MANNY’S HUG WAS STIFF and he sounded as if he was still on the phone, distant, suspicious, but Maria was too startled by how he had aged into a likeness of their father to take offense. His hair had receded in the same spots, and the bulge of his stomach, just like their father’s, appeared disproportionate to the rest of his body. She had remembered him taller. Was it guilt over her loss of him that led her to grow him in memory? People, books—people in books—claimed that everything from childhood revisited after years away appeared absurdly small, but Maria had not found this to be true. Her town felt larger, even though her mother claimed it had lost a quarter of its population in the past ten years.
Her father was short—five feet six at the most—but he had, at least when he was still working, carried himself so stoutly that she never thought of him as below average height. Manny, standing by the hostess station at Rudy’s when she first walked in, was her father, in nicer jeans, an inch or two taller in his thick-heeled boots.
No, Manny was not her father. He knew the waitress by name. They sat at a booth by the window. Manny ordered a Bud Light, Maria stuck to water. “So” was the first word of the first five sentences she asked him. Waitress that my brother knows by a name I have already forgotten, if I was even paying attention in the first place, please hurry back. Bring me food I am too nervous to eat and probably would not eat, anyway. Maria needed somewhere for her hands to go instead of her lap, where they sat clasped and clammy. Chips came, with salsa, but Manny stopped eating after the third or fourth, noticing, she was sure, that she had not once reached for the basket.
“So, I came here once before. In high school.”
“New Braunfels?” He said it in a way she knew was the way of natives.
“The water park. Schlitterbahn? I can’t believe I still remember the name of it.”
“Hard to forget,” said Manny. “I’d say that’s what most people know us by.”
Us. As in, he’d found a home here. Why did this bother her, given how long she’d been gone?
“Also we went to see these tiny houses. I guess the Germans built them when they settled here?”
“Sunday houses. Ranchers would come into town and stay over on the weekends so they wouldn’t miss church.”
“Are they still around?” asked Maria, thinking of the car ride back from El Paso with her mother, talking about abbreviations. Tiny houses, what gym was short for: Did everyone, after years away, have to push through talk so small? Or was it only her?
“Some. They rent them out now, to people who come for the tubing.”
“I went down the river this afternoon,” she said.
“By yourself ?” he said, as if this was a violation of some local ordinance, or dangerous, or flat-out pathetic. It might have been pathetic had she floated it alone, which she would never have done. She would, instead, have paced around her hotel room, or taken a magazine down to the tiny pool and tried to read it, or tried to watch the Food Channel, tried to nap. Tried everything, been engaged by nothing. When Marcus first suggested tubing, Maria felt like it was just another thing she’d have to try to involve herself in. She saw through it—his attempt to distract her, which she thought sweet but unnecessary—and bumping up against flotillas of drunks was likely to make her even more anxious.
But Marcus was so excited by it. First by the idea of it, which he referred to as “an adventure.” His enthusiasm made her slightly nervous, as she worried that he was in a similar state when he drove down to the border for a hike and got his truck stolen. Once he stepped foot in the Dollar General, though, he turned so goofy, pretending to want everything he saw, marveling over flip-flops and calendars and a rack of personalized key chains as if he had no idea such ephemera existed, threatening to buy a burnt-orange bathing suit emblazoned with the longhorn insignia of UT athletics, that she realized, once on the river, that he did think of it as an adventure.
“I have a friend with me,” said Maria. Maybe she should have pretended she went down alone—maybe it would have been easier if he thought her pathetic—but Marcus was her friend.
“Boyfriend?”
“Just a friend.”
“He come with you from out west?”
“He’s just here for a visit.” This was neither a lie nor a denial. Hadn’t he left her a note stating his intention to move on? He was passing through, slower than a train, faster than a drought. She wasn’t about to explain all this, much less how she knew Marcus, to Manny. Manny’s obvious lack of interest made it easy to leave things out. She had asked ten questions to his one, and the few questions he did ask were delivered so declaratively they hardly seemed to require an answer.
The one thing she wanted to ask him was when he’d been home last, but she was worried it would sound hypocritical, given her years away. A lot more recent than you, that’s for sure: he had every right to say it. But she had not come all this way (and it seemed, sitting across from him in the booth, that she had come, not from far across the state, but all the way from Oregon, across valley and mountain and endless treeless plain) to not ask.
It didn’t seem possible to provoke his ire, given that he had about as much emotional stake in the conversation as he did in his Bud Light. The food came: roast turkey for her, brisket for Manny. Without a word he rose and she followed him to the condiment bar, marveling at the oddity of the choices: pickles, peppers, onions, brown sugar, slices of white bread. Following him as he threaded his way back to their booth reminded her of how much she’d worshipped him once, how she used to sit by the window before she went to school and wait for the bus to deliver him home.
Manny might have passed on the chips because he did not want to be the only one eating them, but he did not wait to see if she put her napkin in her lap before he started in on the three-bean salad. He ate as if he were starving, as if he’d come here not to see his sister again after twelve years. She was hurt, but also annoyed, and it was her annoyance that allowed her to say, “Have you been back there lately?”
Manny pointed to his cheek. He chewed awhile, cleared his throat, swallowed some beer, and said, “Back where?”
“Home,” she said, though she knew this was the wrong word for it.
The way Manny looked above her head, as if someone behind her, someone besides her, had asked him such a silly question, was the first hint of their mother she’d found in him.
“I used to go pretty regular when I was just out of the Coast Guard and living in Midland for a while. But it got to be, why even bother? She’d stay gone when I was there. I’d just see her for a few minutes, she’d make a big fuss like she was glad to see me, and then she’d say she had to get back to work. It was always like that. And he never left the house. He’d just sit there telling me how she was going to quit her foolishness, they were about to get right, and he was going to go back to work, start his own grading business, or it was going to be repairing drill bits, or he was going to go in with Alberto and run cows. But nothing ever happened. He got sick and died. But you knew that part.”
Of course you were too busy to come home for your own daddy’s funeral, was what she heard him say. What she wanted to say to him, even though it didn’t exactly explain why she stayed away from the funeral, was that it was her father who would not let her go to Randy’s funeral. Through the cracked door of her bedroom, where she lay unwashed and distraught three days after Randy died, she had overheard her parents fighting about it in the kitchen.
“She knew him as good as anyone,” her mother had said.
“Doesn’t mean Randy’s parents want her anywhere near that church.”
“Well, a funeral, last time I went to one, it wasn’t like a wedding, they don’t send out invites.” Maria was slow to realize that her mother, who had said nothing at all to her about Randy, who had dealt with her daughter’s grief by boiling her canned soup and bringing her ginger ale, was taking her side.
“Be hard for a person to send out invites from the grave,” said her father, in his
I-don’t-want-to-hear-any-more-about-this voice.
“Well, you’re as good as saying she ought to go, then. Randy would have wanted her there, but Randy’s not the one gets to—”
“It’s about some respect, Harriet. Randy’s not going to be there. It’s his family that stands to be riled. If Maria turned up in her Sunday dress and sat up by the grave carrying on . . . What has got into you, anyway? Why would you even think it would be okay for Maria to attend that boy’s funeral?”
“Well, she loved him,” her mother said, which caused Maria to gasp. Other than “I’d love a Coke about now,” it might well have been the first time in her life Maria had heard her mother say that word.
“You ought to have told me,” her father said. “You drove her to El Paso, so you must have known about it for a while, and you never said one word. She’s my daughter, too.”
Her mother said something she could not hear that caused her father to start shouting, and even though his words echoed tinny through the heat grate and she could have made them out, she did not care to hear, because she had realized that they were no longer talking about her, that what had happened between her and Randy was, to both of her parents, mostly about what was happening between them.
Maria started to tell her brother about this conversation, but he was nearly done with his food and she had had only a few bites of turkey and she had not even buttered her corn and there wasn’t time to say everything. There would not be enough time.
“Why didn’t he leave?” said Maria.
“He couldn’t,” Manny said, in a way that made it clear to her that he thought they’d all have been better off if he had.
“Why didn’t she leave him?”
“Why don’t you ask her? You’re the one staying with her.”
That he seemed annoyed by her questions did not displease her, for at least now he had a stake in the conversation.
“She won’t talk about stuff like that with me. Especially Daddy. She’s said a few things about Ray. I didn’t realize he was sick the same time Daddy was. I guess he had Alzheimer’s?”
Manny shrugged, as if he knew little and cared less about Ray or what killed him.
“You married?” said Manny.
“No.”
“Never have been?”
“No.”
“Not easy to walk out. Especially if you got kids. It’s got to get real bad.”
“You don’t think it got bad for Mom and Dad?”
“Well,” he said, “every time I asked why didn’t he just leave, he would say, ‘I wouldn’t know what to do without that woman.’ He called her ‘that woman.’ Like he didn’t even know who she was anymore and didn’t even care, he just didn’t want to be alone. Last time I was out there before he got real sick, I went out there once to see him just before he died, but the time before that I was out there and he said to me, ‘If I’m not good enough for her, then at least some of me does her some good. Otherwise she’d have left me a long time ago.’ ”
Manny looked out the window at the steady traffic coming in from Canyon Lake. Maria looked where he looked. The cars backed up in a long line at the intersection were not cars to her, nor people on their way somewhere, but lights in the quickly falling night.
“It was a mess,” he said. “He was a mess, and she wouldn’t give anybody the time of day. I don’t know, I just could not see why . . .” He stopped and took a sip of beer. “Anyway,” he said.
She wanted him to finish but she could not ask. There was no end to what they were talking about. She followed his gaze again. Outside, the light had switched to green. Traffic was moving again.
What she wanted to know from him he could not tell her because he did not know himself. She needed them to figure it out together, for soon Manny would be a truck pulling out of the parking lot, which she would watch turn into a trail of light.
But she didn’t know what else to ask. She picked up her fork and tried to eat. Finally Manny said, “Want to see a picture of the girls?”
“Of course. I was about to ask.”
Manny pulled out his wallet and showed her several pictures of the oldest, who was a sophomore at Texas State, and the youngest, who was sixteen. Inez and Iris. Iris in her photo wore a pink gown and held a bouquet and was posed in front of a blue velvet backdrop. Maria was about to ask if it was her prom when she remembered that Manny’s ex-wife was Mexican, and she said, “Her Quinceañera?”
Manny told her all about it—how all Iris’s friends were there, how some of his ex-wife Alicia’s people came up from Mexico to attend.
“I’m still paying for that party a year later. But it was worth it, to see the look on Iris’s face that day. Even now when Gloria—that’s my girlfriend, she’s close to both the girls—when Gloria’ll get the photo album out and they start going through it and telling all the stories, Iris just beams.”
“Gloria sounds great,” said Maria.
“She’s got me speaking Spanish. Dad told me once the schoolteachers would beat him if he didn’t speak English, so I can see why we never learned growing up. But I guess being with Mexican women and living away from Mom all these years, whatever West Texas redneck was in me has about gone by now.”
She heard him but not really, for she was staring at the photo of Iris, who might have grown to know her cousin. She started to stop herself from crying but couldn’t. Why shouldn’t she show Manny what still needled her awake some nights? He was her brother. He ought to know, even if he did not care to know, why she stayed away from funerals.
Manny said, “You all right?”
“I was thinking, I don’t know. It’s been so long since all that happened with Randy. You know, I’m always—well, I guess anybody in my situation would always be aware of how old they’d be.”
“How old who would be?”
“You know,” she said, drying her eyes with her napkin. “If we’d had the baby.”
Manny moved his beer mug around on the table. He studied the ring it had left.
“Me and Randy. That’s what started all this.”
“Started all what?”
“That’s why I left,” she said. I thought you knew that, she almost said, for of course he knew it, and the way he would not acknowledge what he knew, the way he made her say everything out loud, words she did not think she needed to say—“baby,” “Randy”—was the second thing that evening that made Maria see her mother in Manny.
“You running off didn’t start any of what we’ve been talking about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“No, what? What do you mean, Manny?”
“Just, I thought we were talking about Mom. And Dad. Why he never left her.”
“We were,” she said. “Then we were talking about your daughter. And then I said—”
“I know what you said.” Manny looked at her until she wished he’d look out the window again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I didn’t really . . . I mean, since I was gone I wasn’t all that up on what was happening,” Manny said. “Dad told me about it, but way later.”
Maria started to shrug. It was true, she realized, what he’d said earlier: her leaving did not start, or stop, the things that had taken place whether she was there or not.
“No,” she said. “No, Manny, look, even had you known about it, there’s nothing you could have done. I know I didn’t handle it well. I ought not to have brought it up.”
She waited for him to tell her it was okay—she thought he might say more so that she could say more, she thought they were just starting to talk—but Manny said, “Well, I better be getting back to Gloria.”
She tucked her bottom lip in her mouth and clamped it with her teeth to keep it from quivering. His leaving so abruptly, when the conversation turned difficult, would be the last thing that reminded her of her mother, the third thing, the charm. Obviously he did not see it.
Whatever West Texas redneck was in me has about gone by now. But it wasn’t as if she ever understood, or even considered, how she might be acting like either one of her parents. What did it matter now? Manny was not leaving because he had been overtaken by some slim remnant of the mother he’d tried so hard to get away from. Manny was Manny. He was leaving because he had somewhere to get back to, people waiting for him to return.
In the parking lot his hug was looser but still reserved. Maria said, swallowing, “Do you think sometime I could bring Mom out here? We could stay in one of those Sunday houses. They’d be the right size for us.”
It wasn’t that she could not leave well enough alone, since there was nothing well, or enough, and certainly nothing that could be understood, ever, as alone.
“I’m glad she’s got you there,” Manny said. “I hope you’re planning on staying with her awhile.” What kept her from registering her disappointment was her understanding that the way he’d said, No, I don’t want her around me, was exactly the way her mother would have put it. Their way of saying no—evasive but unequivocal if you knew how to translate their language—was strangely reassuring, as it reminded Maria that she could not fix whatever was broken between Manny and her mother.
“Which is your car?” he said, gesturing to the parking lot, and she said, “Oh, you don’t have to—” and he did not let her finish. “I’m not going to leave my baby sister out in the parking lot of Rudy’s, bunch of drunks coming in off the river. Which is it?”
That she didn’t need his help did not stop her from wanting to pull him close to her again, link her arm in his, and lead him to the Buick. This is my brother, Manny, she imagined saying to Marcus, saw the two of them shaking hands, exchanging comments about the Buick. Two men talking about cars was not something she had ever desired. But when they approached the Buick, she stopped. She’d made a promise to Marcus: no awkward conversations with family.
All I Have in This World Page 19
