The Last Karankawas(24)
What?
Nothing. Just … He pauses, filling their glasses from the tap. I never thought you’d be the kind who came back.
She’s about to say something, maybe that he thought wrong, or that she could say the same of him, but someone else walks up and orders a pitcher of Bud. Josh winks at her, steps away.
She returns to the table and hands Carlos his drink. He glances at it—Baby, where’s yours?—and she looks down. He’d wanted a Shiner, she a rum and Diet. But she was so distracted by Josh she brought back two Shiners. It’s okay, Carlos says. We’ll make it work.
* * *
They visit her dad once a week, making the drive into Uvalde to meet him at the Catholic church. She attends Mass and mouths the words, asking for forgiveness from the God she isn’t sure she believes in anymore, and then she takes her dad to lunch. He’s concerned about the developers making their way into town—reps from various businesses have been spotted in Sabinal, Utopia, and Uvalde. Carlos thinks it’s a good idea to bring in new money and venues to the area. She and her dad trade sorrowful glances. City boy, her dad says, and they chuckle.
Carlos mentions their active hurricane season this year—some formations way out on the Gulf. His parents have made plans to stay with his brother in Katy if they’re forced to evacuate.
We’re so far out now that probably no one will come stay. But I figured we could offer anyway, in case. He glances once at Luz and away quickly, but she can read his thoughts, his sorrow, at being so far from home. His home.
Like who? she asks.
Carly and her grandmother. Jess, maybe. Hector’s in Sealy now, so he’s probably fine, but I’m thinking of the ones still on the island. If that’s okay with you?
Luz sips her iced tea, considers. She didn’t like Carly at first. Carlos’s only female friend, a girl he’d known all his life, an islander, bound to be rough. And she was. Loud and blunt, her dark waves of hair frizzing in the humidity. The way she drank whiskey with the guys, still wore lip liner a shade too dark. But when her mother’s cancer metastasized, Luz found herself calling Carly almost every day. She was in nursing school and she answered Luz’s questions, asked around for the answers if she didn’t know them. Sent over Domino’s and Wingstop and, once, King Ranch casserole—Hector’s grandmother’s recipe, she said. She’s from Brownsville, so you know it’s legit.
Yes, Luz says. Tell them they can come here if they need a place to stay.
Later her dad asks if she has seen anyone from school, and she mentions Josh. Yeah, he says, he’s been back a little while now. I saw his mom the other day, she said he couldn’t get his grades up to keep that football scholarship. Bounced around to a few other schools, then finally packed it in. Qué lástima. Hell of a receiver, that boy.
Carlos looks at her. Friend of yours?
Just a guy I knew growing up.
* * *
She wonders about cycles. What leaves, what returns. In her mind flickers a bright cartoon diagram of the water cycle from elementary school science: rain, groundwater, evaporation, rain again. Over and over and over, repeating through the years. People are born, grow up, build lives by the water, die, are replaced by other people. The current flows down to some larger body she can’t see, and the river refills.
She pauses reshelving sunblock and bug spray on the general store shelves to reach for her phone and type a text. Want to hang tonight?
Minutes later: Sure. I’m off at 7. Josh sends a smiley face.
She tucks her phone back in her pocket. Karma. Sending something out into the world that will ultimately come back to her.
* * *
In the fading light Luz inhales the scent of rock and wet ground thick in her nostrils, getting thicker as she and Josh draw nearer to the water. She notices—with small delight—that despite the new bridges there are still crossings in Concan like this one in front of them, where the current flows right over the road, the paving worn ice-smooth by moss and water. She and Josh laugh about the special sandals in the general store she has to stock for tourists; they two, like the other river rats, don’t wear them. The grip of her toes, the crevices in her calloused soles, these are all she needs. Josh rolls up his jeans, slips off his shoes, and she follows suit. Crosses the road barefoot with him. Steps over gnarled cypress roots that have snaked their way up out of the ground where they belong and into the water.
He says how sorry he is about her mom, chokes up a little. She thanks him, doesn’t mention that her mother never liked him. They pass the crescent curl of the river, downstream from the waterfall where they once spent a whole summer making out. She doesn’t mention that, either.
He tells her about TCU. I tried, Luz—you feel me? I really did. I could’ve done it. I had some good seasons left in me. She pats him on the shoulder because she does; she knows just how hard that must have been for him. In a rural area like this, in a state like this, where boys play sports and launch as high as they can to the pros, only to fall short and spend their lives welding pipes, digging in the dirt, firing a gun in Afghanistan. How that is life, even if they wish it were different. Josh was closer than most, the fall to earth more heartbreaking, people in town say, because that boy had such potential. And because he is white, of course: unspoken.
It’s nearly an hour before he mentions he has a three-year-old daughter. It happens at a moment she is bending to scoop up skipping stones. He says it so casually—mentions his daughter, Kayla or Layla—that the words feel like a branding iron on Luz’s skin, a sear that strips her bare as it closes her back again.