Because of all the people who came to Old Town to see the festive luminarias, Papa kept the shop open late. It was nine o’clock and the streets were crowded with locals and tourists. A mariachi band was playing seasonal music on the plaza just across from San Felipe de Neri Church. The church, constructed of five-foot-thick adobe brick, was being spruced up. It was about to celebrate its bicentennial. San Felipe de Neri reminded Jocelyn of her mother: battered and buffeted by the years, but still standing.
For all of Jocelyn’s mother’s health problems, she seemed destined to live on and on. Thanks, of course, to Jocelyn’s constant care and attention.
Jocelyn and her father, Ruben, had just stepped out of the shop when they saw them coming down the sidewalk: Ernesto and one of the waitresses who worked in the restaurant in Old Town that Ernesto’s father owned and Ernesto managed. She was hanging on Ernesto’s — on Jocelyn’s boyfriend’s arm, drunkenly nibbling his ear. Ernesto appeared drunk too. He seemed, at first, to be looking right through Jocelyn, but when her presence finally registered, he quickly detached himself from the draping, clinging, nibbling woman who was all flouncy Mexican skirt and ruffled blouse, all lipstick and eyeshadow and everything feminine and desirable that Jocelyn had never allowed herself to be. Jocelyn hadn’t time for herself. She was the self-sacrificing caregiver. She was the handsome woman in muted colors who helped the old man in his shop. Jocelyn had to tamp down her vibrant female spirit as she waited for the circumstances of her life to change.
“Hello, Jocelyn. Hello, Ruben,” said Ernesto. “This is Rosa.”
“I know Rosa,” said Jocelyn without smiling.
“Feliz Navidad to you both. Rosa and I are going to a party.”
“Tell them the good news, Ernesto,” slurred Rosa.
“Oh, yes. My father has decided to retire. He wants me to have Luna’s. He’s giving me good terms.”
“Tell them the other good news, Ernesto.”
“Not now, cariño.”
Ernesto waited until the next day to tell Jocelyn the “good news.” It wasn’t so good for Jocelyn. As Mama and Papa and Jocelyn’s three brothers and one sister and all of her nieces and nephews were sitting themselves down to Christmas dinner, Ernesto came to the door and took Jocelyn out onto the xeriscaped front lawn (though she was needed inside to help serve). He had to tell Jocelyn something important: he wouldn’t be seeing her anymore. He was seeing Rosa now. Soon he would be marrying Rosa. He had waited for four years for Jocelyn to come around and he wasn’t going to wait anymore.
Jocelyn felt as if the sky had fallen down on top of her. She hated Ernesto for leaving her, for making her stop thinking about tomorrow, but at the same time she was aware of how unfair it had been to leave him on the hook for so long. And yet, was any of it Jocelyn’s fault? This was the way it worked: the youngest daughter was required to put her life upon the shelf if this be the mother’s wish, to remain in attendance to her mother’s later-life needs — to sacrifice a large part of her own life for the woman who bore her.
It had Jocelyn wishing for her mother’s death, for which she felt horribly guilty.
Death came during the monsoon rains of the following August. Mama Lucero caught a chill and went to bed with a high fever. The illness taxed her fragile heart. The cause of death was put down as congestive heart failure.
There was a family conference. It was decided that Jocelyn should have the house. It was in her mother’s name, and now it would be put in Jocelyn’s name. Ruben agreed that this was the right thing to do. The consensus among the four older siblings was that their baby sister could keep working for their father if she liked. Or she could do something entirely different with her life. She had permission now.
Jocelyn nodded and agreed that everything being offered to her was fair and generous. Inside, though, her heart had hardened toward her siblings. She was forty. She had tended to her mother since she was a little girl. In her spare time she had driven to Old Town and worked behind a counter selling Native American jewelry her father had purchased wholesale from the local pueblos. She had made friends with a couple of the neighboring storekeepers, but few others.
Along the way she had fallen in love with an older man named Ernesto, a large man with jet-black hair and bright green eyes, who claimed her virginity at the age of thirty-six in the little apartment he kept over the restaurant. He had asked her to marry him, knowing that her answer could only be “No, not now. Not just yet.”
He seemed to understand.
Or was it that he had proposed marriage knowing fully well what the answer would be? Because this was Ernesto’s way of keeping Jocelyn on the hook: taking her up to his rooms above the restaurant until someone better came along.
Rosa. The whore.
Today was September 14. The rains had tapered off. Fall was in the air. Jocelyn sat in her car. The radio station was playing the song — the song she now despised. She was stopped at the light, waiting to make her left turn onto her street. The house was on Candelaria. It was one of the many streets in Albuquerque’s North Valley that still carried vestiges of the neighborhood’s farming and ranching past. The street came to a dead end near the Rio Grande, at a place where cottonwood trees grew in the sandy soil of the river’s gallery forest.
She didn’t want to make the turn. The light had changed to green and the way was clear to go, but she couldn’t make herself do it. She didn’t even roll forward into the intersection. There was a car behind her. The driver was being polite. He wasn’t honking, though she clearly should be turning so that he could then make his turn.
The light turned yellow.
Jocelyn Lucero didn’t turn.
The light turned red. Jocelyn could see through her rearview mirror the middle-aged man pounding his fist upon his steering wheel in frustration.
She didn’t want to make the turn because she didn’t want to go home. She had spent forty years of her life in that stucco house, watching each of her three brothers and her sister walk out the door and come back only on his or her own terms. She had stayed home because it was expected of her. And now she was supposed to go home because there was no place else for her to go.
The light turned green. The man behind her tapped his horn lightly.
This time she cooperated. She pulled up. When the way was clear, she made her turn. She drove down Candelaria, a residential street with every house different from the one next to it. The North Valley was home to people who didn’t care what the house next to them looked like. Sometimes it wasn’t a house at all; it might be an old barn or even a sheep pen.
This was old Albuquerque. This was The Valley.
Jocelyn slowed as she approached the house. The driveway was empty. Her father was staying a little late at the store. She had said she would go home and start dinner for the both of them. Instead, she kept driving. She passed the house and took the street to the place where it came to an end. She parked her car and walked to the river. She had been coming here for years — ever since she was a young girl. Every fall she came to see the majestic cottonwoods put on their leafy coats of brilliant yellow. There were no oranges or reds allowed in this southwestern bosque — only this single, all-pervasive color, like liquid sunshine dripped upon these gnarled, defiant giants of the desert.