Oscar Casares (14 page)

Before Jerry could say anything, I told him I was on my way to pick up Anna, so I only had a few minutes. Really, she wasn't getting off for another hour, but I figured it was probably a good idea to have an excuse in case he was here on business. Anna works at a small accounting office close to the stadium. She does bookkeeping, taxes, and filing for the man who owns the business. Her hours are nine to five, Monday through Friday, except during tax season, when she has to go in on the weekends. She's good with numbers and handles all the money in our house. Payday comes and I hand her the check. I tell her, As long as you don't run off to Las Vegas, I don't care what you do with the money. Not that I'm rich or anything. That isn't going to happen working at the bridge. I've been there eight years so far. As long as there's a bridge to Mexico, I have a job. That's how I like to think about it. Good, dependable work. I think that's what Anna likes the most about me. Especially the “dependable” part. I've thought about applying for the Border Patrol, but Anna thinks it's dangerous work. She likes to tell me that we don't need the money, that we're already rich in other ways. I won the lottery when I married you, she likes to say. Sometimes Anna has a nice way of putting things, but the truth is I haven't been feeling like such a rich guy lately.

I had the late shift at the bridge that night. I'd been home all day, working around the house. I spent some time reading the
Herald
and washed the car about eleven o'clock. After lunch, I took a nap and then watched an
Andy Griffith
rerun. It had been quiet all afternoon until Jerry knocked on my door.

“So what's up, Jerry?” I asked, bracing myself for what might be coming.

He said, “It's about the future. Do you ever think about the future?”

“Yeah, I guess. As much as the next guy.”

I wasn't sure what he was getting at, but I knew he didn't come over to compare horoscopes. He was looking over at a wedding picture sittting on top of the TV set.

“How long you been married now, primo?”

“Almost six years.” It was a stupid question to ask me, since he'd been at the wedding and knew damn well how long it had been. He was just trying to soften me up for something.

“Six years?” he said. “It's time to start thinking about having some little Georges, no?”

“Maybe. We haven't really talked about it.”

We had talked about it, but it wasn't any of Jerry's business. Anna and I had decided to wait a couple of years. It was a mutual decision, but you could say I encouraged it. What's the rush? I told her.

“That's great, George. You have a beautiful wife.” He kept looking at the wedding picture while he was saying this. It was almost as if I wasn't in the room and he was talking to himself. I looked over at the picture and thought Anna did look kind of nice. Sometimes you can overlook these things.

I started remembering the last time I saw Jerry at the bridge. He had pulled up in his red Firebird with this pretty girl who couldn't have been more than twenty, maybe twenty-two at the most. She was young enough to be a student at the college, if that tells you anything. Anyway, Jerry looked drunk, and his right hand was resting between the girl's skinny legs. She was wearing a black miniskirt and a white shirt that I think was see-through, but I couldn't tell for sure, so I won't guarantee you. Her long brown hair came over her shoulders, and she wore a necklace with a gold cross that reached way down into her shirt—probably a lot further down than I should have been looking. She had on maroon lipstick that made her lips look like she was getting ready to kiss you even when she wasn't. Jerry smiled when he saw me staring at his girl a little too long. Then he turned to her and said, Say hello, Monica. The girl giggled, looked up at me, and said, Hello, Monica. Then Jerry laughed and reached into the ashtray to pull out a bunch of change for the toll. Later, primo
,
he said. His tires screeched a little as he took off. When I counted the coins he was a dime short.

Jerry was now leaning forward in my chair and looking at me. He was quiet for a few seconds. Trying to find inspiration for what he was about to tell me, I guess. His hands were together, and it actually seemed that he might have something honest to say.

“Do you ever think of what might happen to Anna if, God forbid, something were to happen to you?” he finally said.

So now I'm wondering, What the hell does Jerry know that I don't? Is there some disease in our family nobody ever told me about, and now he's here to tell me I have six months to live? And why Jerry? I can think of a dozen other relatives I'd rather hear it from.

“The reason I ask you about the future is that I'm now a pre-arranger for Buena Vista.” He reached over and handed me a brochure.

I'd only been to two funerals at Buena Vista. The first time was for my grandmother and the second time for my grandfather. Jerry was there because they were his grandmother and grandfather, too. Both times the long procession bounced its way along the bumpy road in front of the project homes and then turned into the cemetery before it got to Highway 77. My grandparents died a few years ago, but listening to Jerry tell me he was a “pre-arranger,” I started getting the same heavy feeling in my chest I had when they lowered the caskets. I sat back and opened the brochure, except I'm not sure why. The thought of death is not something I'm comfortable with. It never has been. I only went to those funerals because my family wouldn't have let me live it down if I hadn't gone. And when I think about it, the only reason I even let Jerry in the house and didn't throw him out was the fact that he was family.

“Jerry, I'm only thirty-three,” I said after a while. “I think I have some time before I have to think about these kinds of things.”

“That's what you would think,” he said. “That's what everybody thinks.”

He was shaking his head. I could tell he was disappointed with me.

“Remember Pete Hernandez? You think the cancer thought
he
was too young? And what about that twenty-six-year-old guy in the paper yesterday? Poor guy hit his head in the shower and woke up dead in the morning, next to his wife.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Nobody likes to think about these things, primo. Aren't you the kind of husband that would want Anna taken care of in a time like this?” He was saying it with his head tilted to the right. His hair was sitting perfectly still, even with the ceiling fan on high.

“Sure.”

What else was I going to say?
No,
I don't want her taken care of? I knew that was one of Jerry's salesman questions, where the customer didn't have a choice but to agree with him. These questions of his always made me feel dumb, which was just one more reason to hate the guy.

“I know what you're thinking, primo. You're thinking that this is going to be expensive.”

It wasn't anything like what I was thinking, but I let him go on. My mind was on the idea of Anna dying and me being alive. When my grandmother died, she left my grandfather behind. They'd been married sixty-five years. About a month after they buried her, my grandfather drove his truck fifty miles an hour, head-on, into a palm tree and was dead long before the ambulance showed up. I always thought he did it on purpose, so he could be with my grandmother. I considered it true love. And as much as I cared for Anna, I didn't know if I could do the same for her.

“Well, that's why I'm here,” Jerry said. “I came up with a plan to make it affordable for you. It has to do with both you and Anna buying the services and burial space, side by side. That way I know I can get you a discount.” He said it like I should be thanking him already, maybe pulling out my checkbook and signing up right there and then.

“The other thing is, you don't have to pay for it all right now. I can set you up on a five-year plan, ten-year, whatever. It's just like buying a house. You pay off a little every month until, before you know it, it's all taken care of.”

But it wasn't anything like buying a house. I'd be dead.

And there'd be no kitchen, no bedroom, no bathroom, no driveway, no garage, no yard. Nothing. Just a coffin and a lot of dirt all around me is what there'd be.

“This way you won't have to worry later. N'hombre, primo, believe me, you don't want to be thinking about these sorts of things if, God forbid, Anna happens to pass before you do.” He crossed himself as he said this. It seemed like the idea of Anna dying before me was sadder to him.

I opened the brochure again and looked at the different models of coffins. Some of the fancier ones had a nice shine to them like a polished-up lowrider. The cheaper ones were made of a dark wood and didn't look so comfortable. They also didn't look like they would last as long as the polished ones. I wondered which one Anna would pick out for me, if it were her decision and not mine. She'd probably go with something middle-of-the-road. Not too expensive, not too cheap. But dependable. It had to be dependable. Then I thought about the one suit I owned and how I'd worn it to every family wedding for the past few years. Is that really how I wanted everybody to see me for the last time? Not that any of these things would matter in the end, but it did get me thinking.

“Primo,
I don't want you to say a word. I want you to talk about it with your beautiful wife, and then tell me what you've decided. Remember, I can make this plan work for you.”

We stood up at the same time, and he opened his arms to give me an abrazo. He held me tight for a few seconds, patting me on the back over and over again. I felt like I was at a funeral for somebody who had died young and unexpectedly.

If it hadn't been for Anna, that would've been the end of all the pre-arrangement talk.

“Jerry called,” she said. She woke up to tell me this. I had come home from work and we were lying in bed with the lights off. “He told me how you were interested in making the pre-arrangements. He said he wanted to know how I felt about it and if there were any questions he could help me with.”

“I never said I was interested.”

“That's not what he said. And anyway, it sounds like a good idea.”

Anna never saw the problems in Jerry that I did. She thought he meant well, and all he needed was a wife who understood him and could straighten him out. Once, she even tried to set Jerry up with one of her single girlfriends. Like he needed help finding a date.

“What's a good idea?” I said.

“Being prepared, it's a good idea. You know what happened to my mother.”

I knew what happened with her mother—I just never understood it. One day she was fine, the next day she had cancer. The doctors couldn't do anything for her. It happened that quick. And because she had never made “arrangements,” she ended up being buried on the other side of the cemetery from where Anna's father was buried. It meant something to Anna that they be together, side by side. I never understood what the big deal was. I didn't see the point of being in the ground dead next to someone else who was dead. To me, dead was dead.

“Don't you want to be together…you know, when it's that time?” Anna turned to look at me.

Hearing her question made me think of Jerry's questions. I started feeling that she might have picked it up from his phone call, or maybe he'd coached her on what to say to me, to get me to say yes.

“Listen, to start with, Jerry made that up. I'm not interested. He's just trying to get his commission, and he's using us to get it. Don't believe him. Don't believe anything he tells you.”

Anna was quiet for a few seconds, and then she moved a little closer. “He told me you might say that, but it was only because you're afraid of dying and losing me.”

She put her head on my chest, and a minute later she fell asleep.

For the next week, I didn't answer the phone because I thought it might be Jerry. He left at least two messages on the machine every day.

“Hey,
primo,
I don't remember if I left my business card with you,” he said, even though we both knew he had, “but let me give you my office number and my pager, just in case. Ready?”

Or, “Hey,
primo,
it's me, Jerry. Just checking to see if you had any more questions. I know I can make this work for you. We're family, remember.”

I never picked up the phone or called him back, but it didn't matter, because Anna did. She was getting more and more excited about the whole thing. One day she even went to the Buena Vista offices and looked at the coffins in person. She said she'd already picked out two of them for us, and they matched. I told her it wouldn't matter unless we were hit by the same bus and died together. Anna said she didn't know why I was being so negative. She said that she'd talked to Olga, a woman who worked in the office next to her, and that Olga and her husband had already made pre-arrangements.

“Yeah,” I said, “But Olga is around sixty years old, and her husband is about eighty and has a hole in his throat from smoking since he was a kid. That makes sense. You pre-arrange when you're eighty and you have a hole in your throat, not when you're thirty-three and healthy like we are. This is crazy. I can't believe you're listening to these crazy people and my psycho cousin.”

It was that, the part about being crazy, that brought the tears rolling down her cheeks. She threw herself on the bed, facedown with a pillow over her head, and didn't get up for the rest of the night. And from there, as they say, it was a done deal.

Jerry brought over the papers for us to sign the next morning. He was all smiles. You would have thought we'd just bought a brand-new Cadillac from him. There were places on the contract where I signed my full name and others where I only put my initials. The papers said we were to pay $115 a month until everything was paid off in ten years. Jerry pointed out how we were actually saving money by making the arrangements now instead of in the future, when they'd for sure be more expensive.

“¿Qué te dije, primo? Didn't I tell you I'd take care of you?”

I just looked over at Anna. She could tell I was upset with the way things had turned out. She smiled at me the way she had at our wedding. It wasn't exactly a happy smile, but more like a smile that said everything was good in her world. She had a roof over her head, clothes on her back, food in the refrigerator, a nice car to drive, and now a pair of prearranged funerals. She reached out and gave my hand a tight squeeze.