Maya watched with the helplessness of someone behind glass; she was watching others live out their lives, the rituals familiar but incomprehensible. Max squirmed, and, smiling weakly at the man, she led her son down the length of the counter. “I’m right here,” she said, kneeling in front of him. Max took the knob of the door, looked back at his mother resentfully, and disappeared inside.
She craved coffee. Her head felt attached to the rest of her only by the stem of pain that rose from its base. Of course she could have taken Max into the bathroom; she had abandoned her son for coffee. Not knowing where else to go, she sat at the counter, by the cup waiting for her. The man squinted at her. He had a pleasantly shaped face that headed toward but missed handsomeness. The long, narrow nose flared out slightly on one side; the lips were thin; and his skin showed age. But it missed well. The features added up to make a coarse but appealing American face. She liked its Americanness, a different kind of Americanness than what she was used to. The face studied her with a slight sneer — the upper lip was up slightly — or maybe it was amusement again. The inspection was not unfriendly, something forest-like to the eyes, lush and somnolent. Melancholy — or maybe Maya was hoping; she felt a monopoly on despair while the rest of the world celebrated. He was not young — Maya liked this as well, because she felt disheveled and old. Up close, his eyes were grayer than green, baleful not playful.
“They’re nice girls,” she said, and nodded toward them. They were staring at the screen of a cell phone.
She remembered she had not brushed her teeth. Was wearing yesterday’s clothes. Bedding down in the bucket seat of a Ford Escape had sprung half her ponytail loose, and several strands hung in front of her eyes. Her usual instincts were asleep. With frantic casualness, she tried to feed her hair back into the ponytail. And then she was out of steam even for this simple mission, her hair falling over her shoulders. Her fingers worked the unemployed hair band.
The man studied the short-order window. In her sleepiness, she was touched by the intensity with which he gazed at it — he was looking for something to say. Of course the waitresses would have found her at the podium — he had wanted her to sit at the counter.
Finally, he turned to Maya and said, “In this book”—he indicated it with the tip of his knife; the spine said 21st Century Parenting—“they talk about how when a ewe lambs, it’s mystified by what’s come out of it. It wants nothing to do with that baby mess. She’ll sniff the lamb and head butt it down in the straw. But after a time, they’re inseparable. If the lamb dies, the ewe won’t take another. You have to skin the dead guy and sit that new pelt on some unmothered lamb, and smear the pelt with the dead liver. And little by little, the mother will agree to be fooled.”
Maya laughed — loudly, lavishly. She understood nothing except the keenness with which the speaker had spoken. He was older — at his temples, his hair, which came high off his forehead before falling past his ears, was flecked with gray — but he was not the only one at the counter with gray hair. She was ready to forget this about herself as readily as her occasional accent. There was no end to the things that needed forgetting. She saw the look of dismay on his face and beseeched him with her hands.
“I’m sorry — I wasn’t laughing at what you said.”
“I’m just blurting away,” he said. “I’ve had too much coffee, and you none.”
“Is it that bad?” Maya said, touching her hair.
“No. .” he started, and she also held up her hands — they stared at each other in an awkward silence, then both laughed lightly, then looked away, then looked back at each other, and finally, he drove a hand at her.
“Marion Hostetler,” he said. Again, she saw the beads of paint on his wrist. She wanted to scrape them off, like crumbs off a tablecloth. She took his hand. How quickly a trip revised what seemed normal; she was shaking another man’s hand in a diner. But this is what Americans did; they just started talking to each other, a nation with the oafish amiability of the slightly touched.
“I slept in the car,” Maya said, trying to explain her appearance. It made her sound homeless.
“I’ve got no excuse,” he said. “I go on sometimes. Isn’t that so, girls?”
“Daddy, we love you,” the older one said. When she wasn’t laughing, she had a deep, reasonable voice.
“Only since you and Mom split,” the younger one replied to her father. Maya wondered if she was hearing a reprimand. Or he was. Behind the soft lips of youth, sharp teeth.
“Which left you with a calico cat with one eye and limited opportunity to express your mind,” the older one said. “You don’t have an outlet.”
“Well, the university is certainly doing its job,” Marion said mournfully. “Alma and Celia,” he wagged his finger between the girls for Maya.
“That’s ‘soul’ in Spanish and German, the two sides of the family,” Alma, the younger one, said. She was still smiling, but Maya saw that she was worried about her father.
“Let’s flag you some coffee,” Marion Hostetler said.
“I should check on Max,” Maya said, glancing at the bathroom door, but remained on her stool. She looked longingly at a coffeepot crinkling on a hotplate by the short-order window. Marion had been right about the waitresses; Maya’s glance sent some kind of homing signal off in the one with the bank hairstyle, and she filled a cup for Maya and returned the pot to the hot plate without setting eyes on either the cup or the pot. It looked just like the coffee of Maya’s imagination, more brown than black.
Maya took a sip. It was revolting, but she made herself drink again. Marion looked inquiringly at the bathroom. “He’s my only,” Maya said. The English words felt good in her mouth — she had used them before, many times, but she liked the way they sounded now, here. “No sons?” Maya asked the man — Marion.
“Brothers,” Marion said. “Three of them. My mother pulled hard for a girl in my place — there were three boys already. She thought that if she settled on Mary, God would have to be a real SOB not to give her a girl. And out came I. Calling me Marion, that was revenge. Only she missed the Lord and got me instead. She refused to have any more kids after that. Stopped believing in God, too. But then I got only daughters. When she was dying, my mother said, ‘You get what you want, but not what you were planning.’ I tried to put it on her gravestone. No such luck.”
“Why?” Maya said.
“Rick. Rick is the car-dealership brother. He had them engrave a heart on the stone, and inside it, ‘Mother.’ Jesse did it — he’s a stonemason. And accessory. Jesse’s the second. One night I’ll have too much to drink and go in there and deface the thing. What can you make out of ‘Mother’? Other.”
“This coffee is disgusting,” Maya said.
“Come on, you don’t want any of that,” Marion said. He pulled a thermos from a pocket of his coat and poured some into a new cup from the tray. “The other middle brother made out the best. He farms coffee beans on a shady hill in Guatemala. Now you know every one of us.”
Maya smiled weakly. She felt soldered to her seat, by her fatigue and his talking. Working herself loose from the heavy fingers of both, she made herself slip off the stool — it was like another woman doing it, her legs were like stone — and laid her palm into the door of the bathroom.