What's Mine and Yours(4)

“You just got to be careful, man. You need to do it like I do.”

He was cocky, which was one of the things Ray liked about him. At first, he’d wondered if Ventura was gay, if he was flirting at him when he winked and bragged and pooched out his lips at him. But he’d learned it was just the way he talked, although Ray wasn’t sure how much of it was because he was Latin and how much of it was because he was from New York.

Once, after work, Ray’s car wouldn’t start, and he’d walked up the street to the garage to ask if someone could take a look. They told him it would cost fifty bucks to tow the car, even if it was going just to the end of the block. One of the mechanics had agreed to help him push, off the clock, since his shift was over. “It’s all right,” the mechanic had said, “he’s my neighbor,” although they’d never seen each other before. He helped Ray get the car in, and the next day, Ray brought him a coffee and a sandwich. After that, the mechanic came by once a week for his lunch.

He handed Ventura his sandwich, a cup of coffee. “The secret is I wear my work shirt over the white,” he said. “That way, when I leave the garage, I’m looking nice.”

Ray shook his head. “Out here? For what? There ain’t nobody out here.”

Ventura laughed and gestured at the two of them, as if they were enough of a reason. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jeans and waved them in the air.

Linette surfaced from the back, as if she had read their minds. “You’re due for a break, Ray. Go on and take your lunch, just don’t go too far.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ray said, and he and Ventura hurried out like boys given leave to go and play.

They went around to the back of Superfine and lit up.

“I’m buying a house. I told you?” Ventura said. “Out by the forest. We’re going to be living in the trees.” He smiled, all his good teeth gleaming, a gold chain visible underneath the collar of his shirt. Ventura always looked sharp. “My wife is packing us up right now.”

“You’ve got two girls, right?”

“Three. My youngest had her first birthday a few months ago. You only got the one, right?”

Ray hadn’t bothered to explain about Gee, so he nodded.

“It’s crazy, man. I thought I loved my wife—I do. But you’d do anything for your kids. It’s like something changes in your brain. They climb in there and take over. They’re the ones in charge. They don’t know it, but they are.”

Ray figured there was no point in saying it wasn’t automatic. Something in him had been reordered when he met Gee because he’d let the boy come in and rearrange everything. But it hadn’t happened with his own parents: his father, who’d left him with his mother, or his mother, who left him to watch the kids she babysat, returning once in a while to drop off juice and chips and hot cereal, until she didn’t return at all, and Ray went to live with his grandmother until she died. He was twenty by then, and he met Jade waiting in line at the DMV. She was getting her first driver’s license, Gee nodding off on her chest, and she looked too skinny to be someone’s mother, her teeth pretty and wide and set apart, and Ray was there to change his last name. He figured he didn’t want anything in common with his mother, his father, so he took on his grandmother’s first name as his last, Gilbert, from Gilberta, and Jade thought it was funny. If he wanted to honor his grandmother, why change her name into a man’s name? “If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it all the way,” she’d said, and he’d known then that was how she lived her life, whether she was drinking or studying or screwing a college boy, or giving her opinion on a band or an election or how much sugar Ray put in her coffee. He’d seen quickly that he wanted to live just like that, all the way, with her.

Ventura went on about the house. “It’s on the north side of the county. Feels like the country. There’s too much crime around here. I thought New York was bad. But every time you read the paper, there’s some kid who moved down here from the Bronx because his moms thought it would be safer, and he winds up dead.” Ventura fired an imaginary gun with his hand.

Ray nodded. He had heard more than one story like that.

“You get a good deal on the house?”

“Almost nothing down, can you believe it? It’s not like I thought. They only care if you can make the payments on time.” Ventura squinted at the sun, running his tongue over his bottom lip. “You know, nobody in my family has ever owned anything. Not in Colombia, not here. But now I have something to leave for my kids.”

Ray laughed. “Everybody’s talking about dying today. You got a disease I don’t know about or something?”

“You think about it, man,” Ventura said. “You see the next generation, and you remember we’re on the way out. We got to leave them something to hold on to when we’re gone.”

“Yeah.” Ray nodded. “Memories. Good times.”

Ventura dragged on his cigarette, shook his head. “You can’t live in good times, man. You can’t live inside a memory. You need a deed with your name on it.”

They could see downtown from the back of the shop, the compact cluster of brick buildings, the water tanks, a few newer towers made of glass. Beyond the city, to the north, rose a bank of longleaf pines. Even farther, the state park surged with trees blushing rose and yellow.