The Lifeguards(17)
Gazing at her pudgy husband, Annette felt a wave of affection soothe her irritation. Louis was a quarter inch shorter than she was, but he loved her in high stiletto heels anyway. The way Louis allowed the world to delight him was a marvel to Annette, though sometimes his willful ignorance could grate.
Annette and Louis had met at the University of Texas. He was an oil heir from Midland, she an undocumented basketball superstar. It had been different in the nineties for border kids, especially gifted athletes. UT hadn’t even mentioned Annette’s status when they recruited her: She’d turned down full rides at small northeastern colleges because she wanted Div I, and she’d wanted to stay home. Or near home, anyway—Laredo was a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Austin.
The first time Louis introduced himself was after a game. Annette was on her way to the locker room and he’d stepped in front of her. “I’m going to marry you,” he said.
Annette had sidestepped him—laughing, bewildered.
But Louis was sweet and serious. “I mean it,” he’d said. “I’m Louis. Can I take you to dinner tonight?”
“Annette!” her assistant coach called.
Annette said, “I have to go.”
“Mars Restaurant, eight o’clock?” he’d said. “It’s on San Antonio Street.”
“I…” she said
“I’ll be there until you come,” said Louis.
“Tonight’s not good,” she said.
“I can wait,” said Louis.
Annette shook her head and jogged to catch up to her teammates. There was no time for anything but basketball. Annette had been the first person in her family to go to college and she wasn’t going to screw it up for some guy, even a sweetheart who had somehow custom-ordered a jersey with her number on it.
Louis came to every game of the season, screamed every time she made a basket, began sending roses to her dorm room on Saturdays. Every bouquet had the same card: “Mars, 8 p.m., tonight?”
After the season ended, the roses kept coming, but Annette drove her beat-up Honda Pilot to Laredo every weekend to help in her father’s boot shop. One weekend, she intercepted the floral delivery guy on her way to the parking lot, so she brought the roses with her, dumping them on her parents’ kitchen counter when she got home late at night.
Her mother was waiting for her in the morning with a fresh cup of coffee and a hundred questions. Perhaps Annette had known when she brought the flowers home that she needed guidance. “He sends them every week!” she told her mother, as Maya arranged the bouquet in a ceramic vase.
Annette’s childhood home was large—her father made beautiful boots and had done well financially. He’d bought the house on Bordeaux Drive with cash, adding on every time he had two cents to rub together. Her uncles and later her brothers helped out with the construction; Annette’s mother was a gifted decorator who loved nothing more than a day spent shopping across the border or at her favorite store, Vega’s Interiores Mejicanos. The house was filled with hand-carved tables and chairs (the dining room table was inlaid with horses) and Mexican hanging lamps and chandeliers that cast beautiful patterns on the orange and raspberry sherbet–colored walls.
Annette had not had to work. She’d just played basketball, and her family’s financial success allowed her to train with the best coaches and attend all the pricey summer camps the white girls did.
Some of her friends had been born in Laredo and some had come over from Mexico as babies or young kids. Many students at her high school spoke Spanish at home and English at school. The border was porous in the nineties and early two thousands—Mexicans came over to work for the day or see family, and Americans swarmed from Laredo into Nuevo Laredo to go to bullfights, booze it up, and shop for pottery, vanilla, and diet pills. The bridge over the Rio Grande was a busy one in both directions.
Annette’s parents, Maya and Roberto, wanted their family to perfect their English, so didn’t allow Spanish at home. Annette’s grandmother spoke little English.
When she’d visited a tiny, elite college in Massachusetts, Annette had definitely felt her skin color. On her student tour, she’d been the only nonwhite teenager. The blasé, appraising expressions on the other kids’ faces gave her the creeps. The basketball coach had been kind, but the town had seemed like a cold and forbidding place; Annette had breathed a sigh of relief as she landed back home. Before she’d even seen her offer from UT, Annette had made her decision to stay. (A full ride, thank goodness, because without citizenship, she would have been charged out-of-state tuition.)
* * *
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MAYA FINISHED ARRANGING THE roses. Her kitchen was stunning: the floor was created from square orange tiles and the counters were tiled in deep blue. A custom mural had been created as a backsplash behind her modern range. Thirty-six hand-painted tiles depicted a yellow-eyed coyote hidden behind a colorful spray of flowers. Maya had told Annette that in the Oaxacan village she was from, she could hear coyotes howling in the hills at night. “I should have been afraid, but the sounds helped me sleep,” she said. “I felt like they were watching over me, keeping me safe.”
Maya gestured to the roses and raised an eyebrow. “Mars, eight p.m., tonight?” she said. “Is this a code or something?”
Annette smiled shyly. “It’s a boy from Midland,” she said.