So here he was, waiting under the carport at the front of the clinic for a white van. It was the time of year most people were with their families, resting up and taking stock. Soren's father's family was on the sixth floor and Soren's father's lunch truck business was suffering without his day-to-day involvement and he was about to go on a date for the first time in years because he knew he needed to. Soren's father could see his truck over against the far fence, lording above the cars. He knew he should go start it and let it run a minute, but he wasn't going to do that. It was the same lack of will he felt when he wanted to do pushups. He didn't want to smell the inside of the truck, the odor of grease and dust, a bad smell that was also comforting. He didn't want to hear the engine knock around and then settle, didn't want to picture Soren sitting on his knees at the other end of the bench seat, his face turned toward a window full of endless faded sky.
Soren's father spotted the van. It was certainly white. It was one of those old vans, not a minivan. Gee was two minutes late. In his business, two minutes late was a crisis, but for most people it was the same as right on time. Soren's father found himself short of breath when the van made the turn and rolled under the carport. He felt rooted to the cement. Gee hopped down from the driver's seat and strode over and hugged Soren's father. His feeling at seeing her was one of muted elation. He'd seen nothing but the sixth-floor nurses for two and a half months. Gee's teeth were white, same as the van. She wore a loose sweater and had cool eyes.
Gee drove them down out of the city, Soren's father watching the clinic until it was a spot of light among many. This was the farthest away he'd been. This was farther from the clinic than his house was. The night would be cold, Soren's father could tell, but his palms were sweating. He looked at Gee, driving with both hands locked onto the wheel like they taught you as a teenager. There were no rear seats in her van and the space was taken with rods and couplers and sacks of bolts. Soren's father asked about the supplies and Gee said she was helping someone set up an art gallery. Her tiny earrings were glittering in the light from the dash.
“I meant to buy you flowers,” Soren's father said. “I forgot.”
“I don't believe in buying flowers,” Gee said. “I believe in letting them grow wild and happening upon them.”
She pulled onto a gravel lot next to a tall, restored home. She explained that the chef lived upstairs and used the ground floor as a dining room. The chef's two daughters were the waitstaff. Aside from a potted poinsettia on the front walk, there were no holiday decorations, and this pleased Soren's father. There were no menus either. Small glasses of beer were brought out and Soren's father realized he hadn't had a beer since Soren's coma.
“My only hope for tonight is that you can relax a little,” Gee said. “You're the kind of father that needs to be forced to worry less, and I'm going to help with that. The first thing is, loosen your grip on that little black phone.”
Soren's father set the phone on the table, and then he picked it up and put it in his pocket.
“Are you supposed to sip this or something?” he said, holding his little beer.
Gee shrugged. “Chug it if you want.”
Soren's father tipped the glass back and emptied it, then flagged down one of the daughters to bring him another. The beer came out and soon after that an appetizer.
“I should put this on the lunch truck,” Soren's father said. “See how the guys down at the paper processing plant would like some confit.”
“That's a thing,” Gee said. “Trucks with gourmet food on them. They drive around the downtown office buildings. It makes the lawyers feel alive, buying a meal in cash off the back of a truck.”
“What makes it a confit, anyway?”
“They cook it in its own fat,” said Gee. “The French will do anything to an animal. A lot worse things than confit.”
The main plates came forth, trout that had been cooked on a wood plank and a salad of beets and cactus flowers and different puckery cheeses. Gee ordered wine but Soren's father stuck with more beer. The food was ridiculously better than the lunch truck food or the clinic food. No denying it. He had the vague feeling of being in someone else's life. His wife had been good at living, but he could already tell she had nothing on Gee when it came to enjoying things. Soren's father watched Gee cut her fish into too-large bites and then savor each one. Maybe she would enjoy him that way. Maybe she could force herself into a space in his mind. He could think of her while he sat the hours away at the clinic.
“Since I started writing my memoir,” Gee said, “everything I do feels like a scene from a book.”
“You're going to write about us having dinner? You're going to write about us eating trout with the head on it?”
“I don't know. I have to wait and see if it seems important after some time passes.”
“What made you decide to write a memoir?”
“I noticed a lot of boring people were doing it, and crybabies.”
“You're not a crybaby, are you?” Soren's father asked.
Gee smiled. Soren's father was out of beer again.
“Last Christmas I was in Mexico,” Gee said. “I went hiking.”
Soren's father had quickly finished his food and he couldn't tell if he was still hungry. He pushed his plate away.
“This year it kind of slipped by,” he said.
“It's pointless without children,” Gee said. “Most holidays are.”
“I could've put up a little tree in his room and put a gift under it. I got him a bike. It's at home in the garage.”
“When he wakes up, it'll be waiting on him. He won't care he didn't get it on Christmas.”
“It has training wheels.”
“Sounds like my speed. I never learned how to ride a bike.”
“Why not?”
“I never learned. People always say you never forget how to ride a bike, but I never learned. And I never learned how to whistle.”
“Never learned to whistle?” Soren's father said. “What do you do when you see a pretty girl?”
“I am a pretty girl,” Gee said.
Soren's father drew in a breath like he was going to whistle but then didn't.
“I think I'm getting my wish,” Gee said.
“You are?” “You're relaxing, just a little.”
Soren's father saw the girls coming around with dessert and coffee. Gee was swirling the last bit of her wine. He saw her trick. Soren's father had never once considered that she might not like him. He wasn't sure how she'd done that. She'd banished all doubt from him without his knowing about it.
“Better finish that,” Soren's father said. “Coffee's on the way.”
“I never finish the last sip of wine,” Gee said. “It's too sad.”
Two nights in a row without one guest. There'd been a band of three couples on Christmas night, each couple getting their own room, and they'd stayed on for the night of the twenty-sixth, but nothing the night of the twenty-seventh and nothing tonight. No laundry. No questions to answer. No coffee to brew in the lobby. Mayor Cabrera, out of spite, flicked on the “no” in the sign. NO VACANCY. When things got too slow at the motel, Mayor Cabrera would think of the old days, when he ran a small roofing company. Roofing was something you could do until you stopped, and then you couldn't do it anymore. It was too hot and too hard on the back. In the roofing business you worked some punishing hours but then when you were off you were really off. You felt the work in your hands when you held a beer. In the motel business, Mayor Cabrera was always bored and never felt off-duty. He wished he was still roofing, and that he was doing it for Dana, his professional lady. Being in a higher, hotter spot than everyone else all day helped a man, but you had to do it
for
someone. It was nice to think of Dana when he had a little downtime, but he had nothing but downtime and was thinking about her all the time. He was thinking about her more and harder than he'd ever thought about his wife, back when she was alive. Mayor Cabrera had once had a devoted woman and manual labor, and now he sat in a motel in a dying town, pining for a prostitute.
He went downstairs into the basement. It was a refuge, the basement, but also made him feel closed in. There were a couple high slats of window and now and then the wind would lash sand against the glass. Mayor Cabrera stopped and looked at his calendar, tacked to the wall with a pencil hanging next to it. He used to fill the boxes up with scrunched writingâmeetings concerning the town, meetings concerning the motel, his paydays and days off. Lately he left the calendar clean. If he forgot something, he forgot something. Mayor Cabrera cleared some clutter off the old metal desk, scraping a pile of old papers into the trashcan. There were some old granola bars in the pencil drawer and he threw those out too. He paused before pulling open the deep bottom drawer. He knew what was in there. All the potholders his sister-in-law had knitted. There must've been a
couple hundred. He'd never attempted to sell them. Who would want potholders while they were drifting through the desert? The old rotary phone rang and Mayor Cabrera plucked it off the desktop.
“What's the word, mayor?”
It was the owner of the motel, Mayor Cabrera's boss. Mayor Cabrera hoped he wasn't calling because he was on his way. He was due for a visit.
“How's shelter renting tonight?”
“Shelter is hardly renting at all,” said Mayor Cabrera.
“That bad?”
Mayor Cabrera knew the motel owner didn't care if the Javelina made money. He had other businesses that made money. Mayor Cabrera could probably stay at the Javelina until the owner died, and maybe even after, if the owner's kids decided not to sell the place. Or the owner could die tomorrow and the place could be on the market next week. Both were deflating thoughts, being out of a job or staying at the motel for years to come.
“Is it snowing there?”
“Not that I've noticed,” said Mayor Cabrera.
“I heard something about it snowing in New Mexico. One time I was in Old Mexico and it snowed. Did you know it snowed down there?”
The motel owner sounded drunk. Arizona had likely played a basketball game. The motel owner donated small fortunes to University of Arizona, and he judged the quality of each year he spent on earth by how the basketball team performed.
“Oh, wait,” said Mayor Cabrera. It took a lot of effort for him to be dishonest, but he wasn't going to have a drawn-out conversation with his drunken boss. “I think I hear somebody. Better get up to the office.”
“Okay,” said the motel owner. “Rent that shelter.”
Mayor Cabrera hung up the phone. He stared down at the potholders in their drawer, then picked one up and handled it. It was the ochre color of mountains at noon. Mayor Cabrera always brought stew to his sister-in-law's place when he cooked up a batch. He'd always brought her stew, from way back when her sister was alive, and though he'd quit speaking to his sister-in-law, though he diligently avoided her company because he
didn't want to be reminded of his losses, he'd never quit delivering the stew. It was a way to not feel guilty. For all he knew, she dumped it all out. He always left it on her front porch and rang the bell and drove off like a teenager pulling a prank. One day he'd found a mess of potholders in a plastic bag on the step, with a note that read SELL THESE IN THE LOBBY, WE'LL SPLIT THE PROFITS. He'd picked up bag after bag of the stiff, rectangular cloths. She had no way to know when he was coming, so sometimes the potholders must've sat out there for many nights, collecting dew and then drying out and then collecting dew. His sister-in-law had never seemed like a woman to crochet or knit or whatever. She wasn't
that
old. Mayor Cabrera wasn't old. He could clearly recall the days before Cecelia had come along, before his sister-in-law was even his sister-in-law, when she was the spunky sister of his future wife. He thought of a trip the three of them had taken to Taos. They'd gone up in early spring to hike, when the trees would be budding and the streams filling and the birds amorous, and no sooner did they get into town and find a place for breakfast then the sky turned gray and the playful breeze turned into a stiff wind full of icy intent. Mayor Cabrera could remember, like it had happened last weekend, asking the waitress for hot sauce for his hash browns and then becoming aware of the first tiny snowflakes flitting against the windows of the restaurant like confused insects. They couldn't go hiking and weren't about to race the storm back to the basin, so they located the cheapest bar in Taos, which didn't seem all that cheap, and drank the sunless day away. Mayor Cabrera's wife who wasn't yet his wife became easier and easier to convince that another round would be a good idea, and Mayor Cabrera, though he couldn't afford it, kept buying drinks for the locals. At some point what little light had been in the sky was gone and the snow was falling in a perfect endless sheet. The three of them piled into Mayor Cabrera's old El Camino and pulled away from the bar not knowing where they were headed, using the weather as an excuse to drive slowly. Just outside town they turned down a quiet road lined with identical rental villas, snug-looking, cozy rather than cramped. Mayor Cabrera pulled into an empty driveway and they sat there. The place was unoccupied. Nowadays
a villa like that would have as many cameras and alarms as a bank. No one had protested. He could hear it now, his sister-in-law giggling and giggling, nervous and excited, the unspoken and obvious fact of what they were going to do becoming clear in the cab of the El Camino. They were hidden by the storm. The villa wasn't big but had three or four chimneys. Mayor Cabrera had gotten out and clomped around the back and found a bathroom window he could force open. The three of them had kept the lights off in the villa and the fireplaces cold but they did prepare hot cocoa in the kitchen and click on the space heaters. The cocoa was from Europe or something, in a fancy canister, and his sister-in-law packed it in her bag. They played a few hands of Castle, but once they were warm, the alcohol wearing off, the girls were all yawns. When they heard the banging on the front door the next morning it roused them from a dry-mouthed slumber. They'd fled out the back of the place, coats half on, and tripped out into the white-gowned Ponderosa pines. They circled around and found themselves on a vista from which they could see the restaurant from the day before, and the bar. What was wrong with Mayor Cabrera's memory? It was too good. He could painfully recall how satisfied he'd felt driving back to the basin, barreling through the bright cold with two women sleeping beside him and a fresh adventure under his belt and the desert opening and opening before him.