The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue

by Manuel Munoz

  At the school’s front office, painted in the same clinical, soothing light green he remembered from Jefferson, Martín held Adán’s hand. The boy quietly watched as Martín set down the pile of identifications: Adán’s birth certificate, his inoculation records, his preschool report cards. It took him a moment to recognize the woman at the desk, who had smiled wanly at him when he entered, unsure of how to approach him: she turned out to be Candi Leal, a girl he’d gone to high school with and a good friend of his younger sister, Perla. He had never liked Perla’s friends, a whole brood of mean, belligerent girls whose troublemaking began with skipping school and ended with pregnancies by the tenth grade, the father-boys nowhere to be found. But here was Candi, who had had her own kid, if Martín recalled correctly, sometime in the eighth grade, and now she was a grown woman in a respectable job at the very elementary school she had attended.

  When he stated his business, without really saying hello to her, Candi slid him some forms and a pen, glancing down at Adán, who stood on the other side of the counter as if waiting for questions. Martín ignored her, deliberate in writing out the usual information: child’s name, parental contact information, emergency phone numbers. He pressed hard through the triplicate, lifting the sheets just to check if the marks had gone down all the way to the goldenrod at the bottom. When he got to the section about Adán’s mother, Martín casually slashed a large X across it.

  “So when did you move back?” Candi asked. Her tone wasn’t innocent and it wasn’t oblivious: Martín knew she had already heard from Perla.

  “Last month,” he answered as Candi skipped her fingers down the information on the forms.

  “San Francisco’s tough,” she said. “Expensive, too.” She reached the section he had slashed out and paused, looking at it for a moment, as if she expected to learn something.

  “How’s your kid?” Martín asked her. “He must be in junior high by now.”

  “Eighth grade,” Candi replied, but she didn’t say anything more. She gave Martín his goldenrod copy and told him when Adán should report to school. He tried to get her to look him in the eye the whole time, knowing he had the upper hand, the way people would be prying and wanting to know. People had made their mistakes a long time ago, when they were young and hadn’t known better, and he was perfectly willing to remind them if it came to that.

  ON THE SCHOOL DOCUMENTS where Candi stopped her fingers, in the space slashed out in pen, was the story: the small town just south of Orlando, Florida, and a burial in the torrid heat, tropical humidity searing through Martín’s suit. Missing from that document was a name — Adrian — and a sudden aneurysm late at night in an airport hotel room in Denver, Colorado, during a business trip, and a family in Florida who had barely acknowledged Martín and offered no comfort. What Candi wanted to know, when she asked Perla, was more about who Adrian was and what had happened, but Perla had no way of knowing about any of it. Martín had kept Adrian close and offered little; not even Adrian’s death would change that. No one but he would know about the uncomfortable trip to Orlando for the funeral, or about the cousin, Priscilla, who was cordial, but whose cowed silence, in the end, meant Martín would have no ally in Adrian’s greater family. No one — not even Adán, who was too young to be able to remember it fully later — would know about the cheap, pink-walled motel room where they had spent the night, a heavy breakfast of eggs and hash browns the next morning before the flight back to San Francisco, Martín staring out the taxi window at the pastel colors of Florida, knowing he would never see it again. If Perla had been with him, maybe her defensive, angry way of seeing the world would have prepared him for the legalities and the long, fruitless contesting of beneficiary money. Perla would have said he hadn’t fought hard enough, that you get only what you fight for, and whatever he lost to Adrian’s family was the result of his own stupidity. Perla would have said this if she had known the whole story — but it was almost as if she knew the undercurrent of it when Martín announced that he had to move away from San Francisco and come back to the Valley. “Is that right?” she had said, over the telephone, her voice coming over, he thought, with barely disguised triumph. “You can stay with us if you have to,” she had offered, meaning with her and her now-teenage son, but Martín had politely refused.

  Before long, though, it was humbling to face what was happening with his finances and, for once, to admit that circumstances could overwhelm a person. Always, Martín had been a person who believed that choices governed your road: you had to look past the crumbling downtown and imagine something better. You had to count the pregnant teenage girls and swear not to get involved in anything like that. You had to think of the orange groves nestled on the brink of the foothills and look past the deep green leaves for the meth labs hidden there. The Valley was a mess of lack, of descending into dust, of utter failure, and he had learned that long, long ago. But in the San Francisco apartment, opening the letters from the Florida lawyers and reading the documents that allowed Adrian’s family to siphon away what little had been left behind, Martín finally came face-to-face with failing. He thought of the helplessness of his sister when she had her baby, the decisions she had to make as a teenager. He thought of other girls like her, sitting in family courts, in lawyers' offices, at juvenile detention centers where the father-boys served out a month or two. He thought of the cruelty of Adrian’s family, saying nothing about wanting to gain custody of Adán for themselves and bring him to Florida. In the end, he was the same as those girls in retreating back to the Valley. He would have to make do.

  In his honesty with himself, Martín would never call himself arrogant, but he knows Perla would. And she would call him hypocritical, insensitive, unforgiving, judgmental, quick tempered, and mean spirited. She could very well have reveled in his struggle. Still, on the day he had made the move to the new place in his old hometown, Martín had finished the long trip from San Francisco with Adán sleeping the entire way, and there was Perla on the sidewalk. She knocked on the passenger window, waking Adán, and waved a stuffed purple elephant at him in greeting. Adán had rolled down the window, smiling for the first time in many weeks as Martín parked the car.

  “Look what your aunt Pearl has for you,” she said to Adán. As for Martín, she greeted him cautiously, a hug that felt more like letting go.

  IN THE LATE-DARK of the new house, in the rooms that echoed with their emptiness, by the wide windows that still had no curtains and let in the streetlight, Martín was the one who could not sleep for nights on end. Grief would come like a ghost at the foot of the bed, just as he was sleeping, and the curve of Adrian’s face would ask why he was trying to forget.

  He ignored the grief as best he could and fretted endlessly over the new circumstances, trying not to toss in bed, because Adán slept soundly next to him. Despite having his own room, Adán refused to sleep alone — this the only indication in his behavior that something was amiss. In the first few days in town, with Martín not yet prepared to look for a job and running daily errands to get their house in order, Adán had fidgeted and scrambled in every line Martín had to wait in. If Adán wasn’t playing with another child in line, he distracted himself with the simplest of things: a pebble in an empty plastic bottle, a nickel deposited over and over into a pay phone. Misbehavior, if Martín correctly read the reactions of the faces around him, but he paid them no mind. All the better to exhaust Adán and not have to battle with him at bedtime, leaving Martín the night hours to go over what needed to be done.

  In the dark, he owned up to how he felt about Adán: this was not his child. All along, it had been Adrian’s idea; it had been Adrian who had spoken plainly and honestly with a woman he’d been friends with for years — Holly, a chubby white girl from way back when in Orlando. Martín had gone along with the idea, perhaps not fully grasping the responsibility but assured by Adrian’s enthusiasm. Adrian would be the one to raise him, and he would be the one earning the money, too: a sales job took him up all around the wester
n states, commissions rolling in, Martín maybe too self-satisfied with a no-nonsense accounting job he had in Oakland. The mistake was colossal. He had never considered what it would require to be the child’s sole guardian. In the dark, he had to raise himself quietly from the bed, careful not to wake up Adán, and pace in the kitchen, wondering how he would ever admit something like this to Perla.

  What plagued him most was the repetition, the continuation of a cycle he had thought he would never be part of. One afternoon in town, stopping at the post office to mail off documents to yet another lawyer in Florida, Martín had caught a glimpse of Perla’s son, Matthew. He hadn’t seen Matthew except in pictures, and even those were of his nephew when he was nine or ten. Martín knew it was him, though, because he looked every bit like the skinny white boy who was his father, a troublemaker who disappeared long before Perla even knew she was pregnant. Martín had gone to school with that guy, a year ahead of him; he still remembered his slouch, his dirty-blond hair, the way his eyes always looked bruised and damaged underneath. His nephew looked enough like that guy for Martín to do a double take, and that’s when the sadness of the situation hit him deeply. His nephew was fifteen, a walking mirror of his absent father, the same darkness under his eyes, and it was all Martín had to see to understand why Perla never brought him over to the house.

  To be in a house with only one parent: look how it had turned out for Perla. Their mother had fought with her repeatedly, pointing to her older brother as an example. Of course, Martín had deliberately set an impossible standard, out of sheer distaste for his sister’s belligerence, her selfishness, her disrespect, and her stupidity. He went to church even though he didn’t like it, just to have one more thing over her. Perla fought against rules, leaving the house in the middle of the night, sometimes letting the car that came to pick her up idle shamelessly right in front of the house, just to wake up their mother. Such rebellion — it scared Martín now, alone, even though the prospect was years away with Adán.

  In the dark of the kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table, which had only two chairs, he poured himself a glass of milk. He would never dare ask Perla to discuss their mother, how she truly felt about her. They did not speak to each other. But surely Perla knew that their mother had also stopped speaking to him after he moved in with Adrian. Both of her children, then, were cut off: a monumental anger she had with them for having failed her.

  This is how he thought at night, starting with simple, solvable problems like the electricity bill or a doctor’s appointment. Grief summoned itself, impossible to release, Adrian insisting himself back to life — Martín had to ignore it to keep from being overwhelmed. Then a wave of guilt would sweep over him for his inability to completely summon a love for either Adán or his sister. Eyes open in the dark, he would sit in the kitchen until sunrise, asking himself questions that were impossible to answer. What would make him happy, satisfied? How would his mother have answered that question? Perla? Had their mother favored him more because he looked like her and Perla looked like their father? Did Matthew know that he looked like his father and that Perla saw it every time she looked at him? Is it possible to will yourself to love someone? If it isn’t love, then what is it?

  BY THE BEGINNING OF October, with Adán a few weeks into kindergarten, everything eased some when Martín found a job at a small accounting office in Fresno. The job wasn’t the best of circumstances: the building was on the south side, the more dangerous part of the city after dark, and the office was situated in a converted warehouse, the false ceiling perfect for tossing up sharpened pencils to see if they would stick. Drafts of the hot afternoon air somehow snaked past the warehouse’s corrugated paneling and into the core offices, which were nothing more than walls of Sheetrock; in the mornings, the drafts were chilly enough to force Martín to drink a third cup of coffee. Every Friday afternoon, the secretary would come around with the paychecks, personally signed by the company owner, and Martín would not complain about the ten minutes he’d be docked if he had been late.

  Perla mercifully made it easy for him. She kept her phone calls cautious and intermittent, but when he told her that he had found a job, she had been the one to volunteer to care for Adán after school. “I’ll pick him up and bring him to your house or mine, whichever,” she said. What, then, was she doing for work? Martín wanted to know, especially with a teenager at home, but he felt too ashamed to pry when he himself was in need. “My house,” he had told her, and gave her a set of keys.

  Most days, after he came home from work, Perla wouldn’t linger more than a few minutes before she excused herself, touching Adán gently on the shoulder. Neither Martín nor Perla would bring up the subject of money, but it was on Martín’s mind once a few paychecks came his way. He knew taking care of Adán was costing her something, and he knew her willingness to help was rooted in a desire to move past their differences. Somewhere along the line, like her friend Candi Leal at the front office of the elementary school, she had eased into a forgiveness of the world at large, and that included him. One Friday night, he came home to find Perla cutting up a roast chicken from the grocery store and Adán busy folding paper towels for the table. “I bought dinner,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. Matthew fends for himself most times anyway.” In helping her set the table, Martín took a peek at the receipt in the bag to see how much she had laid out for everything, the containers of macaroni salad and wild rice, the rolls. She had bought beer, too, but that would be for later apparently. When they were ready to eat, he insisted she take one of the two chairs, and he ate leaning against the kitchen counter.

  When bedtime came for Adán, Perla helped get him into pajamas and cajoled him into sleeping in his own room. “Here,” she said to him, handing him the purple elephant. “Me and your dad will be in the kitchen, so no monsters can come, okay?” Martín, putting away the dishes they had washed, could hear the murmur of protest, but Perla’s voice was gentle in its command and patience. “I’ll leave the door open a little bit, but be a big boy and go to sleep,” she said, and made her way down the hallway to the kitchen.

  She pulled two cans of beer from the refrigerator and handed him one. “I went to the school today,” she said, sitting at the table.

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “The school pictures they took the first week? The money? A kid in the fourth grade took the check you gave him.”

  “That was weeks ago,” he said, thinking of the morning he had given in to Adán’s pestering to wear his favorite sweatshirt — a purple one with a green dragon on it. “I forgot all about it. He never said anything.”

  “Did you expect him to?” She took the tiniest sip of beer from the can, licking her lips a little, and it occurred to Martín that he had never actually seen her drink before. She was almost demure about it, and it reminded him of one of the first times he’d gone out to dinner with Adrian, to a restaurant with thick tablecloths, and of the careful way he’d had to handle the wineglasses. He tried to picture his sister at such a place.

  “He got beat up that day,” Perla added. “Or shoved around. You know how kids exaggerate a little. I don’t think he really got hurt.”

  “Who was the kid?”

  “Just some older boy. Probably the older brother of some kid in his class.”

  He took a deep drink from the can. The beer was watery and cheap, but he said nothing because it was from Perla’s courtesy and generosity. “You should have called me. I would’ve come down and taken care of it.”

  “What was there to take care of? You can’t be bothered at work right now. Not with you just starting and everything. I know how bosses can be.”

  “So what did they do? Did they punish the kid?”

  “Well, the principal — do you remember Roberta Beltrán? She was three years ahead of you, or something like that. That really fat girl? She’s the principal there, if you can believe it, and she had that boy in tears in no time. He still has the check, and he has to bring it to the school o
n Monday.”

  “For what?”

  “To apologize. He’s supposed to write a letter.” She laughed, shaking her head. “Can you believe it? That’s the punishment. We would’ve gotten a lot worse back in the day.”

  He laughed with her, but it felt forced. He took another drink of his beer, noticed Perla looking down at the lip of the can as if she had remembered suddenly what it had been like for her as a teenager, as if she had become lost in pinpointing where the trouble had started, how young she had actually been.

  “You know, I hate to ask you, but I gave them some of the money for the pictures. I told them you’d bring the rest on Monday.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said, putting down his beer. He reached into his back pocket for his wallet.

  “I had twelve dollars on me. So you owe them thirteen,” she said, getting up from the chair. She went into the living room and reached behind the couch, where she had hidden the pictures. “I wanted to bring them to you as a surprise, so you wouldn’t have to wait till Monday.”

  He pulled a twenty from his wallet, this being payday. Then he pulled two more and put the bills on the table as Perla made her way back.

  “It was just twelve, Martín.”

  “Yeah, I know, but you’ve been doing a lot for me. It’s just a little bit.” He reached for the pictures and pretended to study them closely. Only the head of the green dragon on Adán’s sweatshirt was visible, a cartoon dragon with bubble eyes and a little tongue upturned as if in thought or effort. Adán was smiling in the photograph, as if nothing had happened that particular day. All the pictures were the same, but Martín slid them out for inspection so Perla could reach to the table and fold the bills quietly in her hand.