blurry at both ends. There were boys from school, and Tonio, and other men. Michael Sage. I got up, went to the bathroom, rearranged my pillow and slept again. In my uneasy sleep I searched for the faces. I woke before dawn, my gown soaked with perspiration. I had seen my father so clearly.
He had been standing on the very top of that cold iron spire, balanced, humbled—as I had been that star-soaked night high in the mountains—to find what he wanted, held out to him, within easy reach.
Chapter 10
I KNEW the instant I heard the plane who it was. Sleepy hounds whined as he circled and buzzed the ranch and then landed. I had been lounging on the cold floor of the library, looking at a book of photographs of insects. I went down the walkway to the office and sat on a low bench across from it, in the tangled shade of climbing vines. Hounds were sprawled like throw rugs, too lazy in the hot afternoon to do more than shuffle their haunches.
I heard him at the gate on the other side of the walls, whistling a tune I knew but could not place, a song from childhood. As he closed the gate, an old gray Mexican hairless sprang from a shadow in the grass and bolted for him, barking like a pup. He took the time to squat and greet the ugly dog, scratching him on the belly and head. When he stood up again he looked down the walk and saw me on the bench, my hands folded in my lap like a schoolgirl. He came toward me in long easy strides, grinning.
I had gone to the ranch to stay for a few days after I got back from Texas. I knew if I stayed at the hotel while I was still feeling so strung out from my trip, I’d do whatever Michael Sage asked me to do. Of course I knew I was only postponing things; he had been vivid in my dream. He was next on some damned list I was writing with my life. Now he was here. He had come after me, gone out of his way. I gave him that as credit.
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