American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “Hello, Jocelyn. Hello, Ruben,” said Ernesto. “This is Rosa.”

  “I know Rosa,” said Jocelyn without smiling.

  “Feliz Navidad to you both. Rosa and I are going to a party.”

  “Tell them the good news, Ernesto,” slurred Rosa.

  “Oh, yes. My father has decided to retire. He wants me to have Luna’s. He’s giving me good terms.”

  “Tell them the other good news, Ernesto.”

  “Not now, cariño.”

  Ernesto waited until the next day to tell Jocelyn the “good news.” It wasn’t so good for Jocelyn. As Mama and Papa and Jocelyn’s three brothers and one sister and all of her nieces and nephews were sitting themselves down to Christmas dinner, Ernesto came to the door and took Jocelyn out onto the xeriscaped front lawn (though she was needed inside to help serve). He had to tell Jocelyn something important: he wouldn’t be seeing her anymore. He was seeing Rosa now. Soon he would be marrying Rosa. He had waited for four years for Jocelyn to come around and he wasn’t going to wait anymore.

  Jocelyn felt as if the sky had fallen down on top of her. She hated Ernesto for leaving her, for making her stop thinking about tomorrow, but at the same time she was aware of how unfair it had been to leave him on the hook for so long. And yet, was any of it Jocelyn’s fault? This was the way it worked: the youngest daughter was required to put her life upon the shelf if this be the mother’s wish, to remain in attendance to her mother’s later-life needs—to sacrifice a large part of her own life for the woman who bore her.

  It had Jocelyn wishing for her mother’s death, for which she felt horribly guilty.

  Death came during the monsoon rains of the following August. Mama Lucero caught a chill and went to bed with a high fever. The illness taxed her fragile heart. The cause of death was put down as congestive heart failure.

  There was a family conference. It was decided that Jocelyn should have the house. It was in her mother’s name, and now it would be put in Jocelyn’s name. Ruben agreed that this was the right thing to do. The consensus among the four older siblings was that their baby sister could keep working for their father if she liked. Or she could do something entirely different with her life. She had permission now.

  Jocelyn nodded and agreed that everything being offered to her was fair and generous. Inside, though, her heart had hardened toward her siblings. She was forty. She had tended to her mother since she was a little girl. In her spare time she had driven to Old Town and worked behind a counter selling Native American jewelry her father had purchased wholesale from the local pueblos. She had made friends with a couple of the neighboring storekeepers, but few others.

  Along the way she had fallen in love with an older man named Ernesto, a large man with jet-black hair and bright green eyes, who claimed her virginity at the age of thirty-six in the little apartment he kept over the restaurant. He had asked her to marry him, knowing that her answer could only be “No, not now. Not just yet.”

  He seemed to understand.

  Or was it that he had proposed marriage knowing fully well what the answer would be? Because this was Ernesto’s way of keeping Jocelyn on the hook: taking her up to his rooms above the restaurant until someone better came along.

  Rosa. The whore.

  Today was September 14. The rains had tapered off. Fall was in the air. Jocelyn sat in her car. The radio station was playing the song—the song she now despised. She was stopped at the light, waiting to make her left turn onto her street. The house was on Candelaria. It was one of the many streets in Albuquerque’s North Valley that still carried vestiges of the neighborhood’s farming and ranching past. The street came to a dead end near the Rio Grande, at a place where cottonwood trees grew in the sandy soil of the river’s gallery forest.

  She didn’t want to make the turn. The light had changed to green and the way was clear to go, but she couldn’t make herself do it. She didn’t even roll forward into the intersection. There was a car behind her. The driver was being polite. He wasn’t honking, though she clearly should be turning so that he could then make his turn.

  The light turned yellow.

  Jocelyn Lucero didn’t turn.

  The light turned red. Jocelyn could see through her rearview mirror the middle-aged man pounding his fist upon his steering wheel in frustration.

  She didn’t want to make the turn because she didn’t want to go home. She had spent forty years of her life in that stucco house, watching each of her three brothers and her sister walk out the door and come back only on his or her own terms. She had stayed home because it was expected of her. And now she was supposed to go home because there was no place else for her to go.

  The light turned green. The man behind her tapped his horn lightly.

  This time she cooperated. She pulled up. When the way was clear, she made her turn. She drove down Candelaria, a residential street with every house different from the one next to it. The North Valley was home to people who didn’t care what the house next to them looked like. Sometimes it wasn’t a house at all; it might be an old barn or even a sheep pen.

  This was old Albuquerque. This was The Valley.

  Jocelyn slowed as she approached the house. The driveway was empty. Her father was staying a little late at the store. She had said she would go home and start dinner for the both of them. Instead, she kept driving. She passed the house and took the street to the place where it came to an end. She parked her car and walked to the river. She had been coming here for years—ever since she was a young girl. Every fall she came to see the majestic cottonwoods put on their leafy coats of brilliant yellow. There were no oranges or reds allowed in this southwestern bosque—only this single, all-pervasive color, like liquid sunshine dripped upon these gnarled, defiant giants of the desert.

  She remembered a picnic she once had with Ernesto beneath these trees. He had said he would remain patient, because he loved her. “My love isn’t going anywhere, Jocelyn.”

  Today the trees were green. The wispy cotton they had shed in early summer had been blown away. The path through the bosque was choked by seasonally opportunistic weeds and wild grasses. Jocelyn walked along the river’s edge. She looked up at the houses perched upon the western bluff. The forest was too dense for her to see the mountains that towered behind her—the ones given the name Sandia, Spanish for “watermelon,” because of the watermelon-pinkish color they took on in the waning light of the winter sunsets.

  There were Canada geese wading near a sand island in the middle of the river. Jocelyn listened to the sounds of the place where she had grown up: the flutter and cooing of the ubiquitous mourning doves overhead, the distant barking of dogs in this city of canine hegemony, the gentle rustle of a horse brushing the crowding thicket along a nearby bridle trail, the gurgle of the river current purling over rocks and errant branches and other river clutter at her feet.

  She loved this city for the sense of place and belonging that it gave her, but she hated it for having held on to her for too long—like the cottonwoods, forever stingy about dropping their leaves. They would shed them only reluctantly, when they were dried and brown and crumbling, and only when the winds shook some sense into their branches. Who was to blame? Her mother needed her, and she didn’t want to make a stand. She’d known young women who did—who then became ostracized by family members who had won their own family lotteries of gender and age and didn’t understand why their little sister didn’t accept her fate with equanimity.

  She thought of Ernesto and the way he had wanted to make love to her in the stand of flimsy elms as covert as a chain-link fence. Oh how she had protested, but oh how it had stirred her, had made her feel alive, had made her feel independent even as she was submitting to someone else who had his own idea of what it was that she ought to be doing.

  She loved him, of course.

  Or did she?

  Was Ernesto simply someone who had come along at the right time—when she needed to be loved for the woman she so wanted to be
?

  They were going to run the restaurant together. They were going to open other Luna’s Restaurant in the Northeast Heights, in Bernalillo, perhaps even in Santa Fe. Ernesto’s father, Silverio, had been content never to dream big.

  Jocelyn and Ernesto dreamed big. They aimed high.

  “Someday, cariño. Someday soon, yes?”

  Someday.

  Now Jocelyn felt betrayed. She kicked a rock into the river. She walked back to her car.

  Her sister Olivia was waiting at the house. “Weren’t you supposed to be home at five thirty?”

  It was twenty past six.

  “What do you want, Olivia?” asked Jocelyn. “Why are you here?”

  “I need Mama’s recipe for calavacitas. I’m having some people over tomorrow night.”

  “You’ve watched Mama make it all your life. You’ve watched me make it. You don’t remember what goes in it?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’s wrong?’ I come home a few minutes late to a house that I assumed would be empty only to find you standing here making demands.”

  Olivia got her pouty face. “I didn’t know I’d be putting you out.”

  “You mean because I probably wouldn’t be doing anything important anyway, except throwing something together for Papa and me to eat? We’re having Stouffer’s lasagna, if it’s any of your business—which it isn’t.”

  “You’re too young to be going through the change. I wish you would tell me what this is about.”

  Jocelyn sat down on the sofa. “The problem, Olivia, is that you don’t know what the problem is—not you or Luis or Marco or Vic. Or Papa.”

  Olivia sat down on the sofa next to her younger sister. “I miss Mama too. But we all have to get on with our lives, baby sister.”

  Jocelyn didn’t speak at first. She stared at Olivia with disbelief and contempt. Then she said, “I hated our mother. I wanted her dead so my family indentureship would end. She died too late.”

  “I don’t think you mean that.”

  “I do.”

  “And Ernesto wasn’t good for you. I was happy when the two of you broke up.”

  “We didn’t break up. He left me. He got tired of waiting. How long did you make Mark wait?”

  “Our situations are very different. Are you going to give me the recipe or not?”

  “Not. And get out of my house. It’s the only thing I’ve ever gotten from this family, and I’m looking forward to the day that Papa drops dead so I can truly have it all to myself.”

  “I don’t believe that you’ve become this person. I won’t believe it.”

  “Please leave, Olivia. Go.”

  Olivia left, taking her indignation and Reddi-wipped victim complex with her.

  Ruben Lucero came home twenty minutes later. Jocelyn served him Stouffer’s meat sauce lasagna. They had a beer. Jocelyn and her father didn’t usually talk much during the quiet evenings following Francine Lucero’s death. They spoke to each other at the store—about shop business—and that seemed enough for one day.

  Tonight was different. There was something Ruben very much wanted to discuss with his daughter. And he had something to give her.

  It was a brochure for a Caribbean cruise line. “It’s for one of those singles cruises. Your mother and I decided after Ernesto—well, we decided that you needed to get away, that you needed to meet some men who weren’t anything like that sly little weasel.”

  “This was Mama’s idea too?”

  “Yes. In the end. I did have to do a little persuading, but she came around. Then she had all that trouble in the spring, and the woman we were going to get to come in to help her out in the summer—well, it didn’t work out. And then, of course, she died, God rest her soul. So go on the cruise. Have a wonderful time. Start your life, Corazon.”

  “You haven’t called me that in years.”

  “It’s time I picked it up again.”

  Jocelyn got up from the table. She reached down and gave him a hug. She picked up the travel brochure. “This is the name of the ship? It’s a odd name for a ship.”

  Ruben agreed.

  Deus ex Machina. It was indeed a very odd name for a ship.

  “All right. Comments? Impressions? Yes, Derrick?”

  “I understand that we’re supposed to make these comments as positive and constructive as possible, but to be honest, I thought the ending sucked.”

  “That isn’t helpful.”

  “No, that’s okay. Tell me, Derrick. Tell me why my ending sucked.”

  “It was too clever by half. It felt author-intrusive.”

  “What do you mean by ‘author-intrusive’? Your hand is up, Sheila. What do you think Derrick means by ‘author-intrusive’?”

  “The author calling attention to herself through a transparent manipulation of the story elements. It also sounds like she wrote herself into a corner and had to call upon the proverbial gods for deliverance.”

  “Derrick’s right. I did write myself into a corner. Because I knew that in reality, Jocelyn was destined to spend the rest of her life working for her father—both in the Old Town shop and at home—and then after he died, living alone. Pretty dreary stuff.”

  “Cynthia, you’re being very quiet back there. Perhaps you might like to contribute something here?”

  “Not really. It sounds like Campbell knows what’s wrong with her story. It doesn’t have a realistic ending.”

  “But taking the story overall, do you think that she did a good job of fleshing out her characters—creating a plausible narrative up to a point?”

  “Yes.”

  Cynthia didn’t elaborate. She didn’t know Campbell. She knew that Campbell had no window into her own life, yet it was uncanny how closely her own life story resembled that of Jocelyn Lucero’s. Cynthia even lived in the Albuquerque’s North Valley not that far from Candelaria.

  It gave her pause. It gave her chills, actually. She was the youngest. She was left behind to take care of her mother—a mother who was constantly ill but never too ill not to keep plodding on, with the help of Cynthia’s filial love and attendance. It was a wonder that Cynthia was able to get away for the creative writing class she took two nights a week at UNM.

  Cynthia liked the idea of a cruise. It served her escape fantasy.

  Five days later that fantasy became a reality when Cynthia Baca bought a ticket for a Caribbean singles cruise and disappeared for a month. Her two brothers and two sisters were horrified, her mother devastated to be abandoned by her baby—someone who up until that point had been so dependable, so lovingly self-sacrificing.

  Cynthia sent Campbell a postcard from the Bahamas in care of the school, thanking her for providing the impetus for her liberation, thanking Campbell for the chance to meet Paul in Freeport and then Kent in Nassau and then Danny in the midnight buffet line aboard ship. Because Cynthia had been transformed by this act of self-empowerment. At the age of thirty-eight she’d finally come into her own.

  In Cynthia’s enthusiastic opinion, continuing education classes had the potential to be life-altering experiences.

  “That ending is simply horrible, Anita. You can’t be serious about entering that story into the writing competition.”

  “Dead serious, Sis. And I intend to win that all-expenses-paid trip to New York City, and Mama will just have to fend for herself. On second thought, you can drive down from Santa Fe and stay with her yourself. For once.”

  “What’s gotten into you?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “And this is where it ends?”

  “Yes.”

  1994

  CROONING AND SWOONING IN SOUTH DAKOTA

  Just as she said she would, Mrs. Richman (“Oh, please, call me Natalia!”) arrived at 5:30.

  “Is there anybody in America besides bakers and dairy farmers who gets up before 5:30?” Jeremy had groggily inquired as he pulled the coffee pot from the coffee maker.

  “Mrs. Richman ca
n hear you,” Erin said from the dining room.

  “Oh, please, call me Natalia!”

  Natalia looked around the room. It was everything Erin and her brother Jeremy had said it would be: a hoarder’s trove of Roy Rogers memorabilia. “Your grandfather had quite an extensive collection. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve been doing estate sales for over twenty years.”

  Natalia’s hand fell upon a framed, autographed portrait of all the members of the singing group, Sons of the Pioneers, which Roy had formed in the early thirties, back when he was still Leonard Slye of Cincinnati, Ohio. “How long did it take your grandfather to assemble this collection?”

  “Almost fifty years,” said Erin.

  “And where is he now—is he already in the nursing home?”

  “As of a couple of weeks ago,” offered Jeremy, coming in from the kitchen, a cup of coffee in each hand.

  “Thank you, Jeremy,” said Erin to her brother, taking a cup. “So Mrs.—I mean, Natalia, how do you think we’ll do?”

  “Well, I’ve kept my fee down to twenty percent. That helps. But the fact that the sale will appeal mostly to collectors of Roy Rogers memorabilia—”

  “Serious collectors.”

  “True. It is limiting. On the other hand—and I’m definitely an ‘other hand’ sort of person—I’ve advertised all over this end of the state. And I’ll bet you there will be some Roy Rogers and Dale Evans fans who’ll get wind of it from as far away as Nebraska and Minnesota, so we’ll just cross our fingers for a good turnout. May I ask: is the collection complete?”

  “Complete in what way?” asked Jeremy, who was now sipping from his own cup of coffee.

  “Roy Rogers was famous for putting his name on everything. Nobody branded more merchandise in his heyday except Disney. Still, there are a finite variety of items that Rogers collectors are able to get their hands on. Did your grandfather tell you if he’d acquired them all?”