All I Have in This World (19 page)

During Maria's silence, after she stopped in the middle of the street and slid across the seat, leaving Her Lowness unmanned, Marcus, driving them out of town, went from one hand to the other. On the one hand, dirty mop water rose beneath the streets and would any minute bubble up from the grates and career the Buick into a thirsty wash. Marcus must have summoned the surge, even though he had taken action to redress not only his present predicament but a deep rent in his psyche long in need of repair: He had testified on the back of a bloodstained bag in order to avoid another folly. He had rejected impulse and the present tense for forethought and prudence. He had outwitted stasis, only to have it swamp him less than a half mile from the scene of the crime.

The other hand wasn't so much a hand as a finger that he could not quite put on the way he felt, driving into the country, Maria riding shotgun. It had to be Her Lowness because Marcus, when out for a ride, had always preferred male company to female. Men just put their elbows out the window and either smoked or didn't. It never occurred to them to switch on the radio and waste good wayside scenery mashing buttons that made different voices and instruments spill tinny from the speakers. The countryside flashing past was enough to occupy their minds. No need to talk small or wag chin.

Women—whose company Marcus in all other respects preferred overwhelmingly—did not understand the concept of an aimless drive. When he said to a woman, Let's go to ride (for that is how they said it back in Silt, not, Let's go
for
a ride) she would say, Why? Where are we going? How long will it take?

Driving around with Maria was different. Maybe coming from a place so vast and open and unpopulated, where one had to travel more than a hundred miles to attend a high school football game at the home field of the closest rival, had made Maria so uncharacteristically talented at going to ride.

That was what Marcus was thinking during the first few miles out of town: that it was the car plus the girl that made the ride so pleasurable. Curiously, her lack of explanation—for it was a little odd, her pulling over in the street and abandoning the wheel to him after he had left her a note relinquishing his rights to the Buick—did not make him anxious or impatient. Clearly she needed him in a way that she both had not before and could not yet articulate.

Then, twenty minutes into it, Maria asked him for a favor. “Sure,” said Marcus, as was his wont when asked for favors. He had not been raised to ascertain the nature of the favor before agreeing to it. In this case Maria's request for him to keep the car annoyed him. He found it rote and insincere. He had relinquished his rights, and here she was, responding in kind. You go. No, you go. Was this what passed for partnership? For co-ownership? Theirs was not a democracy; how could it ever be equitable? He'd claimed Sunday mornings because of his love of a Sunday morning cruise, but he had lied to her when she asked if he was a churchgoer. Therefore the partnership was tainted from the get-go.

Marcus was distressed by the notion that, having taken the great risk of buying the car together, they were now fighting to give it away. That a part of him wanted to take her up on her offer distressed him even further. He tried to remember how he'd felt just an hour ago in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen. Monte Gale was a mistake, but it took only his signature to redress his error. Was it even plausible for him to think that he would never again act on impulse?

As for their partnership, the equality of it: no relationships, business or romantic, were free from the manipulations of desire. So when, so quickly after offering him the Buick, she suggested a sightseeing trip around Texas, Marcus did not allow himself to say what he was thinking: that she offered the car only so he would refuse it again and she could, with impunity, ask him to turn around and then dump him in front of his hotel and take off to wherever it was she really wanted to go.

When he was a kid, Marcus had favored, above comic strips and the sports page, the district court docket of the local newspaper. Only documented trouble engaged his eleven-year-old interest. He had no idea what many of the charges were, and he did not want to reveal his secret passion to his parents, so he came up with his own definitions.
Uttering
he confused at first with muttering, mumbling. He imagined a sheriff's deputy leading him handcuffed from his social studies class, his mouth trembling with muffled oath and supplication. Though he was old enough to know better, when he saw someone charged with
check kiting
he imagined wings of checks Scotch-taped to a stick, soaring skyward, and a criminal dangling one-armed from the line, laughing at the cops in hot pursuit on the ground below.
Breaking and entering,
though less metaphorical, scared Marcus no less, for it seemed every place he wanted to be was locked, and he possessed neither key nor combination.

What was in his heart that drew him to such fascination with broken law and due punishment? He understood even then that his sin was not original, that it was a cliché, that he was born with it like the rest of the world, and that he would live with it always. And yet there was one phrase that seemed to apply specifically to Marcus and that kept him up nights:
failure to appear.
How it terrified him, as all he wanted then and had wanted his whole life was the one thing he thought himself incapable of: to be present, to show up, to participate.

Maybe she wanted him to say, Okay, you win, you can have the car. But it felt just as likely, as they took the ramp onto the interstate, that she needed him to show up.

“That is, if you think the car will make it that far,” Maria said, and Marcus, one hand outweighing the other, understood that walking away from the Buick and its co-owner was far worse than committing another Monte Gale. When Marcus replied that, with proper maintenance, Her Lowness could get them to Alberta, Maria did not say that
she
wanted to go to San Antonio, not Alberta. Marcus relaxed his grip on the wheel of what seemed not a car but a pronoun made plural so that he might remain present, if not a willing participant.

T
HEY WERE IN
O
ZONA,
three hours east of home, before the guilt Maria felt for not telling Marcus the truth about this trip outweighed all the rationalizations she'd concocted to keep it a secret. Showing him Texas—especially the Alamo—would never have motivated her to leave town. Offering him the car was also calculated, for she had read his note and she knew he would refuse her, but she banked on her offer making him more inclined to go along.

Yet telling him to take the car after he had tried to give it to her seemed almost obligatory; she would have taken the car had she not been keeping something from him. Pretending to be some sort of tour guide for the state of Texas, however, was ludicrous. She lacked both the knowledge and the enthusiasm, having been gone for so long and having missed not the state itself but
her
corner of it, the only part that was real. Sand, rock, creosote, agave, and sunsets so brilliant, due to much dust and little humidity, that she used to make Randy pull onto the shoulder so they could watch them as they would a drive-in movie, the horizon their own endless screen. The way the train sounded in the night, no trees or towns for miles to mute its whistle. The things that were real to her, that were hers, would not be real to Marcus, for they were images, not facts. He had said he had his degree in history. He would depend on her for dates and the names of things.

She knew nothing about the rest of the state. She'd only been to Austin twice, once with her parents when she was too young to remember, and another time with her classmates on their senior trip. They had stopped on their way from San Antonio to Austin in New Braunfels to spend the day at a water park. It was just weeks before Randy died, and they had sneaked away while everyone was eating pizza and fooled around on the bus. What was she thinking? What if they'd been caught by the chaperones? Later she would wish that someone had noticed them gone and seen their shadows through the tinted windows of the bus, for based on math done months later, that was when she got pregnant.

What a thing for her to want to nail down, given what happened. Who cares which time it was, for it could have been any of a couple of dozen times, and in effect it was all one time. But back then it had helped her to think of a specific instance where they might have refrained, for it made it easier in her mind to justify all the times when everything worked out.

She had no good memories of New Braunfels, but this was where her brother lived. What she had not yet told Marcus was that they were on their way to see her brother. She had decided this after finding her mother's letter. It had been longer than ten years since she'd seen him, as he was away in the Coast Guard when she left town, and did not often come home on leave. She could not say she much missed him, because she could not say she knew him. To her mind there were two sorts of families: those so close they seemed to share the same tastes if not convictions, who talked on the phone and spent holidays together and took common vacations; and her stripe, for whom kinship was a fact and not some sacrosanct bond, and blood was something drawn by nick or cut, not a substance shared in the manner of royalty.

But after reading her mother's letter and feeling at once saddened and annoyed by the way her mother, when confronted with the slightest breach of “common sense,” withdrew, Maria wanted Manny to explain to her why he never visited or even called home. She wanted to know why her mother had claimed, after Maria returned from an errand, that she had just missed Manny, he had called while she was out. Her mother would, not looking at Maria, consumed in some task or other, deliver news that
sounded
like lies: how his kids were enjoying soccer, how much he liked driving a truck for H-E-B, how he was planning a trip home this summer when he could stay longer than a weekend.

Of course she did not need Marcus to come along, but she wanted him to. It was seven hours to New Braunfels, most of it on interstate. She had never driven on an interstate. Marcus hadn't found work yet. What else did he do with his days? They could split the driving. She would feel safer with him along. The Buick, after all, was twenty years old. Fine vehicle for around town, said Bobby Kepler. Randy always drove. She only knew how to ride in a car with Randy, and Randy would not want her to drive all that way alone in a quarter-century-old car.

But it wasn't just practical. There were other reasons, less selfish ones. He was good company. His presence filled a blank. Even if she could not narrate their sightseeing with the appropriate authority, wouldn't he still see some of the world he would not otherwise have seen? And the car was half his.

As agreeable as he was, she did not look forward to telling him they were going to interrupt their sightseeing to visit her brother, or rather asking him if they might. But first she had to call her mother and let her know she'd be gone for a while. She owed her that much, at least.

In Junction she asked Marcus to stop at a gas station. In the bathroom she locked the door and called her mother. Her mother did not own a cell phone. Maria knew she would be at the motel, so she left a message on her landline. “Hi, it's Maria,” she said, trying to sound as if nothing was wrong, as if she'd read the note and was fine with it. She said she was going to San Antonio but she did not say why. She said she'd be back in a few days, and because some part of her she was not proud of but could not quite control wanted to punish her mother, she said, instead of good-bye, “Take care.”

They ate dinner in a Thai place Maria spotted on a service road just off the interstate. Neither had eaten since breakfast and so they double-ordered fresh spring rolls and tasted each other's entrées and split a bottle of wine.

Marcus, offering her a taste of his chicken with lemongrass curry, said,“My mother says about every other thing she eats, ‘This is the best thing I ever in my whole life tasted.' ”

“Does she mean it?”

“I'm no linguist, but I would wager that a close examination of her syntax would prove her sincerity.”

“So you're saying she means it?”

“Yep.”

Maria took a bite of chicken.

“It's pretty damn good,” she said.

While he ate, she found herself studying his eyes, which were a blue that seemed washed out but which flashed and sparkled, and his lips, which were oddly attractive, given their unevenness—the top one was plump, the bottom only a slight line. She wondered why he was alone still, for other than the few extra pounds, which women almost expected on a man his age (men past forty with flat stomachs and definition in their arms were, in Maria's experience, trouble), he was attractive. He was in pretty good shape, considering his diet—he'd told her at lunch that first day how much he'd taken to breakfast tacos, and he professed a love of the deep-fat-fried jalapeños called poppers, which he ate at Dairy Queen. And he was interesting. He did not talk about himself too much; he was curious about other people. Best of all, he knew, when he saw a woman stop her car in the middle of the street and slide over, to get in and drive her out of town and not ask her what or why.

But surely it was more complicated, and none of her business, why he was alone, and not even something she cared to discuss with him, especially now that they'd arrived in San Antonio and she needed to reveal the true purpose of their visit. They finished the wine, and the wine made it slightly easier for her to ask, in the car on the way back to the motel, if they might rearrange their itinerary a bit.

“I wasn't aware we had one,” he said, which was exactly what she wanted him to say.

“I know you wanted to see the Alamo, and while we're here we should take a stroll along the River Walk and go see a mission or two. But I'm wondering if you'd mind if tomorrow I could stop by to see my brother. He lives less than an hour from here, in a town called New Braunfels.”