Widowish: A Memoir(44)

I stared at myself in the mirror, ran some cold water on my inner wrists, and breathed.

When I got back to the table, Marcos’s beer had arrived. I picked it up and drank half of it in one giant gulp. He gave me a look.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You OK?” he asked. “You seem a little . . . I don’t know, nervous or something.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just. Well, it’s a lot. And I thought, I mean, Joel and I thought, that maybe you were in AA?”

He started laughing.

“Joel thought that? Why?”

“Well, I mean, I may have convinced him of it. I just thought . . . You do some work with the food pantry, right?”

“I’m the director. Going on six years.”

“You’re the director of the whole food pantry? Do you get paid for that?” I couldn’t help but be direct.

“Nope. Strictly volunteer.”

“Wow,” I said. “You must meet a lot of homeless people.”

He nodded his head, ran a hand through his thick hair. I could tell he was considering a response.

“The pantry isn’t just for the homeless. There’s a lot of elderly people. A mom or a dad who just lost a job or who’ve been out of work. People who fall just below the poverty line.”

“So why do you do it? Especially if it’s volunteer,” I asked.

Marcos started to laugh.

“Why? Well, it’s the kind of thing, I guess you could say . . .” He really was contemplating the question. “I guess I think that if I don’t do it, who will?”

The people I knew wrote checks. Maybe volunteered once a year at Thanksgiving or Christmas by feeding people in homeless shelters. I had never seen or heard of real-life altruism like this.

Marcos looked at me, his eyes slightly squinted, like he was trying to figure me out.

“So why do you think I’m an alcoholic?” he asked.

I tried to tread lightly.

“Well. You live at the church, right?”

He nodded.

“They have AA meetings there . . . and you’re raising your son there—”

The minute I said son I had to catch my breath. The psychic. She said a man who has a son, someone I already know, loves me. Will love me. Future love me. Marcos?

“You ever meet Davis? He’s just a couple of years older than Sophie. She knows him.”

The truth is, everyone in our neighborhood knew Davis. He was the quintessential bad boy. Wild. Gorgeous. Troubled. Girls who were scared of him also had crushes on him. Boys who weren’t scared of him wanted to be his friend.

“OK, I’m just going to say it. I thought that since you lived at the church and worked at the pantry, you must be in recovery. Found Jesus. And devoted your life to giving back out of gratitude for being saved. Like, maybe you were a born-again Christian or something?”

I couldn’t help myself and added, “Or . . . maybe you were a drug addict?”

“What? No!”

I covered my mouth with my hand. I was slightly mortified by my assumptions.

“I’m sorry!” I muttered. Then, because I couldn’t help myself: “Any tattoos?”

Marcos started laughing, shaking his head. “Wow,” he said. “You’re a writer, right? Did you tell me that or did Joel?”

“I don’t know if I did,” I said, liking that he mentioned Joel again.

“Your husband must have told me. You’re good. That’s a story, alright,” he said. “It’s all wrong. Not even close, but plausible. Points for plausible.”

We both smiled as our food arrived. I had taken Marcos’s beer. The waiter asked if he wanted another. He considered for a minute, then shook his head, smiling. “No, thank you, compadre. Better not.”

The beer helped calm my nerves. I gobbled up my cheese enchiladas. They were delicious. Marcos and I talked easily, but I couldn’t help but feel like he was doing me a favor. Yes, he had helped with Joel’s guitars, which I was grateful for. But it felt like he was taking out his friend’s kid sister on the night of the prom to distract her from the fact that she didn’t get asked to go.

When he dropped me off at home, he got out of his truck and came around to open my door. He then got back in on the driver’s side, said, “I’ll be in touch,” and drove off.

When I picked up Sophie from school that afternoon, she got in the car and asked, “What’s for dinner?”

It was always the first thing she asked when I picked her up. There could have been an earthquake that morning, there could have been a horse in the back seat, I could have even been driving a different car, but no matter what, this was the first and usually only question she ever asked.

“Cheese enchiladas,” I told her.

“Yay!” She clapped happily.

Thankfully she didn’t ask where I had gotten them. I didn’t want to tell her about my afternoon with Marcos. It would be too confusing and too weird to tell her that he and I had lunch, so I didn’t volunteer the information either. We were both just happy she had something delicious for dinner that night.

The following week, as I was pulling up to my writing group, my phone rang. I checked to make sure it wasn’t Sophie, and instead I saw Marcos’s name pop up.