Night at the Fiestas: Stories (14 page)

Jeff has heard it said that teachers reach only the emotional maturity of their oldest students. His mother, then, is a kindergartener, launching out stubbornly on her own, and then rushing back, crying, for comfort. She calls Jeff nearly every day, unless she’s feeling fragile, in which case Jeff is supposed to call her and to keep calling until she picks up. Small problems loom large for Jeff’s mother and require endless discussion—whether or not to replace the microwave, what to do about the stray cat that has begun to linger at the patio doors. Just a few months ago, she called Jeff in tears because she’d run into Jeff’s father at the gas station. She hadn’t even talked to him, just glimpsed him, or thought she had. Almost twenty years they’ve been divorced, and she’s still ready to fall to pieces.

Jeff thinks, not for the first time, that maybe he should move back to Albuquerque and finish his dissertation here. Lisa wouldn’t be happy, but she couldn’t object, not with his suicidal sister and bereaved mother needing him. He could live right here—or, better, in the guesthouse out back. That would make a certain kind of sense. He’s always felt proprietary toward the guesthouse. When he was a kid he played out there among the remnants of his grandmother’s New England life: his dead grandfather’s clothing, his mother’s childhood toys, everything she’d dragged with her across the country. It occurs to him for the first time how unlike her it was to save all that stuff, since he’d never known her to be sentimental, unlike Jeff himself, who mourns even memories that aren’t his. “Can I live here when I grow up?” he asked when he was ten, and his grandmother laughed. “Consider it yours.”

Jeff swallows hard and thumps his list. “We’ve got to unload this place, pronto.”

“Maybe we should discuss it?” There’s something rigid in his sister’s tone that makes Jeff look at her more closely.

“What’s to discuss? Mom needs the money.”

“Well,” says Brooke, straightening a pile of junk mail, “I don’t want to sell, and I don’t think you do, either. Also it’s not your decision.”

Jeff exhales. “You think
Mom’s
going to step up?”

“You know, being the favorite may have meant something when Grandma was alive, but it doesn’t grant you total authority now.” She raises her head in challenge.

“Oh, stop.” This is an old accusation, made by both Brooke and, less frequently but with more bitterness, their mother. But it isn’t fair, attributing Jeff’s closeness with his grandmother to favoritism—unearned, undeserved—given how much Jeff put into that relationship. For years he stopped by most days after school and, once he’d left home, called every other day. By comparison, Brooke and their mother barely tried. “You want to find renters? Deal with inspectors and repairs and leases? Run a little property management company on the side while you finish up your gen-ed requirements?” He pushes the steno pad at her so hard the pages riffle, then immediately feels foolish.

“You know,” Brooke says, “Grandma would have hated that service. The preacher or whatever looked at his notes before he said her name.”

The funeral, which took place in a flat-roofed brick monstrosity moored in an expanse of crushed rock,
was
terrible, dreary and sparsely attended. “I did my best.” Jeff’s voice cracks, and he’s glad, because his sister should feel bad about giving him a hard time.

Brooke’s tone softens. “You did a fine job.” She leans on the counter with her knuckles, rocks back and forth, then laughs a single harsh bray. “But if my funeral is like that, I’ll kill myself.”

“Christ, Brooke,” Jeff starts, but he’s stopped by the ringing phone.

She answers, listens a moment, then says, “Talk to Jeff.” He gives her a puzzled look as he takes it, but her face reveals nothing.

“Jeffy, honey. I’m real sorry your grandma died. She was a great lady.”

His stomach seizes even before Jeff consciously places the voice. Victor, their father: unemployed and undependable, obstinately friendly, chronically drunk.

“Don’t you recognize me? It’s your
papa
, man.”

Jeff closes his eyes. “We appreciate your thoughts, Victor.”

“Listen, there’s stuff we got to talk about.”

“I’m afraid now’s not a good time. As you’ve pointed out, my grandmother just died.”

A silence follows, through which Jeff can almost hear his father scheming. Victor says, “Well, I’m probably dying, too. Cancer.”

Jeff laughs. Brooke’s hands on the counter are still; she watches him, impassive. Jeff half-turns, leans into the receiver, as if to protect her from the conversation. “I can’t help thinking this is a coincidence, Victor. Your calling now.” His grandmother’s phone is equipped with a foam shoulder rest, which Jeff crushes in his hand. With effort he relaxes his grip. “The funeral ended two hours ago.”

“That’s what I’m saying. A death really makes you think about mortality and all that. Man,
poor
Becky. I’m just saying you might want to see me. It’s my stomach. They say that’s a bad one.”

“What’s this about, Victor? Do you need money?”

“No.” Victor sounds offended.

Jeff doesn’t know why he asked. His father has never asked for money, not even after the divorce. He could tell Victor to screw himself, but part of him is curious to know if his father actually is dying. The man’s history of manipulation doesn’t exempt him from real cancer, Jeff supposes. He wonders if his father’s illness will trigger grief and catharsis, forgiveness and reconciliation. He shudders, then flips to a new page, clicks the pen. “Fine. We’ll say our goodbyes. You still at the same place? Give me your address.”

“No need!” His father’s tone is cheerful. “I’m right out back.”

“What?”

“Just look.” And, indeed, there he is, their father, in the middle of the dry lawn in their grandmother’s backyard. He waves sheepishly, cell phone pressed to his ear. “I could see you two standing there. I almost came in, but I didn’t want to freak you.”

Jeff hangs the phone on the wall but continues to steady himself against the receiver. “He says he’s got cancer,” he says, jerking his thumb at the window. “So make of that what you will.” There’s something almost pleasing in the anger Jeff feels toward his father. He feels beleaguered, wronged, and also energized, because once again he has to take charge.

Brooke turns and shrugs her hunched shoulders, crossing her arms over her breasts, matching Jeff’s show of nonchalance. Her whole life she’s had bad posture; she even slumped as a defeated little toddler. Outside, Victor is taking a leak in the tomato bed, squinting into the colorless sky.

“I should see what he wants. Care to join?”

Brooke looks at her stubby fingernails and shakes her head.

“How long do you think he’s been lurking out there?” Again Brooke shrugs, and he feels his frustration mount. “Well, if I’m not back in twenty minutes, send a search party.”

Jeff turns the deadbolt on the back door and steps outside.

T
HIS CALL SHOULDN’T BE
a surprise. As if driven by an instinct for calamity, Victor pops up when Jeff and Brooke are at their most vulnerable. Two years ago, for instance, when Brooke was just home from the hospital, still trying to keep down clear fluids, Victor arrived to announce he was getting clean, moving to Alaska to work on a commercial fishing boat, and wanted to make amends before he left. While Victor wept and wrung the hem of his t-shirt, Jeff blocked the doorway, trying to prevent his father’s voice from reaching his mother and sister at the back of the house.

Jeff remembers more of life with their father than Brooke does. He had eight years of it, while she was just a year old, too fat to walk, when Victor left. Jeff is glad she was spared the memories, but he knows she just feels excluded.

Victor has never been the kind of father to demand visitations or parental rights, and seems to accept his role as failed father and human with remarkable good humor, holding no one—not his ex-wife, not his children, and least of all himself—responsible.

Jeff encounters his father about once a year, never by choice. Now and then when back in town Jeff will bump into relatives of his father or see them on commercials or the evening news. Victor’s family is immense and tangled: half of them are drunks and the others have had success in real estate and local politics. All their children go through the public school system, so periodically one ends up in Jeff’s mother’s classroom, where she guides its little hands, tracing letters on a table dusted with flour.

She came to Albuquerque from New Hampshire for college, hair in a long braid, full of enthusiasm for the desert flora, the vistas and dry air, what she called
the realness
of the place. That same realness presumably drew her to Victor, an electrician rewiring the Education Building, and they were married within a year. There are pictures from this time, his mother dragging playfully on Victor’s shiny tanned arm, her braid swinging.

This was before Jeff was born, before Victor punched Jeff’s mother in the throat and stomped on her hand, breaking six of those matchstick bones. This was before his grandmother moved to join her only child. “Your mom needed help,” she said. “She’s always needed help.”

“H
EY, MY MAN
!” Victor comes in for a hug, but Jeff puts his arms up, absurdly defensive. Victor laughs and waves his hands in mock surrender, then slouches against the cinder-block wall of the guesthouse. He squints into the kitchen window, where Brooke’s dim figure is bent over the counter. “Make your sister come out. I haven’t seen her in forever.”

Jeff shrugs. “She will if she wants.”

Victor seems about to argue, but instead he says, “How’s your mom?”

Jeff hesitates. “How do you think? She’s a wreck.”

Victor perks up. “She’s not doing good?”

Jeff hooks his fingers in his pockets and pretends to survey his grandmother’s backyard. Victor doesn’t look sick, doesn’t seem to have aged at all. His hair is wet and a little long, combed straight back, curly at the nape. The man isn’t even balding, which Jeff finds galling, since his own hairline has been in retreat since college. Victor’s undershirt is worn thin enough that Jeff can see his dark nipples, a queasily intimate sight.

“How’s Lupe?” Jeff asks, then regrets taking responsibility for the conversation, making things easier on Victor.

“Didn’t work out. She just wanted my money. But was she
fine
.” Jeff’s father purses his lips and bobs his head as though appreciating good music.

Lupe was Jeff’s twenty-three-year-old stepmother. The one time Jeff met her, last year, she served saltines on a plastic TV table in the dirt outside their travel trailer. While Victor swigged his beer and talked about his plans for fixing up the place, building a deck—no mention of Alaska—she and two pit bulls watched Jeff sullenly as he sipped warm orange juice. When Jeff made to refill his cup, she moved the carton away.

“Yep,” says Victor philosophically. “Went back to Chihuahua. Took the dogs and car and TV and everything.” He shrugs. “She was mad the whole time, anyway. She married me ’cause she thought I had a pool. The city one was just down the street, but it wasn’t good enough for her.”

“So,” Jeff says, because he doesn’t have all day. “Cancer.”

Victor bats the word away and turns abruptly to the guesthouse. He pushes hard on the door, and it scrapes along the concrete. He stands aside and extends a formal arm to let Jeff pass. “Come in, see my place.”

Jeff steps inside automatically, but his brain seems to be taking a very long time to process the information before him. The dusty, comfortable jumble is gone, all of it. The boxes and bureaus, his mother’s childhood dollhouse, the Victorian cabinet filled with his grandfather’s mineral collection. Victor has robbed them. Sold their history. With real grief, Jeff remembers the pleasure of finding a set of little wooden village pieces belonging to his grandmother when she was a child, remembers how she’d brightened when he brought them to her.

The violation is astonishing. “What have you done, Victor?” Jeff’s voice comes out strangled.

“I knew you’d flip out,” Victor says, as though once again disappointed by the sheer uncoolness of his son. “Shit.”

The dim air smells of urine. A square of brown shag covers the concrete between the couch and the TV. Daylight falls on an open microwave crusted with exploded food, a plastic trashcan stuffed to overflowing, a bag of pork rinds scattered across the floor. Three or four metal restaurant chairs with brown vinyl backs are covered in beer cans, clothing, fast-food wrappers, plastic empties of cheap vodka.

Victor is also surveying the place, and he looks a little uneasy. “I let it go a bit, I guess, but it’s usually real cozy. Home sweet home.”

Jeff turns to his father, disbelieving. His father in his grandmother’s home. None of this makes sense. “You broke in. You’re
squatting
.”

“Would you quit?” Victor screws up his face in annoyance. “I didn’t break in anywhere.”

“Oh, God. You don’t have cancer. Did you really think I wouldn’t press charges if I thought you were dying?”

“Becky let me stay. She said if I cleaned it out it was all mine. I’m telling you, she’s one nice lady.”

There is no way his grandmother let Victor stay here. There is no way. She didn’t even know Victor anymore; if they’d had any contact at all, she’d have told Jeff, he’s certain. The last time they saw each other was when? Jeff’s high school graduation? Almost ten years ago. He remembers them talking, briefly, smiling and standing apart like strangers, while Jeff kept his hand on his mother’s arm and involved her in a conversation with his English teacher. “I’m calling the police,” he says without conviction. Then he hears it: a snuffling, squeaking noise.

Along the back of the dim room is a huge terrarium. At first Jeff is under the impression that Victor has a dog living in there, one of his pit bulls, maybe. As his eyes adjust, however, he sees that the tank is filled with rats. A wire top is held down with bricks. The rats are glossy gray and brown and black, teeming behind the glass with their obscene naked tails and intelligent faces.