At dawn, she roused Kiki from the blankets strewn on the living room floor and poured him some cereal. He blinked against the harshness of the kitchen light at such an early hour, surprised at his mother wearing one of his father’s long-sleeve work shirts, and even more surprised by the knock at the door. Lis stood there, her daughter behind her. Buenos dias, Delfina said and waved the girl Irma inside. She poured her a bowl of cereal, too, and Irma sat quietly at the table without having to be told to do so.
Thank you for taking care of him, Delfina said. We’ll be back in the middle of the afternoon. She knew she didn’t have to say more than that, trusted that Lis had spoken with the same motherly sense of warning that she used. Still, it was only now, on the brink of leaving them alone for the day, that she wished she had asked Kiki if he had been dreaming about his father, if he might have communicated something about what was true for him while he slept.
Lis showed her the gloves and the work knives and then the two costales to hold the fruit, a sturdy one of thick canvas with a hearty shoulder strap and a smaller one of nylon mesh. Her other hand balanced a water jug and a small ice chest, where Delfina put in a bundle of foil-wrapped bean tacos that would keep through the heat of the day.
In the car, Lis pointed her south of town and toward the orchards and Delfina drove along. They kept going south, the orchards endless, cars parked over on the side of the road and pickers approaching foremen, work already getting started even though the dawn’s light hadn’t yet seeped into the trees.
Up there, Lis said, where a few cars had already lined up and several workers had gathered around a man sitting on the open tailgate of his work truck. Wait here, she said.
Before Delfina could ask why, Lis had exited, approaching the man with a handshake. He seemed to recognize her and then looked back at Delfina in the car. Lis finished what she needed to say and the man took one more look at Delfina and then pointed down the rows.
Lis motioned her to get out of the car.
He says he’ll give us two rows for now and we do what we can. If we’re fast, he’ll give us more. And he’s letting us use a ladder free of charge.
That’s kind of him . . .
They charge sometimes, Lis said. She took one end of a heavy-looking wooden ladder, the tripod hinge rusty and the rungs worn smooth in the middle. So fifty-fifty?
Half and half, Delfina agreed.
I can pick the tops and you can do the bottoms, if you’re afraid of heights. Or you can walk the costales back to the crates for weighing. Give them your name if you want to, but make sure the foreman tells you exactly how much we brought in.
They worked quickly, the morning still cool. Delfina parted the leaves where the peaches sat golden among the boughs and the work felt easy at first. The fruit came down with scarcely more than a tug and when she yanked hard enough to rustle the branches, Lis spoke her advice from the ladder above: Just the redder ones and not too hard. Feel them, she said. If they’re too hard, leave them. Someone else will come back around in a few days and they’ll be riper then.
They did a few rounds like this, Delfina taking the costales back to the road to have them weighed. Sometimes Lis was ready with the smaller nylon sack and sometimes Delfina had to wait for other pickers to have their fruit accounted for. The morning moved on, a brighter white light coming into the orchard as they got closer to noon. As they picked the trees near clean, they moved deeper and deeper into the orchard and the walk back to the crates took longer, Lis almost lost to her among the leaves.
They had not quite finished the row when the sun finally peaked directly overhead and their end of the orchard sank into quiet. Delfina let out a sigh upon her return.
I should’ve brought the ice chest while I was there.
I can get it, said Lis. You’ve walked enough. She came down with the half-empty nylon costal and pulled a few more peaches from the bottom boughs as Delfina rested. She started walking toward the road, then turned around. The keys, she said, and held out her hand.
Delfina watched her go. Lis walked quickly with the nylon costal dangling over her shoulder. Maybe the weight of Lis’s work was all in her arms from stretching and pulling, and not heavy and burning in the thighs like hers. Delfina sat in the higher bank of the orchard row, catching her breath, massaging her upper legs and resting. It was a Sunday, she remembered, and Lis had been right after all. People did work on this day, even if it felt as tranquil and lonely as Sundays always did, here among the trees with the leaves growing more and more still, the orchard quiet and then quieter. Sundays were always so peaceful, Delfina thought, no matter where you were, so serene she imagined the birds themselves had gone dumb. El día de Dios, she thought, and remembered Sundays when her white-haired father had not yet slept out the drunkenness of the previous night. Her own husband had sometimes broken the sacredness of a Sunday silence and she was oddly thankful for the calm of this orchard moment that had been brought on only by his absence. Delfina looked down the row to soak in that blessed quiet and the longer she looked, the emptier and emptier it became. The empty row where, she realized, Lis had disappeared like a faraway star.
She started back toward the road. The walk was long and she couldn’t hear a sound, not of the other workers, not other cars rumbling past the orchards, just the endless trees and her feet against the heavy dirt of the fields. The day’s weariness slowed her and made the trees impossible to count, but she walked on, resolute, the gray of the road coming into view. She emerged onto the shoulder of the road and saw the foreman and the foreman’s truck and a few other cars, but the Galaxie was gone.
Excuse me, she said, approaching the foreman, who seemed surprised to see her, though he had seen her all morning, noting down the weight of the peaches she had brought in, saying the numbers twice, tallied under the last name Arellano.
You’re still here, the foreman said, very kindly, as if the fact was a surprise to him too, and his face grew into a scowl like the faces of the white men Delfina had encountered in Texas, the ones who always seemed surprised that she spoke English. But where their faces had been steely and uncaring, his softened with concern, as if he recognized that he had made a serious mistake.
I thought you were gone, he said.
We were supposed to split . . . She held a hand to her head and looked up the road, one way and then the other, as if the car were on its way back, Lis having gone only to the small country store to fetch colder drinks.
Arellano, the foreman said, tapping his ledger. Arellano is the first name on the list, he said. I paid it out about a half hour ago.
That was my car, Delfina said, as if that would be enough for him to know what to do next. But the foreman only stared back at her. It was my husband’s car, she said, because that was how she saw it now, what her husband would say about its loss if he ever made it back.
She told me that you two were sisters, the foreman said. If he only knew, Delfina thought, her real sister back in Texas. The mere mention made her turn back toward the orchard and walk into the row. She could sense the foreman walking to the row’s opening to see where she was going, and when she reached the ladder, she folded it down and heaved it best as she could, its legs cutting a little trough behind her as she dragged it back to the road.
You didn’t have to do that, the foreman said.
You did right by letting us use it, Delfina said. It’s only fair. Other pickers had approached the foreman’s truck and he attended to them, though he kept looking over at Delfina now and then, his face sunken in concern. None of the workers looked at her and she let go of the idea of asking any of them for a ride back into town. She sat in the dirt under the shade of a peach tree and watched while the foreman flipped out small wads of cash as the workers began to quit for the afternoon. When the last of them shook hands with the foreman and began to leave, she rose to help him load all of the wooden ladders back on to the truck.
He accepted her help and opened the door of the truck cab, motioning fo
r her to get in. They drove slow back into town, the ladders clattering with every stop and start, the weight of them shifting and settling. Neither of them said a word, but before the orchards gave way back to the houses, the foreman cleared his throat and spoke: I think it’s the first time I ever had two women come out alone like that, but I was raised to think that anybody can do anything and you don’t ask questions just because something isn’t normal. Even just a little bit of work is better than none at all and I kept thinking about the story she told me, that you two were sisters and that your husbands had gotten thrown over the border. You can tell a lot by a wife who wants to work as hard as her husband, you know what I mean? I wasn’t sure you could finish two rows just the both of you, but you kept coming and coming with those sacks and that’s how I knew you had kids to feed.
At the four-way intersection, just before the last mile into town, the foreman fished into his pocket and pulled out a bill. Take it, he said. He handed it to her, a twenty, and almost pushed it into Delfina’s hands as he started the turn, needing to keep the steering wheel steady. The bill fluttered in her fingers from the breeze of the open passenger window, but the truck wasn’t going to pick up much more speed. She wouldn’t lose it.
Thank you, she said.
It’s not your fault, he said. And I’m not defending her for what she did. But I believe any story that anybody tells me. You can’t be to blame if you got faith in people.
You’re right, she agreed. And though she didn’t have to say it, she followed it with the words of blind acceptance before she could stop herself. I understand, she said, and it was not worth explaining that she really didn’t.
Where should I take you? asked the foreman.
She didn’t hesitate. There’s a little store right near Gold Street, just across the tracks, she said. If you could stop, just so I can get something for my boy.
Of course, he said, though there could have been no other possible way to respond, since Delfina’s request came with a small hiccup of tears, which she quickly swallowed away as the truck pulled into the store’s small lot. Other workers had stopped there, too, and men from other neighborhoods lingered out front with their open cases of beer and skinny bags of sunflower seeds, staring at her as she wiped at her face with her dirty sleeves. She brought a package of bologna and a loaf of bread to the register and fished out three bottles of cola from the case at the front counter. The clerk broke the twenty into a bundle of ones, and she held them with the temporary solace of pretending there would be money enough for the days ahead and that money was going to be the least of her worries anyway.
She directed the foreman just a couple more blocks and when they turned the corner, the neighborhood held a Sunday quiet that made her think first of an empty church, but she had not been to a service in years. No, it was a quiet like the porch of the house in Texas when she and her husband had driven away, leaving her sister and her mother, a stillness that she was sure held only so long before one of them had started crying, followed by the other. A calm like that could only be broken by the bereft and that was how she understood that neither of them would ever forgive her. But that didn’t matter now. The hotter days of July were coming, Delfina knew, and the work of picking all the fruit would last from sunup to sundown. Something would work out, she told herself, clear and resolute against the emptiness of her neighborhood, Lis’s house stark in its vacancy. There, she said, pointing to her house, and she wasn’t surprised to see Kiki sitting there on the front steps all alone.
There he is, waiting for his mama, the foreman said, as he pulled up, and Kiki looked back at them, with neither curiosity nor glee.
She handed the foreman the third cola bottle.
You know, he said, it’ll work out in the end. Sisters always end up doing the right thing. She’ll be back, you’ll see.
What story had he figured out for himself, Delfina wondered, after she hadn’t bothered to correct him about Lis not being her sister, and she decided that this also mattered little in the end, how he would explain this to his wife back home. She would not explain this to her husband when he came back. All her husband would care about was what happened to the Galaxie and that would be enough of a story. She might even tell her husband about the luck of the twenty-dollar bill but she would hold private the detail of the ring on the foreman’s finger. She would hold in her mind what it felt like to be treated with a faithful kindness.
Thank you, she said, and descended from the truck cab, nodding her head goodbye.
On the steps, Kiki eyed the tall bottles of cola in her hand. But first there was the heavy field dust to pound away from her shoes and the tiredness she could suddenly feel in her bones. Delfina kicked her shoes off and sat on the front steps. She lodged one of the bottles under the water spigot to pop the cap, a trick she had seen her husband do. She handed that bottle to Kiki and he took it with both hands, full of thirst or greed for the sweetness, she couldn’t tell. She took some of the bread loaf and the bologna for herself and offered him a bite, knowing he wouldn’t eat one of his own. He was hungry and this was how she knew that Irma was gone, too. She was a girl who did what she was told and Delfina didn’t blame her. Kiki crowded close to her knees, even in the heat of the afternoon, and so she popped the cap of the second bottle to take a sip herself and asked her little boy of no words to tell where he thought the older girl had gone, and where he dreamed his father was. Dígame, she said, asking him to tell her a whole story, but Kiki had already taken the little metal car from his pocket and he was showing her, starting from the crook of his arm, how a car had driven away slowly, slowly, and on out past the edge of his little hand and out of their lives forever.
SIGRID NUNEZ
The Plan
from LitMag
He wanted to have more culture. This was what he always thought when he found himself at Lincoln Center. He remembered coming here on a school trip once, about ten years ago, when the complex was still partly under construction. There’d been some kind of tour and a concert-lecture for kids from different schools in the city. It had gone on and on, of no interest to him. He had never been back. He’d never even thought of going back. But earlier that summer of ’76, on one of his long city walks, he happened to arrive at the plaza.
It was evening but the sun was still very bright. From a distance he could see rainbows dancing in the fountain spray. He had started to walk closer for a better view, though, of course, as soon as he did that the rainbows vanished. Since then he had returned several times, more than once around the same hour. But he never saw the rainbows again.
Tonight he’d been walking for almost two hours. He sat down to rest on the lip of the fountain, refreshed by the spray that dampened the back of his shirt and his neck. He had an image of his mother, spritzing shirts from an atomized plastic bottle as she ironed them. Unless he was mistaken, this was the first time he’d thought of his mother in a long while.
He sat smoking a cigarette, cooling off and looking around him. It was near curtain time, and the plaza streamed with people going to the various theaters. Most of the men were in suits and ties. The women wore dresses that bared their shoulders, high heels, and evening makeup. The warm air was infused with the mingled smells of their perfume and hair spray.
It would not have occurred to him to see if he could get a ticket to any of the performances. Not just because he was out of his element, but because, from what he could tell, everyone seemed to be with somebody else. A person by himself would stick out—like a person eating alone in a fancy restaurant. If you were rich you could get away with that kind of thing, you’d only be seen as eccentric, maybe. But he thought an ordinary person, especially a man, would be looked on with suspicion.
So he wouldn’t have thought of going to a performance alone, and he didn’t know anyone he would ask to go with him. He had no idea if he’d enjoy a concert here any more than he’d enjoyed the one he’d been to as a kid. But, starting with the first time his rambles had led hi
m to Lincoln Center, the idea had taken shape: he would like to know more about music and art.
As a kid, he’d been a big reader. Later, for some reason he lost the habit. Now he thought he would like to read more, not just newspapers and magazines, but big, interesting books—books that a lot of other people were also reading.
Get more culture. He put that on the list. The list of things to do after. For now, though, too much thinking about anything not connected with his plan was a distraction, and too much distraction would not do. That was how these walks had gotten started. He had discovered how, when you had something important to work out, long walks could be helpful. He couldn’t think well at home, not even when he was alone. And when Harley was there he couldn’t think at all. Harley’s effect on his thinking was like the effect on their TV when their neighbor was in his garage using one of his power tools. It would not take living much longer with Harley to turn his brain into mush.
Where they lived people didn’t walk. He was sure he’d never seen anyone in his neighborhood out walking unless it was with a dog. Again, a lone man would have stuck out. He would have felt too conspicuous strolling through the streets. The town had a park but it was small, and since lately it had become the turf of drug addicts it was often cruised by the cops. In the city, on the other hand, you could walk forever, invisible, unhassled. It was a mystery to him how all the bustle only made it easier for him to think.
Two young women sat down next to him. They began talking, raising their voices above the splash of the fountain. They had been shopping. They were pleased silly with themselves and the swimsuits and sandals they’d snagged for next to nothing thanks to the big end-of-summer sales. He had no desire to listen to their babble, but they could not be ignored. Both had high-pitched, almost squealing voices, and one had the bad habit of saying everything twice.
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