by Carol Coffey
Brendan and Jonathan entered the office where two female staff were positioned behind tall glass partitions at the far end of the room. Three rows of red plastic seats lined the room which was empty save for Zeb who was asleep on a chair in the back row. Brendan looked at him and was about to go over to him when a voice from behind one of the partitions called out.
“Oh, leave him be! He’s not harming anyone.”
Brendan looked over and saw a thin woman with a shock of red curly hair glaring at him.
“I wasn’t going to bother him. I know him.”
“Zeb comes in here for the air conditioning. He sits here most of the day.”
Brendan looked at the sleeping man and felt a surge of pity. He wondered where most of the shelter’s clients went during the day and was glad Zeb had found a place where people were kind to him.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
Brendanleant into the window that separated him from her and flashed his brightest smile.
“I was looking for some birth certificates for my friend here,” he said.
He looked behind him but Jonathan seemed to have lost interest in their mission and had walked away to study three large framed maps on the wall behind the seats. Brendan watched as he gingerly walked by Zeb on tip-toes and almost pressed his short-sighted eyes against the maps.
“Jonathan?” Brendan said.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” he replied without turning around.
Brendan looked at the woman’s badge and read her name: Maureen Logan.
She handed him two forms to complete.
“I need seven. Thank you, Maureen,” he said flirtatiously.
The woman laughed and handed him a pile of forms. Brendan could see a wedding ring on her finger and decided to believe that was the reason that his charms didn’t work on this occasion. He took the forms over to the counter and filled in the names of the entire Nelson family, one on each form. As Jonathan looked over his shoulder, Brendan completed a form for Cassie, then Jonathan, Virgil, Clay and the twins, Mackenzie and Tyler. He knew that he was guessing their ages but even if he got one birth certificate it would be proof that Jonathan once belonged to the family. When he was finished, he had one form left over.
“Why don’t you apply for you own and get your daddy’s first name, Brendan?” said Jonathan.
“What for?”
“Be nice to know, wouldn’t it?”
Brendan shrugged and wrote his name and date of birth with his mother’s maiden name and married name of Martin.
“1976? You’re only thirty-five? I’m not sassing you but you look a lot older than that,” Jonathan said, amazed.
“I had a tough paper round!” Brendan joked.
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
Brendan brought the completed forms back to Maureen who flicked through them and then looked up at him. An expression of amusement spread over her face.
“Are you serious?” she said.She chuckled but put her hand to her mouth and tried to become serious.
“Yes, why?” Brendan asked.
“Well, these are . . . Are these are really his family’s names?”
“Yes!” Brendan replied, irritated.
Maureen looked back at the forms.“Oh, look, you stated that these are Virginian births so we can’t access them here. You need to go to the state they were born in.”
Brendan sighed and looked behind him to see if his friend was disappointed but Jonathan had gone to study the maps on the back wall of the office.
“I can get this one for you though. This one is right here in Dover,” she said, pulling Brendan’s application from the bottom of the pile.
When she left the room, Brendan joined Jonathan at the maps. He scanned them but they were confined to New Jersey. He took a seat on the back row and glanced at Zeb who had not moved one inch. He noticed a cut above his right eye.
“Zeb got hurt,” he said to Jonathan.
“Uh huh, I know,” he replied absent-mindedly.
“How do you know about it?”
“He was fighting with Sam Wallace the other night over who owned what bed and Sam hit him. Kuvic came up the stairs and there was a big to-do. Kuvic said if Zeb caused anymore trouble, he’d throw him out. I heard it all going on underneath me.”
Brendan sighed and shook his head. He was beginning to hate Kuvic and hoped that he wouldn’t have to see much of him for the rest of his community service. Maureen returned and called him to the counter.
She handed him his certificate. Brendan walked away and read it but returned instantly to the counter.
“This must be some mistake,” he said.
“No mistake,” she replied confidently.
“This isn’t my birth cert!” he insisted.
“Check the details,” she said.
Brendan turned away and let his eye run down the columns. His date of birth was correct. August 23rd, 1976. He checked his mother’s name. Patricia, maiden name Dalton, birthplace Ireland. He reluctantly looked again at his father’s name. This was not his birth certificate. Something was wrong.
He turned back to the window where Maureen’s smile had faded and she was looking sympathetically at him.
“Are your parents divorced?” she asked.
Brendan shook his head.“Separated.”
“Well, lots of people change their name to Martin. People can be narrow-minded, even here in this town.”
Brendan stuffed the certificate into his jeans pocket. He would have to talk to Uncle Frank before he did anything.
“You get it?” Jonathan asked.
Brendan nodded but kept his eyes fixed on the ground.
“And?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Jonathan.”
Brendan saw the look of disappointment on his friend’s face but he knew it had more to do with Brendan not showing him his certificate than their failure to get information on his siblings.
“Aren’t you disappointed?” he asked Jonathan. He could hear the anger in his voice, anger that had nothing to do with Jonathan’s odd behaviour.
“Oh, I already knew they wouldn’t be able to help us here,” he drawled.
“Then why didn’t you tell me that before we came here!” Brendan spat.
“Cos you didn’t say where we were going.”
Brendan looked away from Jonathan. He was right. He was a fool to think Jonathan hadn’t already looked for his own birth certificate.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“What’s eating you, Brendan?” Jonathan asked anxiously.
“Nothing. I’ve . . . I’ve got to talk to myuncle, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”
When Brendan arrived back at the shelter, Pilar had gone home early and Alice was standing in the garden. She watched as they walked up the driveway.
“Pilar was looking for you. Better think of a good story about where you were.”
Brendan nodded. He sat down on the lawn at her feet and stretched out. Jonathan walked onwards to the back entrance in search of Eileen.
“We were looking for birth certificates.”
Alice nodded.“I expected it’d be somethin’ like that. You find anything?”
Brendan could hear how much more laboured Alice’s breathing had become. Even though she kept insisting on it, he did not believe that she was fine.
“No. Nothing,” he replied. “Alice, do you mind if I leave early? There’s nothing to do until that wood arrives anyway.”
“That’s fine, Brendan. Seems like you’ve nearly finished your service anyway. I’ll be sad to see you go.”
Brendan stood and touched Alice’s arm.
“Oh!” she said. “I almost forgot. I’m having a party Saturday, three weeks’ time. I’d love it if you and Eileen would come. Pilar too.”
“What’s the occasion?”
He noticed her eyes mist over.“Oh, just getting my friends together, that’s all. My son will be there. I’d love y
ou to meet Theo.”
“My mother arrives a few days before that but I’d say it’d be fine.”
“Well, bring her.”
“Oh, no,” he said hastily. “She’s not . . . sociable.”
Alice looked at him assessingly.
“I’d love to come, thanks,” he said. “Tell Eileen I’ll be back later for her.”
Then he took off down the driveway towards home.
When Brendan arrived at the house Coleen was out and Frank was sitting slumped on the sofa in the lounge room listening to traditional Irish music. Brendan’s muscles went taut as he contemplated raising the sensitive subject of his parentage with his uncle whose mood was usually low when he’d been listening to the hauntingly sad tunes. Brendan wondered why he did that, why he listened to music that upset him and made him long for his homeland.
He sat down on the sofa beside his uncle and took the crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. As he unfurled the certificate, his uncle glanced sideways and squinted at the fine print. Brendan handed the piece of paper to him. Frank exhaled loudly and slowly straightened his back into an upright position.
“I was wondering when you’d go looking for this,” he said slowly.“I was hoping it’d never occur to you but I should have known better.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was up to your mother. I guess she thought it was better that you didn’t know.”
“Because he was Mexican?”
“No, because he was no good, son.”
Brendan took the paper from his uncle and looked again at his father’s details.
Rafael Martinez. Place of birth: Mexico.
Frank stood and turned off the CD player beside him. He moved seats and sat on an armchair facing his nephew.
“Your father was a crook, son, but Patricia didn’t know that when she met him. It was small stuff, I think – petty theft, using fake passports, that sort of thing. He was working here in Dover, just passing through for a few months. He was a handsome man, charming too, and Patricia was completely taken in by him. You . . . you look so much like him.”
“Do you have any photos of him?”
Frank shook his head. “Sorry, son. Anyway, Rafael was illegal and I knew as soon as I saw him that a green card was what he was after but my sister wouldn’t listen to me. She wouldn’t even listen to Coleen and a lot of the time I depended on your aunt to talk sense to her. Well, when she fell pregnant with you she married him as quick as she could. She couldn’t wait to get out from under my roof. Ran off to New York with him and . . . I don’t really know what happened there. We had no address for her and we were worried sick the whole time she was gone. When she came back she was a nervous wreck and she wouldn’t tell us anything. You were born three weeks later and . . . well, that was that. She never saw Rafael again and she went back to Ireland with you. Son, if it hadn’t been for the fact that we already had Eileen to care for, we’d have kept you here. Orla was on the way and Coleen wasn’t too well so we had our own worries. It’s a regret Coleen and I will have for the rest of our lives.”
“Where is he now?”
Frank let out a long sigh. “I don’t know, son. I doubt if your mother knows anymore but you could ask her. I guess you’ve a right to know.”
Brendan looked at his feet. He felt his uncle was lying about not knowing where Rafael Martinez was but he didn’t want to push it anymore. It didn’t matter anyway.
“I know what happened to Eileen,” he said.
His cousin’s comment that what happened to her was the final straw for Uncle Frank now made sense. She was talking about what happened to Patricia. He wondered if the whole family knew about it and how many more family secrets he was unaware of.
Frank reddened and moved his gaze out of the window. Brendan could see his chin tremble and knew the memory still upset him greatly.
Frank eased his heavy body up from the armchair and patted his nephew’s leg.
“You going to be okay?”
Brendan nodded. He’d just found out that there was a whole other side to his background that he knew nothing about, a whole other race of people whose language he did not speak and whose country he had never been to. He had never given any thought to his father because he had just thought of him as a useless man who’d abandoned his mother and he had been able to put him out of his mind. He guessed that knowing his father was Mexican did not change any of that.
He checked his watch. It was only three o’clock and he had three hours to kill before he picked Eileen up. He went to his apartment to shave and change his shirt. A short time later, he pulled open the patio door of the main house and shouted to Frank that he’d be back later. There was someone he wanted to see.
Chapter 13
Pilar Diaz’s house was a low-roofed single-storey house in the middle of Crystal Avenue, a quiet cul-de-sac about a twenty-minute walk from Watson Drive. The front door stood to the extreme left of the house with two long windows to its right, set low on the beige clapboard wall. A small wooden gate opened onto a narrow pathway to the door of the house and a two-vehicle carport sat to the side. Two children’s bikes lay abandoned beside a small herb gardenon the right of the uncut lawn. From where he stood on the opposite side of the road, Brendan could see a man pouring oil into one of the cars in the carport. It was a pale green Ford and was parked beside Pilar’s small blue car. Brendan focused on the man and decided he must be her brother. He had followed in his father, Emilio’s, footsteps and was dressed in a New Jersey police uniform.
Brendan stood a while longer, embarrassed to be carrying the small bunch of flowers that had seemed like a good idea until he actually arrived on Pilar’s street. He clenched his shoulder blades back and heard his tense vertebrae crunch. He moved his head from side to side until a similar crack occurred in his neck. He had not felt so tense in a long time and he couldn’t believe he was actually going to ask this man for permission to ask his sister out.
When the man suddenly moved from the carport and looked his way, Brendan almost lost his nerve. Guido Diaz was a not a tall man but he was well built and Uncle Frank had joked with Brendan one night that he had better bulk up if he decided to face Pilar’s brother head on.
He threw the flowers onto the grass verge and began to nervously massage the mole on his cheek. He put one foot onto the road but lost his nerve and was turning back when a child called out to him in Spanish. The girl was about six years old and was standing there holding the flowers he had thrown down.
“Shoo!” Brendan said.
She laughed and began to call across to Pilar’s brother – probably her father.
“Get lost!” Brendan said but Guido was looking directly at him and had moved down the car port to greet him.
The girl stuck her tongue out at Brendan and followed him across the road, holding the flowers and placing one foot in front of the other like a bride.
“¿Puedo ayudarle?” the man asked.
“No hablo español,” Brendan said and for the first time he understood why so many Hispanic people found this amusing. When they looked at him, they saw a fellow Hispanic, not an Irishman.
Guido Diaz looked him up and down for what seemed to Brendan to be an eternity.
“I said – can I help you?”
“I’m . . . I’m Brendan. Brendan Martin. I’m here to see Pilar . . .with your permission.” He cringed as he said those last few words. If the lads in Murphy’s could see him now!
“You the DWI guy?” Guido asked in a broad New Jersey accent.
Brendan sighed.“Yes.”
“You do time for it?”
“Eight days,” Brendan replied in humiliation.
“And you want to see my sister?” He spoke as if the very idea was ridiculous.
Guido Diaz finished wiping the oil off his hands but did not move his gaze from the visitor who had begun to sweat in the sweltering summer heat. Guido moved back to his car and threw the rag onto the ground.
&nb
sp; “Listen, man,” he said, “if it were up to me, I’d send you packing right now, but Pilar makes her own decisions.” He looked him up and down again. “Well, come on in.”
Guidoled him into a narrow tiled hallway. He opened a door to the right and introduced Brendan to a heavily pregnant woman who was sitting under a fan trying to cool herself.
“This is my wife, Isabel.”
Brendan shook the woman’s hand and followed Guido out of the room and down the long, dimly lit hallway. He glanced quickly at the paintings on the wall. A small oil painting of the Virgin Mary hung to the side of a large tapestry of the Last Supper.
“You Catholic?” Guido asked when he caught Brendan staring at them.
“Yes,” he replied even though he hadn’t been to Mass even once since he had come to America.
“Good.”
They entered the small kitchen at the back of the house.
Brendan lowered his head to enter the room and found Pilar sitting at the kitchen table feeding a little boy in a high chair. She stood and blushed.
“You’ve got a visitor,” her brother said sourly. He turned to Brendan. “You don’t look nothing like Frank.”
“I know. I’m half Mexican.”
It was the first time he said it yet the words rolled off his tongue like they had always belonged there.
“Huh!” Guido said while Pilar’s mouth dropped open.
Brendan wondered if this would change anything, if being half Hispanic would gain him any brownie points with Guido or with Pilar herself.
“Well, I’ll leave you two alone. I’ve got to go to work in a few minutes.”
Brendan understood his meaning. Guido was telling him that he’d better be gone by then.
Guido walked out of the room but glanced back at Brendan and gave him a look that said ‘don’t mess with her’. Brendan understood it. If he had a sister he would do the same thing himself.
He stood awkwardly in the room and waited for an invitation to sit but Pilar stayed standing and crossed her arms around her body. She was wearing a light cotton dress with purple flowers and was barefoot. Her hair, which was normally tiedup tightly, hung loose around her shoulders and fell down to her tiny waist.
