“You were his apprentice. Maybe it’s time to ply the trade. Maybe you’re the answer, right here under our noses.”
This was how Nate’s mind worked. Everything could be fixed by hustling. Nate had booked all the gigs and gotten local critics to review the band and had bought a bunch of equipment with his own money.
“I’m presently not touching my guitar,” Cecelia said. “That’ll make things tricky.”
“You’re going to stop playing music?” Nate asked. “You’re going to take up jogging or collect stamps? Just keep going to those vigil things and waste away? That’s what Reggie would want?”
“Let’s leave Reggie out of it,” said Cecelia.
“I’ll put it this way. I’m keeping the band going and I’m retaining the name. So what I’m really asking is if you’re quitting.”
“Then, yes. I’m quitting.”
“Think it over. Let your emotions settle. Or better yet, leave your emotions out of it.” Nate looked out the window. There wasn’t much out behind the diner — some dumpsters and a sagging fence. Somehow you could tell the wind was blowing. “Our name has some recognition factor in this town, you know.”
“With a dozen people.”
“You’re underestimating us and you know it.”
“No one wants to hear us without Reggie and you know that.”
“They’d get over it. Just like us, they need to get over it. We can mourn Reggie the person, but Reggie the band member we’ve got to move on without. Lots of bands have lost a member.”
“Not one I’ve been in.”
They were quiet for a while, resting their cases, each testily examining a menu even though they’d already ordered. Eventually the waitress showed back up. She dropped off their food and Nate asked her if she’d heard of a band called Shirt of Apes.
“Shit of Apes?” said the waitress.
“Shirt of Apes,” Nate pronounced.
“I don’t think so. Y’all need anything else?”
Nate shook his head and the waitress left.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” he said.
Cecelia didn’t believe there was any decision to be made. Even if she’d wanted to keep the band going, where would they get songs from without Reggie? Nate had never written a note in his life and Cecelia was just another chick who had some complaints she put to guitar.
“Just have an open mind,” Nate said. “Can you at least do that?”
“My mind is open,” said Cecelia. “It’s the topic that’s closed.”
When they were done eating, Nate paid the bill and they went outside. The air smelled cheap, like sand and rubber. Cecelia didn’t want to make plans to see Nate again. Without the band their paths might not cross, and that was fine. They said goodbye and Cecelia moved toward her car, but Nate followed her, trailing a few feet behind. Cecelia slowed and Nate caught up and walked her backward a step like they were dancing. He put her against her car with his body and leaned in with the unmistakable intent of kissing her. Cecelia squirmed, her breath misplaced, Nate’s eyes close to hers, the chemical smell of his hair all around. Cecelia could not stop their lips from brushing. She couldn’t stop a kiss of sorts from occurring before she jerked herself back against her Scirrocco, her elbow banging the window. She was flabbergasted. She looked at Nate, hoping for an explanation, but the look that came over his face meant that he had nothing to be sorry about. Cecelia tried to duck into her car but then remembered the driver door handle was broken. Nate didn’t give any ground and Cecelia had to sidestep away from him and circle around to the passenger door. She glanced over the top of the car toward Nate, and he was still standing there, almost jaunty, smirking at Cecelia uncharitably as she fumbled with her keys.
DANNIE
She needed to convince her body that she was settled in New Mexico for the long haul, so she finally started putting away all the trucker’s things. She carried armload after armload of clutter to the extra bedroom, a room she rarely entered, and loaded up the closet until it was spilling. She stacked pictures on the bed, constructed mounds of knickknacks on the floor. Soon the window was blocked with extra chairs and wall racks. Dannie thought it odd that a person who lived in the desert owned a mirror with a cactus and a wolf on it. That’s what people did, though. People who lived near the beach filled their cottages with shells. In cities, people jammed their lofts with sharp, efficient gadgets.
Dannie got the idea that the trucker, like her, had moved to New Mexico to escape. In his case it was probably alcohol or pills, in her case the wreckage of a failed marriage and a mother who’d found religion and was impossible to talk to. As Dannie piled all the trucker’s belongings into the extra bedroom, she wondered if he would miss any of it. Dannie wished she could throw it all out, take it to the dump and keep the extra room for a study or a gym. Maybe the trucker wanted rid of all this shit but didn’t have the guts to do something about it, to turn it all over to the gulls at the landfill. Dannie wished she could mail every picture and bookend and paper towel holder to people she used to know. She was likely missing a staggering number of showers and weddings and housewarmings. She was way behind on gifts. She took a photo off the wall in which the trucker was skydiving, his thick gray hair popping out of his helmet, and carried it down the hall and tossed it on the pile.
Later in the day, tired from rearranging the condo, she sat on her balcony with two rock-hard avocados in her lap. It was finally chilly enough to wear a sweater. Dannie was considering returning the avocados. The idea would either burn off over the course of the day, like the desert haze, or it would gather. She’d bought the avocados the day before. They were nowhere near ripe, and she wanted guacamole. She could always buy guacamole at the restaurant where she bought her little batches of sopapilla, but there was nothing like spanking fresh guacamole. If she were in L.A. and had bought the avocados at the supermarket she would’ve returned them in a heartbeat, but the store in Lofte was a mom-and-pop place and they needed every sale they could get. Mom and Pop were old. Their store was failing.
Dannie, as sometimes happened when she was alone at the condo, was having dark thoughts about Arn. She suspected he was using her for a place to stay. There was circumstantial evidence, namely that he didn’t seem to have had a place of his own when they’d met. He had a topper on his pickup and Dannie was pretty sure he’d been sleeping in the bed of the truck and keeping his stuff in the cab. She’d never asked him to move in. He’d slept over for several nights, taking sick days off work, then one day he’d stayed at the condo all day when Dannie went out, then before she knew it there was a stack of his shirts on the dresser and bacon in the fridge. He was fully moved in and had never had to bring stuff from anywhere else, hadn’t carried in any lamps or books or spoken of a broken lease. Dannie didn’t have grounds to be indignant, since she was basically stealing Arn’s sperm, but she had grounds for good old romantic worry because she’d grown to like the kid. She imagined him up at that sonic observatory where he worked, and hoped he was imagining her at the condo. The owner of the observatory kept a huge poetry book up there, like 700 pages. No novels, no magazines, no puzzle books. The idea was that when the aliens contacted us, the first thing they would hear was our poetry, our most worthy expression. Dannie pictured Arn vacantly leafing through the humungous tome, letting the stanzas drift into and out of his mind, preoccupied with thoughts about her.
She sniffed the avocados. They smelled like California. She didn’t want to live in California ever again, but she thought she’d like to take Arn there. For all she knew, he’d never been out of New Mexico. He was a good guy. She wouldn’t be worrying about his motives, she knew, if they were the same age. She doubted a kid his age could genuinely be interested in her, knew how to be interested in her. She had lied and told him she was twenty-seven, then come clean and told him she was twenty-nine, but really she was thirty-three. She was thinking of taking Arn to where she grew up and she couldn’t even be honest with him about her age. Every relationship Dannie had ever been in had been farcical, and this one was no exception. What had ever led her to believe she could be married? In Los Angeles, to a guy from Los Angeles? Dannie was glad she hadn’t had a baby there. The baby would’ve turned out like her, thirty-three years old and with no idea who she was. She wanted to have a baby in a place where it could grow up to be itself, where it could take each morning and afternoon and night as it came, where it could live like Arn, relying on instinct rather than twisting itself in knots with scheming.