She knew nothing about the rest of the state. She’d only been to Austin twice, once with her parents when she was too young to remember, and another time with her classmates on their senior trip. They had stopped on their way from San Antonio to Austin in New Braunfels to spend the day at a water park. It was just weeks before Randy died, and they had sneaked away while everyone was eating pizza and fooled around on the bus. What was she thinking? What if they’d been caught by the chaperones? Later she would wish that someone had noticed them gone and seen their shadows through the tinted windows of the bus, for based on math done months later, that was when she got pregnant.
What a thing for her to want to nail down, given what happened. Who cares which time it was, for it could have been any of a couple of dozen times, and in effect it was all one time. But back then it had helped her to think of a specific instance where they might have refrained, for it made it easier in her mind to justify all the times when everything worked out.
She had no good memories of New Braunfels, but this was where her brother lived. What she had not yet told Marcus was that they were on their way to see her brother. She had decided this after finding her mother’s letter. It had been longer than ten years since she’d seen him, as he was away in the Coast Guard when she left town, and did not often come home on leave. She could not say she much missed him, because she could not say she knew him. To her mind there were two sorts of families: those so close they seemed to share the same tastes if not convictions, who talked on the phone and spent holidays together and took common vacations; and her stripe, for whom kinship was a fact and not some sacrosanct bond, and blood was something drawn by nick or cut, not a substance shared in the manner of royalty.
But after reading her mother’s letter and feeling at once saddened and annoyed by the way her mother, when confronted with the slightest breach of “common sense,” withdrew, Maria wanted Manny to explain to her why he never visited or even called home. She wanted to know why her mother had claimed, after Maria returned from an errand, that she had just missed Manny, he had called while she was out. Her mother would, not looking at Maria, consumed in some task or other, deliver news that sounded like lies: how his kids were enjoying soccer, how much he liked driving a truck for H-E-B, how he was planning a trip home this summer when he could stay longer than a weekend.
Of course she did not need Marcus to come along, but she wanted him to. It was seven hours to New Braunfels, most of it on interstate. She had never driven on an interstate. Marcus hadn’t found work yet. What else did he do with his days? They could split the driving. She would feel safer with him along. The Buick, after all, was twenty years old. Fine vehicle for around town, said Bobby Kepler. Randy always drove. She only knew how to ride in a car with Randy, and Randy would not want her to drive all that way alone in a quarter-century-old car.
But it wasn’t just practical. There were other reasons, less selfish ones. He was good company. His presence filled a blank. Even if she could not narrate their sightseeing with the appropriate authority, wouldn’t he still see some of the world he would not otherwise have seen? And the car was half his.
As agreeable as he was, she did not look forward to telling him they were going to interrupt their sightseeing to visit her brother, or rather asking him if they might. But first she had to call her mother and let her know she’d be gone for a while. She owed her that much, at least.
In Junction she asked Marcus to stop at a gas station. In the bathroom she locked the door and called her mother. Her mother did not own a cell phone. Maria knew she would be at the motel, so she left a message on her landline. “Hi, it’s Maria,” she said, trying to sound as if nothing was wrong, as if she’d read the note and was fine with it. She said she was going to San Antonio but she did not say why. She said she’d be back in a few days, and because some part of her she was not proud of but could not quite control wanted to punish her mother, she said, instead of good-bye, “Take care.”
They ate dinner in a Thai place Maria spotted on a service road just off the interstate. Neither had eaten since breakfast and so they double-ordered fresh spring rolls and tasted each other’s entrées and split a bottle of wine.
Marcus, offering her a taste of his chicken with lemongrass curry, said,“My mother says about every other thing she eats, ‘This is the best thing I ever in my whole life tasted.’ ”
“Does she mean it?”
“I’m no linguist, but I would wager that a close examination of her syntax would prove her sincerity.”
“So you’re saying she means it?”
“Yep.”
Maria took a bite of chicken.
“It’s pretty damn good,” she said.
While he ate, she found herself studying his eyes, which were a blue that seemed washed out but which flashed and sparkled, and his lips, which were oddly attractive, given their unevenness—the top one was plump, the bottom only a slight line. She wondered why he was alone still, for other than the few extra pounds, which women almost expected on a man his age (men past forty with flat stomachs and definition in their arms were, in Maria’s experience, trouble), he was attractive. He was in pretty good shape, considering his diet—he’d told her at lunch that first day how much he’d taken to breakfast tacos, and he professed a love of the deep-fat-fried jalapeños called poppers, which he ate at Dairy Queen. And he was interesting. He did not talk about himself too much; he was curious about other people. Best of all, he knew, when he saw a woman stop her car in the middle of the street and slide over, to get in and drive her out of town and not ask her what or why.
But surely it was more complicated, and none of her business, why he was alone, and not even something she cared to discuss with him, especially now that they’d arrived in San Antonio and she needed to reveal the true purpose of their visit. They finished the wine, and the wine made it slightly easier for her to ask, in the car on the way back to the motel, if they might rearrange their itinerary a bit.
“I wasn’t aware we had one,” he said, which was exactly what she wanted him to say.
“I know you wanted to see the Alamo, and while we’re here we should take a stroll along the River Walk and go see a mission or two. But I’m wondering if you’d mind if tomorrow I could stop by to see my brother. He lives less than an hour from here, in a town called New Braunfels.”
“Well, I’m dying to see the Alamo after your glowing endorsement.” He smiled to let her know he was joking. “Of course I don’t mind. Family comes first, always.”
Instead of comforting her, this made her feel even more guilty for deceiving him.
“You can drop me off and take the car and go exploring, or I can get my brother to meet me somewhere. I promise I will not subject you to the awkwardness of meeting someone else’s relatives.”
“I don’t have a problem with other people’s families,” he said. “How long has it been since you’ve seen your brother?”
“Do you have siblings?” she asked Marcus, aware that she was answering his question by posing another, but fully intending to answer his question after gathering some knowledge of how he might interpret the story of Manny.
“One sister,” he said, studying her face as they stopped at a light.
“Are you close?”
“We see each other a couple times a year.”
“Talk on the phone?”
“Only if something’s up with my mom.”
“Does she have children?”
“She’s gay.”
“Gay people have kids, Marcus.”
“She told me once she was just pretending to be gay so she wouldn’t have to have kids. But she was just playing with me. Or maybe she was just trying to make me feel better for not having kids myself.”
“Does she have a partner?”
“If by ‘partner’ you mean girlfriend, it seems she switches them out every six months or so. Like you’re supposed to do with batteries in your smoke alarm.”
“You me
an she breaks up with them when the time changes?”
“Seems like word would get around, right? I find it hard to believe there is an unlimited supply of lesbians in Asheville, North Carolina. Sooner or later she’s going to run out.”
“Actually I’ve had smoke alarms go for years without switching batteries. She might have to just learn to go until it gives out.”
“Or else move to another town when Asheville runs dry. I’ll put my money on the latter.”
“I’m going to answer your question.”
“Oh, I know you are.”
“You do?”
“You’re stalling,” he said, “but I’m patient.”
He was patient. They were back at the motel but neither had made a move to get out of the car. The Buick had contained them all day and they were not yet sick of its space. And it had performed brilliantly, holding its own on the interstate among tractor trailers and pickups pulling campers. Now it sat ticking, settling down for a night’s rest under the protective eye of streetlights busy with swarming bugs.
“I have not seen my brother in over ten years,” she said. “Nor talked to him.”
“So tomorrow’s going to be tough?”
“I don’t even know if he’ll see me.”
“He’ll see you,” said Marcus.
She almost told him not to say things like that, for she had enough of her mother in her to feel, when confronted by cheerful optimism, annoyed rather than comforted. But she’d bought a car with this man and it had worked out so far and maybe there was something he knew about how to make things right.
“I guess I’ll find out in a minute,” she said, and she told him to sleep well and she’d meet him for breakfast.
Alone in her room, dialing the number she’d copied off the list her mother posted on the wall of the kitchen, Maria came close to hyperventilating. Her voice cracked as she told the woman who answered the phone who she was and asked if her brother was around.
“Manny’s got a sister?”
She should have seen this coming, but it made it even harder to draw a breath. “I’ve been living out west.”
“Still,” said the woman. “I got sisters in Corpus and Round Rock and one in Mexico, and Manny has not met all my sisters but he at least knows about them.”
“Right,” said Maria. What else could she say? The woman said nothing and there was a silence long enough to make Maria think she’d hung up, but then Mannie’s voice came on the line.
“Maria?”
“Hey, Manny,” she said. “Blast from the past.”
When he said nothing, she felt foolish for trying to sound casual.
“I know it’s been forever,” she said. More silence, even louder this time.
“I’m back in Texas,” she said. “For a while. I’ve been staying with Mom.”
“I heard that.”
“From Mom? You talked to her?”
“She sent me one of her notes. She never calls me. Nor writes me, really, except at Christmas and on my birthday.”
She did not say, on the telephone, Why is that? Instead she asked how he liked living in New Braunfels and he said it was okay, and then, as if he were nervous to talk to her, he went on about the rivers, the Comal and the Guadalupe, about how his youngest daughter worked for one of the tubing outfits, how much fun she had, how much of a pain it was to live here in the summer, how he was thinking of buying a place out past Boerne, away from all the tubers.
“Actually, I’m in San Antonio,” she said. “I was wondering if I could come by and visit for a while.”
“Well, I got to work tomorrow. You mean tomorrow? I have to go to work.”
“Tomorrow evening? I could take you out to dinner.”
The pause lasted so long that she was about to tell him it was okay, she understood, she was sorry to bother him, when he said, “I guess we could meet at Rudy’s. They got good barbecue. Not the best I’ve ever ate but it’s pretty good for a chain. You eat meat?”
“Living at home, with Mom? She doesn’t really do vegetables. I’d starve to death if I didn’t.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said, as if he had no memories of the meals their mother had cooked for them before he left home, as if she’d turned carnivore after he left.
“I’ll see you there at six,” he said.
“Rudy’s,” she said, but Manny had already hung up.
THE NIGHT BEFORE, AT dinner, Maria had told Marcus about the water park with the crazy Teutonic title, and about the rivers, the Guadalupe and the Comal, one of which flowed smack through town, the other of which skirted it, where people from all over central Texas came to float on inner tubes and so when he met her for breakfast and saw in her face a rigidity so severe her lips would barely part to make words, he said, You know, where I come from we have rivers but the water moccasins hide in the Spanish moss and wait for boats and kayaks and canoes to come by so they can drop in for lunch, I’d no more sink my fat ass through a circle of rubber and into that evil black water than I would leave the keys in Her Lowness while I take a hike down the Rio Grande so do you think since we have a whole day to kill here before you see your brother, do you think we could go by the Dollar General and get ourselves some cheap bathing suits and maybe a cheap cooler and a couple of beers, all on me of course, you paid for the rooms and the gas, I’ll pay for everything today, and while Marcus was laying out his plan, Maria’s face did not so much relax as slightly brighten and in that barely perceptible shift he sensed that she saw right through his plan to take her mind off what she faced later that day (and even though it was not the same thing, for Maria’s estrangement from her brother did not seem to him to have anything to do with money, he knew he would welcome the same from her if at the end of the day he faced a reunion with Annie) and obviously Maria did not care if he was only trying to distract her because an hour and ten minutes later they were putting their tubes into the Comal River and a few minutes after that Marcus had lashed his to Maria’s and to the extra tube for the cooler and was freestyling down the sweet green river, its water so clean and clear he wanted to eat it, and overhead stretched a canopy so full it made him realize how long it had been since he’d been underneath a tree, a real tree, one even slightly reminiscent of the thick forest surrounding the farm, and because he did not want to think about the farm, he was glad when the grackles along the bank, not native to his part of the world, screeched their windup-toy noises to each other, and soon the river thickened near the tube chutes with huge knots of folks whose inner tubes were connected by rope or in some cases arms and even legs, everyone laughing and somehow attractive in the slashes of sunlight that penetrated the lushness above, and sometimes on the river bottom a blemish of aluminum and the sacrilege of beer cans in such purity antagonized him until he dived for trash, and in forty-five minutes of their four-hour float he had collected so much trash that Maria (who was at first stiff in the floral bikini she had finally decided to purchase despite the fact that she would never in any other circumstance wear such a thing, it’s only because it’s six bucks and I have to have something to swim in, she said) after a mile or so afloat leaned back with her eyes closed, her hair dipping into the river, her skin shiny with lotion (and okay, yes, she was beautiful and yes Marcus liked it when other people—men, some women—noticed her and assumed she was with him in a way that she was not and that he did not really want her to be, not that he did not find her attractive, but there just seemed far more at stake here than whether he slept alone or not), and said to him, Okay, Al Gore, You have to can it now, The garbage barge is about to tank, and he dived down and swam over to the other side of her and popped up and said, But who will save mother earth? and she laughed at his silliness and said, Future generations, and Marcus was so pleased to see her smile and hear her laugh that for the next mile of the river he hung on the side of her tube and they talked or they didn’t and when they did their talk was slow and idle and perfect as the water beneath them and when they did not talk Ma
rcus thought, well, I may have lost the farm and my truck and my birthright and my dignity and it is possible that I am into something crazy destructive with this woman and there may well be something lurking under these waters that I cannot see, say under the docks of those houses perched above the river, or among the rocks lining the banks, maybe a snake, harbinger of unrest, or maybe not even a harbinger, just unrest itself, and I may well soon be broke and homeless, it seems almost certain, since I am jobless and barely employable and spent a good portion of my savings on a by-God Buick with this woman who might be using me, though I’m not quite sure what for, her chauffeur maybe or maybe just someone to drag along for kicks while she cavorts through her mysterious past trying to make right whatever happened back there, but you know what, if she is using me I can’t say I really am ready for her to stop because here I am wearing a pair of Jams I got at the Dollar General for $4.99 floating down a sweet green river with a woman with whom I bought a low silky ride and the water I’m going to say it again is so pure and green it must be bubbling up from someone’s fantasy and in the cooler are a couple of cans of ice-cold Beck’s, tallboys too, waiting for me should I get thirsty and here he was in Texas, of all places Texas, who would have predicted how much he loved it here, loved its rivers and deserts and shimmery grasslands, its taquerias and dance halls, and also to his mild alarm loved Texans, all of them, even the drunkest ones on this river, hell, even the ones who stole his truck, though they might have been Mexicans, but he loved Mexicans too, and Mexico, and he was glad Maria had ignored his bag letter and taken him along to see this river, and he was thankful also to the Buick for not overheating or throwing a rod and to Earth, Wind and Fire for writing “That’s the Way of the World,” which he had played over and over for the last hour of their trip, singing to the highway ahead and the trucks alongside and Maria beside him the lines “You will find peace of mind / If you look way down in your heart and soul” as if he believed such a platitude, as if by singing it even badly he might make it true, until Maria threatened to toss the tape out the window, and owing to some crazy Texan variety of religious experience, some miracle equal almost to a Ruffles potato chip in which Jesus on the cross is discernible if you look way down in your heart and soul, Marcus even loved, for a glorious sunburst, in the sweet green current, most of all—for making it down here, for purchasing a sky-blue chariot so that he might have reason to stick around, for failing to disappear—himself.
All I Have in This World Page 18
