The Other Americans(22)

“I’m sorry, Mary.” I was trying to think of a graceful way to ask her to drop her complaint, see if she could accept some kind of payment for the car, but when I touched her arm, she pulled back from me with fear in her eyes. I was startled, and took a step back from the threshold myself. Something about the way she looked at me made me feel tainted, as if Fierro’s crime said something about me, too. But just because we’d been in the Marines together didn’t mean we were the same. Whatever troubled Fierro had started long before he’d gone to war. Surely she knew that. Still, the look in her eyes stopped me from bringing this up. “Listen,” I said after a minute. “Change the locks.”

“Yeah, I know. Locksmith left an hour ago.”

“And get a dog.”

“That’s it? That’s your advice? Why don’t you tell him to leave me the hell alone? If you really wanted to help, that’s what you’d do. Keep him away from me.”

“I already told him this, Mary. He wouldn’t listen.” Again, I felt the heat of her rage. I saw how badly I had miscalculated, coming here to try to fix things. I was only making them worse.

A gust of dry wind blew across the street and a piece of glass fell from a window of the Mustang and crashed on the driveway. Mary glanced at it, then fixed her green eyes on me again. “You know, if someone had told me five years ago that you’d be the one with a steady job and going to college, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

I wanted to tell her that I wouldn’t have believed it, either. Five years ago, Fierro had landed a job in security at the Indian casino in Morongo, while I had to get by on roofing work whenever I could find it. Five years ago, I’d gotten so drunk at their wedding that I’d thrown up in the water fountain where rose petals had been set to float. Five years ago, I couldn’t have put a name to the bridesmaid I woke up with the next day at the Travelodge, her blond hair a tangle of ornate pins and glitter against my chest. I lost a year, maybe a year and a half, like that, just drifting, trying to fill the hole in me that I thought the war had left, until I realized it was the same hole I had gone into the Marines to fill in the first place. I was living with my sister at the time, and she kept telling me to go to church and stop drinking so much. Promise me, she begged, promise me. I’d kept half of that promise. Some weeks later, I was driving back from a roofing job when I noticed a billboard advertisement for the police academy in San Bernardino.

Maybe that feeling of being out of place would eventually clear up for Fierro, just as it had for me. But he needed to work at it. “He can get better,” I said.

“Yeah, well. Good luck with that. I tried. I’m done trying.”

And with this, she pushed the door closed.





Nora




In my memory, the cafeteria at Yucca Mesa Elementary was immense, but that evening it seemed small and cramped. This was an illusion, of course, because the cafeteria hadn’t changed; I had. Folding chairs had been set up in a dozen neat rows, but nearly half the seats were already taken, and sweaters and scarves marked the spaces that were being saved. In the center aisle, an old man in a Dodgers cap was mounting his camera on a tripod. I followed my mother down to the front row, where Salma sat alone, staring at her cell phone. We kissed each other on the cheeks. “Where’s Tareq?” my mother asked Salma.

“Emergency tooth repair.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s too bad he’ll miss the play.”

“That’s how it is when you run a practice,” my sister said coolly.

I turned my attention to the program booklet. Sleeping Beauty, the title said in gold lettering. I skipped past the director’s introduction, the donors’ list, the appeals for fundraising for next year’s performance, and looked for the twins’ names on the cast list. Aida and Zaid were to play night watchmen. “Do they have any lines?” I asked.

“No.”

“How come?”

Salma shrugged.

“Well, I’m looking forward to it anyway,” I said. “I’ve never seen them in a school performance.” From behind the curtain came the shrill sound of a microphone being hooked up to a power source. The air-conditioning unit stopped and, a moment later, started again. Back when I went to school here, there was no AC, just an oversized fan that whirred painfully from above. I had to sit backstage in whatever costume Mrs. Fleming had sewn for the play, sweating under its weight, scratching my skin in places where it met the cheap fabric, waiting for my cue. Even though I ended up with the same parts every year, I liked performing in plays because it was the closest thing I’d found to reading a book. Books were better, of course. In books, I could be more than the mute sidekick; I could be the hero. “It’s already ten past six,” I said, looking at my watch.

“Do you have somewhere else you need to be?” my sister asked sharply.

The testiness in her voice had been there since my father’s will had been delivered to the house by a courier from the lawyer’s office. The will had been drawn up many years ago and we all knew what it said: legalese about splitting my father’s assets between his spouse and children. What none of us had expected was a life insurance policy worth $250,000. Its sole beneficiary was me.

The din in the cafeteria rose. A cell phone rang, then another. In the back, chairs scraped against the floor. “I don’t understand,” Salma said. “I just don’t understand. What did I ever do to him?”