Small Damages
Authors: Beth Kephart
Tags: #Teen & Young Adult, #Literature & Fiction, #Social & Family Issues, #Being a Teen, #Pregnancy
beth kephart
PHILOMEL BOOKS
An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Copyright © 2012 by Beth Kephart. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Philomel Books, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kephart, Beth. Small damages / Beth Kephart. p. cm.
Summary: Eighteen-year-old Kenzie of Philadelphia, pregnant by Yale-bound Kevin, is bitter when her mother sends her to Spain to deliver and give her baby away, but discovers a makeshift family with the rancher who takes her in, his cook, and the young man they have raised together.
[1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Pregnancy—Fiction. 3. Cooking—Fiction. 4. Ranch life—Spain—Fiction. 5. Adoption—Fiction. 6. Spain—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.K438Sm 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011020947
ISBN 978-1-101-57218-4
For Jeremy, who once said, long ago,
Tell the story of the living, not the dying.
Contents
Through the empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in sea
rch of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.
Federico García Lorca
PART ONE
ONE
The streets of Seville are the size of sidewalks, and there are alleys leaking off from the streets. In the back of the cab, where I sit by myself, I watch the past rushing by. I roll the smeary window down, stick out my arm. I run one finger against the crumble-down of walls. Touch them for you:
Hello, Seville.
At the Hotel de Plaza de Santa
Isabel, the old lady in the vestibule is half my height, not even. She has thick elephant legs and opaque stockings, and maybe the sun banged her awake when I opened the door, or maybe the look of me disturbs her, but whatever it is, she’s bothered. She puts her hand out for my deposit, finds a key, and knocks it down on the table between us. She thrusts her chin sky high, and I turn and take the marble stairs, where there are so many smashed-in footsteps before mine. Smashed in and empty and hollow.
My room is long and thin, like a hallway corked on either end by a door. The first door takes me in from the stairs and the second one takes me back out, past a bed, a toilet, a porcelain sink, toward a tall and thick-glass window. Outside, three stories down, a man is sitting on a bench, and a nun and then another nun are dragging their black skirts across the plaza tile. There are orange trees cracking the concrete.
“You’ll be home in five months,” my mother said at the airport terminal—twelve hours ago, just twelve.
“Five months is forever,” I told her.
“You made your choices,” she said, and I said, “No.” Because the only thing I chose was you.
TWO
When I wake it is already tomorrow. I change, brush out my hair, and slip down the steps, where Elephant Legs has gone missing. When I open the door, a nun blackbirds by, and I keep walking out into the air, which smells like fruit and sun and the color blue; it smells like blue in Seville. Down one street I walk and then another, getting lost and not even caring. Later this morning, Miguel will come for me, and I will belong to him and to his
cortijo,
which is an island of dust in a land of dust, or at least that’s how I dreamed it in flight, high in the sky, higher than birds, above the plunging deep Atlantic. Miguel has friends, my mother said. Friends who will help me forget this.
As if.
“If Dad were alive, he wouldn’t let you,” I told my mother, who had packed for me, arranged for me, exchanged dollars for pesetas for me, never asked me. My mother, the Main Line party planner.
“Don’t kid yourself, Kenzie. And don’t accuse. Someday you’ll be grateful.”
“It was different,” I said, “when you went to Spain.”
“
I
was different,” she said. “
I
was responsible.”
I don’t know what time it is—can’t do the math off my watch, which still reads Philadelphia. At every corner there is a bar, and in every window a dead pig dangles from its hard black socks, and past the ham, on oiled counters, there are sugar rolls heaped on bright trays. I yank at a door and head inside. I take a seat at the counter. The waiter slides me a coffee in a thick porcelain mug. I choose a pastry from the tray—raisins, white frosting, a rising yellow marmalade, and then I’m back out on the streets, thinking of you, tiny as a finger curled, and fed.
THREE
Miguel is tall as royalty, and his thick, long, white hair gleams, and his eyes are blue, but only one of them sees; the other, as my mother says, was lost to polo. I know this much about him. He has raised the famous bulls, the
toros bravos
. He farms olives, breeds quail, is the master of thousands of acres.
Breeds
, she said.
Masters
.
Thousands of acres.
Like this were some gift she was giving. Like her connection to someone who knows someone who wants something is my own super special salvation. Super. Special.
Now here he is, at the edge of the Santa Isabel plaza. “Kenzie?” he asks me. That’s all: “Kenzie?” He fits my two suitcases into the trunk of his red Citroën and cranks open the door of the passenger’s side and shuts me in. The traffic out of Seville is light, the air already steaming. There are olive trees and orange trees and the smell of gasoline mixed up with citrus. Cyclists going by at a fast-whiz pace. Farmers in long-sleeved striped shirts. The sky has started turning silver, and then there are small pieces of blue, and soon the landscape is nothing but a blast-up of green and haze.
“Did you enjoy Seville?” Miguel asks me, his English full of Spanish sounds.
“It’s different,” I tell him. “And hot.” I give him a good, hard profile study. Then I’m back studying the road.
There are orchards. There are places where the earth has been dug but not planted. There is a grove of miniature palms that look like giant fruits—pineapples, that’s what they are, growing out of the ground—and there are black pigs and bulls in the distance.
If I were filming this for Shipley TV, I’d go white balance and manual focus; I’d keep the sun behind me. I’d zoom in first, to find the story, then I’d pan out again. Black pigs. Black bulls. Pineapples.
“Hungry?” Miguel asks, and I say, “Maybe. A little.”
He stops at a roadside restaurant that I’d have guessed was abandoned, but the woman behind the bar knows Miguel. She slaps some tuna on a long loaf of bread, brings out a beer, hands it all over before Miguel says a thing. Then she nods at me.
“And you?” Miguel asks. “Your preference?”
There’s a freezer in the corner, blue. I lean toward it. Pull out a lemon Popsicle.
“That’s it?” Miguel asks.
“That’s it.”
The proprietress whistles. Miguel pays.
* * *
We drive an hour more, at least. Miguel rolls down the windows of his car—or tries to anyway, but this is, he says, a cranky old car, a car that he starts to call Gloria. Why a man like Miguel would hold on to such a junker and call it by a name is one hundred percent beyond me. “She has a temperamental,” Miguel says, his Spanish colliding with his English. I give him that.
Finally Miguel steers left, and the skinny line of road goes lumpy. There are olive trees on the one side, sunflowers on the other, some horses and a lonely mule, a patch of blooming cacti, lizards, and at the road’s end, a wide stucco wall punched through with a center arch whose stucco rim is painted peach. Above the archway,
LOS NIETOS
is spelled out with blue tile, and beyond the archway is a courtyard, and in the windows of the house blue curtains hang, their bottoms brushing the begonias in the peeling window boxes. Everyone I know is at the Jersey shore—Kevin, Ellie, Andrea, and Tim—thinking that the sea goes on forever.
Where the road ends, Miguel parks. He gets out and opens my door. He hoists my two suitcases from the trunk, cuts beneath the arch, and walks across the courtyard toward the house. I get out, look around, look down the road, and finally decide to walk with him—through one of the doors on the courtyard side of the stucco house, beneath a hive of wasps, and down a hall where bulls hang blinkless from three tall walls. It is a dark room lit by the broken slat in the heavy wooden shutters, and I sit down. Miguel brings me a Coke and sits, and a cloud of dust floats to the ceiling.
He is sixty-one. He wears faded jeans and scuffed work boots
.
“My bulls,” he says, his chin nodding toward the walls.
“The finest,” he tells me, explaining how twice his bulls have been spared the final death sword by a
corrida
president at the height of a fight, explaining slowly because I have no idea what he means. “Front-page news,” he says, and leaves it at that. Whatever, I think, and shrug like it doesn’t bother me to be stared down by a wall full of bulls. And then he tells me how once he fought his own bulls, and to make some kind of proof of his point, he gets up, finds a photograph, and slips it onto my lap. I look from the photograph to him and back. I sip at my Coke and say nothing.
“I will introduce you to Los Nietos,” he says then, leaning down to collect his photo. I stand to follow—out of the room and through to the opposite side of the house and a backside courtyard—a bunch of horses in stalls, the sound of one bird singing, a sorry, beat-up jeep, and two people under the hard pouring bleach of the sun. He introduces the woman first, a short version of stern. “This is Estela,” Miguel says. “Our queen.”
“Your cook,” she says, in English.
“
Buenas tardes,
” I say.
“
Sí,
” she answers. “
Buenas tardes
. Hello.”
She looks at me, and she looks at you. I stare out beyond her.
“And this is Esteban,” Miguel says now. “The horseman of Los Nietos.”
I turn my head, size him up with a squint, decide he is no man. He’s a boy around my age in a tipped-down hat. He lets me stare at him and doesn’t blink. I feel a burn light up my cheeks.
“So,” Miguel says.
“So.”
“This is Los Nietos.”
“Uh-huh.” This is Los Nietos, and that is Miguel, and all around is southern Spain, where my mother had traveled as some sorority girl, and where her best friend still lives—the only friend in whom my mother ever confides the actual and honest. “I can’t have her here,” my mother had told her friend, Mari, over the phone. “I can’t let anybody see what she has done, who she’s become.” It was Mari who arranged for all of this—Mari, who had married a Spaniard years ago and who knew someone somewhere wanting a child. “Why can’t I just stay with Mari?” I asked my mother, before I left.
“Because Mari travels,” my mother said. “Life of a diplomat’s wife.”
“But what if I don’t like whoever it is who’s adopting my child?”
“Don’t call it that.”
“What?”
“
Your
child.”
Miguel heads for the jeep. I climb in beside him and slam the door, and he drives—past the house into the fields of bleached-out grass, over earth rising and collapsing, into the thick of the dust. There are checkpoints—that’s what he calls them—and at each, Miguel hops out, turns the key in a lock, swings open the gate, hops back in, drives forward, stops, then locks the gate behind us, until finally we are out among the bulls, jerking along like some African safari they play on the travel shows on TV. He tells me the facts as he thinks them up, and when he has the English to explain: The bulls fight when they are four. They weigh 480 kilos. They wear the brands of their birthdays on their back, the
cortijo
logo. They have nice, straight backs and horn geometry.
We scatter the herd, break the bulls out of the shade until they are near, running beside us—fast in a straight line, awkward on the turns, annoyed. Miguel keeps talking about the finest horns, the best backs, the beauty. In a few weeks, he says, he will take the six bulls that he loves most and pack them into a truck and send them off to a bullring. Bullfighting is poetry and mind, he tells me, and when his bulls die well, he does not feel the sadness; he feels the pride.
“Pride?” I say.
“Sí.”
I can’t remember pride. Want, I remember. Need. Not pride, but if I remembered pride, that wouldn’t be the word I’d use for sending my best loved to their dying. This is a place for a guy like Hemingway, and for a teacher like Ms. Peri, who said that if she had to choose between a Hemingway sentence and a Fitzgerald one, she’d choose the Hemingway. I raised my hand, said I’d choose Fitzgerald, and this was in February, a long time ago. That was when things weren’t so hard. When you had a choice—Hemingway or Fitzgerald—and nobody’s life depended on it.
Miguel drives along the ridge and the reservoir. Out toward the pastured cows. Back around to his horses. Over to the forest edge, where the deer and the quail and whatever else is hiding there make themselves safe. He circles back to a group of buildings near the main house, and we climb out and look around, and this, he says, is his bullring. His own private bullring, yellow and red and broken in places where a bull rammed its head or the weather won or the wood gave up for good and split.
“The summers are long,” he tells me.
I touch the burn still high in my cheek.
“Estela expects your help in the kitchen.”
“Right.”
“Soon you meet Javier and Adair.”
“Who are Javier and Adair?” I ask.
“The parents,” he says. “Of your child.”
Sometimes, with a camcorder, you record motion. Sometimes you try to stop it. Slow it down, find the shadows, know what lies between.