She speaks with a kind of exhausted resignation Stanley recognizes in himself. He runs his thumb along the inside of her fingers. “If we ask them to stay, it might remind them that they were planning to go.” He’d meant this as a joke, but it doesn’t come out sounding that way.
Nieves props her head on her hand, “First, though — you should take her to see your mother.”
“Oh.” Stanley shakes his head. He strokes the length of her inner forearm. He feels cushioned by fatigue. “That’s pretty much the last thing she’ll do.”
“It’s different now. She’s relaxed — more used to things. Please, just — ask her again?”
“She’ll think I’m trying to force her.” He eases onto his back. “That’s how it is with Felice. This whole thing now — it’s kind of what it used to be like — she held us all hostage.”
But the longer that Felice is there, the worse he feels about not telling his parents — more of an accomplice. It was as if, in the past, they could have pretended her running away had been a sort of natural disaster — inescapable, and nobody’s fault. But this, her avoidance, seems personal. And the more he considers this, the more the old anger returns, tightening his stomach. He thinks: What gives her the right?
THAT MORNING, STANLEY GOES into the market early: Felice is already at the cheese display arranging a pyramid of sepia-edged triple-crèmes from Normandy. When Stanley first opened the market, the only cheeses they carried were flavorless bricks of organic jack and a rubbery, casein-free, vegan cheddar. Felice touches the cheeses with care, as if they’re infants, her hands hovering above each piece, placing it just so. She has arranged sprays of yellow dendrobium around the lightly refrigerated deck. She is actually humming. When she turns toward him, her expression broken open, Stanley catches a glimpse of natural contentment before the wariness resurfaces. Her lifted hands pause, then move to her chest — as if identifying or shielding herself. With dismay, he sees her eyes glisten. “You want us to go, don’t you?” she asks.
No. He doesn’t say anything. Stanley lowers his gaze, studies the speckles in the linoleum. He argues with himself, with his old, hard nature, that tight nut at his center, that makes him feel at times that he’s lived longer than almost anybody. She got herself here, didn’t she? he asks himself. She’s doing the best she can. Stanley can’t bring himself to speak directly, though. He can’t imagine using a word like trust. He shakes his obstinate head — just as stubborn, it occurs to him, as his sister. “I don’t know,” he says finally.
“You can’t.” She turns back to the stack of cheeses as if something’s been resolved: as if her life depends on achieving that perfect symmetry. Her fingers tremble. She won’t look at him. “I know how you are, Stan. You can’t deal with it.”
He backs away from her, turning his face, and retreats to the office.
Nieves brings him lunch around two, looks at him closely. She says his name, stirs the hair off his forehead with a finger, then returns her hands to her stomach. “Whatever.” She smoothes little circles around her small swell. “But I wish you’d get over yourself.”
After she goes, Stanley cups his forehead with both hands; he rubs his scalp, wondering how hard he’d have to bang his head against the desk before he’d pass out. He sits back, kneads his side. His market should carry Maalox. The inventory sheets arrayed before him make no sense. There are notes from Eduardo: Calvin needs letter of intent by next week — latest; The basmati full of flies; Garlic shipment rotted… He sits that way, immobilized, incapable of following his thoughts to any sort of insight or solution. This is the one problem he’d never expected to have. He feels stupid and afraid, internally frozen, a mastodon, afraid to leave his icy tomb. The little red light on his cell flashes — another apologetic call from one or both parents, wanting to talk, asking how they’d come through the hurricane.
At some point, beyond his silenced body and thoughts, he becomes aware of a sound: a long, low rumble, then a scraping noise. He isn’t sure how long he’s been listening without hearing it. He knows what it is. The rear lot for delivery trucks was repaved last year: now it’s smooth and slightly curved, lifted a few inches at one end, on the natural incline of the land. The elegant surface was discovered by the local skateboarders. They’re a nuisance — occasionally a couple of them clatter around the front lot and startle the customers. Stanley has added to his list the fear that one of his purveyors’ trucks will hit a skateboarder and everyone will get hauled into court. Still, it’s hard for him to muster what Nieves calls the “authoritarian will” to chase them away. Their rumble and scraping have become such a familiar backdrop he forgets they’re around until he hears the dairy deliveryman out in back yelling at them.
This afternoon, dispersing skateboarders seems a simple, appealingly tangible task. He stands on the loading platform and inhales the syrupy hot air, watching the boys racing and spinning — their crisp, airborne movements. It’s a small group of teenagers: weedy hair, thin chests, shoulders like clothes hangers. They push off against a small retaining wall, their arms sailing up, parallel to the earth, a deep crouch, aloft. It occurs to Stanley, watching them, that his own baby — gender yet unknown — could grow into one of them. He wonders — could he actually love this, the flapping clothes and hair and bad skin? He realizes finally that the boy he’s been watching snap his board into the air, then neatly touch down — long, black, gleaming hair, pale white skin — is Felice. He didn’t know she’d learned how to skateboard. He’s never seen her like this before — so intently focused and content — her beauty beside the point, merely part of the catalog of effects — speed, balance, daring. He admires her athletic form and feels moved in some unexpected way. The three boys with her — neighbor kids, the Mexican-American sons of the migrants — call out, their voices lost in the hot air and a distant whir of insects rising from the fields beyond the lot.
Felice swishes to a stop, neatly twisting the board to one side. She jumps down, stomps on one end, flips it up, and catches the top, nonchalant as a gunslinger. Smiling, possibly at her show of bravado, she hands it over to its owner — fourteen-year-old son of one of the onion growers. She slides her hands into her pockets, straight-armed and now shy, and slinks over to Stanley. “Hey, Stan.” She pulls back her hair.
“Pret-ty cool.” He nods at the other skateboarders, who continue rolling but shoot him wary glances. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“It’s not so hard,” she mumbles. “Just gotta do it a bunch.”
“Hey, Nieves is saying—” He stops himself, frowns into the sheer light, a distant vista of date palms. “She’s going to be upset, you know, if you guys go.”
Felice smiles and winces; she uses the flat of her hand as a visor. “She told me we should stay.” Under her hand her eyes look like river stones. “We can’t, though, right now. We’re gonna take off in a day or two. I mean, we got this plan, you know? Maybe we can — for a visit — when the baby comes? If you want us to?”
“Don’t say—” He cuts himself off again. Takes a deep breath he feels in his ribs. This moment. “Don’t say anything you’re not going to do,” he says more gently. He pulls out a fat brown envelope from his notebook — two thousand in well-worn tens and twenties: he and Nieves have subsisted on lentil soup, hummus, and bread in the past. “If you absolutely have to go.”
She pushes the envelope back at him. “No. No freakin’ way.” Her brows lift and he sees the glint of their mother’s will in her face. “We have money. Emerson saved up.”