Night at the Fiestas: Stories (22 page)

A
T THE BUFFET
, Parker and Matty were laughing over a bowl of guacamole. Matty leaned forward in a way that meant he had designs on her. Of course he did. But Andrea didn’t care about Matty just now.

Andrea was swollen with shame, her upper lip damp as though the shame were actually oozing out of her. And yet, at the edges of the remorse and sorrow, she was obscurely jealous, too, as if with those pills Parker had established once again her supremacy over Andrea. But Andrea would rise above that, be the gracious, expansive person she’d always hoped she’d become. She hurried toward them.

“Parker,” she said, generous, repentant. She composed her face into a semblance of sobriety, because what she had to say was important.

“Oh,
what
now?” asked Matty.

“Listen—I just met your stepmother.”

“She’s not my stepmother,” Parker said warily.

Andrea laid a hand on Parker’s bare arm. She could feel the tiny golden hairs, the heat of her skin, and affection welled in her. “She told me that you tried to kill yourself. And I just wanted to say I’m so sorry. So, so sorry.” Why couldn’t she get the tone right? She really was sorry.

Parker flushed so deeply that her eyelids pinkened, too, and Andrea wondered with a bleak horror if the girl was going to cry, here in front of everyone. “Why are you even here? You think I don’t notice you hate me?”

Andrea tightened her hold on Parker’s arm. That’s not true, she wanted to say.

Matty grabbed the edge of Andrea’s sleeve. “I think we should leave.”

“Parker, I’m just trying to be nice.”

“Let’s go, Andrea.” Matty put his arm around her, just as she’d always hoped he would, but she shook him off.

And then, on the other side of the party, the door of the taco truck swung open and her father descended the steps, wiping his hands on a towel. He looked around, smiling absently, before his gaze snagged on Andrea. Suddenly a dreadful thought occurred to her. If Parker chose, she could have her father fired, all because Andrea came here today. Her blood became very still and very cold.

He came toward them, smiling quizzically, head tilted. Andrea grinned, bright and tense, waved. She held the grin, looking, no doubt, maniacal, but she didn’t know what else to do. “I’m really sorry,” she told Parker. “This had nothing to do with my dad. He didn’t even know I was coming.”

Parker looked slapped. “Fuck you, Andrea. I
like
your dad.”

“I only wanted—”

“Just shut up.” Matty’s tone was urgent, and it was this urgency, and the look of embarrassment on his face, that made her understand how far she’d gone.

Andrea turned on him. “Where do you get off?
You
said Parker looked easy.”

Parker’s expression was gratifyingly bruised. “What?”

Her father sped up. He gripped Matty by the shoulder. “Is he bothering you?” he asked Parker.

Matty widened his soft eyes in surprise.

“God, no,” said Parker.

Salvador searched Andrea’s face. “Is everything okay, mija?”

Andrea averted her eyes from her father in time to see Parker and Matty exchange a look. She saw them decide to protect her.

Parker smiled resolutely. “Everything’s fine, Salvador. Your tacos are amazing.”

Her father wouldn’t be so easily reassured, Andrea knew, though he also wouldn’t argue with Parker. Still, Andrea didn’t stay to find out.

She turned and ran into the trees. She slowed only when the mariachi music was faint at her back, then walked deeper down the rows. The branches were covered in tight green nectarines, hard and fierce. She ripped one off and threw it at the trunk, but it landed dully in the mulch.

God, how she’d wanted to get together with Parker for that lunch last summer. How she’d wanted to sit in that kitchen, eating vanilla ice cream topped with blueberries from those fragile green bowls. Feet swinging from the bar stools, she and Parker would marvel at how much they had in common. Astonishing that they hadn’t been closer all these years!

The real astonishment, when the invitation never came, was how surprised Andrea had been—though of course she should have known. She imagined how it went: William Lowell suggesting lunch and Parker dismissing the suggestion, horrified by the prospect of starting the school year saddled with Andrea.

“You are the leaders of tomorrow,” the university president had told them in September at their freshman convocation. Even then Andrea had known that he hadn’t meant her. “Look around. Look at yourself. Every one of you has the unique talents that this world is waiting for.” Probably he even believed it. But Andrea knew that whatever she was granted in life would be granted as a result of her wheedling. She’d forever be checking ethnicity boxes, emphasizing her parents’ work: farm laborer, housekeeper. Trying to prove that she was smart enough, committed enough, pleasant enough, to be granted a trial period in their world. Sure, she’d make a success of herself, more or less, but her entire life would be spent gushing about gratitude and indebtedness and writing thank-you notes to alumni and rich benefactors and to the Lowells.

Andrea cut across the rows, feeling the brush of the leaves against her arms. When she emerged from the orchard, she was at the far edge of the blueberry field. From here, she couldn’t see the party, but the music skimmed over the bushes, the violin’s manic dance softened by distance. The canes were taller than Andrea, and they bobbed in the breeze as if to the music, until, with a flourish of trumpet, the song ended. Brief, tepid applause, then the canes bobbed only for themselves. Her anger was gone now, and her shame, too. Andrea was left with just the sound of the wind in the leaves and a terrible sense of loss. This place had mattered to her, she realized—it still mattered to her—and now it was irretrievable. Never again would she be allowed to return.

Mr. Lowell hadn’t actually yelled at her that day when she was nine. He’d called out, “Stop! Please stop!” as he jogged down the row toward her. Then he’d slowed and said more gently, as though approaching an escaped and not entirely tame pet, “Hi there, honey.” He’d taken the scratched five-gallon bucket from her hands and thanked her for her help, and he gave her the cold Coke from his lunch cooler, settling her on the tailgate of his truck until her father emerged from the trees.

Before that, though, before Mr. Lowell found her, Andrea had been alone in the row of Jubilee blueberries, the leaves shining and swaying over her head.

Seek, pluck, seek, pluck. The percussion of the berries as they dropped into the bucket. The berries firm and warm between her thumb and forefinger, their fragile dusty skin printed from her touch, the sweet burst on her tongue. The scent of the sun and soil and leaves.

Her head was pleasantly hot and fuzzy with a soft sense of calm and focus, of complete absorption in her task. She was covering the entire bottom of the bucket, a single even layer, and then she’d form the next layer and the next until the entire bucket was filled with that fragrance and sweetness and heft.

“Jubilee,” she said, the word as mild and sweet as the berry itself. “Jubilee, jubilee, jubilee.” Through the rows, she could hear the indistinct voices of the other pickers and the burble of the irrigation system.

Now, ten years later, she picked another berry and then another. When her hands were full, she made a hammock of her skirt and filled it, not caring that now she’d never be able to return the dress. She picked and she picked until she forgot there were other people around, and as the leaves rustled and the light scattered over her, she forgot herself, too.

ORDINARY SINS

L
AST NIGHT
C
RYSTAL DREAMED SHE WAS SITTING NAKED
on the corduroy rectory couch next to Father Paul, who was snipping at her fingers with orange-handled scissors. In the dream she was holding a prayer card on which was printed, in place of a saint, a still from her sonogram. She felt stinging cuts on her knuckles and in the webbing between her fingers, saw the warm blood running down her wrists and beading on the laminated surface of the card, but she neither cried for help nor tried to get away; she was pinned to the couch by her pregnant belly.

If the dream hadn’t been so unsettling, it might have been almost comical, Crystal thought now, Monday morning, as she updated the calendar of events for Our Lady of Seven Sorrows: Father Paul, so benign and solicitous and eager for approval in waking life, starring as the villain in her dream. She glanced down at her fingers typing, intact. If she were to tell Father Paul about her dream—though she wouldn’t tell him anything about her life ever again—he’d be concerned and apologetic, as if it weren’t Crystal’s own warped brain that had cast him in the scene. Even the thought of his concern irritated her. Any minute, Father Paul would walk into the office, and when he did, she’d smile as if everything were just fine, as if their conversation on Friday had never happened.

Impressive, how efficiently her subconscious tallied, dismantled, and blended together her sins, molding them all into a tidy and disturbing little narrative as persistent and irksome as pine sap. First, on Friday, she’d been rude to Father Paul. Then, on Saturday, she’d gone to a party at a condo in a new development west of town with friends from Santa Fe High and had spent the evening sipping from other people’s drinks. That was bad enough. But she’d also left with someone, a friend of a friend, ridden back to his apartment in his truck, knowing full well that he was drunk but not feeling an ounce of concern for the babies or for herself. “I’ve never fucked a pregnant girl,” the guy had said softly, watching from the bed in his filthy bedroom as she pulled down her maternity jeans. He’d been cautious and attentive, and for as long as it lasted Crystal had felt deeply sexy and, for the first time in seven months, unburdened.

Only at dawn, once she’d slipped out into the chill and was waiting for a cab on an unfamiliar street in a tired, trucks-on-blocks kind of neighborhood, did it occur to her to worry about the babies, that they’d been squished or knocked about, polluted by his fluids. And Crystal might have been murdered, too—strangled, shot, beaten beyond recognition. Wasn’t murder the leading cause of death for pregnant women?

With a pang of dismay, she thought of her last checkup. She’d been given a 3-D ultrasound, the latest in prenatal imaging, the technician told her, which they were offering free because they were still training on the machine. The images were terrifying and unreal: boy and girl, fists and ears and pursed lips, bent legs stringy with tendons, alien eyes swollen shut. Everything looked yellow and cold and shiny, as if dipped in wax. “Say hello to your cuties,” the technician had said, and Crystal had watched in silence as they pulsed on the screen.

But today the babies seemed great, kicking up a storm, and she hadn’t been murdered. Saturday had been nothing more than a last hurrah, Crystal reminded herself, a harmless attempt to pretend that her life was still her own, whatever Father Paul or her mother might say. Looked at another way, the dream was even reassuring: at least Crystal
felt
guilt. At least she might think twice next time. Yes, everything was fine, and it was even nice to be back at work, away from her weekend and her nightmare, in the close clutter of the parish office, where the day was predictable, the tasks manageable—where, in theory at any rate, earnest, hopeful work was taking place all around her.

Meanwhile, the real Father Paul was late yet again, this time for his eight o’clock premarital-counseling appointment. A young couple sat on the couch facing Collette’s desk. The man plucked at one of his sideburns with sullen impatience; the girl sat upright and glanced nervously at him. Every few minutes, Collette looked up from folding the weekly bulletins and glared at them.

From her desk in the corner, Crystal sipped her Diet Coke and watched. Collette’s bad temper was democratic in its reach and, when it wasn’t directed at Crystal, could be very entertaining. Once, when they were alone in the office, Collette had startled her by pausing at her desk and saying, darkly, that Crystal was an example to young women, choosing life. For a moment Crystal had seen herself as Collette might: a tragic figure, a fallen woman, but, when it came down to it, contrite and virtuous, taking responsibility for her mistake. But then Collette had elaborated: “If girls are going to run around like that, they should pay.”

The young man opened his cell phone, then snapped it shut. “Eight fifty-seven,” he said. “Jesus. I got
work
to do.”

“He’ll be here,” the girl said. She looked at Crystal and gave her a miserable, apologetic smile. She’d dressed for the appointment: black pants tight around the thighs, shirt made of a cheap stretchy satin. Her hair was down, sprayed into crispy waves around her face. A gold cross hung from her neck. Crystal imagined she’d dug it out so that Father Paul would think she was a virgin, which was what Crystal herself had done when she took the job two years ago.

Since the arrival of Father Leon, the young Nigerian priest, three months before, Father Paul had been sleeping past his alarm. Crystal enjoyed the thought of the priests chattering away late into the night like girls at a sleepover—but the idea of humorless, aloof Father Leon saying anything that wasn’t strictly necessary defied imagination. Sometimes, to amuse herself, Crystal experimented by greeting him with wide-ranging degrees of enthusiasm, but Father Leon gave her the same solemn nod every time.