All I Have in This World (27 page)

“She's getting ready. She's got to go see somebody. Can you take her over there?”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Marcus.

“This isn't going to be anything easy. I mean, it's, she's got to do something and it's going to be hard on her. She asked me to ask you to drive her over there and I just want to know she's going to be safe.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said. “She'll be safe.”

The woman studied him. She said, “You look to be about as old as I am. You can skip the ‘ma'am.' ”

“You haven't said your name.”

“That's because it's Harriet.”

“Oh, okay,” said Marcus, as if this were reason to withhold her name. Now she would hate him. He'd just met her and she hated him. But here she was trusting him, with an errand she said wasn't going to be anything easy. She trusted him but he needed her to like him.

“What would you have
chosen
to go by, if it were up to you?”

The look on Maria's mother's face suggested she was appalled by his question, as if it were wholly inappropriate. Oh God, what have I gone and said now? For he did not plan on saying it; he would never have planned on saying such a thing to a woman asking him to perform an important task. They weren't at a lawn party. Surely she was about to ask him to leave. But when he looked up at her she had started to blink. Her eyes grew wet, and he realized that she was crying. Very lightly at first, the way he imagined it rained sometimes in this place so unaccustomed to moisture, a soft and ephemeral tease of a rain. It seemed to Marcus that Maria's mother had been holding off crying for a very long time.

“I guess Juice,” she said. “Like Juice Newton?”

Marcus didn't say anything. He did not even nod. Maria's mother's face was soaked with her tears. Maria came out of the house. She had changed into a skirt and she carried a sweater. When she saw her mother crying she hurried over and pulled her close. They held each other. Maria looked at him over her mother's shoulder. She did not want him to leave; she needed him to drive. While Maria and her mother sobbed into each other's necks, the water drained away. The car dried out, but it didn't make Marcus feel any better knowing that his pain had subsided only in the mounting presence of someone else's.

The hugging and crying lasted for what felt to Marcus like five minutes until Maria's mother pulled away from Maria and said, “I'm going to call her and tell her you're coming and that you won't take up more than a few minutes and will she please see you,” and Maria nodded and then she got into the car. Maria's mother squatted beside Marcus. She held on to the door with both hands and said in a softer way than before, “Thank you. You just took me by surprise asking me that. You can call me Harriet.” Marcus said it was nice to meet her and said his name. Harriet nodded and stood and wrapped her arms around her rib cage as if she were alone now, walking through pasture into a frigid wind. “Bring her straight on back here,” she said, and he said he would.

He would not have disturbed Maria's silence had he known where they were going, but on the way into town she said nothing at all. He put off asking as long as he could. “Take a right by the Thriftway,” Maria said, and then, “Go left here.” Two more turns before they were in a neighborhood over near the high school. She told him to pull up in front of a ranch house. A basketball hoop above a garage, a conversion van parked in the drive, a satellite dish titled skyward in the side yard.

Marcus switched off the Buick. They sat in its sanctuary. Maria did not move. He reached across her and rolled her window down. She said, “Now I don't know why I'm doing this. What is it I am apologizing for, again? What am I doing in front of Randy's house?”

“It's going to be okay,” said Marcus.

“How do you know?”

Marcus did not know. He only really knew what
he
was in the middle of. But we're always in the middle of something. Never does it begin the way we choose to isolate it in memory, and never, ever does it end with our actions. But he could not say this. She had asked him to drive her over here. In order to help, he had to lie.

“Why do you have to know what you're sorry for? Can't you just say you're sorry and then come back to the Buick and we'll leave?”

“Except she might think . . . I mean, I don't want her to think I have spent all these years feeling guilty about what I did in El Paso.”

“She won't think that.”

“How do you know?”

“I don't know,” said Marcus. “I don't know the lady. But from what you've said about her, it seems like if she thought you were capable of feeling guilty about the choice you made, wouldn't that mean she'd have to forgive you? And isn't it easier for her not to forgive you?”

“Why is it easier?”

“Just makes the world smaller. She can understand it better that way,” said Marcus.

Maria was quiet. She'd stopped crying but it felt to Marcus like the moment when a storm passed and the sun has not yet emerged to wash everything brilliant and clean. “You're right,” she said. “She won't forgive me.”

“Are you here for her forgiveness?” he asked, but he was thinking about his sister, of how he could never pay down her hate. A hundred dollars a month. His wages garnered until he keeled over making change at a Whataburger. The thought of money ushered in the tide.

“I want to come with you,” he said.

“What?” said Maria. “Why? No.”

“I'm not just being nice. I'm not all that nice. I need to.”

“But why?” she said. “Why do you need to go with me?”

It was not a competition, what each of them had lost; it wasn't something to tally up on one of his little lists. Her losses were not quantifiable in the way of greenhouses, geodesic domes, slabs of limestone imported from Pennsylvania, tools he never learned to use. Even land, no matter its history or its mystical aura cultivated by sentimental agrarians, a club into which he had been born, was something you could auction off, a minimum bid firmly in mind.

She had started to cry again. She looked at the house and he looked also. A curtain parted behind a bay window.

“I'll stay with the car, then,” he said. Not
in
the car but
with
it. As if it were more than vinyl and metal. Something to be minded, tended to, never left alone. His preposition rattled him. He remembered that look on Maria's mother's face when she said, “Juice,” as if she had been carrying this around for years and had never let herself think it, much less say it.

Maria did not appear to have heard. She'd gone off somewhere. Finally she said, “Randy used to do that. Leave me in the car. He'd say, ‘I've got to stop by Johnny's house for a minute and pick something up, I'll just be a sec,' and he'd hop out and leave me in the car with the motor running. There was something so lonely about that. It made me so anxious sitting there, the car running but not moving. There was never the right song on the radio.”

She went away again. While she was gone, Marcus thought, You could have just switched the station. But then he remembered how it is when you are a teenager, especially one of a certain sensitive stripe, how there is only one station, and usually only one song. If he stayed with the car, he would only be able to tune in to the slosh and gurgle of rising water.

“I won't say anything, I promise,” he said. “I'll just stand beside you.”

“It's going to be awful.”

“For five minutes maybe. Then it will be over.”

“Why should I do this?”

“Because you told your mother you would.”

“It's for her, then,” said Maria. “For us.”

Marcus heard “us” and thought she meant
them.
But Marcus and Maria were only a chart. From now on they would adhere strictly to that chart. He would, like Maria's mother, mean business.

“Someone is watching us,” he said. “We should either leave or go to the door. I say, just do it. Later you can make it make sense.”

Maria wiped her nose with the sleeve of her sweater. She nodded, sniffling. The hinges creaked as she pushed open the door. She stood in the street pulling on her sweater. The fabric bunched up on her back; Marcus plucked it loose and smoothed it out as he followed her up to the front porch.

The woman who came in time to the door was shorter than Maria but plump. Her hair was long in the back and she wore bangs. Her haircut made her look even more angry and severe.

“Your mother told me you were on your way over here. She asked would I give you five minutes of my time. I told her I would give you three.”

The woman looked at Marcus.

“Is he your husband?”

“No,” said Maria. “This is Marcus.” Randy's mother looked him over and said, “Why is he here?”

“He's my friend,” said Maria.

“Well, why are
you
here?”

Maria said she was there to say that she was sorry and that she never got the chance to say it because her daddy would not let her go to the funeral, and Randy's mother interrupted her to say, “You were not wanted at the funeral.”

“But Randy . . .,” Maria started to say, and Marcus wanted to somehow let Maria know that she ought not to be telling Randy's mother what Randy had wanted. But he was not there to talk for her or tell her what to say. He was in the middle of a slow black river.

“Then I moved away,” Maria was saying. “But now I'm back.”

“I heard.”

“And so I came over here to say I'm sorry and to say also that I wish—”

“I cannot forgive you, Maria.”

“I know,” said Maria. She nodded but just barely.

“I wish I could. It makes me feel terrible not to. God wants me to but I can't. I am not at peace with him over this because I know he wants me to forgive you but I can't. That's all I can say to you. I'm sure it's not what you came over here for.”

“No,” said Maria. “That's enough. I didn't come—”

The woman closed the door in the middle of Maria's sentence. They carried it with them, unfinished, up the walkway to the car. Maria was in front and she got in on the driver's side. Her mother had asked him to take her over here, and what would her mother think of him if they pulled up in the drive and he was riding shotgun? But Maria wanted to drive. It was her day now. Maria's mother would just have to hate him.

On the drive she was quiet except sometimes she cried. They caught two lights just as they turned from yellow to red, and at both lights Marcus almost said, I'll get out here. But he didn't and he was glad because as they were passing the Thriftway, Maria started to talk.

“Because Randy is dead I get to make him up. He is more alive to me because he is dead. But if he were still alive, he might be, I don't know, my dad. Grilling his venison steaks in the drive, working on his car under the carport. Or we'd be divorced and I would still live here and I would run into him in the Thriftway and he'd be with his new wife and she'd be someone I sort of knew from school and she'd hate me because I had been with him first. She would talk for him, as if he had laryngitis. He would look at the rows of pinto beans or cereal boxes while she said what they'd been up to. Or probably I would move away and never think too much about him.”

Now she turned to Marcus. “Thank you for going over there with me, Marcus. Thanks for taking me and for going to the door with me. I don't think that what I said to Randy's mother and what she said back to me changed anything. But I told my mother I would go, and thanks to you I went through with it.”

“Credit due Her Lowness,” said Marcus, patting the dashboard. He had noticed, while idling in Maria's driveway, that they needed gas. He was about to ask Maria to stop by the Fina station when she braked and pulled over to the side of the road as if she were letting him out.

“Oh my God. You came over to my house because you needed to talk and I totally took you off on my thing. Now it's been hours. I'm so sorry. What is it you wanted to talk about? What's wrong?”

Marcus stared out the window. He remembered leaving the gas station knowing he had somewhere to go, someone he could call. But now he did not want to show his face to Maria because something in her tone suggested that the look on
her
face would resemble her I-mean-business mother

“You have a lot of your mother in you, you know that?” he said.

“That's it?” said Maria. “That's what you came over to tell me?”

When Marcus did not answer, she said,“You met my mother for, what, two minutes?”

“She makes an impression.”

“Oh God.”

“No, she's great. You know what she said while you were inside getting ready?”

Maria hunched her shoulders and sat up in her seat. Would he always say the wrong thing?

“What did she say?”

“I kept calling her ‘ma'am' and she finally told me to stop and I said I would but I didn't know what else to call her because she had not told me her name. So she said, ‘That's because it's Harriet.' ”

Maria eased back into the seat. She swabbed her cheek with a bit of sweater she'd pulled like a glove over her hand. “She said that?”

“I haven't gotten to the good part. Because your mother is pretty intimidating and I wanted her to like me—I mean, actually I really
needed
her to like me—I asked her, even though it was hardly the time or place for such a question, I don't even know where it came from, I said, Well, what would you have
liked
to be named?”

“You asked my mom that?”

“Sometimes I blurt. You might have noticed.”

“I can't imagine asking her that.”

“Well, me neither, now,” he said, worried again that he'd ruined things, but she seemed more shocked than angry.