Oh, how did I ever manage to work up the nerve to say those things to her? How did I harden myself to flatten another human being like that? I might as well have run over her with my truck that day at Castlegate High.
And still her face remained expressionless—at least for any outsider to see. Only I could see. Only I was close enough to witness the trembling chin and lips tightened against her emotions.
We stood there like that, me outside the truck looking up at her sitting just like the Queen of England in that fancy little getup she threw together while I was talking to Ray back at the gate. Or maybe she didn’t just throw it together. Maybe she had it planned all along.
“Ray and Carlos and Eduardo think you’re my boyfriend?” she finally asked, breaking the heavy silence. After everything I’d just unloaded, I couldn’t believe that was the best she could come up with.
“And the others too,” I said.
“All of them?”
“I think so,” I said. “I don’t speak Spanish, so I can’t say for sure.”
“None of them ever said that to me.”
“Why would they? You’re the boss’s daughter. And you’re a girl besides. Guys will say stuff around other guys they’d never say around a girl.”
And then we were back to silently staring at each other but, strangely, that ridiculous interlude somehow defused a lot of the tension.
“My dad’s gone,” she said, at last breaking our newest silence. “And Nana went with him. They went into town, so they won’t be back for a few hours.”
I looked behind me toward where the vineyard was—the last place I’d seen the crew working. I didn’t hear or see the tractor. Probably they were all in the avocado grove resting in the shade and eating their own lunches. I put a hand on the lowered tailgate and hopped into the back of her new truck.
“Have a seat,” Bettina said, her face suddenly as bright as the sun.
I sat.
Twenty-Five
Bettina picked up one of the white cloth napkins and arranged it on her lap, so I did the same. Then she lifted her glass and tilted it toward me as if she was toasting. She took a few small sips before setting it down.
“It’s half lemonade and half iced tea,” she said.
“Arnold Palmer.”
“Who’s Arnold Palmer?’
“The drink is an Arnold Palmer. I don’t know why it’s called that or who he is . . . I guess the guy who invented the drink was named Arnold Palmer.”
“Here’s to Arnold Palmer.” She lifted her glass, tilted it in a toast, and took another sip. “An amazing drink inventor.”
But I’d been working in the sun all morning and I was ravenously thirsty. Or maybe it’s supposed to be ravenously hungry, but I was the equivalent of that when it came to thirst. I gulped my entire Arnold Palmer without stopping for a breath. Then I let out a big “Aaah” and set the empty glass on the table.
Bettina raised her eyebrows and fixed her gaze on me; without looking away, she lifted her glass to her mouth and downed the entire contents in about two seconds. Then, oh so delicately, she patted her lips dry with a corner of her napkin and belched so loudly I almost jumped out of my seat.
“Okay, that just happened,” I said.
“Try the fried chicken,” she said. “It’s very good.”
“So . . . is this actual fried chicken I can eat with my hands, or—”
“Technical fried chicken?” She finished my thought. “You can eat it any way you like.”
“Okay, I just wanted to make sure since everything is so fancy and all.” The fried chicken did look delicious and I picked up a drumstick with my hands and started gnawing on it, probably looking somewhat like a caveman.
Bettina watched me for a few seconds before picking up her knife and fork and carefully carving the chicken on her plate. She speared a tiny piece with the tip of her fork as though she was about to feed a miniature-size baby. She chewed delicately, looking around here and there but not looking directly at me. She speared a minuscule bite of potato salad and set to work on that. After a few minutes of this I dropped the remainder of the drumstick on my plate and reached for the napkin on my lap. I wiped down my fingers and all the grease around my mouth, then picked up my own fork and knife.
“I’m not going to eat with my hands if you’re going to eat like that,” I said.
“Why shouldn’t you?”
“I dunno. Kind of takes all the fun out of it.”
“I didn’t think about that,” she said as though she would think about it now.
Then she reached into the bowl of fruit with her bare hands and started pulling out various bits of the fruit salad and popping them in her mouth—orange, grape, apple, banana. When her mouth was full she began to talk to me.
“Help yourself to some bread,” she said as she uncovered a basket of bread that had been hidden under another white napkin. Except she was talking with her mouth so full it sounded more like “Hph yphsph t’suh brd.”
“You’re weird,” I said. “Really weird.”
She chewed and swallowed and chewed and swallowed and finally her mouth was empty again.
“Why do you say that? I was just trying to encourage you to be comfortable enough to eat any way you like.”
She dabbed her mouth delicately with her napkin.
“Okay, I can appreciate that. In fact, I thank you for that. But I think I’ll just use my utensils since you went to all this trouble.”
Truth was, I really wanted to eat the chicken with my hands, but I was determined not to let her think I was uncivilized.
“But do you really think so?” she asked.
“Think what?”
“That I’m weird.”
By then I had a mouthful of potato salad, and I wasn’t about to match her in the talking-with-your-mouth-full department, so I worked on chewing and swallowing until everything was on its way down to my belly.
“It’s not that you’re weird, you’re just different,” I said.
A hornet landed on the chicken and she swatted it away with her bare hand.
“Different how?”
I didn’t want to spoil her lunch, but she asked like she really wanted to know.
“Everyone is different but you’re different in a different way.”
“Wouldn’t everyone be different in a different way . . . by definition?”
We’d both stopped eating by that point, which was too bad because I was still hungry and, honestly, the food was amazing.
“It’s just that you have no filter,” I said. “I’m not saying it’s bad different. I’m just saying it’s different, that’s all.”
“What’s the point of a filter? I don’t see the point of having one.”
“Well, with a filter . . . You don’t have to say everything you think, you know.”
“If I don’t say what I think, how will anyone know what I’m thinking?”
She pulled the napkin from her lap and set it on the table, which I took to mean she was done eating. She scooted her chair back a few inches from the table, which I took as absolute confirmation she was done eating.
“Look,” I said. “If everyone just walked around saying exactly what they were thinking, there would be all kinds of fights breaking out all over the place. There would be world wars. Societies would descend into chaos, and it could be the end of civilization.”
She stood up from her chair and glared at me, her eyes narrowed, and her mouth straightened into that scary face. It was then I realized it had been me who started the whole confrontation, and there I was practically blaming her for bringing on the apocalypse.
“You can say what’s on your mind,” I said meekly. She was still glaring at me through those angry slits. “But maybe you don’t always have to be completely . . . honest?”
The last word came out like a peace-offering type of question, but then again maybe it was me having the last word just like
she said that one time.
“Does that mean I shouldn’t believe anything you tell me?”
“No, of course not. I didn’t mean that, but you . . . but I . . . ”
I was hopelessly overmatched.
She sat down and scooted her chair back to the table. Her eyes relaxed and widened a bit. Then a bit more.
“Dessert?” she asked.
Twenty-Six
Ihave to hand it to her, it was one of the tastiest lunches I’d had in a long while. But when my hour was almost up, I was nervous Ray would come around looking for me, and my life on the ranch would pretty much be over if he caught me in the back of her truck like that.
I started making a stack of all the dirty dishes and utensils. “Look, I’m sorry I can’t help you take all this inside and wash up, but I think you know how I feel about going in your house. I’ll carry it to that delivery door. How’s that?”
“That’s fine.”
I laid everything on the tailgate and hopped off the back of the truck. Then when she came to the edge, I held out my hand to help her down the way any guy would offer to help a girl about to make a three-foot jump while wearing a short dress and high sandals. But she ignored my hand, kicked off her shoes and jumped, landing on the gravel with bare feet.
“That couldn’t have felt very good,” I said.
I could see from the wince on her face that it didn’t, but she wasn’t about to let on.
“My feet are really tough,” she said, which I didn’t believe, although I knew for a fact that she was.
She slammed the tailgate shut. “I’ll come get the table and chairs later,” she said.
“I think I’ll take care of that for you as soon as I put these dishes down. Where do they go?” Leaving behind the evidence of two chairs and a table was an invitation for someone to start asking questions about the scene of the crime, if you could call it that—which I did.
“In that storage area against the back wall of the garage.”
“And if you don’t mind, could you take care of those dishes soon? I mean, I don’t want to sound like your nana but there’s two of everything unless you normally use multiple plates and glasses.”
“Relax, I’ll take care of it. It’s not like we did anything. You act like I just seduced you or something.”
That was the second time she said that and, it’s true, it’s not like she seduced me. All we’d been doing was talking, or mostly arguing. I was just a little jumpy about the whole thing.
“Hey look, it was nice of you to do this, but I don’t think we should make a habit out of it, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not in the habit of serving lunch to people, so don’t worry.”
We were standing in front of the delivery door and I’d just handed her the stack of dishes, so I didn’t want to hold her up any longer. I also wanted to hurry and clear out the table and chairs before my hour was up.
“I’m sorry about today . . . the things I said. Some of it might not have come across so nice, and I didn’t mean it that way. I appreciate the effort you went to.”
She looked at me but didn’t say anything.
“What are you doing for the rest of the day? Any fun plans?” I was fishing for an answer that would prove there weren’t hard feelings between us.
But she stepped through the door and closed it behind her, disappearing inside the house without so much as a goodbye.
Twenty-Seven
The rest of the day I was out there all by myself, inching my way along the perimeter of the fence at a snail’s pace—a sleep-walking snail. I began to wonder if I’d made the right decision and if maybe I should’ve taken Ray up on his offer to pick avocados. It couldn’t have been any more tedious than my current job—or any more lonesome.
I tried to conjure up an image of Masie to distract me and I blasted the music to levels guaranteed to give me permanent hearing damage. But every time I thought about Masie, Bettina’s face would float into my daydream like a black cloud covering up the sun until it was just Bettina’s face, and I couldn’t even visualize Masie. When I did manage to focus on Masie, it was hard to know if she was the green-eyed, blond-haired Masie or the golden-eyed, brunette Masie. The entire afternoon I kept expecting a shadow to fall over me, which would turn out to be Bettina standing there in that unannounced and strange way she had of showing up out of the blue.
But Bettina didn’t come. No shadow. No Bettina. And why couldn’t I stop thinking about her anyway? Must have been the guilt I was holding on to. I was generally a pretty nice guy, and maybe I hadn’t been so nice to her at lunch.
A few times I set my shovel against the fence and, using the pretense of taking a break, I walked through the orchard to see if she was on the lawn playing croquet or practicing her putting skills. But nothing was going on there. Later, I walked as far as the shed and peeked through the opening in the oleander hedge to see if she was lying poolside. But she wasn’t there either. Once I walked all the way to the parking lot, figuring that if I ran into anyone, I’d make an excuse like I was getting a bottle of water from my truck. In reality, I just wanted to see if Bettina’s truck was around, but it wasn’t parked near mine anymore and the garage doors were closed so I couldn’t look inside.
I don’t know what would’ve happened if I’d actually found her. I’d been thinking I’d try out another apology, only this time I’d say it like I really meant it. But I never got the chance to see how that would work because she wasn’t around. And then it was time to go home.
By the time I got home, I was tired to the bone. It’s an expression people use, but I understood exactly what it meant that night. Literally the only thing on me that still felt solid was my skeleton, and there wasn’t a muscle in my body that wasn’t completely spent. If our house was burning down, I doubt seriously I could’ve gotten out of bed to save my life. Del and Claude kept coming in my room to bother me after dinner, but I barely had the energy to yell at them. After a while, they left me alone, I guess because it’s not much fun messing with a dead guy and that’s what I must have seemed like to them. I think Del was worried about me, but I heard Maman tell him I was okay, and I’d just had a long day and needed to sleep. Then she shut my light and closed the door softly and I knew I wasn’t going to make it to the shower even though I needed one badly.
I couldn’t fall asleep straightaway because something was poking around in my brain and it didn’t want to leave me alone. At first, I was too tired to figure out what it was, but I knew I had to make my peace with it or I’d be awake the entire night. So I chased it round and round in my head, like a hamster on one of those exercise wheels that was never going to stop. And then when I was about to give up, get out of bed, and go take a shower, the wheel stopped and the thing that was bothering me fell out like a dead rat.
Bettina told me the kids at school had turned her into a beast. When I questioned her about it, she’d said it was because maybe she was one. I hadn’t even brought it up at lunch—I never even asked about it. And that was probably something I should’ve done.
After that, I don’t even remember falling asleep.
I woke up at three in the morning with the room spinning around me, my head pounding, and my mouth feeling like I’d eaten glue instead of chicken for dinner. I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed and stumbled into the bathroom. When I took a leak barely anything came out, and what did come out was orange. I didn’t have to be a genius or even a doctor to figure out I was dehydrated. I went into the kitchen and drank glass after glass of water from the tap. I tried to think of how much I’d had to drink that day but the best I could come up with was the Arnold Palmer—even that, I remembered gulping down like there was no tomorrow. I sat in the dark on the sofa staring at the square, actually trapezoid, of moonlight that beamed through the window onto the floor by my feet. After about twenty minutes, I felt almost normal, so I went back to the bathroom and took an extra-long shower even
though we weren’t supposed to waste water because of the drought. The hot water pulsing on the sore muscles of my back felt therapeutic. It also gave me a chance to think things over.
I’d completed two full days and one half day of my total obligation. I only had two fulls left and three halves. Tomorrow was Sunday—church day. Last Sunday, Mr. Diaz told me not to come until one o’clock. But that was when I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Now I knew I had to trench the entire perimeter of the fence. It was much cooler in the morning and if I worked then, it would leave me with a free Sunday afternoon. I was already feeling somewhat rested and I still had another three hours to catch up on my sleep. I decided to set my alarm for seven o’clock so I could go in early.
Did Bettina have anything to do with my decision? Maybe. But at the time I didn’t allow myself to admit it.
Twenty-Eight
Iwon’t lie and say it wasn’t nerve-wracking ringing the doorbell of that delivery entrance, just like I had the week before, only this time it was worse. I waited a long time for someone to answer because it seemed to take these folks ages to respond to a doorbell ring. At my house you could make it to the front door in ten seconds flat no matter what room you were coming from, but the Diaz family had a lot more territory to cover. With that in mind, I rang a second time and waited about five minutes before giving up.
As soon as I got to the side gate I realized something was up. I knew the exact spot where I’d left off the day before, but the trenching line had been extended by maybe about twenty yards. Off in the distance, a lone figure toiled—slight and fashionably unfashionable in her “work clothes.” There was Bettina bizarrely in the act of unloading a shovelful of earth onto the edge of the trench. And just at that moment, I was surprised by a feeling so unfamiliar I had to dig deep to place it somewhere in the catalog of my life experiences. It wasn’t that dopey, stars-in-my-eyes feeling I got when I was around Masie, or even when I thought about her. It was more that same feeling of being a kid on Christmas morning when you first see all the presents under the tree. I could barely believe it myself but I was happy to see her.
Beau and Bett Page 10
