Have You Seen Luis Velez?(5)

“Luis Velez,” she said. “That name sounds really familiar. I think I work with a guy named Luis Velez. Oh. Wait. No. That’s Luis Vasquez.”

“I know a guy named Jose Velez,” Ed said, which was surprisingly unhelpful. Or it would have been surprising from someone else. Ed tended toward the unhelpful.

Raymond expected them to ask why he wanted to know, or who this Luis Velez was to him. Something that showed an interest, or a connection. Then, a moment later, he wondered why he had expected it. After all these years.

“What about you, honey?” his mom said, turning her attention on Rhonda. “How was school?”

Rhonda only shrugged.

Raymond left the table in his head. Thought about finding a phone book or an online directory and seeing how many listings there were for Luis Velez. A couple? A couple dozen? A couple hundred? Then he wondered why the old lady hadn’t done the same. Her eyes, maybe? But there was still directory assistance.

He couldn’t get a bead on whether there was a logical reason why the old woman wasn’t able to solve this problem on her own.

Something she had said earlier came popping up into his brain.

For more than four years he came here to help me and check on me.

Which meant she needed help. And checking. And she had no one helping or checking on her now.





Chapter Two




* * *





Tea

He knocked on her door at just after eight thirty in the morning.

He expected her to be afraid to open the door. He thought she’d ask in a wary voice who was out there. Instead he heard the immediate—and strangely rapid for a woman her age—undoing of many locks.

She threw the door open wide.

“Luis? Is that you?”

She was looking right up into Raymond’s face when she asked it.

“No, ma’am. I’m sorry. It’s just me. Raymond.”

“From the fourth floor.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

But it was a silly thing to say, he realized. Because he clearly hadn’t wakened her. She was dressed in a blue-and-white striped housedress, and real shoes instead of slippers—those solid white shoes that nurses wore. Her hair looked freshly braided, the braid falling forward over one shoulder.

It struck Raymond as a surprisingly youthful gesture, if one could refer to the positioning of a braid as a gesture. The fact that it was pure white notwithstanding, it reminded Raymond that she had once been young.

“Oh my goodness, no,” she said. “Even the sun sleeps later than I do. What did you learn? Do your parents know anything?”

“No, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

He watched her face fall. His gut filled with a sickening sensation somewhere between guilt and self-loathing. Probably closer to the latter. He had said he would come by if he learned anything. If his parents knew anything about Luis Velez. If he knew nothing more—and he didn’t—he should have told her first thing. Maybe even before she opened the door.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“I think you are sorrier than you need to be,” she said. “Especially since you came and knocked on my door. Most people don’t. Most people hurry by, and the more I try to reach out, the faster they hurry. ‘Oh, no,’ they say, not with their lips but with their hurrying. They say, ‘You are not my family or my friend, you are not my little tribe. You are a them, you are not an us.’ And I know that the very fact that I would speak to them across those well-recognized dividing lines makes them feel they were right to be afraid of me all along. This is how people are these days, I’m afraid. You are welcome to come in, Raymond from the fourth floor. But I must ask that you not move anything. If you pull out a chair, later today I will fall over that chair. Everything must stay exactly where I expect it to be.”

They stood a moment, silent and still. Raymond did not go in. He was not quite ready to be in.

He looked past her, into her apartment. A hand-crocheted afghan lay carefully folded on the back of her faded sofa. There were lace doilies on the arms of it. And more doilies on the round antique wooden dining table.

“Here’s why I came by,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Tell me. You came because you are a good young man, but probably there is something more specific than that.”

“I got to thinking about something you said. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. You said Luis used to come help you and check on you.”

“He did,” she said. “For more than four years.”

“And now he’s gone.”

“I am sorry to say yes.”

“So now there’s no one to help you. Or check on you.”

“You are correct. And you are a very decent person, Raymond. Which I knew all along. I’m a very good judge of human nature, you know.”

Raymond shifted his weight back and forth from one foot to the other. It was his way of processing being ill at ease with her kind words. He liked them. But the very fact that they felt good as they settled inside him brought its own sense of unease.

“What did he help you do?”

A woman came down the stairs. Fortyish. Dark haired. Her forehead knitted into a careful frown, though Raymond couldn’t imagine over what. She looked up and saw him there, talking to the old woman. And saw the old woman there. She cut her eyes away and hurried faster down the stairs.