Oscar Casares (17 page)

She was surprised to see such a young police officer knocking on her door. He was maybe twenty-five and a little taller than she was. Her first thought was that she'd been robbed by a teenage boy and now she was reporting the crime to his slightly older brother. The officer walked through the house, letting out a little whistle each time he noticed more evidence of the break-in. She wished they would have sent someone with more experience.

“How long have you been a policeman?” she asked.

“Two years, ma'am. Why?”

“Because I asked them to send Timo Hinojosa, he was my husband's friend. He lives on this street.”

“I don't know, but I think Sergeant Hinojosa is getting ready to retire. He stays at the station a lot, you know. He's not so young anymore.”

“¿Y eso qué quiere decir?”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Perez. I was just saying that after so many years, he deserves to not work so hard.”

Lola stopped to think about that. She had never seen her neighbor as an old man, especially since he was a few years younger than she was.

They sat at the kitchen table so the officer could fill out his report.

“I saw him with my own eyes,” she said.

“Did he look like he was in junior high or high school?” the officer asked. “Like a teenager?”

“How did you know?”

“The bananas,” he said. “Sometimes these kids break in and they spend all their time eating or drinking people's beer. We got a call one time from a woman whose house had been broken into. She wasn't going to call us, but then she found one of these boys in the backyard throwing up.”

He started to laugh at this, but stopped when he saw that Lola wasn't smiling.

“It's good he ran off, Mrs. Perez. Some of them get crazy on spray paint and they think they can do anything.”

Lola shook her head.

“Can you tell me exactly what he took, ma'am?”

“My bowling ball.”

“What else?”

“My bag.”

“Your purse?”

“No, my bowling bag, with my ball.”

“Anything else?”

“That's not enough for you?”

She explained that it was a polyurethane ball that had cost $175, plus an extra $15 for the fitting, $10 for the engraving, and $30 for a black leather bag that had her full name embroidered on the outside. Her shoes were in the bag and they were worth another $35. Then she remembered her wrist brace, which was another $10. The officer wrote it all down, but he didn't offer much hope. They'd put the word out at the pawnshops. You never know, he said as he was leaving. In all the confusion, Lola forgot to mention the rings or the busted watch.

She sat in the recliner again and looked at her trophies. Most of them had been won with her cherry red ball, and she tried to remember a time before she had the ball. She had started bowling only after her husband died of a bad heart at the age of fifty-two. All the Perez men had heart problems that were only made worse with their tempers. Lola had to admit that in spite of his faults, Agustin had worked hard and had taken care of his family. The girls had been able to go away to college with the savings he had set aside. Lola lived comfortably now because of how tight he was with money throughout their marriage. Over the years, she and Agustin passed by the bowling alley hundreds of times, but they never entered the building. “Puros vicios, that's all you're going to find inside those four walls. People throwing their money away. Parrandeando.” Agustin worked as an electrician for the city and earned a decent living, but he never wanted to spend more than absolutely necessary. He considered anything other than work and church to be a waste of time and money, something invented to make sure the workingman stayed poor.

After the girls started school, Lola found a job as a receptionist at a doctor's office. She worked only until two in the afternoon so she could be home when her girls got out of school. The office was an escape from her life of cooking and cleaning. She learned about illnesses she'd never heard of, talked to the patients and the medical representatives who came by, and even helped out the nurses when they were busy. She admired a nurse named Vangie who had gone to school while she was raising her children. Lola and Vangie were about the same age, but Vangie looked much younger in her crisp white uniform. If there weren't too many patients, they would sometimes take their breaks together, either in the file room or behind the office, where Vangie could smoke. Except for some María Félix movies, Lola had never seen a woman smoke so freely.

“You should've been a nurse,” Vangie told her one day. She was lighting a cigarette next to the back door.

“It's too late now,” Lola said.

“Not really. You could get your nurse's aid certificate.”

“I don't have time.”

“Sure you do,” Vangie said. “It takes less than a year. The doctor might even help you pay for it.”

“I don't know, Vangie.”

“Well, I think you should.” She took a short draw on her cigarette and blew the smoke straight up. “I think you would make a good nurse.”

The possibility of a different life surprised Lola. After her first baby, she had never really considered doing anything other than raising her family. She had been a good student in high school and her teachers were always encouraging her to do something with her future. Maybe this was it. The girls were old enough to help around the house and give her time to study. She spent months thinking it over. Then one day Agustin came home from work with the flu. The next morning she brought him into the doctor's office. The waiting room was already crammed with other patients, many of them also suffering through the flu. Agustin became impatient the longer it took. Lola helped the nurses as much as she could, especially when it came Agustin's turn to see the doctor. She couldn't believe how fate had worked to grant her this moment with her husband. Agustin would be able to see how much she'd learned and how easily it came to her. Studying to be a nurse's assistant would be the most natural thing for her to do. She weighed him, took his temperature, read his blood pressure, and handed him the glass bottle for his urine sample. She was methodical in how she did it because she wanted to impress him, although she questioned whether he was well enough to notice anything she was doing. A few days passed before he started feeling better.

“We need to talk,” he told her that night.

“¿De qué?”

“About what you do at the doctor's office.”

“Did you see all I learned how to do?”

“I saw it. You do this with everybody who comes in?”

“Only when they get busy and they need me.”

“And to the men?”

“Sometimes. I don't choose the patients. They just say, ‘Mrs. Perez, we need you here, Mrs. Perez, we need you over there.’”

“It don't matter what they say. I don't want you doing that anymore.”

“But why?”

“Because I don't want my wife walking around with bottles of you know what.”

“It's called a urine sample.”

“It's called meados where I come from.”

“Ay, you're being crazy now.”

“Some man sticks it in that glass bottle, makes his chorro, and then my wife walks around the office like she's carrying a glass of lemonade. And you think I'm the crazy one?”

“Agustin, por favor.”

“No, Lola, you're going to stop all of that ahorita mero.”

“I can't stop my job.”

“Yes, you can. You just tell them tomorrow morning that you're not going to touch any more bottles with meados. If they don't like it, tell them I said to call your husband. I'll explain it to them real clear.”

She never told them anything and instead quit at the end of the week. When Vangie asked her why, she said her family needed her.

After she stopped working at the office, Lola saw Vangie only when she or one of her girls was sick. She always stayed a little longer at the office on those visits. Vangie would invite her out to lunch or coffee, and Lola would say she'd call one of these days, but then she never would. Lola might not have seen her again if Vangie hadn't come to offer her condolences at Agustin's Rosary. When Lola looked up from her pew, she realized that the woman standing in front of her was the last friend she could remember having made in more than ten years. They held each other and Lola cried on her shoulder, some for Agustin, but also because the scent of cigarette smoke on Vangie's sweater reminded her of what she had walked away from.

Lola and Vangie finally went out for the lunches they'd been talking about for years. Usually, they went to Luby's on Saturdays. They both liked the cafeteria selection and they could stay as long as they wanted to. Vangie was always introducing Lola to her bowling friends she'd see at the restaurant. She and her husband, Beto, were on a men's and women's league that played every Wednesday night. When Vangie would introduce her as Lola, and not Mrs. Perez, it felt as if she were trying to pass for someone she'd met once many years earlier. It took some convincing for Lola to finally accept Vangie's invitation to come watch her bowl. She sat at a table on the upper level, so she could see all thirty lanes at once. Half the lanes were reserved for league play and half were for regular play. The bowling alley was louder than she ever imagined it would be. She found a new world in the thunder of the smashing pins, the musical notes coming from the pinball machines, the laughter of kids running around tables, the mournful sound of Freddy Fender's voice on the jukebox, the click-clack-click of the Foosball, and the crackling intercom that told everyone Cande's nachos were ready and getting cold.

She saw some of the same women Vangie had introduced her to at lunch, and now they came up between games and introduced her to their friends. There was an Alice and a Dora and a Linda and an Edith and a Dolly and a Terri, and so many others that she couldn't remember who was who. No, she'd never bowled, she kept having to tell all these new people. They looked at her as if she had told them she'd never been with a man.

“Do you want to try it?” Vangie asked her after the league play ended.

“Ay, no.” Lola waved her away.

“Why?”

“Ya estoy muy vieja, Vangie.”

“Lola, you're only two years older than me.”

“Yeah, but you…”

“Come on, I'll show you how. You can quit if you don't like it.”

Vangie pulled her out of her seat and brought her down to the floor. Lola stood next to Vangie and followed her motions. It was one, two, three, four steps and release the ball. Vangie held Lola's left hand and showed her how far back to swing her arm. All she had to do was aim for the little arrows on the floor. Holding Vangie's ball made her feel as if she were somehow being disloyal to Agustin, worse than if she had been carrying another man's urine in a glass bottle. Lola knocked down nine pins with her first throw. She picked up the spare on her second throw, and as fast as the number seven pin slammed into the back panel, she was hooked. She had strikes on her fifth and eighth frames. A month later she joined the Rio Grande Valley Women's League and played for De Luna Lumber Supply. On the back of her team shirt a giant hammer came smashing down on ten bowling pins that were running away with horror on their faces.

Lola had started bowling with a fourteen-pound ball she bought at the local pro shop. It was a plain black rubber ball that cost her $40. She still remembered how they took special care measuring her fingers for the holes and how it felt as if she were being fitted for an expensive piece of jewelry. She was happy now that she'd stored her old ball in the cuartito, next to the washer and dryer. This was the ball she'd be using for league play that night.

She spent the afternoon cleaning up the house and putting everything back in its place. Time passed quickly, until she got distracted looking at the old photos in the hatbox. Some of the pictures were more than forty years old. She found one taken in April 1947, when she and Agustin were honeymooning in Monterrey. They had spent the afternoon making love in their hotel room and that evening decided to go for a stroll. In the distance, they spotted an old man struggling to carry his large camera stand through the jardín. Lola waited while Agustin haggled with the photographer for twenty minutes. Agustin had offered him half the standard price. The old man kept saying it was unjust that he would be making only a few pesos for his services. His family had to eat, too. Agustin told him he would be making even less if he continued to be so terco about his price. Lola tried to help by saying she'd put in the extra pesos, but Agustin hushed her and said he would handle it. When he grabbed Lola's hand so they could walk away, the old man gave in. Agustin squeezed her hand and smiled to let her know he'd been planning it that way all along. In the photo, the newlyweds stood with their backs to a lit water fountain. Lola held a bouquet of flowers that Agustin had borrowed from a young man whose girlfriend hadn't shown up yet. Agustin gripped his new bride around her slender waist. She wore the nervous smile of a young woman who has just realized that she's boarded the wrong train.

Lola arrived at the bowling alley earlier than usual. She wanted to get comfortable with the old ball before everyone showed up. The manager was working behind the counter, and after he heard what happened, he let her borrow a pair of shoes on the house. She stopped by the pro shop and bought the same kind of wrist brace she had before. It took only a few frames for her to find her rhythm with the ball. The lanes had been conditioned that morning for the beginning of league play. She bowled a 174 on her first practice game.

Word spread quickly about Lola's cherry red ball. It seemed that she spent half the night answering questions about the break-in. She was having a hard time concentrating on her game. The loss of her ball sank in when her friends said how sorry they were about what had happened. The other ladies on the De Luna team were expecting her to score high for them. For most of the women, this was a social hour, a time to leave their husbands with the kids and go out with the girls. There was always talk going back and forth among the different teams. Lola joined in when they were just sitting around, but during the game she played to win.