What's Mine and Yours(66)
“So, I’m going to the east side? Alone? While you two ride together?”
Diane looked flustered. “That’s what I was thinking, but we could always change the plan.”
“You can ride with Diane,” Noelle offered in a rare motion of magnanimity.
“Or you two can ride together,” Diane said.
“Forget it,” Margarita said, picking up her plate and shoving it into the sink. “I should have known that’s how it would be. Let’s get a move on then.”
At first, Margarita had been bothered mostly that her sisters had left her alone. But then she figured something was wrong with Noelle, and it was in Diane’s DNA to go to the person in need. She was like a dog. Dogs sat at the feet of the most reprehensible people. They found sick people, lonely people, mean people, and chose them, because dogs knew who needed to be comforted. She decided she couldn’t blame Diane, and then she felt better, more even. She released her anger into the universe. She didn’t have to sit in the parked car anymore, alternating between banging on the wheel and trying to observe her breath.
She started making the rounds, stopping into the different shops, asking after Robbie Ventura and flashing his picture, describing his stature. Sometimes, she had to speak in Spanish, and she stumbled over her words. She knew mi papá, but she couldn’t figure out how to say he was missing, he’d disappeared, so she’d say, él no está aquí, which didn’t help things. They would agree with her and repeat, él no está aquí. She spoke to cashiers and stock boys, the waiter at a taqueria, and eventually they’d piece together a definitive no. Nobody knew where he was, and most of the time, they didn’t know who he was. At best, he looked familiar, but they didn’t know his name, and they couldn’t say where they’d seen him last.
It was an hour before lunchtime, when Margarita was set to see her sisters again and debrief about their progress. They were meeting downtown for sushi. So far, Diane had been paying for everything, and that was fine with Margarita. She’d amused herself as she drove between places, by imagining what rolls she’d order, how she’d arrange everything in front of her, the little ceramic dish of soy sauce for the pictures she’d post in the afternoon. But after her seventh stop with no luck, she was tired, and she needed something to enliven her. She didn’t like the feeling of incompetence, the way people furrowed their brows in confusion at her, the way her tongue malformed the words. And she didn’t like how they’d cast her out—her sisters. If she had to name her feelings, it would be piqued. So she stopped early for lunch, for herself, a liquid lunch.
There was a terra-cotta-colored restaurant folded into the corner of a shopping center just off the main artery of Valentine Road. In the window blinked a sign: TAMALES, CERVEZA Y MáS.
Inside the restaurant, there was a bar, vinyl booths, a bad mural of a chili pepper cartoon hero on a quest. The lights were dim, although the scene inside was relatively wholesome. The seats were crowded with pairs and families, eating beans and rice, drinking soda from frosted glasses filled with ice. A waiter approached her and said, “Se?orita, how can I help you?” Margarita liked that. She asked to sit at the bar.
She ordered a beer and a shot of tequila, and the bartender blinked at her but didn’t fuss. They arrived along with a basket of tortilla chips. She plowed through the chips, the burning salsa much hotter than she’d expected. She shot back her tequila then asked for another to keep company with her beer. When the bartender returned with her fresh pour, she showed him a picture of her father.
The photograph was old, from around the time Margarita had been in high school. Her father looked as if he were in his late thirties. He was tan, the holes in his ears empty, the diamond studs gone, likely lost or pawned. He was too lean, the sinew of his muscles visible, as if he were a man who had done manual labor that wore his body down, although his work in the auto shops was hardly that—he rolled under and out from cars, fixed up the paint jobs, and anything heavy was lifted by machines. He was bronze skinned, smiling despite his missing teeth: one in the front, a lower canine, a few molars in the back. His eyes were slitted, as if he were boring a hole with his gaze at the photographer. Margarita didn’t know who had taken it, or where it was from. Lacey May had given it to her.
“Well?” she asked.
“No lo conozco,” the bartender answered, and she knew enough Spanish to understand that. He asked her if she wanted to order any food, and she asked for another tequila instead. Margarita felt the liquor searing her stomach. The sharp edges of the chips bothered her gums. Everything was wrong, and it was taking over her body, too. Her mother was dying, possibly, maybe. They all were dying, but Lacey May was dying sooner, much sooner than they’d expected. And, for all she knew, her father was dead. When Robbie first started disappearing, they worried he’d been hurt, but he always turned up afterward. It became the pattern, a normal thing, but Margarita never lost sight of the fact that one time the disappearance would be for good. She didn’t think of it much—what was the point? When he died, he died, just like any of them, but she wondered about it now. Whether the plot twist none of them expected would be that Robbie was already gone. She’d get her fare back to California no matter what, but she didn’t like to think about her father no longer being alive. It was easier for her if her parents stayed stuck in the same rhythms—Lacey May and Hank working at the store, living out their little makeshift marriage, and Robbie, fixing cars, getting high, vanishing, and reappearing, calling the girls drunk to tell them how much he loved them. She knew what to expect that way; she could focus on her own life, her career. For years, her parents had been a familiar act, playing on the television set on mute. She didn’t have to watch, but they were always there.