Authors: Lynne Hinton
I
t was after ten o’clock before everyone had cleared out from the party. Malene and Roger were the last ones left, packing up the leftovers and the party supplies, cleaning up the tables, and tying up the trash bags and throwing them in the back of Roger’s truck. The moon was high and full.
“Good party,” Roger said as he walked up to the shelter from the ball field, a large bag of garbage thrown over his shoulder. He dropped it by his side.
Malene was stacking up another load of plastic dishes and boxing up the condiments. “It was nice, wasn’t it?” She stopped, yawned, and sat down at the table where she was working. She decided to take a break. “Alex seemed pleased.”
“He was worn out,” Roger noted, taking her cue and sitting down at the table across from his ex-wife. “He’ll sleep good tonight at your dad’s.”
“He got so many gifts,” Malene commented. “It took Daddy and me at least four trips to get everything in the car.” She smiled. “And you know how big that trunk in the new Buick is.”
“Yes, Oris has made me look inside his trunk at least three or four times.” Roger stuck his hands in his pockets. “Did Frieda drive your van to his house?” He knew Alex’s wheelchair couldn’t fit in a car, even Oris’s Buick.
Malene nodded. “I figured you would give me a ride back,” she responded.
Roger nodded. He never minded driving Malene anywhere.
“He is smitten by the girl,” Malene said, eyeing Roger, waiting for more information about his new tenant.
“Trina,” said Roger. “And I know,” he added. “He had his eye on her the first time he saw her.”
“That working out, her living in the apartment?” she asked. Alex had told her about the living arrangements right after he met Trina.
“So far. Of course, she hasn’t paid me anything yet.” He shook his head. “What is it with these young people? You and I had to live at your parents’ house for months before we struck out on our own.”
“And we had at least enough money saved,” Malene recalled, “to pay rent for a year when we finally did move into that little apartment near your office.” She shrugged. “Just a different generation, I guess.”
Roger waited. “He thinks she looks like Angel.”
Malene sighed. “I know.”
There was a pause between the two.
“You know, he asked me at least five times this morning if the mail had come. He never said, but I know he was hoping for a card from her.”
Roger shook his head and didn’t respond.
Malene blew out a breath. “I know that I said not to try to find her, to leave her alone, but honest to God, you think that girl would have called, at the very least, just called to tell her son happy birthday.” She shook her head. “Or sent a card. I swear, I tell myself every year I’m not going to get upset, and every year it just burns me up.” She looked up at Roger. “We did not raise that girl to be this way.”
Roger took off his hat and ran his hands through his hair. This was the conversation that never ended. It was the fight no one could ever win. It was the main reason their marriage had ended. Malene could not let go of being angry at her daughter. He sighed and didn’t answer.
“Oh, don’t sit there and act like I’m just being irrational. You could see it bothered Alex that she didn’t come. You told me yourself he was asking about her. And you were the one who wanted to go up to Taos and get her.”
There was no response. Roger just dropped his glance away from Malene.
“Just let me be mad for a few minutes,” she said. “I deserve at least that on the boy’s birthday.”
Roger looked up and smiled. He loved Malene. He had since they were twelve years old. They had divorced not because he had stopped caring about her or because he fell in love with someone else or because, like so many other married couples, they had just drifted apart. They hadn’t even fought all that much. They divorced because they could never seem to agree on how to make their daughter face her addiction and her poor choices and get her to be somebody she would never be able to be.
Malene wanted to use the tough love angle: make Angel pay for her mistakes, make her go to prison and face the consequences of her choices. And Roger, well, Roger realized that he was always trying to save his daughter.
He used every resource available to him as sheriff to try to get his daughter opportunities to do better, to be better, to tow the line, to do the right thing—finish school, come home, get a job, take care of her child. In the end, neither strategy seemed to work. Angel had chosen her own path, and there was nothing either parent could do to force her down another one.
When Angel turned fifteen, she became somebody neither of her parents recognized. And none of Malene’s tough love antics or Roger’s attempts to arrange for her salvation—the drives from one end of New Mexico to the other to bail her out or get her cleaned up, the favors from lawmen across the state, his efforts to keep her out of prison and in a halfway house or an inpatient facility—none of it worked. Even though Roger knew Malene knew it wasn’t his fault, she needed somebody to blame. And so he let her blame him. He figured it was easier than having her blame herself, so he made the decision, not long after Alex was born, when it was clear that Malene was eaten up with anger and bitterness, that he would give her that gift. He would let her hold him responsible. He felt like he was anyway. As angry as Malene was, Roger was guilty. So he took the blame for them both. At least that was something.
The two of them sat in silence.
“The cake was good,” Roger finally said.
“It ought to have been,” she responded, willing to change the subject. “The grocery store in Socorro lost my order, and I had to drive clear up to Los Lunas to find a cake big enough to serve everybody. Ended up costing me forty dollars for the cake and sixty dollars for gas.” She shook her head. “It was supposed to have a guitar on it, but all they had at the Wal-Mart was Disney characters and monsters. I just had them write ‘Happy Birthday’ and be done with it.”
“Alex loved it. And I’ll cover the extra costs,” Roger offered. “It was worth it.”
Malene shook her head. “Nah, it’s all right. Daddy gave me some money.” She rested her arms on the table. “It was good cake, though, wasn’t it? I mean, being one I just picked up without ordering.” She leaned against her elbows. “It’s a shame we don’t have anybody baking around here anymore.”
Roger nodded. He remembered the sisters and their bakery. Everybody complained about too many pies and cakes and not enough meat and potatoes, but it was sure helpful for special occasions to have somebody in town who could bake a cake.
“You sounded good tonight,” Malene said, referring to Roger’s music. He and a group of other musicians had played and sang for about three hours.
“I couldn’t keep the strings in tune for some reason, the humidity I guess, but it was fun, and Alex seemed to enjoy the music. I think he was happy about his gift from us. He already knows a few chords, and the size of the guitar is perfect for him.” Roger was glad he had sent away for the small guitar. It worked well for someone confined to a wheelchair.
“It was much nicer than I expected. I know I owe you more than you asked for.”
Roger shook his head. “We’ll just call it even, with the cake and all.”
Malene nodded.
There was a pause.
“The new priest seemed to have a good time.”
Roger laughed a bit. “I don’t think he ever understood which punch was for the children and which punch . . .”
“. . . my father got hold of,” Malene interrupted. “When did Oris buy liquor?” she asked. “And how did he get it in the punch bowl with no one seeing him?”
Roger shook his head. “I didn’t know what was going on until I noticed Ms. Millie going back for her third or fourth cup.” He thought for a minute. “Have you ever known her to dance with your father?”
“Not like that,” Malene answered. “For a second there I even thought she was going for a stripper’s pole.”
Roger slid his hand down the back of his head and across the back of his neck. “Now that’s something I do not care to witness,” he noted.
Malene laughed. “You seemed pretty happy yourself. How many cups of punch did you drink?”
Roger shook his head. “A few more than I needed,” he replied. “But not as many as Father George.”
“Yeah, I figure he’ll have a bit of a headache come morning,” she said. “Maybe you should drive up there and check on him, make sure he can make it to his early Mass in Omega.”
“You’re asking me to babysit the new priest?” he asked.
Malene shrugged. “He seems so young and nervous. And he tries too hard. And he’s probably never had more than wine at communion in his whole life. You checking on him is just the neighborly thing to do. After all, it was our party.” She paused. “You think he was able to drive back to the parish house okay?”
Roger scratched his head. “Well, since all the deputies were here, at least he wasn’t in danger of being pulled over for a DUI.” He placed his hands on the table and rubbed his fingers together. His thoughts went to smoking a cigarette. “And I haven’t gotten a call about a priest in a ditch, so I’m sure he’s fine.” He looked at Malene. “What about you? Did you have a little punch?” He winked. He could tell his ex-wife had imbibed. She seemed to have loosened up a bit as the party went on, and he had enjoyed watching her in her relaxed state.
She waved off the question. “Maybe a couple of glasses,” she replied. “But that was hours ago. Now I’m just tired.” She rested her chin in her hand. “You thinking about a smoke?” she asked.
Roger leaned back and shoved his hands in his pockets. “It’d be a great time for one right about now.”
Malene nodded. “You’ve done good this time,” she commented.
“Almost a month,” he noted. “And it’s just as hard as it was the first day.”
They both laughed. There was a pause in the conversation.
“Full moon,” Roger finally said. He peeked out of the shelter and looked up at the sky. “I can’t remember the last time we sat alone outside under a full moon.” He sat back up and smiled.
“You used to sing to me under the full moon,” Malene remembered. “What was that song you used to sing, something about a freckle beside my lips?”
“
Ese lunar que tienes cielito lindo junta tu boca. No se lo des a nadie cielito lindo, que a mi me toca
,” he sang.
“You know I fell in love with you because of your singing,” Malene said.
“You fell in love with me because I was the only boy you could beat in a footrace,” Roger responded.
Malene laughed. “You never were very fast.”
“That’s not what you were saying by the time we were in high school.” Roger smiled.
Malene shook her head. “Ah, to be young again,” she said, dropping her head on her arm to rest.
“
Ay! Ay! Ayay!
Canta y no llores, porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo, los corazones
.” Roger sang another line from their song while Malene closed her eyes and smiled.
It was the perfect ending to a perfect day.
F
ather George was drunk. He had managed to drive himself back to the parish house without incident, although he had gone a few miles before he realized he had turned on the windshield wipers and not the lights. He handled the dirt road up to the parish and was able to park the car in the appropriate place next to the house. He had to wait a minute to be able to get out of the car, catch his breath, steady himself, before he could manage to stumble to the door, unlock it, and walk inside. But that was all he could do before the spinning intensified. He hurried to the bed, falling on it.
When he first left the party, he thought he must be sick, coming down with something, since he hadn’t knowingly drunk alcohol. However, by the time he had gotten off of the main road and was having such a hard time concentrating while he drove, he knew what was happening. The punch was spiked, and he was definitely intoxicated. He thought the people standing around the bowl of punch seemed oddly delighted that he was enjoying so much of it. He thought it had been a bit strange that everyone stopped talking to watch him as he poured himself a glass. He was not the reason for the tainted drink, but he was certainly an entertaining consequence. The people at the party, members of his parish, had watched their priest unknowingly get drunk. The room spun as George realized what had happened and suddenly remembered the only other time in his life when he had had that much alcohol. Like this one was sure to become, it wasn’t a memory he cherished.
George moaned, jumping up from the bed to run to the bathroom. He was going to be sick. “What on earth did I drink?” he asked out loud. After thirty minutes of vomiting up everything he had eaten for the entire day, he crawled to the kitchen, pulled a bottle of water from the refrigerator, and headed back to his bed. He sat on the edge and took a few swallows of water. The room kept spinning. He closed his eyes and leaned forward over his knees, dropping his head in his hands. Voices and bits of conversations floated across his mind.
“Get some boots,” he recalled somebody saying. “You two just seem to show up everywhere together,” the same voice commented. “You believe in angels?” a girl asked. “Altar Guild . . . that skunk seemed to take up with the priest . . . den of rattlesnakes at the parish house . . . cancel Mass. . . .” The voices just kept resounding, getting louder and louder. He ran back to the toilet.
Father George Morris had been planning to be a priest since he was eight years old. That was the year his family moved into the downstairs apartment in a house that was right beside St. Peter’s Church. He discovered the way to the altar on the day they moved in, and once he found that the side door was always unlocked, the one next to the priest’s private office, George spent more time at the church than he did in the apartment.
He loved everything about the place. The music, the chanting, the silence, the incense, the candles, the order of things, and mostly the relief he felt when he entered. It became his own private sanctuary, his solace, his home. Since his parents were either fighting or working late hours or drinking until they passed out, neither of them seemed to mind or notice that their only son was becoming so pious. They didn’t say a word when the priest would let him stay over for meals or even sleep in the parish hall, or when he made arrangements for the boy to start parochial school. After all, it didn’t cost them anything. They were just glad not to have to worry about bus schedules or even teacher-parent meetings, since the priest handled them. George was out of their way, and that was all that seemed to matter to them.
George flourished in the church and in the parish school. In his early years as a student in public school, teachers had assumed something was wrong with the boy. He was too quiet, too sullen, too withdrawn, and they were always having him tested for disabilities or assessing him for special needs. One teacher thought he might be deaf. Another was convinced he was autistic. They would arrange for doctors and clinical trials, and as long as they were free and held during regular school hours, his parents never interfered. They didn’t share the teachers’ concerns about their son and yet didn’t mind the special attention. Since they weren’t willing to spend extra time trying to analyze or understand their only child, they were glad to have experts interested enough to try to figure the boy out.
Only when George was five years old did his father demonstrate any special interest in his son. He tried, as he put it to his wife, “to get the boy out of his shell.” For weeks he tried teaching his son how to box, goaded him into emotional outbursts, even whipped him when George refused to fight another boy who lived next door. Mr. Morris finally gave up and went back to drinking and playing cards with his friends when George stood out on the porch, locked out for four hours, missing supper and practically freezing to death, because he wouldn’t scream out what he wanted. Finally, his mother rescued him, unlocking the door and taking her quiet, unemotional son to bed. Neither parent tried to figure their son out again, leaving the diagnosis and treatments to teachers and school aides and well-meaning social workers.
At the church and the parish school, however, George blossomed. He was still quiet and even-tempered, did not have many friends, and preferred to work alone, but instead of raising suspicions from the adults, his behavior was rewarded and celebrated in this setting. He was coddled by the nuns and set apart by the priest as a special child, even one called by God to service. He had found his place at an early age, and in almost twenty years he had never regretted his childhood or the decision he made. He had even found great love and pity for his parents, and he was grateful that they had moved to that apartment and grateful that they never stood in the way of God’s plan for his life.
George lay on the cold bathroom floor, his mouth dry and his head starting to pound. He didn’t try to get up.
After seminary, when he finished his studies, he asked for a call to serve in another country. He believed there was greater reward in serving the poorest of the poor. And he relished the thought of being out of America, away from the influence of television, the Internet, and all things secular. He thought it would be a good fit for him to serve in missions.
George remembered his spiritual director at seminary, who had recommended that George stay in domestic service, noting that the young man might find difficulties in being too isolated. He claimed that George’s desire to serve in an undeveloped country was more pathological than spiritual, and he was concerned that isolation for George would be more harmful than helpful. His spiritual director had said that George should wait for a few years, have a bit more supervision, before being sent abroad. The young man had disagreed with his mentor, but in typical fashion for George, he accepted what was handed down to him.
“I wonder what Father Leon would say now,” he said to himself. “At least in Haiti I wouldn’t have to worry about somebody getting me drunk.” He sat up, resting on his arms, and waited for the room to stop spinning.
He thought about what he had said, the words “getting me drunk.” He recalled that the other time he was intoxicated it had happened in exactly the same way . . . at the hands of somebody else. He leaned back against the bathroom wall, recalling the only other time he had felt this bad.
After being harassed for weeks for not going out, not joining the other students for anything other than study groups, he had agreed to go with his roommates to Cincinnati to “blow off some steam,” as they called it, the semester before they would be taking their final vows. It seemed harmless enough to George. They told him their itinerary. They planned to take in a movie, go to a ball game, spend time at a shopping mall, and sample a few restaurants. Seeking guidance about the idea, George had discovered that even Father Leon agreed that the outing would be a good thing for him to do.
George sat on the bathroom floor and remembered that weekend. For the first night and the first full day, it had been fun. He had found himself enjoying a bit of leisure. The guys had even commented that he looked more relaxed away from school and that the trip seemed to be good for him. And he thought it was. He liked the movie, loved the ball game, even enjoyed being in a shopping mall, seeing all the people. He was pleased with himself and his decision to join his friends, until the last night they were together.
That night was the night, they later confessed, they had made a plan “to get George drunk.” It started innocently enough with a late dinner at a nice restaurant. Following the first course, he noticed that his iced tea tasted different. It wasn’t the iced tea he was used to. There was a sweet taste to it, syrupy, but it wasn’t a sugary sweetness. It was something else. When he wanted to complain or ask for something else to drink, the other guys had convinced him it was fine, and he had ended up having two refills.
Later, when the roommates decided it would be fun to take a cab over to the river walk and find a club to hear some live music, George decided to head back to the hotel. He had told them that he wasn’t feeling very good, and after they admitted to him what he had been drinking, and after he had already been to the restroom three times, sick from the drinks, they agreed to go on without him. The plan to watch George get drunk didn’t produce the great excitement the others had expected. It was actually quite a letdown. So they believed him when he promised them that he was fine and would be able to find his way back to the hotel.
He recalled that on the last day of the trip, hours after they had missed their bus back to seminary and minutes before they were getting ready to call the police to report that he was missing, he had stumbled into the hotel room, hungover, without his shirt or his wallet, claiming he had no memory of where he had been or what had happened.
After a week they quit asking, quit feeling angry and guilty, and they never knew where George had been, never knew what had happened to him while they were listening to some bad karaoke and flirting with college girls. They also never invited him to join them on a weekend out of town again. Father Leon knew that there was some story to tell, that something had happened, but after three sessions in which George would speak only of his upcoming vows and what would be required of him upon graduation, refusing to answer questions about the trip or what happened, the older priest quit pressing as well. He simply denied the young man’s request for foreign service, thinking George needed more time to mature spiritually and socially, more time located near supervision and assistance before being sent somewhere out of the country.
“Is this what you had in mind for me as a priest in the States, Father Leon? You think somebody would have gotten me drunk in Haiti after being there only four days?” He asked the questions out loud again, the words filling up the room. “You think New Mexico is all that much better than a foreign mission field?” He shook his head slowly, careful not to make the pounding worse. “You’re the one who needs to get out more,” he said. “This is a Third World country.”
He pulled himself up from the floor and made his way, leaning against the wall, back to the bedroom. He took a deep breath and removed his clothes and hung them on the chair next to the bed. He pulled aside the covers, reached for his rosary on the table beside him, and crawled in. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” he started to pray, and then he stopped. He rubbed his eyes and started the rosary prayer again. “Hail Mary, full of grace, pray for us sinners now. . . .” And he stopped again.
This time he quit praying because he thought he heard something outside. He listened, straining to hear whether the voices were real or just more sounds from earlier in the night that were rumbling across his mind. He opened his eyes. There were voices, he thought, coming very near his window. He clinched his fingers around the rosary and held his breath.
“He’s home.” It was a whisper, male, very close to his head.
“Shhhhh . . . get away from there.” Another voice, female, a little farther away.
“No doubt, if he drank as much as everyone else did at the party, he’s dead to the world, I’m sure.”
There were footsteps moving away from his window. Father George waited a few seconds, and then he sat up in bed and turned to face outside. He stayed perfectly still as he heard the voices moving farther away, heading in the direction of the church. He took in another breath, suddenly feeling much clearer, and leaned up to pull aside the curtains. As he did, he saw a young couple walking toward the back of the church. They were holding hands, the boy leading the girl. He watched them and was sure that the boy was someone he did not recognize, but the girl he was quite confident he knew.
He dropped back down into the bed, threw the covers over his head, the rosary falling behind the pillow, and closed his eyes, deciding that he wasn’t in the mood to deal with young lovers, even if they were trespassing.