The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue

by Manuel Munoz

  “Who does he look like?” she asked Martín as he returned the pictures to the envelope.

  “More and more like his father,” he nodded. “Adrian was Cuban. Dark hair, a little wavy,” he said. “Dark eyes.”

  “He’s kind of light skinned.”

  “His mother was white. A friend of Adrian’s.” Perla had never seen a picture of Adrian, and he thought for a moment that she might ask. He didn’t know whether he would show her or, if he did, where he would begin the story. Maybe from the beginning, which was the end. When he moved into the new place, he had left pictures of Adrian packed in their boxes, hoping Adán wouldn’t say anything about them.

  Perla went to the refrigerator to get another beer, and she turned to wiggle a can at him in invitation. He nodded and she brought them back, popping hers open with relish and taking a longer drink this time. “In the car,” she said, “on the way home . . . he told me that he looked like you.”

  Martín almost snorted and ran his fingers through his hair. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, sighing. “The things I’m going to have to explain to that kid . . .”

  “Well, you know, I’m here to help you,” Perla said, tapping her fingernails nervously against her beer can. “You’re my brother.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, but couldn’t add much more. Part of him felt ashamed at Perla’s attempt to bring their slow reconciliation out in the open, felt ashamed of how little he was trying to meet her halfway.

  “I’ve learned a lot trying to raise Matthew,” she said. “I made a lot of stupid mistakes. So did some of my friends, the ones who had their own kids. It’s hard, Martín. It’s harder than you think.”

  He looked at the picture of Adán, the joyful color of his purple sweatshirt and the cartoon dragon, and found it hard to imagine a point when Adán would fully form into his own person. The fourth-grade boy couldn’t have been more than ten years old, and already he had discovered that you could bully your way through this world if you wanted. You didn’t have to follow the rules.

  “Perla,” he asked, “what do you do for work? For money?”

  “I clean houses,” she replied. “Mostly here, but sometimes over in Reedley or in Visalia. A lot in Visalia. There’s people moving there from the Bay Area. Lot of money.”

  “Not me.”

  She laughed slightly. “Normal situations, I mean. People who had money to throw around to begin with, so they buy land and build these really huge houses to live in, and then rent tiny apartments in San Francisco so they have that when they need it.”

  “Is it enough? The money you make?”

  She sighed and put her chin in her hand. Her hair was pulled back and knotted up almost haphazardly, and though it was as long and black as he remembered it, the sheen was a little dull, as if her hair were somehow thinking of shading gray. It was hair pulled back out of necessity, to keep it out of the way as she hurried in the morning, not like she wore it in high school — combed razor-straight like the other girls', her eyeliner heavy, and her lips glossy with a deep blackberry. “Money comes and goes,” Perla said. “I work hard only for myself now. I used to do for Matthew, used to do a lot, but he’s just a real angry kid. He’s got a lot inside him that I can’t get to.”

  “He looks like his father. That kid —”

  “Well,” she interrupted, “that’s the problem, I think. Every time he looks in the mirror . . . the things he says to me sometimes.” When she put her hand to her mouth, the way she did that, he thought of their mother and her regretting. “I’m almost thirty years old, you know? I did what I could and the rest is up to him. If he wants to come home, well, then he comes home. And if he stays at a friend’s house, that’s none of my business anymore. You can’t control that if they don’t want to let you.”

  When she began crying, as he expected her to, Martín sat quietly and watched his younger sister’s resolve shimmer through the helplessness. One hand was still on the beer can, and because he looked closely now, because he paid attention, he saw that she wore no nail polish, and the two rings on her fingers were simple, unadorned silver. Rings she must have picked out for herself, shopping alone at one of the malls in Visalia, studying the velvet display boxes intently, not bothering to worry over the price, thinking of herself for once. But it wasn’t selfishness — Martín understood that. It wasn’t like the way he thought of himself, of deserving and wanting, the self-satisfaction and the near greed of having, after years of not-having. Instead, it was a contentment and a self-knowledge, a forgiveness for her own part in her unhappiness, a releasing.

  “Do you want another beer?” he asked her. “Finish off the pack?”

  “I have to drive home,” Perla said, dabbing at her eyes gently.

  “Sleep on the couch,” he told her. When she didn’t answer, he crossed to the refrigerator and brought back the last two cans. Perla popped hers open as if with effort, grinning a little, and before she took a drink, she raised her beer as if in toast. They tapped cans, the aluminum sounding as sincere as glass.

  MONDAY MORNING, HE CALLED in sick to work, and though the secretary quizzed him, Martín held his resolve over the phone and promised to be better by the next day. The principal had asked to see him at ten o’clock, and he arrived at Lincoln School fifteen minutes early. Candi Leal, busy with the phones and a string of kids slumped in plastic chairs against the wall, nodded knowingly at him, raising her wrist to tap at her watch: she’d get to him soon. On the way there, Martín had imagined himself speaking to Candi at her desk, prompting an exchange that he should have engaged in weeks ago when he had registered Adán. She was too busy now, and he regretted how he might have misread her before, her initial spark of forgiveness, of new possibilities, of growing and maturing, and how he had wiped it away by not returning her grace.

  Almost on the dot, the door to the principal’s office opened and Roberta Beltrán came over to shake his hand. “Good morning,” she said good naturedly. “It’s nice to see you again.” If anything, she had gained more weight; she had always been a large girl, but now her size gave her a commanding presence Martín had always associated with both principals and mean teachers. “Jesse,” she said, crooking a finger at a boy in a Raiders jacket. “In my office, please,” she ordered, then turned to hold the door for them.

  “We’ll make this quick,” Roberta said, sitting at her desk and clasping her hands. “Jesse, do you have something for Mr. Grijalva, like I asked you on Friday?”

  “Yes,” Jesse answered in a half groan as he dug into the pockets of his Raiders jacket.

  “Sit up straight, please,” Roberta ordered as Jesse took his time finding a piece of paper that he then unfolded. “Speak clearly.”

  Jesse read from the paper, his voice flat footed despite his sincerity. “Dear Mister Grijalva, I am sorry that I stole the money from Adam and that I brang the money to my house. I am sorry that Adam did not get his pictures because of me and I am sorry that I hurt his feelings. Sincerely, Jesse Leal.” Finished, he handed the letter to Martín.

  “And where is the check?” asked Roberta.

  Jesse fished in the jacket’s other pocket and drew out the check, folded tiny in a triangular shape, its edges smoothed down and worn.

  “Unfold it,” Roberta said. “Is that how you took it from Adán?”

  “No,” he answered. His fingers seemed confused by the folds, but he unraveled the check and smoothed it against his leg before handing it to Martín.

  “Thank you,” Martín said, taking it.

  “What do we say?”

  Jesse turned to her, confused, but Roberta only tilted her head down at him, as if looking over the brim of a pair of glasses. “We need to apologize.”

  “But I did . . . ,” he protested.

  “You read the letter. You also need to say it like you mean it. Look him in the eye.”

  Jesse Leal turned to look at Martín, and though he said he was sorry, he drawled it. Martín nodded his head as if in acceptance, but he thought o
f the battle Jesse Leal would turn into, a ten-year-old who had somehow already managed to persuade his parents to buy him an expensive Raiders jacket. “Fine,” he said to Jesse Leal. “Just don’t do it again.”

  “You’re excused,” Roberta said, and Jesse turned abruptly to the door. “Get a pass from Ms. Leal to get back to your room,” she called out after him.

  When the door closed, Martín reached for his wallet and pulled out the money he still owed for the pictures. “Was it twelve or thirteen?”

  “Thirteen, I think. But Candi knows for sure. Why don’t you give the money to her?”

  “Okay,” he said, but before he walked to the door, he asked Roberta quietly, “That wasn’t her kid, right? Candi’s?”

  Roberta shook her head and reached for the phone. “Oh no,” she said, dialing. “Maybe a cousin of some kind, but not her kid. She had her own problems long ago.” She waved good-bye to him as she waited for her call to go through.

  SINCE HE HAD THE rest of the day off, Martín went to the Kmart in town. It had opened when he was in high school, but now it was losing out to some of the newer chains at the broadened strip mall. He found a large frame for Adán’s picture and then bought a smaller one to give to Perla.

  Waiting in line to buy them, he pulled out the check and the handwritten letter from Jesse Leal. When Jesse had read it, there had been no way to imagine how lousy every aspect of the note would actually be: the lone, emphatic period, circled dark and certain when there were clearly two sentences. The misspelling of every name except his own. The crabbed penmanship. Martín bristled at the blatant brang. He thought of Roberta Beltrán and Candi Leal and any of the people he had grown up with who might be teachers now, of all of their night training at the local colleges, their effort to push books and paper in front of kids like Jesse Leal. Somewhere along the line, they would know when the right time had come to correct these errors, before they became bad habits, more obvious in speech: these were the smallest of a whole string of corrections, and Martín multiplied them by the numbers of kids in the office this morning, of the kids waiting in the classrooms, the enormity of the task. Perla had failed. His mother had failed: he remembered that day when he was a teenager, when he had opened the envelope from the adult-training center, the application that his mother had put in, the handwriting scratchy and uncertain, the information inaccurate or missing because his mother had not understood the questions. Her application for job training had been denied. He had thrown it away before she even saw it. Diction, syntax, grammar, basic math, conceptual thinking. Symmetries, the logic of sympathy, the order of gratitude, empathy, concern, the rigor of understanding, the faulty equation of grief and anger. He had failed, too, somewhere along the line. He handed the money for the picture frames to the woman at the register, her bare arms thick and dark, her red smock rumpled from a long early morning shift. He thanked her aloud when she handed him his change.

  At the house, he put Adán’s picture in the large frame and hung it in the living room. For a brief moment, Martín considered putting it in the hallway, just as his mother had done in their house on Gold Street when he and Perla were growing up. Their individual year-by-year school pictures, Perla in her glasses and barrettes until she changed into the girl with the razor-straight hair in eighth grade. Pictures of him and Perla when they were both very young, their mother with them, standing behind proudly, and even a picture with all of them: Martín, Perla, their mother, their father, the photograph so old that the tint had washed out in an odd red hue. But the living room it would be, just Adán’s photograph above the couch. There would be time enough for others.

  Later, he left a message at Perla’s inviting her to come for dinner, and after he picked up Adán from kindergarten, they went to the grocery store, where Adán helped select the dinner items for his aunt Pearl. He let Adán call her whatever he wanted and didn’t correct him. Though he had no reason to be, Martín felt exhausted, but there was dinner to make. There were many days ahead. Still, when they got back to the house and before he started dinner, he fished in one of the boxes that he had stashed away in his own bedroom and found a picture of himself and Adrian. He loosened it from the layers and layers of plastic he had wrapped around it, Adrian coming back to light. His mother, upset, would say she could feel a knot in her throat, but the Spanish word meant more: un nudo — and then the gesture toward the neck as if to ward off the noose doing the damage. Martín gave the frame a quick swipe with the hem of his shirt and set it on a little table in the living room.

  ON THE DAY OF Adrian’s plane trip to Denver, the morning had brought a hard rain to San Francisco. The two of them had shuffled quietly around the apartment, packing Adrian’s suitcase. Adrian would return on Monday night if there were no delays — Denver meant the possibility of snow. Adán slept with a raging fever, and for a rare time, it would be Martín taking complete care of him. There would be no driving to the airport, no good-byes with tickets in hand.

  That rainy morning, the apartment sat dark. The windows let in a weak light. Adán didn’t budge in his sleep, though his face was flushed and his pajama top soaked through with sweat. There was a sticky pink medicine that smelled like citrus.

  Martín spent all day in Adán’s room with the apartment quiet. He spent the day looking out the window at Coit Tower in the distance and fell into a well of doubt. Adrian was a good man, but he was all his own and not fully Martín’s to love. There was a young child here, but he was Adrian’s, not his. After years of wishing for a relationship, here it was, but with it came a certain boredom and an isolation. Martín found himself longing for something to change in his life. He thought, for the first time in years, of his father, and in the quiet of the apartment, Martín let himself inch toward understanding him.

  Adán’s fever broke that afternoon, but he remained sleeping. The daylight stayed the same gray — it was impossible to guess the hour. Martín flipped through four magazines and tried to read a book, until finally the call came from the Denver airport, Adrian’s tired voice telling him that he had landed safely. Martín wasn’t up for much talk; he wanted to go back to the warm, quiet room of just thinking, of solitude, so they chatted for a minute at most. Monday would come soon enough.

  All day it rained. Nothing changed. It rained all day.

  THE HEART FINDS ITS OWN CONCLUSION

  THERE WAS MORE TO it than a woman with long black hair, flipped high in front, a woman wearing just pink panties low on the hip, her hands on a sheer curtain, a woman looking out of a window, down into the street. Cecilia wished she could remember the face of the man who had just left the room, who had closed the door after himself, and the woman who had put her hand against it as if the door had captured his warmth. But that had been years ago, back when Cecilia was a child, and the actress with the long black hair had never become famous. That woman couldn’t be easily found and identified. She wasn’t Mia Farrow with her shorn hair in Rosemary’s Baby. She wasn’t Jane Fonda with her voice crackling ominously over the radio from North Vietnam. The film, too, had been forgettable: a drug-running movie from the 1970s, set somewhere in a dusty outpost in Mexico. Cecilia remembered nothing of it beyond glimpses: the cars like the woman’s hair — long and black — with windows tinted against the sun; men with guns shooting for the glory of the sound; a fat man being lifted away from a room, a squealer who had faced his punishment, his white shirt bloody and open, showing the full expanse of his belly; the cars giving chase to one another, careering past potholes and kicking up dust, bouncing and jostling like their old family car. But the story, the how of that woman. What she saw when she looked out of the window of the dank, tiny room with an even tinier bed, a bed she had shared passionately with the man who had just left her. Cecilia didn’t remember that: that had been where Tía Sara had covered her eyes, tsk-tsked between her teeth. A dank, tiny room with a single washbasin jutting out of the wall, a mirror over it where the woman could have washed her face and looked up at herself to dis
cover her own longing. That, though, Cecilia only invented. There was nothing but a room, a departed man, and a woman in pink panties with long black hair.

  Over there was the Crest Theater — the cine — its once grand, sparkly marquee where Tío Nico and Tía Sara took them to see movies. The marquee stood bare now, the lights off. Those years ago, the cine had been no place for children, but there they had been, Cecilia and her cousin Sergio being herded toward the flashing neon. Cecilia had held on to Tío Nico’s hand as the woman behind the small ticket booth spoke into the speaker box. The booth stood at the edge of the cine’s facade, the marquee twinkling bright against the long, sloping entrance to the doors. Her booth shone warm and bright, with room enough just for her stool, and she slipped tickets through the mouse hole in the glass. Cecilia still remembered all of it: the shiny tiles of the cine entrance; the click-click of Tía Sara’s high heels as she edged to the doors, then the quiet carpet once they got inside; the aguas frescas bubbling in their fountains; the Mexican candy with a scarlet rose on the wrapper; the tall stacks of paper cups, swirled in purple and green; the length of the lobby and the ladies waiting patiently outside the bathroom door; the slender wooden phone booths and a man getting inside one, sliding the door against the crowd, a light turning on so he could see; the smell of sauerkraut and mustard and jalapeños from the side counter; the whirr of the ice cream machine; the door to one of the theaters opening and tinny voices coming through like caught conversation.

  She could see the cine from where she was parked, close to the front doors of the bus station in Fresno. She’d driven a long way to pick up her cousin Sergio, who had called her at work late in the afternoon. Since her desk at the insurance office was right next to her boss’s front door, Cecilia had urged Sergio off the phone with a quick approval, even though getting to Fresno meant at least half an hour of driving. When the six o’clock bus from Bakersfield arrived, Sergio hadn’t been on it.