The Last Karankawas(23)

Her father mentioned their friends’ general store on Highway 83 needs a manager. So she stops in front of the small wooden building, admiring the hand-carved goods for sale, the thorny bougainvillea spilling pink and red out of clay pots. The owners are both inside at the counter; seeing Luz, Mrs. Caballero begins to cry, Pobrecita mija, and Mr. Caballero pulls her in for a hug. When she says she’s moving home, Mrs. Caballero cries harder. Luz signs the paperwork for the job that afternoon.

She knows she should go back to Galveston even briefly, but she cannot. Carlos soothes her over the phone: I can handle it, don’t worry. She cannot bring herself to feel guilty that he is processing their move, his own uprooting, alone. She sleeps in her old room, tucked between the shadows thrown by her cheerleading megaphone and framed diplomas and stuffed animals, the photos of her and her mother smiling.

It takes negotiating over the next few months, but eventually, Carlos signs on with a Utopia brokerage. He puts their Galveston house on the market—Jess promises to trim the yard, Carly to look after the stray tabby cat Luz leaves scraps for—and they spend their savings on a two-acre plot with an old cabin about a mile downriver from the tourist area, nestled among ancient pecan trees and a stagnant, marshy part of the Frio where nobody wants to swim. It is only a quarter mile to where the current picks up, and Luz can walk down there any time she wants. She moves in immediately; Carlos joins her with the rest of their things soon after.

In May, she takes him to the river.

When she slides down the mucky slope, stepping between rock and cypress roots to dip her foot in, Luz gasps with pleasure: still steal-your-breath cold, the water, Texas not quite hot enough yet to want it that way. Some locals are there—she recognizes them as swiftly as she does the tourists with their broad-brimmed hats and waterproof stereos. She braces herself and cannonballs in, Carlos’s laugh ringing in her ears. Beneath the water, she opens her eyes to watch minnows and the occasional striped fish slip past. Home. I’m home.

That night she gets her period, and she sees the disappointment in his eyes when she unpacks the tampons. In bed he slides an arm around her, and she burrows in, puts her cheek against his tense shoulders and knows he’s thinking, as she is, of that mutation coded into her DNA. Given to her by her mother, by her grandmother, generations ago. Thinking, too, how some researchers speculate her staggering chances of getting cancer will decrease once she’s had children. Decrease. Decrease. The risk like a blaze weakening, folding into itself if she’d just get pregnant. It would be simple, Carlos has said before. She can conceive, after all. BRCA doesn’t prevent that. And they want children eventually, don’t they?

She agreed, but she lied. She doesn’t know how to say she is afraid of a baby. She hates the idea of being a mother now that she is stumbling without hers, when she knows very well how quickly a mother leaves her child behind.

Don’t worry, baby, he says. It’ll happen if it’s meant to happen. Luz imagines the thread of her life unspooled, extended just for giving birth. Have a baby, live longer. Simple, they say—doctor, father, husband. He strokes the small of her back, and she hates him so much in that moment that she has to remind herself she loves him.



* * *



He gets used to river-country ways, her man from the Gulf. Luz tells him how she has been coming here since before here was here. How back then there were only a handful of cabins along the banks, one general store with tubes and sunblock, one tiny dive with greasy hamburgers and lukewarm Cokes. How the campsites were mostly empty, the water high and fast and worthy of the name Frio; the drought has brought the levels lower these days. She used to hurl out of the backseat, ripping off clothes to the bathing suit underneath, despite her mother shouting to put her things in the car, and racing to the rope swing—before it was frayed from so many city fists closing around it—and whooping as she let go.

Carlos tries it, too, one day, the jump from the rope swing. He doesn’t get very high, but his half flip is admirable.

A family of tourists clambers onto the banks. A white boy with red hair takes his turn on the rope swing, attempting a somersault. He hits the water back-first. Luz laughs at his yelp, his flat, smacking splash, but Carlos winces in sympathy.

That rope is damn near falling apart. Safety hazard, I bet.

She says, It’s been there since I was a kid.

He swipes water from his eyes. Yeah, Luz, that’s the point.



* * *



One evening they eat at the Cattle Prod, the big bar and grill. Carlos sits on the patio with a view overlooking the stretch where people place lawn chairs in the river and listen to George Strait. Luz walks to the bar, tells the bartender their order, and he squints at her, saying her name. She doesn’t recognize him at first. But he says it again, and as she stares, he smiles.

Josh? she asks, and he laughs.

I knew it was you.

The Josh in front of her is slightly shorter than the wide receiver she dated all through high school—plumper around the waist and shoulders, narrower in the legs. The tangled dark curls she used to run her hands through have been cropped away close to his head. But the eyes are the same, green as the Frio.

You work here?

A while now, he says, nodding. I came back to town a year or so after we graduated. Their high school graduation, he means. The last time she saw him.

He asks what she’s doing here, and when she says she’s moved back, she and her husband—she mentions Carlos almost by reflex—Josh shakes his head.