“It’s going to be awful.”
“For five minutes maybe. Then it will be over.”
“Why should I do this?”
“Because you told your mother you would.”
“It’s for her, then,” said Maria. “For us.”
Marcus heard “us” and thought she meant them. But Marcus and Maria were only a chart. From now on they would adhere strictly to that chart. He would, like Maria’s mother, mean business.
“Someone is watching us,” he said. “We should either leave or go to the door. I say, just do it. Later you can make it make sense.”
Maria wiped her nose with the sleeve of her sweater. She nodded, sniffling. The hinges creaked as she pushed open the door. She stood in the street pulling on her sweater. The fabric bunched up on her back; Marcus plucked it loose and smoothed it out as he followed her up to the front porch.
The woman who came in time to the door was shorter than Maria but plump. Her hair was long in the back and she wore bangs. Her haircut made her look even more angry and severe.
“Your mother told me you were on your way over here. She asked would I give you five minutes of my time. I told her I would give you three.”
The woman looked at Marcus.
“Is he your husband?”
“No,” said Maria. “This is Marcus.” Randy’s mother looked him over and said, “Why is he here?”
“He’s my friend,” said Maria.
“Well, why are you here?”
Maria said she was there to say that she was sorry and that she never got the chance to say it because her daddy would not let her go to the funeral, and Randy’s mother interrupted her to say, “You were not wanted at the funeral.”
“But Randy . . .,” Maria started to say, and Marcus wanted to somehow let Maria know that she ought not to be telling Randy’s mother what Randy had wanted. But he was not there to talk for her or tell her what to say. He was in the middle of a slow black river.
“Then I moved away,” Maria was saying. “But now I’m back.”
“I heard.”
“And so I came over here to say I’m sorry and to say also that I wish—”
“I cannot forgive you, Maria.”
“I know,” said Maria. She nodded but just barely.
“I wish I could. It makes me feel terrible not to. God wants me to but I can’t. I am not at peace with him over this because I know he wants me to forgive you but I can’t. That’s all I can say to you. I’m sure it’s not what you came over here for.”
“No,” said Maria. “That’s enough. I didn’t come—”
The woman closed the door in the middle of Maria’s sentence. They carried it with them, unfinished, up the walkway to the car. Maria was in front and she got in on the driver’s side. Her mother had asked him to take her over here, and what would her mother think of him if they pulled up in the drive and he was riding shotgun? But Maria wanted to drive. It was her day now. Maria’s mother would just have to hate him.
On the drive she was quiet except sometimes she cried. They caught two lights just as they turned from yellow to red, and at both lights Marcus almost said, I’ll get out here. But he didn’t and he was glad because as they were passing the Thriftway, Maria started to talk.
“Because Randy is dead I get to make him up. He is more alive to me because he is dead. But if he were still alive, he might be, I don’t know, my dad. Grilling his venison steaks in the drive, working on his car under the carport. Or we’d be divorced and I would still live here and I would run into him in the Thriftway and he’d be with his new wife and she’d be someone I sort of knew from school and she’d hate me because I had been with him first. She would talk for him, as if he had laryngitis. He would look at the rows of pinto beans or cereal boxes while she said what they’d been up to. Or probably I would move away and never think too much about him.”
Now she turned to Marcus. “Thank you for going over there with me, Marcus. Thanks for taking me and for going to the door with me. I don’t think that what I said to Randy’s mother and what she said back to me changed anything. But I told my mother I would go, and thanks to you I went through with it.”
“Credit due Her Lowness,” said Marcus, patting the dashboard. He had noticed, while idling in Maria’s driveway, that they needed gas. He was about to ask Maria to stop by the Fina station when she braked and pulled over to the side of the road as if she were letting him out.
“Oh my God. You came over to my house because you needed to talk and I totally took you off on my thing. Now it’s been hours. I’m so sorry. What is it you wanted to talk about? What’s wrong?”
Marcus stared out the window. He remembered leaving the gas station knowing he had somewhere to go, someone he could call. But now he did not want to show his face to Maria because something in her tone suggested that the look on her face would resemble her I-mean-business mother
“You have a lot of your mother in you, you know that?” he said.
“That’s it?” said Maria. “That’s what you came over to tell me?”
When Marcus did not answer, she said,“You met my mother for, what, two minutes?”
“She makes an impression.”
“Oh God.”
“No, she’s great. You know what she said while you were inside getting ready?”
Maria hunched her shoulders and sat up in her seat. Would he always say the wrong thing?
“What did she say?”
“I kept calling her ‘ma’am’ and she finally told me to stop and I said I would but I didn’t know what else to call her because she had not told me her name. So she said, ‘That’s because it’s Harriet.’ ”
Maria eased back into the seat. She swabbed her cheek with a bit of sweater she’d pulled like a glove over her hand. “She said that?”
“I haven’t gotten to the good part. Because your mother is pretty intimidating and I wanted her to like me—I mean, actually I really needed her to like me—I asked her, even though it was hardly the time or place for such a question, I don’t even know where it came from, I said, Well, what would you have liked to be named?”
“You asked my mom that?”
“Sometimes I blurt. You might have noticed.”
“I can’t imagine asking her that.”
“Well, me neither, now,” he said, worried again that he’d ruined things, but she seemed more shocked than angry.
“Nor can I imagine what her answer would be,” she said. When Marcus did not reply, Maria said, “Am I supposed to guess?”
“If you want.”
Maria looked over the steering wheel. Above town there were clouds dappling the folds of the mountains ahead.
“I have no idea,” she said. She shook her head slowly. “Not a clue.”
“Juice,” said Marcus.
Maria squinted as if she hadn’t heard him. “Juice?”
“Yep.”
“Like Juice Newton?”
“Exactly. That’s what she said. ‘Like Juice Newton.’ ”
At first Maria looked stricken. But then she started to laugh. Her laughter was of the sort you try to squelch and your failure to do so makes it all the more impossible to control. Back-pew church laughter, terrible-elementary-school-orchestra-recital laughter. Maria draped her arms around the steering column and touched her forehead to the wheel, and Marcus, when he was certain she was in fact laughing and not having an asthma attack, succumbed himself. Hicuppy gasps dead-ending in snorts. Maria laughed at the deep offensiveness of his bray. The Buick filled with the air of their lungs unburdened. They would try to stop but they kept failing until finally Maria gained enough control to say, “I don’t know, God, it’s not that funny, it’s actually really sad but it’s also crazy, and in a way—in her way, I mean—it’s so, so sweet.”
They were quiet for a while, and then Maria said, “You never talk about your parents,” and Marcus said, “That’s because they’re named Harriet,” and this started them off again. When t
his round died they were breathless and Marcus craved quiet until he didn’t anymore.
“You want me to get out here?” he said.
“No,” said Maria. “Let’s go for a drive.”
“We need gas,” said Marcus.
“I’m on it,” said Maria, and she pulled into traffic and drove them to the station.
“I can pump my own gas,” said Maria when Marcus opened the door to get out, but Marcus said no, she got gas last, it was his turn. He opened the gas tank and reached for his wallet and found that he had left it back in his room. He went around to her side and motioned for her to roll down the window.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re a little short.”
Marcus allowed that he was a lot short.
“And that’s what you were coming to tell me?” said Maria.
“I wasn’t really coming to tell you anything,” said Marcus.
Pinto Canyon, Texas, June 2004
Harriet loved a map, and even though she made it clear to both parties her feelings about their plan for the Buick, thought it wasteful, not to mention dangerous, liable to land them in trouble with Border Patrol, she knew the area as good as about anyone around. So when Maria and Marcus told her about what they were referring to as their “ceremony,” she suggested the far-back, broken country between Van Horn and Valentine, where she’d grown up.
“My daddy used to work that land. Wasn’t his but he knew it better than the man who owned it, or any other hand. He used to take me along on horseback when he was checking fence and I can’t imagine anything’s changed out there in the last forty years.”
She started to give them directions to the spot she had in mind, but it did not appear to Harriet that either of them (a) were listening too good or (b) would be able to locate the place without a map even if they were listening. They were sitting at her kitchen table one Sunday morning. Sunday was when they did stuff together because it was the only day the three of them had off in common. Maria had paid Alberto and a couple of his friends to gut the Airstream and put in a stove and a window counter and on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights she and Marcus towed it to a lot across from the train station and sold tamales and raspas to the tourists. The rest of the week Maria fixed food for special parties—catered, Harriet guessed was the word for it—out of the kitchen in what used to be Johnny Garcia’s. A couple of weeks after all that mess with Randy’s mother, Marcus had got on out at the Desert Research Center. He put in forty hours a week there. Harriet could not for the life of her figure out what there was to do out there in the desert for forty hours a week. He said he cleared brush and tended to the plants, but she didn’t see what brush there was out there to clear, nor how you could waste more than a couple of hours a week tending to twenty acres of prickly pear and sotol and agave. She guessed she could pay a visit out there and see, but that place was for the tourists.
Maria had fixed some kind of fruit pie for breakfast, only it wasn’t a fried fruit pie but some dough with fruit laid out on top of it. It tasted pretty good. Harriet wouldn’t have picked it, but she had gotten to where she’d eat anything put in front of her when it was the three of them, for she liked it when they did stuff together. Ate dinner, drove to the True Value to pick up some railroad ties she wanted so she could plant something in that space where the camper had sat for so long. Now that Maria had turned that camper into something you might see someone selling popcorn out of at a rodeo, Harriet had told her she had to park it behind the motel. She didn’t want that thing in her yard anymore. Luis had wanted it gone the week after Maria left. He had wanted it gone before she left. But Harriet had not lost that fight.
Maria and Marcus had got to where they carried on like they’d known each other for years. They’d argue, too, almost like they were married. But Harriet knew there wasn’t anything between them. She was glad, too, that it wasn’t going in that direction. If it had, she doubted they’d have wanted her around.
When Maria told her she was going to take the camper out to Austin, explained how there were more people and more money and more of what she called options (which Harriet took to mean she could serve what she damn well wanted to serve), Harriet said, “Well, that sounds like a plan.” She would never have said anything but. Sometimes it amazed her that she ever asked Maria to come back home and help with the motel. Now here Maria was, leaving again not six months later, but at least she would still be in Texas. Sometimes, still, the weight of all those years apart—the not knowing where her child was, then the knowing and the not knowing whether to go after her or even if she ought to write to her, and then the knowing finally that she’d let the girl go, that she did not write because she didn’t know how to say it, what she ought to have said to the girl before she ran off, and then the not standing herself for letting her girl go like she did, and then the not letting herself hate herself anymore over it because what was she supposed to do, climb in some airplane and go flying across the country to bring back a girl who wasn’t a girl but grown and not likely to be talked back onto an airplane by a mother of the type Harriet had been to her?—sometimes the burden of it all came upon her still. She’d be remaking a poorly made bed or revacuuming a room and she’d have to stop and go to the room she kept open, where she and Ray had met for years, their room, 117, and just sit there on the double and think about all her years lying next to Luis by night and poor sweet Ray by day and most of the night too, and now both of them gone and her daughter back but so many years with her lost and her son gone she guessed for good. She thought about how, when Manny did come home, it had seemed he was just there to visit Luis. She knew she ought not to have just given up like she did, but a bigger part of her than she could now stomach saw Manny sitting there with his daddy consumed with talk chosen because she could not share it. Just like Luis done with that boy Randy and she could tell Maria too hated it when they went on about cars and ball games as if these subjects were something safe between them instead of just, she realized now, common interests, not interesting ones but ones they shared, and she just said, Well, I’ll leave them to it. Told Manny she had to get back to work, hugged his neck, and said, “Bring your wife next time,” even after he had got rid of that wife, she knew it, he’d told her, she just slipped up.
Maria was back but now here she was leaving. Harriet didn’t understand a lot of what she did and some of what she said. For instance, what she said she was going to do with that Buick.
Maybe it was the sharing part of what they did with that car that got to her. Or scared her. You could say that parents share their children, that this is what a marriage was supposed to be, a partnership where everything—a house, a car, and even children— was supposed to be jointly tended to and appreciated. Not that it had ever been this way with her and Luis. It was more like they took turns with the kids but not in the way you’re supposed to—one looking after them when the other one was off doing something else, spelling each other until they could all be together. Luis would take Manny off with him and they’d come back and she’d want to get the boy back in her corner, so she’d take him into town and buy him a Blizzard at Dairy Queen. Harriet and Luis were nearly over by the time Maria was old enough to go to school. So then it was sharing her with school, then with whatever she had going on after school, friends and lessons and clubs, and eventually with Randy. But Luis was so keen on Randy that he just let Maria go when Randy came along. Just turned her over to him. Harriet couldn’t fault him, though, because she’d already let go.
She had always thought that she had learned to share when she got with Ray. They came together at first over making a go of the motel. But after they started up with each other, it stopped being a motel or a business or even a building. It was something different, a part of them, the part that never did—because they never could—admit even to each other what they were doing, right out in public practically. So they took it day by day, just like the rooms in the motel, turning over, everybody out by eleven sharp or you’ll g
et charged, and Lord knows she and Ray didn’t run up any bills. Pay as you go, that’s what they were. Or thought they were.
Was she supposed to see in Maria’s choices all the things she’d done wrong? She didn’t know where that would get her. She told Maria, “Well, that sounds like a plan.” She could see this town wasn’t the place for her daughter anymore, if it ever was. She’d outgrown it, and good for her. She’d be in Texas. Harriet had this idea—more like a dream—that she’d go visit Maria in Austin and they’d drive down to New Braunfels and she could get to know her grandchildren and maybe she’d sell the motel and get a place near her children and her grandchildren. But she knew it was a dream. Wouldn’t take a train whistle in her ear to wake her up out of it.
“I’ll draw you how to get there,” she said about the place she had in mind for what they were wanting to do with that Buick. She got a pen out of the drawer and started marking up the back of a bill. She had already paid it but she pretended she hadn’t.
“Y’all can pay this bill, too, when you’re done with the map.”
“Check’s in the mail,” said Marcus. He was eating more of Maria’s fruit pie, and good for him, because he’d gone a little thin. Maria had probably been feeding him organic. Harriet had a plan to put some pounds back on him after Maria left. She knew Marcus favored more her kind of diet than Maria’s and she’d gotten to where she hated eating alone now, that was the loneliest part of it, she’d nearly rather starve than sit behind her desk at the motel stabbing Styrofoam with a plastic fork.
“Good a place as you’re going to find for what y’all want, though if you ask me . . . ,” said Harriet, and Maria said, “We didn’t ask you,” and Harriet said, “Well, I guess it makes sense you didn’t ask me, since you did not ask me the first thing about going in on it,” and Maria pointed at the map and said, “Your maps resemble Marcus’s charts.”
Harriet knew when a subject was being changed. She knew better than to say one more word about what they were planning on doing with that car. She’d said too much already. Still, it seemed like to her a waste, even though she never did much care for that vehicle. She didn’t see what they saw in it. It was too long to park and rode too low for her taste. You couldn’t haul anything in it. She never did see why they chose it, much less why they got in it and drove it around like it was something special.
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