It was a dangerous subject, this business of the migrants, and Estivar knew his wife wouldn’t give it up until she was offered another to take its place. He said, “You’d have handled the case much better than Ford did, of course.”
“In some ways maybe I could.”
“Well, keep a list and send it to him. Don’t waste time telling me. I’m no—”
“I don’t think he should have brought the girl into it, Carla Lopez.” Ysobel rubbed her eyes as though she were erasing an image. “It was a shock to me seeing her again. I thought she’d left town, and good riddance. Then suddenly up she pops, in court of all places, and no longer a girl. A woman, a woman with a baby. I suppose you saw the baby when she had it with her this morning.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it looked like—”
“It looked like a baby,” Estivar said stonily. “Any baby.”
“What fools we were to hire her that summer.”
“I didn’t hire her. You did.”
“It was your idea to get someone who’d be good with the kids.”
“Well, she was good with the kids, all right, only it was the big kids, not the little ones.”
“How was I to foresee that? She looked so innocent,” Ysobel said. “So pure. I never dreamed she’d dangle herself in front of my sons like a... like a—”
“Lower your voice.”
Jaime leaned toward Dulzura and spoke in a whisper: “What’s that mean, dangled herself?”
Dulzura wasn’t certain but she had no intention of admitting it to a fourteen-year-old boy. “You’re too young to know such things.”
“Bull.”
“You get fresh with me and I’ll tell your father. He’ll knock the bejeez out of you.”
“Oh, come on. What’s it mean, she dangled herself?”
“It means,” Dulzura said carefully, “that she paraded around with her chest stuck out.”
“Like a drum majorette?”
“Yes. Only no music or drums. No costume or baton, either.”
“Then what’s left?”
“The chest.”
“What’s so great about that?”
“I told you, you’re too young.”
Jaime studied the row of warts along the knuckles of his left hand. “Her and Felipe used to meet in the packing shed.”
“Well, don’t you tell nobody. It’s none of their business.”
“There are cracks between the boards where I could watch them through.”
“You oughta be ashamed.”
“She didn’t dangle herself,” Jaime said. “She just took off her clothes.”
The five o’clock race to the suburbs had begun and cars were spilling wildly onto the freeway from every ramp. With the windows open, the way Leo liked to drive, conversation was impossible. Above the din of traffic, only very loud noises could have been audible, shouts of anger, excitement, fear. Devon felt only a kind of gray and quiet grief. The tears that stung her eyes dried in the wind and left a dusting of salt across her lashes. She made no attempt to wipe it away.
Leo took the off-ramp to Boca de Rio and it was then that the first words of the journey were exchanged.
“Would you like to stop for a cup of coffee, Devon?”
“If you would.”
“It’s up to you. You’re a free agent now, remember? You have to start making decisions.”
“All right. I’d like some coffee.”
“See how easy it is?”
“I guess so.” She didn’t tell him that her decision had nothing to do with coffee or with him. She only wanted to make sure she wouldn’t be returning to an empty house, that Dulzura would have plenty of time to get home before she did.
They stopped at a small roadside cantina on the outskirts of Boca de Rio. The proprietor, after a voluble exchange of greetings with Leo in Spanish, led the way to a table beside the window. It was a picture window without much of a picture, a stunted paloverde tree and a patch of weeds half-dead of drought.
She said, as though there’d been no lapse of time since midafternoon and the ride to Mrs. Osborne’s house, “Robert must have had some girl friends.”
“Temporary ones. None of them hung around after a few bouts with Mrs. Osborne.”
“Robert wasn’t a weak or timid man. Why didn’t he stand up to her?”
“She was pretty subtle about it, I guess. Maybe he didn’t realize what was going on. Or maybe he didn’t care.”
“You mean he had no need of anyone besides Ruth.” She stared out at the patch of weeds dying hard like hope. “Leo, listen. There’s no — no reasonable doubt that he and Ruth—”
“No reasonable doubt.”
“All those years, ever since he was a boy?”
“I repeat, seventeen-year-olds aren’t boys. Some fifteen-year-olds aren’t either.”
“What are you hinting at?”
“He was fifteen when she sent him away to school.”
“But that was because his father died.”
“Was it? The usual pattern in such cases is for the mother to lean more heavily on the son, not send him away.”
The proprietor brought mugs of coffee and a dish containing slivers of dark sweet Mexican chocolate to sprinkle on top. The chocolate melted as soon as it touched the hot liquid, leaving tiny fragrant pools of oil which caught the sun and shone iridescent like little round rainbows.
Leo broke up the rainbows with the tip of a spoon. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about those two years he was gone, remembering things, some trivial, some important. Ruth was depressed — I remember that well enough. It colored our lives. She told me that every hour was like a big blob of gray she couldn’t see through or over or underneath.”
“What about Mrs. Osborne?”
“She kept pretty much to herself — normal enough for a woman who’d just lost her husband. The Osbornes had very little social life because of Osborne’s drinking, so Mrs. Osborne’s seclusion wasn’t particularly noticeable. We’d never seen much of her anyway, now we saw less.” The miniature rainbows in his cup had re-formed and he broke them up again. “I recall one occasion when I asked Ruth to go over and visit Mrs. Osborne, thinking it might do them both some good. Ruth surprised me by agreeing right away. In fact, she even baked a cake to take with her. She started out on foot toward the Osborne ranch — she couldn’t drive a car and she turned down my offer of a ride. She stayed away for hours. She was still gone when I finished work for the day, so I went to look for her. I found her sitting on the edge of the dry riverbed. There was a flock of blackbirds beside her and she was feeding the cake to them piece by piece. She looked quite happy. I hadn’t seen her look that happy for a long time. Without saying a word she got in the car and we drove home. She never told me what happened, I never asked. That was nine years ago, yet it’s one of the most vivid pictures I have left of Ruth, her sitting quietly on the riverbank feeding cake to a bunch of blackbirds.”
“She liked to feed things?”
“Yes. Dogs, cats, birds, anything that came along.”
“So did Robert.” She looked out at the falling sun. “Perhaps they were just good friends, just very good friends.”
“Perhaps.”
“I’d like to go home now, Leo.”
“All right.”
THE pungent smell of oregano drifting out of the kitchen windows welcomed her home.
Dulzura was at the work counter shredding cheese for enchiladas. She said, without turning, “Are you okay?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“I thought, an early dinner with a little wine— How about that?”
“Fine.”
“Did I do right in court? I was nervous, maybe people couldn’t hear me.”
“They heard you.”
“What kind of wine would you like?”
Devon was on the point of saying “Any kind,” when she remembered Leo’s insisting that she start making decisions on her own. “Port.”