Читать книгу The Talker - Mary Sojourner - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIt all started with black olives, the bogus kind, the ones that look like patent leather and taste worse. They were the first thing we agreed on, this new male possibility and me. We agreed that we hated them and we wondered why, in a desert city where streets were lined with shining olive tree after tree and sidewalks were greasy with the crushed fruit, you could rarely find the real thing, the wrinkled ones that taste of garlic and pepper, and the craft of the one who picked and put them up.
The bogus babies were everywhere, in pizzas, in salads and even on the freebie bonne bouches we served at Coyote, the nouveau Southwestern restaurant the new man and I worked at. Coyote was predictably turquoise and beige and red rock pastels. A long-tailed neon coyote howled over the bar, snout pointed up, moon left to the imagination of those who might have one. Which, as the new man Ben saw it, our customers did not.
“Rich punks, Mollie,” Ben said to me on his fifth day with us. “I hate ‘em and I hate myself for hating ‘em.” He had a Masters in Biomedical Engineering and a brain courtesy bad genetics aided by anything you could chug or smoke. At Coyote he washed dishes and I, his equal in genes and bad choices, arranged carved vegetables on the saguaro-shaped dishes the waiters hustled out to the R.P.s—and we gossipped.
Ben was a gossip champ. He had wit and malice honed wicked as the edge on the sous-chefette’s pet knife. Felice was five feet nothing, about thirty inches around her most abundant parts and she loved Roy Orbison immoderately, rest his soul. We were treated all hours to Mr. O’s sweet ’n sour reminders of all the graveyard loving we’d ever done. Most times, somebody was huddled off in a corner sobbing into their apron. Felice would turn up the volume and check out my creations.
Ben’s fifth night with us, I’d finished setting up a plate of jicama, poblano peppers and pickled carrots carved into suns, moons and lizards.
“Mollie,” Felice said, “those are regular little art darlings. You’re wasted here.”
Ben snickered.
Felice glared at him. “You’re always wasted.”
“Not too wasted,” he drawled, “to remind you again to get rid of the fake olives. Talk to Stu. He’ll listen to you.” Stu was the maitred, who in fact didn’t listen to anybody. “Tell him I’ll pick and put up our house brand. They grow everywhere. They won’t cost us a penny.” His eyes went snakey, his voice alluring. “Come on, Felice, I’ve got a truck. I like to steal. Mollie can help, right?”
I nodded. I hadn’t had a date in a while. And the guy needed a pom pom girl.
“Yeah,” he said, “the Midnight Gypsy Olive Company. My truck, my buddy here and my old man’s recipe. A sure winner.”
Felice patted him on the butt and told him the boss was rich but dense and wouldn’t go for it. “Besides,” she said, “if you want to run goodies so bad, why don’t you just truck on down to your old pals in Meheeco and bring us back a little surprise. I’ll front the money.”
“No way,” he mumbled. And that was that.
I couldn’t figure out why Ben was so obsessed with those olives. He wasn’t some organic hippie fossil and he didn’t seem the type to drop a thirteen-dollar jar of sun-dried tomatoes in his shopping cart. He was an ordinary looking guy about forty, tall, sweet-skinny and ginger-haired, presentable enough to get by anywhere. Only if you looked close or knew the routine could you tell that his sharp jeans and shirts came from Catholic Charities, his spit-shined cowboy boots from Goodwill.
I was starting to love the way he talked—and I really loved the way he listened. We both loved books. I’d watch him on his break, sitting in the shadow of the fake adobe wall, smoking a joint and reading. That was when he looked most happy. Otherwise, his happiness seemed stretched thin. Sometimes when he got really loaded, he’d stand over the sink, moving slow, talking about rats and lethal dosage. He’d swear they do shock monkeys, they do squirt hairspray in those poor rabbits’ eyes.
By that point, it was usually past closing. I’d turn from cleaning and he’d be head down on his arms on the baker’s table. I’d finish up, turn out the lights and throw his jacket over his shoulders. By morning, when I came to set up, he’d be gone.
Around Lent, the customers thinned out. Ben guessed that with religion being back in style, they were doing penance for the tubs of ganache they inhaled the rest of the year. “Shit,” he said, “why bitch about R.P.s? If they’ll eat those plastic olives, they’ll swallow anything.” He was three bowls to the wind, up to his elbows in greasy suds, his fine broad shoulders moving with the work and driving me crazy. He had on his favorite Goodwill shirt. It was polyester, with blue-green flowers on lime paisley and about a hundred pearly-bronze snaps to set off its Western cut. The sweetest part was that somebody had made it for somebody else who’d loved it so much that the collar and cuffs were frayed clear through.
“Now, rich punks,” I said, “would never appreciate that shirt. Just you and me and Tessa and Duane. We’re the only ones who love that shirt.”
“That Tessa,” he said, “putting all that work into this shirt, after graveyard shift at the diner and getting the kids off to school—and Duane not even her real hubby.”
He’d begun the Tessa/Duane story almost as soon as he and I started talking. He’d bring them into our hours together - Tessa, Duane, the kids and Tessa’s clueless hubby—into the quiet kitchen in clean up time, when the cooks had repaired to the bar and the beautiful boy waiters were out by the dry river bank doing a little blow and finishing off the gorgeous wines the R.P.s left behind. I caught on quick and brought the two phantom adulterers into almost every conversation—into our gossip, our longings, our shyness and the earnest chaos of our lives.
We knew the names of Tessa’s three kids and how the littlest, Scheyenne, had nearly caught Tessa and Duane going at it one August afternoon. We judged the real hubby as mean and dumb and cowardly. We knew that Duane had an ex-wife who’d taken his kid, the house, the 1989 Mustang, two-thirds of his pay and everything else but his good heart and slow hand. I told Ben a few things he didn’t know: how Tessa hated her stretch marks, how sometimes she’d do that binge and throw up routine, how she worried about Duane’s tendency to polish off a six-pack most every night. Ben said Duane liked women with a little flesh on them and saw stretch marks as medals of honor. As for the booze, Duane was definitely on top of it.
The night everything changed for me and Ben, he was asleep at the baker’s table. I finished wiping down the prep area and went to drop his jacket over his shoulders. He reached up, tugged me down and kissed me stoned and sweet. His mouth tasted of Beaujolais and dope, and his curls felt exactly as I’d known they would, soft as a kid’s, clean and feathery under my fingers. We were hanging on to each other with a fierce saved-from-drowning hug when Felice and Stu barged in through the back door.
“Holy moley,” she said, “who died?”
“Wait,” Stu said. He was elegant and black and he despised most humans, of all races and sexual persuasions alike.
“They’re sharing,” he said, “deeply, personally, warmly.” He touched the tops of our heads. “Bless you,” he said. “Be blissful, at least for a week, y’all.”
“Be nice,” Felice said. She lifted a bottle of Moet out of the cooler.
“Unh, unh, unh,” Stu said. “You’re a very naughty girl this evening and I don’t mind if I do.”
Felice uncorked the Moet so smoothly you would have thought it was Chablis. Ben had buried his face in my collarbone. He didn’t move. I wondered for a long second if he had died. His hair smelled like rain, which didn’t make any sense, but made me like him even more—which worried me almost as much as the fact that I wanted to shield him from the dazzling duo. And everything else. I wanted to kiss, talk, breath and love the sadness out of his seaweed eyes.
“You are fucked up, kids,” Stu said cheerfully.
“You’re in wuv,” Felice said. She raised the Moet in a toast. I wanted to smack her, but I didn’t want to let go of Ben. He was breathing so gently and evenly against my shoulder that I guessed he had passed out.
“No,” I said, “it’s family troubles. His cousin Tessa up in Chandler, you know.” I felt a soft snort against my shoulder. “Bad marriage. You guys know how that can be.” I lowered my eyes.
“When will you lambies ever learn?” Stu said to the ceiling.
“Come on, preacher,” Felice said. “We’re outta here.” She piled some hot peppers on a plate and headed for the door.
Stu paused. “You can share with Uncle Stu,” he said.
I shook my head. “Some things,” I said, “are just family.” He handed me the Moet and watched me take a good chug.
“Easy does it,” he said, lifted the bottle from my hand and was gone.
I drove us to my place, guided Ben into my room, dumped the books and magazines off the bed and unsnapped the hundred snaps on the green shirt. He glided his wise mouth down my body and I rose up like a wave. I coiled up and over more times than I can bear to remember now. I took him with me, and Tessa and Duane and all the world’s renegade sweethearts and cast us up on some warm shoreline, where the two of us wiped ourselves dry with the beautiful shirt and fell asleep.
Morning was weird. First, there is always the hangover; second, we had to face what we’d done and with whom; third, we had to say how many before, how AC/DC, how drugged out and deadly; fourth, I could not remember his last name.
“I never told you,” he said. “Look, it’s all going to be uphill from here. You make some coffee, look out a window, cry a little and come back. I’ll be here.” I did what he’d suggested, then put plates out and burned a couple of English muffins. We ate them with a jar of peach jam he foraged out of the back of the cupboard. He took my hand and led me back to bed and soon I wasn’t sad anymore.
We had it easy for a while. Easy is a dangerous way to think. We let Tessa and Duane tell our stories and get us over the rough spots. Tessa’s husband went on the road for a week and Duane cut back to three beers a day. Tessa wondered how the future might be. Duane admitted he was scared about what would happen when he was too old to do the work he did. They had their first fight, an incandescent flare-up about something they wouldn’t remember later. One midnight, they decided to go out and steal olives from the trees around the parking lot of one of the country’s biggest and meanest banks.
So did we. Ben wore his new bandito shirt that I’d found in a little second-hand store on Speedway. The shirt was black with moon-silver snaps, and scarlet roses satin-stitched on the pockets. Even though it sparkled under the parking lot security lamps and we made a stunning amount of noise for two quiet people, nobody saw us. Ben figured we came home with enough olives to restore Coyote’s reputation for six months.
Next morning, when Felice came into the kitchen, Ben said, “We’ve got us a passel of olives, boss.”
She shook her head. “You win. I’ll try them. If I like them I’ll sell Stu on the idea and he’ll intimidate the big dogs into featuring them.”
You couldn’t put up olives in a motel room, so Ben moved in with me. He hung his shirts in my closet and laughed at my suggestion that he bunk in the living room. “Why would I want to sleep alone?” he asked. “I’ve done it for twenty years, including the fifteen I was married.”
“Guys,” I said. “Space.”
“I’m not that kind of guy. I need space, I’ll let you know.”
We bought hot pepper flakes and garlic and borrowed a few real hot peppers from our neighbor’s garden. Ben hunted through his suitcase for his old man’s recipe. It wasn’t there. That evening after work, we sat on Coyote’s parking lot wall while Ben fired up a bowl and held forth. “Those olives are going to put Coyote on the map. We’ll take a little road trip up to Flagstaff and get my stuff out of storage. The recipe’s got to be there. Bon Appétit feature story, here we come. Besides, sweetpea, we need a break from this.”
He waved around at “this,” which was air so hot it seemed white, like a blowtorch blast in your throat. Next day we asked Felice for a three-day mid-week weekend and she agreed. She was agreeing to anything. There was a fling going on with the boss. He was abruptly generous. At closing, we’d find white lines of gratitude on the mirrored top of the employee bathroom sink.
“I do not know what’s going on,” Stu said. “It’s absolutely a fantasy d’amour around here.” Even he was flinging, the flingee being a scarily handsome bus boy named Squeeze, who wore a tiny silver lizard in his ear and was steadily cheerful—without chemicals. “It’s a mystery,” Stu said. “At first I thought he was doing that dreary one day at a time thing, but he’s not. He’s just an angel.” He closed his eyes and sighed.
“Good thing,” I said, “him being angelic. Seeing how you hate mortals.”
“A brief reprieve, I’m sure,” Stu said and kissed me on the cheek. He set his hands on his hips. “Now listen, girlfriend. It’s all a little too rosy here. You two be careful on your little vacation.” He unlooped the silk cord and crystal from around his neck and draped it around mine. “I don’t believe in these New Agey things,” he said, “but these are strange times. We mortals need all the help we can get.”
Ben and I left before Tuesday dawn in his primer-patched old Bronco and headed up Route 87. “Here’s to the road,” Ben said. “Here’s to freedom.” He pulled me over next to him and we cut northeast. We wound along a dirt road high above a river, came around a curve and there was a lake shimmering in late morning light. It seemed a mirage, nothing but gunmetal water and hard desert rising on all sides.
“It’s a fake,” Ben said, his breath cool against my cheek. “Dammed.” I looked out over the brilliant water in the rose-gold desert and thought of my childhood home. Up north and east, there were huge lakes, mad rivers, flat gray water and glittering green water and water like obsidian, black water that tore ass around boulders, rippled against banks of wet ferns. I told Ben all of that and he kissed me.
“Where I come from,” he said, “the water’s salt, the marshes are salt, the air is salt.” He shook his head. “The women, too. Salty.” He leaned forward and looked up through the cracked windshield. I moved away. I was still spooky about a man thinking I was crowding him.
“Oriole,” he said and pulled off on the shoulder. “Hooded, I think.” He opened the glove compartment and pulled out binoculars. I watched while he slid out of his seat and hunkered down next to the truck. The back of his shirt was patched with sweat and he was barely breathing. “Get out,” he said. “Crouch next to me.” He handed over the binoculars. “It’s not hooded. It’s a rare one. For here.”
The dust we’d kicked up glittered in the sun. The bird shimmered. It was soft orange, black-capped and winged and had perched on a red-flowered weed as though posing for a poster. Tessa looked at the bird. She looked at Duane’s sweat-drenched hair, how he held his body absolutely still. She saw that he was in the grip of something urgent as lust and private as prayer. She saw that for the first time since their first kiss, she was invisible to him.
Distant thunder whomped to our right. The sky was clean, morning sun shuddering off the truck hood. Gray and brown birds fluttered up through the skeletal bushes, feathers bobbing on top of their heads, goofy as one of Felice’s retro hats. “That’s quail,” Ben said, “that sound. Mollie, we are in paradise.” Ben climbed back in and we rattled down a dirt road toward the lakeshore.
“You like birds?” I said.
“I do,” he said, “immoderately.”
“You never told me that.” I could hear a possessive little whine in my voice.
He laughed. “You don’t know everything about me.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with me. I felt like a spoiled bitch, one of those chicks who has to own everything about her man. I wondered if it was the raw September heat and the way everything around us looked not just dead, but reduced to bone.
The truck’s interior was an oven and when I started to latch my seat belt, the buckle burned my hand. Each bounce of the truck slammed me against the door. The lake sparkled viciously ahead, looking alien in all the cholla and prickly pear and spindly palo verde. I thought of rhinestones and how their cheap glitter set my teeth on edge. Tessa thought it was just beautiful. You could tell the kids would be out of Duane’s old Blazer before it came to a full stop. They’d run straight into the sparkling water, sneakers, shorts and all.
Ben parked near the shoreline. I stepped out into the relentless light. I could feel the sand burning through the bottoms of my flip flops. “Hey,” Ben said as though it had just come to him. “We’ve got food. We’ve got water. Let’s stay a while.” He didn’t look to see if I agreed. “I read there’s Great Blue here,” he said. “All year round. Maybe we’ll stay till evening and drive up to Flag in the cool. They’ll come to feed at twilight. You’ll love them. You’ll see.” He threw out his arms and took a deep breath. “Smell that, Mollie. Water and desert. I love it. It’s the smell of the impossible.”
I took a sniff. The place smelled all too possible, like a low rent dumpster in mid-August—stale beer, piss, rotting worms, plastic diapers and Arby’s wrappers everywhere. There was the mean glitter of broken glass all over the sand and rocks. There was not one second of silence. When the ski-doos cut out, the motorboats cut in. Everybody on the shoreline had a boom-box. Everybody was competing to be the winner in quickest death by noise. Only Tessa had the good manners to wear earbuds. She listened to Rosanne Cash, a soft smile on her face.
“Ben,” I said, “what’s a Great Blue?”
“Heron,” he said and walked toward the water. I followed. My head throbbed. Itchy bumps were rising up behind my elbows and knees. I tried to summon Tessa, couldn’t seem to find her. Maybe she’d disappeared into the crowd at the snack shack or onto one of the huge rafts—or into the back of the Blazer with Duane, where they’d put on the air-conditioning and were lying next to each other, keeping an eye on the kids playing.
Ben waded out into the murky water. “Tadpoles!” he said. His voice was gleeful. I followed him and stood at the water’s edge. “Come on out,” he said. “You gotta see this.” I walked out next to him. He bent and cupped his hands. The tadpole settled down against a strand of lakeweed.
“Ha!” I said. “He’s not there. You can’t see him.”
Ben lunged and came toward me, his hands cupped in front of him. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Me? The tadpole champion of Patchogue, New York?” The tadpole jittered in the tiny puddle in his palms. Tessa shivered. She thought of her hubby, how he’d catch her in his big hands, how he’d grin down at her, triumphant.
“Put it down,” I said. “Imagine if two big hands scooped you up and held you where you couldn’t breath.”
Ben looked at me. “Hey, weren’t you ever a kid?”
“Not so you’d notice,” I said and proceeded into the pity party I’d started with the first damn oriole, a pity party I stayed in all that endless hot stinking afternoon. By the time the power boats started to thin out, I was sitting in the water, willing to risk cholera just to feel a little bit cool. Ben had wandered off, stooping to poke at crud on the shoreline, raising the binoculars to his eyes to scan the lumpy brown hills. I was just starting to get comfortable in the cooling air when he hunkered down beside me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not sure what for, but I’m sorry. We’ll grab a motel up in Payson for tonight, maybe run over to the little casino. I’ll make it up to you.” He nuzzled my damp hairline and set his wet hand between my shoulder blades. I felt ashamed. I heard his breath catch and he stood up. “Look,” he said. “Great Blues. Two of them.”
As I raised my head, two gleaming shadows flew low over the water and fluttered down to a dead cottonwood down the shoreline. Ben handed me the binoculars. “Go ahead, honey,” he said. “Look. Please look.”
I held the glasses to my eyes. The birds were like nothing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t compare them to anything, the way we humans do. They weren’t angels. They weren’t a dream. They were more than all of those. They dropped to the water in slow motion and began to hunt, their silvery-gray and blue feathers catching last light.
“Are they real?” My voice was soft and high as a little girl’s. Ben held my shoulders lightly in his fingertips.
“They are.” We watched them for a long, silent and perfect time. The light faded and the Great Blues went on about their business, stretching out their long necks, stepping through the water slowly and carefully.
I convert fast and when I do, I’m hooked. Gin, good olives, love and birds: they’re all the same. I like them, I want more. The next day we bought me binoculars in Flag, picked up Ben’s meager possessions and drove the short way back to Tucson. I saw ravens up in the mountain pines. I saw crows and learned the difference. Ben saw a red-tailed hawk on a telephone pole and I missed it. There were no more Great Blues. That suited me fine. I was happy with the pictures in my mind, how the light had silvered on their feathers, how they had moved so slowly, how the brown hills had gone black, the saguaro rising up like guardians.
We reached home early evening and sat out on the front stoop poking through Ben’s stuff. The recipe was in a cloth-covered diary that said, “My Year.” I could hardly read the cobwebby writing, but Ben said it was enough to bring it all back.
“I watched my dad every fall,” he said. “This was my great-gran’s recipe book. My dad never taught me anything but to say, ‘Look out,’ or “Move, kid.’ Or ‘Hand me that,’ but he let me watch. I can see his hands now, how he cleaned the peppers, his sure touch with the knife, how he mixed the spices with his bare hands.”
I began to cry. Ben touched my throat. Right where that tight sore spot is. He took my arms in his hands. He stirred my hair with his fingers. I could smell the heat and sorrow rise up from me, and the sweet oil he’d rubbed into my skin the night before and the rosemary soap I’d washed my hands with that morning. Tessa raised her wet face and kissed Duane. She tasted him. She licked the salt from his cheeks and told him someday she would be free. He held her tight and promised her olives for their first supper in their own home, olives put up in oil from the first pressing. He asked her to love him for his whole self, not just because he was a little wild, not just because he was forbidden, not just because he was part-time and beautiful and broken.
Ben made the olives and took them to Felice. She was mad for them. Stu finagled Ben a raise and he started to save money. He paid all the rent for us. He bought a new shirt, a brand new shirt from a shop on Fourth Avenue. He started making trips to Nogales and parts south and he brought me presents. There was a peyote cactus in a donkey planter and a clay grandma skeleton in a black dress and shawl. She held a spray of cloth flowers in her arms. When I picked her up, her head bobbed back and forth.
“She’s your duenna,” Ben said. “You know what that means. She keeps you safe. And she keeps you honest.”
I held her gently. She nodded yes. I didn’t bother to think what kept Ben honest. We had gotten so good. We could tell the truth. We could get through what sometimes follows after truth is told. We kept saying how good it was, as though our words were a charm.
“This is so good,” he might say, “sitting here before the day gets hot, just drinking coffee, listening to those doves, just the two of us, quiet like this.”
“It is, Ben,” I’d say. I loved saying his name. “It’s gorgeous.”
There we’d be, just those few words between us, maybe his hand on my wrist, my ankle crossed over his. Tessa and Duane had drifted away as friends do, or maybe as helpers must. Ben and I both knew they were gone and we believed they had given us their blessing.
How it happens with people like Ben and me, how the changes can be almost invisible, how the dream can stop as if you were awakened by an unknown sound—I knew all of that. Still, the end snuck up on me. Ben upped the Nogales trips to once a week. He started to lose weight. I noticed he was leaving the binoculars behind and the presents were becoming more expensive—vanilla beans in good rum packed in a hand-blown glass jar, a dress embroidered shoulders to hem with real silver thread, pre-Columbian statues that scared me. I wasn’t too surprised when he quit Coyote nor when the boss invited us for dinner. I was surprised that we went.
There were Ben and me, Felice and the boss, Stu and Squeeze at a big glass table set up next to the lit-up pool. The boss’ cook had created a feast: barbecued quail, blue corn tamales, pomegranates, their juice glowing on our lips and hands, on the front of my Mexican dress. I remember looking down at the blotch a long time, the stain so dark on the fine pale cotton, on the delicate silver birds. I think Ben leaned over and kissed me there, but I’m not sure. Everything got busy and loud, people going here, going there, Felice swinging her pale legs in the pool, Stu up to his neck in front of her, Squeeze rubbing my shoulders. Ben went off somewhere and returned, his face gray, his eyes like mica.
The boss play a tape of Navajo flute music over and over. If you’d looked over the fence at us, over the green leafy posts and red blossoms trembling in the light, you would have seen a magical picture. You would have heard the music trembling too, the way a howl can in the summer air.
When I wanted Tessa with us, when I wanted good old solid Duane watching our backs, I couldn’t find them. I was alone with it: with how Ben’s face began to scare me, skin stretched tight over the bones, the way the green shirt he’d started wearing to bed, cuffs buttoned, hung on him like a robe, how I was seeing so little of him, of my phantom lover, that I was glad to see him at all. I knew what it was. I knew that he was being eaten alive and he had offered himself up for the feast.
I called to Tessa and Duane in the long hours I spent alone in the cool dark of early morning, the duenna nodding at me, a Virgen de Guadalupe candle burning next to her, its warm light flickering on the bone-white face. I hadn’t prayed in years. I wasn’t sure I knew how.
“Mother,” I whispered, “whoever the patron saints of sad lovers are, please let me see Tessa and Duane again. I need their heat, their laughter and the scent of oil on their twined bodies.” I’d try to see their faces in the candle shadows, how their eyes were no less shining and soft than Tessa’s kids’. I’d try to catch what they might be saying—all that hope and reassurance and promises kept. I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t do anything. People like me and Ben, like Felice and Stu, we don’t even dare dream that you can cure somebody else. We know the truth, maybe because we can smell hopelessness right away or because we can taste surrender and surely because we’ve stewed up messes ourselves. We know. And I knew that Ben was gone—even as he lay next to me, even as he moved in me, first tentative, then frantic, then gone from me into a cold desperation that ground his sharp hip bones against mine and left me dry and aching.
The duenna watched over our last night together. The Virgen candle had burned down to a moon-white puddle. Ben stood in front of me in the blue light of the huge TV, his most recent gift. He was so handsome it cut my heart. He couldn’t look at me.
“Mollie,” he said. “Can you do me a favor? Can I borrow a couple hundred bucks? I ran out, must have miscalculated something. I’ll pay you back in the morning.”
“No more,” I said. “And I want you to leave. Please. Now.”
Ben picked up the duenna. I took it from his shaking hand.
“Honest,” I said. “I want you to go away.”
He began to move toward our bedroom. As he stepped full in the television’s glow, I saw the shining curve of the Great Blues. I saw the stillness, the careful way Ben set his feet. I saw the concentration and in him, it was terrible.
Ben took a half hour to pack his things. I heard him moving in our bedroom, then the kitchen, then his steps fading away on the front walk. I couldn’t move from the couch. I knew if I did, I would go to him, put my arms around him and beg him to stay.
I sat quietly for a few minutes, then went into the bedroom. He’d left almost all his clothes, except for the green shirt and the black bandito shirt. His binoculars were gone from the dresser, his duffle bag from the closet. I walked out and closed the door. The black shirt, clean and ironed, was on the kitchen table along with a jar of olives. I pulled on the shirt and wished he’d left it smelling of him. I opened the jar, took out an olive and bit into it.
It was sweet. I remembered him reading the recipe. I could see his face, the way his lips moved and I remembered how I’d taken in the sight the way you take in a song you think you may never hear again. Then the pepper hit and my throat warmed. There was the taste of garlic and my tears and the spices he’d mixed with his naked hands.
I chewed every bit of fruit off the stone and put it to dry on the window sill between the cactus and the little Nogales duenna. The truck roared to a start. I wrapped my arms around myself and waited till Ben had driven away. Then I took a white candle out of the cupboard and set it in front of the Virgen.
I lit it. The candle flame shimmered on the Virgen’s downcast eyes and on her hands held out for mercy. “If I knew how to pray,” I said, “I would ask you only for a way to make it through what comes next. Only that.”
