Love Finds You in Romeo, Colorado

by Gwen Ford Faulkenberry

  “How’s my little nieto this morning?” Abuelita’s dark eyes danced when she saw her great-grandson, and she reached out to hug Graeme with her free arm. With the other, she stirred scrambled eggs with a wooden spoon.

  Claire kissed her on both leathery cheeks. “Buenos dias, Abuelita.”

  “Help me put these together, hija. There’s bacon and beans and cheese.”

  Claire began assembling the tacos.

  Graeme stood on his tiptoes to watch. “Yum!”

  They moved to the breakfast room and sat at the table, a round, Pre-Revolution antique made of walnut. After prayer, which she led, Abuelita clapped her hands and inquired, “So, what’s happening with everyone today?”

  “I’m staying home in my pajamas,” Graeme informed them, before taking a big bite of his taco.

  “Oh? Chistosa, Graeme! On a school day?” Abuelita scolded him, charmed.

  “Graeme is going to school, and I’m going to work. It’s Friday, so I’ll be coming home early and can pick him up. We’re planning on going to Mickey’s game tonight. Want to come with us?”

  “No, gracias. These old bones won’t be sitting out on those cold bleachers.”

  “What are you going to do?” Claire asked her.

  “I was thinking of going over to Abe’s in town. I’ve heard they have great weekend dances—corridos and country.”

  Claire gaped at her, incredulous. “What? Are you serious?”

  Abuelita laughed naughtily. “Nah, I’ll probably play chicken feet,” she answered, pouring cream into her coffee. “Louisa and Pablo invited me.”

  Claire shook her head.

  “Mickey’s the new Manassa Mauler,” offered Graeme over his cup of chocolate. “That’s what Billy Sanford told me.”

  Claire and Abuelita exchanged looks of amusement.

  “Is that so?” Claire asked him. “Who is the old Manassa Mauler?”

  “Jack Dipsey, of course. That famous boxer.”

  She didn’t correct his pronunciation of Dempsey. “What else did Billy Sanford tell you?”

  “Oh, nothing, just that our team was going to kick the Sand Lizards’ butts.”

  Abuelita, trying to suppress a laugh, spewed out some of her coffee.

  “I see.” Claire smiled at him and put down her fork. “Well, since Sand Lizards have tails, let’s say ‘tails’ instead of ‘butts,’ okay, buddy?”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  Although Graeme had a bedroom of his own across the hall, which Abuelita had lovingly prepared for him, he didn’t spend much time there. This morning, like every morning, he came into Claire’s room to get dressed. While he buttoned up his polo shirt and pulled on his jeans, she was in the adjoined bathroom with the door open, applying her makeup. Graeme often watched her draw on her eyes and brush her cheeks, like an artist. He said she was as beautiful as a movie star.

  Graeme didn’t like to be far away from his mother. In the evenings, unless he was playing with his toy train or looking at a book from the bookshelf in his room, he’d rather be in Claire’s room where she was. He took his baths in her big claw-footed bath tub and dried off in front of her fireplace. And when it was time for bed, he curled up beside her while she read to him and slept snuggled beside her in bed. They’d slept that way for almost as long as Graeme could remember.

  “About ready to go, Graemesy?” Claire called from the bathroom. “Be sure to get your jacket and backpack.”

  Claire put on a fitted black suit and her favorite jasmine perfume and then met Graeme in the hall. They bounded down the stairs together holding hands.

  On their way out the door, both kissed Abuelita. She was still sitting at the breakfast table, reading her worn Bible.

  “The Lord bless you,” she told them as they waved good-bye.

  In the backseat behind Claire, Graeme buckled his seat belt and then arranged his backpack beside him. “Why does Abuelita always say that?”

  “What?” Claire asked.

  “The Lord bless you.”

  “Oh, it’s just a nice saying. It means that she wants us to be safe and happy, and that she loves us.” Claire put the car in Reverse and backed up. Then they started forward down the painted brick drive.

  “Are you happy, Mommy?” Graeme looked at her in earnest.

  “Well, yes, honey. I’m happy that I have you.” Graeme’s question both startled and saddened Claire—saddened her because he had to ask. She held out the remote. “Want to push the button?”

  Graeme pushed the button to open the gates, something Abuelita had updated several years ago. “What’s your greatest fear?”

  “My goodness, Graemesy. Where are all of these questions coming from?”

  “I don’t know. But what is your greatest fear?” he persisted.

  Claire had always tried to be honest with him, and she was now. “Losing you.”

  “That’s mine, too,” he sighed. “And after that, it’s scorpions.”

  Claire had to laugh. “I don’t like scorpions either!”

  When they reached his school, which was just a few minutes away, Graeme leaned forward to hug her.

  “I’ll pick you up after school, little man. Love you!” she said.

  “The Lord bless you, Mommy.” Graeme slung his backpack over his little shoulder and shut the car door behind him.

  Trekking back past the Casa before turning onto Highway 285, Claire drove straight through the heart of Romeo. She slowed down as she went through town and paid homage to its deteriorated buildings, some of which housed ghosts from her past life.

  There was the Romeo Fire Department, labeled by a crude sign someone had painted with a can of black spray paint and seemingly deserted. Its discolored plywood doors looked so tired that Claire could not conjure an image of a fire truck racing through them to perform a rescue. Were there still volunteer firefighters in Romeo, like her grandfather had been? Claire didn’t know.

  Next to the fire department was a seedy-looking liquor store. It had bars on the windows and a chain on the door. A woman who looked to be in her fifties was working on the lock with a key. The woman acknowledged Claire with a nod of the head when she lifted her hand in a wave.

  On the other side of the liquor store was an abandoned building with several windows broken out. It had a rusted tin roof, with layers of brick, mortar, whitewash, and stucco all exposed, and Claire thought briefly that the building had character. A sign on the door, with peeling paint, still read “Curl Up and Dye.” Claire sighed. That place used to be a beauty shop, where Abuelita had taken Claire to get her first perm.

  On the corner was a white stucco building with three logs protruding from the face at the top. It wasn’t labeled anywhere, but everyone knew the building as Abe’s Bar. Below the logs were tinted windows, which at night were lit with glowing signs that advertised Corona and Budweiser. Claire smiled when she saw one that said Tecate. She’d been teased mercilessly in high school for asking Carlos Caballeros who “Tea-kate” was.

  In the center of the windows was a set of double doors. They opened onto the sidewalk, which was just inches off the road. Had they been wooden and swinging from hinges, it would have seemed more appropriate somehow.

  Claire remembered the time she’d witnessed a fight right in front of those doors, like a scene from a Western movie. She was with her abuelita, when they had gone to visit a sick person in one of the trailers. Claire remembered that Abuelita had put her arm around her as they drove by and told her not to look, but Claire had looked anyway. She couldn’t resist. The look in the fighting men’s eyes had scared her, and so had the crowd that was cheering them on.

  Another time, Claire and her best friend, Martina, had been scared to death by a drunk coming out of those doors. He yelled nasty things at them at them while they passed by in Martina’s Camaro. Claire never told Abuelita about that incident. There wasn’t much to do in those days other than cruise the town, unless you went up to Salida.

  On the other side of Main S
treet, another white stucco building was decorated by a fairly decent looking mural, a desert painting of a wolf howling at a full, white moon. This was the meat-packing business owned by Abe’s son, Jerome, who was a butcher and somewhat famous in the valley. Claire had been there once with her grandfather before he died, to purchase antelope and elk for a charity barbecue.

  Next to the meatpacker’s, between it and the next building, was a vacant lot. Shards of sheet metal were scattered about the lot, which was grown up with weeds. A broken plastic bucket and sheets of old newspaper rolled across it like tumbleweeds in the wind and stuck to the rickety wood fence that served as the lot’s rear border.

  Adjoining the lot was a building that her best friend, Martina, had recently purchased and was busy transforming into a restaurant. Claire slowed her car to inspect Martina’s most recent renovations. The cinderblock building had been freshly painted the color of burnt clay. Directly in the center, where ugly wooden doors had been, Martina and her husband had installed glass ones overlaid with ironwork in the shape of a gigantic desert sun. The painted sign above the doors, in Martina’s fabulous signature style, read “Art and Sol.” Claire recalled Martina’s plans to convert the ugly vacant lot next door into a garden patio for parties and wedding receptions.

  Claire sighed, admiring her friend’s creativity, her ability to transform something useless and broken into something beautiful.

  She pulled away from the strip of buildings that marked the end of Romeo proper, if there was anything proper about it. The housing district, which was next, consisted of two gravel roads lined with old trailer houses. From the steps of scattered trailers, where dogs barked behind fences and toddlers played in the dirt, a few men and women gawked back at Claire as she drove past.

  Passing out of town, she saw that the grade school of her childhood was abandoned. The community center, next to it, looked almost as bad. It stood in a field of weeds against the backdrop of overgrown trees, whose leaves looked like brownish lace pasted to a blue sky. The white stucco facade crumbled in disrepair behind more chain link and signs that said DO NOT ENTER. What else can these people do? Where can they go? Claire wondered fleetingly. She was glad that Martina was trying to make a difference and hoped that her friend’s new restaurant would breathe some life back into their hometown. And I hope it doesn’t suck the life out of her, Claire thought forebodingly.

  The only thing that seemed to be thriving at the moment besides Abe’s Bar was the grain elevator and its adjoining feed store on the outskirts of town. An older man with a sack of feed over his arm tipped his straw hat at her affably as she drove into the vast landscape that swallowed up Highway 285 and made Romeo a memory.

  Before Claire on the way to Alamosa, highline wires stretched out on the shoulders of stripped pines. They looked like an army of toothpicks the further they extended ahead of her on the highway. She wondered what the land must have been like before this acupuncture took it over—and then remembered that acupuncture is supposed to heal a person, relieve her pain, and not add to it.

  Claire arrived at Adams State College fifteen minutes before her first class. Unlocking the door to her office, she unpacked her bag, sorted the papers she needed to hand back to her students, and decided to check her e-mail.

  Her inbox was mostly full of advertisements and forwards, which she promptly deleted. Glad to have that tidied up, she saw a message from Martina and opened it.

  Dear Claire,

  Did you see in the paper that they are calling my Mickey the new “Manassa Mauler”? I’m not sure what to think about that! I hope you are still planning on coming to the game. The coach is in our home church group and he says it will be a great match. Meet us on the fifty-yard line. Jesus and I are looking so forward to seeing you!

  XXOO

  Martina

  Claire giggled. Jesus and I are looking forward to seeing you. Of all of the men out there, Martina would marry a man named Jesús.

  At eight fifty, Claire walked down to the room where her nine o’clock composition class met. On the board, she wrote five quotes for the week’s journal reflections:

  1. “By words the mind is winged.” Aristophanes

  2. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Martin Luther King Jr.

  3. “Beauty is not caused; it is.” Emily Dickinson

  4. “In spite of it all, I still believe people are basically good at heart.” Anne Frank

  5. “It is better to have traveled and gotten lost than never to have traveled at all.” George Santayana

  As she was writing, the class started to fill up.

  “Where do you find these quotes?” Ryan Sellers, a freshman athlete from Pagosa Springs, asked her as he ambled by on the way to his seat.

  Claire answered him without turning around. “I read.”

  “Well, I read, too, but I’ve never read that, about the mind getting wings.”

  “Sounds like you need to read a little more,” Claire teased.

  The class sniggered.

  Turning to face them, Claire picked up their journals and began to pass them out. “When I hand back your journal, start copying the quotes for the next week. Remember that I require at least a page for each of the five entries; other than that, there are no stipulations. You can write whatever you want, within reason. I just want you to write.”

  She took attendance by looking around, noting in her grade book whoever was absent. After giving them a few moments to finish copying the quotes, Claire told them to gather up their things. “We’re going outside.”

  The students followed her out of the building and down the steps. She guided them past the Honors College, across the courtyard, and onto the pathway that led through the giant oaks and wound about the campus. Under the oaks, she stopped and told her students to sit down. They all found places either on benches or on the grass beside the walk.

  “On our school’s Web site we have a picture of this pathway under the trees, and there’s a caption that reads, ‘Adams State College: Great Stories Begin Here.’ Your assignment is to write a great story that begins, literally, here. I’ll take them up at the end of class.”

  There were a few groans, a few nervous laughs, and many sets of wide eyes staring at her.

  “Get started!” Claire commanded with a smile and then waved at Oscar, who’d just come out to the courtyard to smoke a pipe.

  Later that day, as Claire drove the thirty minutes or so it was from the college in Alamosa to Manassa Elementary School, she thought about the assignment she’d given her Composition students. She and Rob had first met under those same trees. I never expected my own story to turn out like this, she thought. Pulling up at Graeme’s school and seeing him standing there, she knew he was the best part of it.

  “Hey, buddy!” Claire said as he piled into the car.

  “Hi, Mom!”

  She took his backpack and set it in the front seat, while he buckled up in the back. “How was your day?”

  “It was good. I got to be the leader in the lunch line.” Graeme’s green eyes were shining.

  “That’s cool.”

  “Yeah. We say, ‘My hands are locked behind my back; I’m standing straight and tall. My lips are sealed so I won’t talk; I’m ready for the hall.’”

  Claire tried to hide her grin. “Wow.”

  “Can we get a snack at Sonic?” Graeme begged. “I’m starving.”

  “I just happened to bring you an apple.” Claire held it back to him.

  Graeme took it and sighed. “Gee, thanks.”

  Back at the Casa, where Claire changed into jeans and a lime-green sweater, there was a note from Abuelita. The scrawl was a mixture of Spanish and English explaining that she had gone to Louisa’s and would be back “when I get there.” Claire rolled her eyes when she read that, hoping her grandmother would be okay driving in the dark.

  They left a little early to pick up burgers at Sonic—at Graeme’s request—and arrived at the game just in ti
me for kick-off.

  “Claire! Graeme! Up here!” A green-and-gold-clad Martina was waving her arms wildly from halfway up the bleachers on the fifty-yard line.

  Claire and Graeme made their way through the crowd toward them, alternately saying “Excuse me” and “Pardón.” When they reached Martina and Jesús, there were hugs all around.

  “Sit down, sit down!” Jesús moved over to make room for Claire and Graeme.

  “How was your day?” Martina asked Claire, keeping her eyes locked on the field.

  “It was good. I did something a little different with my students.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “I took them outside and—”

  Martina broke into Claire’s sentence with a roar. “There they come!”

  The Manassa crowd stood up and cheered as their team entered the field, led by Mickey Rodriguez. The Grizzlies were fired up. As they ran in, dancing like warriors in green and gold, Claire noticed a black man, apparently the head coach, taking charge on their sideline. He was pulling his players together for instructions even as the team captains met in the middle of the field for the coin toss. Graeme looked at his mother with excitement and pointed to Mickey. “There he is! There he is! Number seventy-six!”

  In spite of her usual lack of interest in sports, Claire found herself enjoying the game. Mickey was a wonder, seemingly stopping every offender who came into his path and blasting through the Sand Lizards’ defense like a runaway train. By halftime he’d already scored two touchdowns for the Grizzlies.

  “We’re kicking their but—tails!” Graeme cheered, glancing sideways at his mom as the team trotted off the field.

  “Want to go get a drink?” she asked him.

  “Sure, and I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “We’ll be right back, guys,” Claire told Martina and Jesús.

  They climbed down the bleachers holding hands. In front of the bathrooms, Claire told Graeme, “I know you won’t like this, but I want you to come with me into the ladies’ room.”

  “Why, Mom?”