Rust (21 page)

“She shouldn’t have picked you.” Something in all of this, Rosalita’s breakdown in Elena’s
casita
, felt dirty to Rico. Sneaky. As if she were martialing the troops, lining up the female family forces of guilt and pressure against him. “If she told the girls, I swear to God, I’ll . . .”

He truly had no idea how to finish the sentence.

“I’m sure she didn’t tell the girls,
mi hijo
.” Now her voice was even softer. “She didn’t even mean to tell me. It just happened.” Elena was certain that that was an accurate statement. At dinner, she had noticed that Rosalita was far more quiet than usual, very preoccupied with whatever was going on in her mind.

“Where’s Rico?” Elena had asked. It seemed so odd to sit down to a family dinner without him.

“He’s coming home late,” Maribel said. “I forgot to ask him what he was doing when he called.”

“He’s probably got a big job,” said Elena. Her son was so predictable that no other option came to her mind.

“Yeah, probably,” said Maribel. It was just by accident that Elena, who was sitting next to Rosalita, happened to hear a sharp intake of breath and a little bleat so soft it would have passed for silence in anyone but a blind person’s ears. Elena had cocked her head in Rosalita’s direction and heard it, even felt her efforts to return her breath to an even keel.

When dinner was over, amidst the chaos of cleaning up, the screeching of Jessica, and the banter of the girls, Elena had asked Rosalita to walk her back to her
casita
. Rosalita had risen from the table and come to collect her, offering her mother-in-law her arm, leading her out the back door and along the worn path to Elena’s door.

“You didn’t eat much,” Elena had said as a way of knifing open the membrane that Rosalita seemed to have sealed around herself.

“I’m not too hungry, Mama. Rico and I had a big lunch today.”

“You met for lunch?”

“We went to the Barelas Coffee House.”

She knew that her son and Rosalita were not in the habit of meeting in the middle of the day to go to a restaurant. Rosalita was working at that time, and Rico tended to stay in the garage, where he could listen to the radio while he ate the sack lunch Rosalita prepared for him. “That’s nice,” said Elena. “Very romantic.”

“Not really,” Rosalita had said, and the tone of her voice was like a swinging door that could move in either direction: close down or open up. Then, just like that, she had said, “I think Rico has a girlfriend, Mama.”

By that time, they were approaching Elena’s back door. “Come in, Rosalita. Come in,” Elena had said. And to her surprise, her daughter-in-law did come in, her daughter-in-law who was so very private, whom Elena felt she both knew and did not know, who, Elena knew instinctively, had not wanted her mother-in-law to come and live here in her domain, who had maintained her distance from the start.

Elena had opened the door and Rosalita followed her in. They went straight to the living room and sat down together on the old flowered couch.

“What makes you think this?” she asked.

“It’s easy to think it when you’ve seen the woman, seen the two of them together like lovebirds.” Rosalita was remembering the way they looked, framed in the big window of Rico’s shop, that book spread out before them like a future together they were poised to step into.

“You saw them? Where?”

“At the garage. He says he’s teaching her to weld.”

“Maybe he is,” Elena said, “but what kind of woman wants to learn to weld?”

“An Anglo with hair to her ass and no hips,” Rosalita responded, and then she started to cry. “It’s my fault, Elena. I know that.”

“Don’t talk about fault. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way things go sometimes.” As she’d gotten older, Elena had stopped looking at the world as a reasonable place where things added up. Now she thought of it as a place where things happened, good and bad, to random people. “But are you sure?”

“I don’t know how far it’s gone,” Rosalita said.

And then she had told Elena everything. Some of it Elena knew—such as the way Rosalita had turned off to Rico, though she surely did not know the cold spell had gone on so long. It was three years ago that Rico had told her about it. But the rest of it! Elena felt as if she had been swept into the television set, into one of those love stories she found so riveting.

Rosalita had cried, which was rare for her, cried so much that the top of her blouse was wet, as if she’d just come inside from a rainstorm. When the story was over, she had sat on the couch in silence for a good twenty minutes while Elena made some calming tea and served it to her in an oversize cup. “I never stopped loving Rico,” Rosalita finally said. “Never, no matter what it looks like.”

She had sipped her tea, slowly finishing it without either asking for advice or adding more details. Elena sat close to her on the couch and gently placed her hand on Rosalita’s shoulder. Together, they watched the darkness descend.

After a while, Rosalita went home and Elena turned on her television show. Not much longer after that, Rico came in the door from who know where. Elena didn’t ask, though she noticed that he smelled fresh, like the mountains.

“Rico,” she said, “
Te quiero, mi hijo
.”

“Te quiero, también
,” he replied, and then he took off into the dark night.

M
ARGARET
PEELED
off her T-shirt and jeans, still slightly damp, and climbed into a warm bath into which she had dropped dried lavender. Little purple flecks floated in the water, releasing a scent so lovely that Margaret felt dizzy with sweetness. She closed her eyes and images flooded in: the spectacular jagged rocks of the Jemez Mountains, Magpie standing in the river drinking fresh cold water, she and Rico sprawled out on the rocks like lizards. She had never been in a more beautiful place, never even dreamed of one like that. Already she felt a longing to return, though the next time she would go by herself, just she and Magpie, so she could spend a whole day wandering.

Not that she regretted Rico’s presence on her first venture into the mountains of northern New Mexico. Far from it. His heat, so steady and reliable, had warmed her every moment of their time together, made her feel safe and somehow free; and the things she had done, like immerse herself in the river, would probably not have happened without him. Margaret knew that, but she was certain that he didn’t. Rico saw her as a free spirit, and for some reason, when she was with him, she felt like one. That felt good, very good, to a woman who had been burdened with a sense of sadness her whole life, who had felt that even her skin tone was pasty gray with sadness and smoke. Perhaps Rico would weld a new image of her, one that had no relationship to the old one, and she could simply step into it. It was a possibility.

The idea that an affair was not a possibility made it somehow perfect. She had been clear with him, and he had understood her. He had said he could keep his hands off her, and she believed him. But now, in the bath, her hands, all lathered up with soap that smelled like sagebrush, moved like Rico’s might, all over her body, and she felt the heat they left in their wake, warmer than the water in which she was buried up to her neck, warmer than the sun that had warmed them on the rocks in the last moments of sunlight.

But for Margaret the best part of her day with Rico came later, on the way home, after they had pledged, for better or for worse, to lower the lid onto any possibility of a romance between them. This was new to Margaret, this mature sidestepping of a potential problem, erasing it without erasing the person who had brought it to her door. She had felt such a sense of space in her exhilaration that it was simple, even graceful, to segue into the subject of welding, which Rico more than anyone knew was her obsession.

“I’ve been reading a lot about welding,” she began, “and I’m totally overwhelmed. Everything I read is so complicated. It’s like . . . Remember this?” She took both her hands off the wheel and began to pat the top of her head with one while making circles on her stomach with the other. Rico noticed that she steered the car quite skillfully with her knees during this little demonstration.

“You shouldn’t read so much,” he said. “Just do it.”

“I know you’re right,” she said, “but I’m addicted.”

Margaret had worked seriously at her art life for eight intense childhood and adolescent years before she ever took a class or read one book that analyzed the hows and whys of oil paint. When she had finally signed up for a class, which happened to be the first one she took with Nick, she had worry and trepidation, even fear, that her experience of the paint, of the colors and the way they swept into each other, would be tainted by the shoulds, by what she should do. One benefit of being abandoned by her parents was that Margaret had grown up without the shoulds. Parents should stay with their children, but hers didn’t. Grandfathers should be home in the evening to take care of little girls, but hers often wasn’t. When Donny worked, Margaret stayed across the hall with a merry widow named Mrs. Sullivan who should not have let her watch television shows with adult content until eleven at night, but she did. Nice Catholic girls should not roll up their uniform skirts to reveal several inches of schoolgirl thigh, but Margaret had. Even Donny had told her, when she was just thirteen, that a good policy was to run the other way when she heard the word ‘should.’ “If it’s got should in it,” he said, “you can be sure you won’t want to do it.” This was in response to the nun’s opinion that Margaret should enroll in some practical secretarial training courses, since it was obvious that she, with her tendency to daydream and her lack of interest in homework, was not college material.

Rico had just told her she should quit reading, and for some reason she was tempted to listen to him. But the words captured in the books on welding were portals into a new world for her. Reading them was like having a good dream and then waking up to discover it was real.

“There’s a lot of stuff in the books about color,” she said. “If you heat the metal to cherry red, this will happen. If you heat it to blood red, this will happen. To me, it seems like painting, except the emotions that the colors trigger happen in the metal instead of in the person looking at it.”

Rico burst out laughing. “Jesus, girl, take it easy,” he said. “It’s just welding, It’s not rocket science.”

“How do you know it’s not rocket science?” she countered. “Just because you can do it, it doesn’t mean it’s not complex, Rico. Probably a hundred years ago it
was
rocket science. Anyway, I’m not talking about science. I’m talking about art.” She glanced at him. He had shifted slightly in the seat, and his back now rested partially against the passenger door. She saw him full-on, in the headlights of a passing car, and the way the light flooded onto him and then retracted made him seem like a spirit who could incarnate or disappear at will. “Talk to me about the art of it, Rico. Tell me everything you know. You didn’t get to be
‘el rey’
for nothing.”

She looked so sincere that Rico felt called upon to come up with something smart. But he had never talked about welding to anyone, not because he was against it, but because no one had ever brought it up. Where should he start? Margaret waited silently while he searched for an entry point.

“Well,” he finally began, “most people who’re just starting out fuck up because they don’t keep the base metal hot enough. You have to get it to the melting point and then keep it there, keep it steady. So the best thing to do is burn up some pieces on purpose, overheat them till they’re useless, just wreck them, until you start to get the feeling of what’s just the right amount of heat, not too much and not too little, and that takes time to figure out and it changes depending on what you’re welding. So you’re always keeping right on the edge, balancing, trying not to lose the edge and—”

As he spoke, it was as if there was another Rico emerging, one who had actually formulated quite a few theories, based on personal observation, and was actually able to get the words out in some way that passed for sensible. The more he talked, the more he wanted to say, as if Margaret had forced him to squeeze through the skinny center of some hourglass, and once he did, everything had widened and he had become giddy with all the room there was inside him. Every once in a while, Margaret would stop him and ask a few questions, but mostly she listened intently. He talked nonstop until she pulled off I-25 at Avenida César Chávez, drove up over the bridge above the old railroad yard, and arrived in front of Garcia’s Automotive. She turned off the engine. For a second, Rico considered continuing, perhaps opening the garage door to take her inside for some hands-on experience, but he knew that would come soon enough, the next morning in fact; and he felt obligated to go home to Rosalita and whatever was in store for him there. He had never shown up late without an explanation, and, given the events of the day, he was certain Rosalita was stewing with images, not unlike the ones he had just lived through.

“How’s that?” he asked as a way of ending his long monologue. “Enough to get you going?”