All I Have in This World (28 page)

“Nor can I imagine what her answer would be,” she said. When Marcus did not reply, Maria said, “Am I supposed to guess?”

“If you want.”

Maria looked over the steering wheel. Above town there were clouds dappling the folds of the mountains ahead.

“I have no idea,” she said. She shook her head slowly. “Not a clue.”

“Juice,” said Marcus.

Maria squinted as if she hadn't heard him. “Juice?”

“Yep.”

“Like Juice Newton?”

“Exactly. That's what she said. ‘Like Juice Newton.' ”

At first Maria looked stricken. But then she started to laugh. Her laughter was of the sort you try to squelch and your failure to do so makes it all the more impossible to control. Back-pew church laughter, terrible-elementary-school-orchestra-recital laughter. Maria draped her arms around the steering column and touched her forehead to the wheel, and Marcus, when he was certain she was in fact laughing and not having an asthma attack, succumbed himself. Hicuppy gasps dead-ending in snorts. Maria laughed at the deep offensiveness of his bray. The Buick filled with the air of their lungs unburdened. They would try to stop but they kept failing until finally Maria gained enough control to say, “I don't know, God, it's not that funny, it's actually really sad but it's also crazy, and in a way—in
her
way, I mean—it's so, so sweet.”

They were quiet for a while, and then Maria said, “You never talk about
your
parents,” and Marcus said, “That's because they're named Harriet,” and this started them off again. When this round died they were breathless and Marcus craved quiet until he didn't anymore.

“You want me to get out here?” he said.

“No,” said Maria. “Let's go for a drive.”

“We need gas,” said Marcus.

“I'm on it,” said Maria, and she pulled into traffic and drove them to the station.

“I can pump my own gas,” said Maria when Marcus opened the door to get out, but Marcus said no, she got gas last, it was his turn. He opened the gas tank and reached for his wallet and found that he had left it back in his room. He went around to her side and motioned for her to roll down the window.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You're a little short.”

Marcus allowed that he was a lot short.

“And that's what you were coming to tell me?” said Maria.

“I wasn't really coming to tell you anything,” said Marcus.

Harriet loved a map, and even though she made it clear to both parties her feelings about their plan for the Buick, thought it wasteful, not to mention dangerous, liable to land them in trouble with Border Patrol, she knew the area as good as about anyone around. So when Maria and Marcus told her about what they were referring to as their “ceremony,” she suggested the far-back, broken country between Van Horn and Valentine, where she'd grown up.

“My daddy used to work that land. Wasn't his but he knew it better than the man who owned it, or any other hand. He used to take me along on horseback when he was checking fence and I can't imagine anything's changed out there in the last forty years.”

She started to give them directions to the spot she had in mind, but it did not appear to Harriet that either of them (a) were listening too good or (b) would be able to locate the place without a map even if they were listening. They were sitting at her kitchen table one Sunday morning. Sunday was when they did stuff together because it was the only day the three of them had off in common. Maria had paid Alberto and a couple of his friends to gut the Airstream and put in a stove and a window counter and on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights she and Marcus towed it to a lot across from the train station and sold tamales and raspas to the tourists. The rest of the week Maria fixed food for special parties—
catered,
Harriet guessed was the word for it—out of the kitchen in what used to be Johnny Garcia's. A couple of weeks after all that mess with Randy's mother, Marcus had got on out at the Desert Research Center. He put in forty hours a week there. Harriet could not for the life of her figure out what there was to do out there in the desert for forty hours a week. He said he cleared brush and tended to the plants, but she didn't see what brush there was out there to clear, nor how you could waste more than a couple of hours a week tending to twenty acres of prickly pear and sotol and agave. She guessed she could pay a visit out there and see, but that place was for the tourists.

Maria had fixed some kind of fruit pie for breakfast, only it wasn't a fried fruit pie but some dough with fruit laid out on top of it. It tasted pretty good. Harriet wouldn't have picked it, but she had gotten to where she'd eat anything put in front of her when it was the three of them, for she liked it when they did stuff together. Ate dinner, drove to the True Value to pick up some railroad ties she wanted so she could plant something in that space where the camper had sat for so long. Now that Maria had turned that camper into something you might see someone selling popcorn out of at a rodeo, Harriet had told her she had to park it behind the motel. She didn't want that thing in her yard anymore. Luis had wanted it gone the week after Maria left. He had wanted it gone
before
she left. But Harriet had not lost that fight.

Maria and Marcus had got to where they carried on like they'd known each other for years. They'd argue, too, almost like they were married. But Harriet knew there wasn't anything between them. She was glad, too, that it wasn't going in that direction. If it had, she doubted they'd have wanted her around.

When Maria told her she was going to take the camper out to Austin, explained how there were more people and more money and more of what she called options (which Harriet took to mean she could serve what she damn well wanted to serve), Harriet said, “Well, that sounds like a plan.” She would never have said anything but. Sometimes it amazed her that she ever asked Maria to come back home and help with the motel. Now here Maria was, leaving again not six months later, but at least she would still be in Texas. Sometimes, still, the weight of all those years apart—the not knowing where her child was, then the knowing and the not knowing whether to go after her or even if she ought to write to her, and then the knowing finally that she'd let the girl go, that she did not write because she didn't know how to say it, what she ought to have said to the girl before she ran off, and then the not standing herself for letting her girl go like she did, and then the not letting herself hate herself anymore over it because what was she supposed to do, climb in some airplane and go flying across the country to bring back a girl who wasn't a girl but grown and not likely to be talked back onto an airplane by a mother of the type Harriet had been to her?—sometimes the burden of it all came upon her still. She'd be remaking a poorly made bed or revacuuming a room and she'd have to stop and go to the room she kept open, where she and Ray had met for years, their room, 117, and just sit there on the double and think about all her years lying next to Luis by night and poor sweet Ray by day and most of the night too, and now both of them gone and her daughter back but so many years with her lost and her son gone she guessed for good. She thought about how, when Manny did come home, it had seemed he was just there to visit Luis. She knew she ought not to have just given up like she did, but a bigger part of her than she could now stomach saw Manny sitting there with his daddy consumed with talk chosen because she could not share it. Just like Luis done with that boy Randy and she could tell Maria too hated it when they went on about cars and ball games as if these subjects were something safe between them instead of just, she realized now, common interests, not interesting ones but ones they shared, and she just said, Well, I'll leave them to it. Told Manny she had to get back to work, hugged his neck, and said, “Bring your wife next time,” even after he had got rid of that wife, she knew it, he'd told her, she just slipped up.

Maria was back but now here she was leaving. Harriet didn't understand a lot of what she did and some of what she said. For instance, what she said she was going to do with that Buick.

Maybe it was the sharing part of what they did with that car that got to her. Or scared her. You could say that parents share their children, that this is what a marriage was supposed to be, a partnership where everything—a house, a car, and even children— was supposed to be jointly tended to and appreciated. Not that it had ever been this way with her and Luis. It was more like they took turns with the kids but not in the way you're supposed to—one looking after them when the other one was off doing something else, spelling each other until they could all be together. Luis would take Manny off with him and they'd come back and she'd want to get the boy back in her corner, so she'd take him into town and buy him a Blizzard at Dairy Queen. Harriet and Luis were nearly over by the time Maria was old enough to go to school. So then it was sharing her with school, then with whatever she had going on after school, friends and lessons and clubs, and eventually with Randy. But Luis was so keen on Randy that he just let Maria go when Randy came along. Just turned her over to him. Harriet couldn't fault him, though, because she'd already let go.

She had always thought that she had learned to share when she got with Ray. They came together at first over making a go of the motel. But after they started up with each other, it stopped being a motel or a business or even a building. It was something different, a part of them, the part that never did—because they never could—admit even to each other what they were doing, right out in public practically. So they took it day by day, just like the rooms in the motel, turning over, everybody out by eleven sharp or you'll get charged, and Lord knows she and Ray didn't run up any bills. Pay as you go, that's what they were. Or thought they were.

Was she supposed to see in Maria's choices all the things she'd done wrong? She didn't know where that would get her. She told Maria, “Well, that sounds like a plan.” She could see this town wasn't the place for her daughter anymore, if it ever was. She'd outgrown it, and good for her. She'd be in Texas. Harriet had this idea—more like a dream—that she'd go visit Maria in Austin and they'd drive down to New Braunfels and she could get to know her grandchildren and maybe she'd sell the motel and get a place near her children and her grandchildren. But she knew it was a dream. Wouldn't take a train whistle in her ear to wake her up out of it.

“I'll draw you how to get there,” she said about the place she had in mind for what they were wanting to do with that Buick. She got a pen out of the drawer and started marking up the back of a bill. She had already paid it but she pretended she hadn't.

“Y'all can pay this bill, too, when you're done with the map.”

“Check's in the mail,” said Marcus. He was eating more of Maria's fruit pie, and good for him, because he'd gone a little thin. Maria had probably been feeding him organic. Harriet had a plan to put some pounds back on him after Maria left. She knew Marcus favored more her kind of diet than Maria's and she'd gotten to where she hated eating alone now, that was the loneliest part of it, she'd nearly rather starve than sit behind her desk at the motel stabbing Styrofoam with a plastic fork.

“Good a place as you're going to find for what y'all want, though if you ask me . . . ,” said Harriet, and Maria said, “We didn't ask you,” and Harriet said, “Well, I guess it makes sense you didn't ask me, since you did not ask me the first thing about going in on it,” and Maria pointed at the map and said, “Your maps resemble Marcus's charts.”

Harriet knew when a subject was being changed. She knew better than to say one more word about what they were planning on doing with that car. She'd said too much already. Still, it seemed like to her a waste, even though she never did much care for that vehicle. She didn't see what they saw in it. It was too long to park and rode too low for her taste. You couldn't haul anything in it. She never did see why they chose it, much less why they got in it and drove it around like it was something special.

“You like a chart, Marcus?” she said.

“I do love a chart.”

“I wish you'd make one for me, then. I could use a chart to give out to my help so they'd know when to show up and when not to. And what time they ought to get there, because some of them don't know what a watch is.”

The ranch hand out searching for stray cattle found, hidden under piles of cut brush, a sky-blue Buick Electra. He did not see at first that despite having no battery and no tags, the car was in relatively good shape and perhaps salvageable if you were inclined to drive a Buick. He did not know anyone in the area, save some of the older couples he had seen in town driving slowly down the streets toward church or the grocery store, who might drive a car like this. It wasn't a very good car for the terrain.

He wondered how in the devil it got down here in the draw. It had rained some in the past few weeks, so it wasn't possible to track it. He didn't carry a cell phone. He couldn't call the sheriff, so he poked around a bit, trying to figure out why someone would leave this car out here.

Someone went to some trouble to hide this Buick. Opening doors and glove compartments and looking up under seats did not enlighten him as to why. In fact the longer he stuck around out there, the more he felt like it wasn't any of his business, this abandoned Buick. Could be any number of things led to it being left out here, and none of them, to his mind, called for him to meddle or squeal. He had parked his ATV over on the rise and someone might come up on his tracks, but if he told his boss man, Sure, I saw it but I didn't feel like it was any of mine, his boss man, who had been known to lie to the Border Patrol because they had gotten to be more and more a nuisance, would take up for him. But the hand did not think it would come to that. He had this feeling he'd be the last to see the Buick.

The last human. Antelope came to poke. And javelina, set on something to eat. Coyotes came down out of the mountains. The ranch hand in his examination of the Buick had left its right rear door cracked open enough for anything smaller than a burro to squeeze in wanting shelter from a wind. Grasshoppers, tarantulas, snakes—all the crafty species adapted to survival in a place not known for its bounty. Tumbleweeds in time added to the brush piled atop it, some of which blew away, only to be replenished by the wind. Rust came slowly in this thirsty draw but dust was so thick across it that within weeks the Buick blended with the desert but for a patch on the hood as clear blue and startling as cloudless sky.