“Here I go again,” Nell said with a sigh. “I’ll think about it and give you an answer after I feel you perform one more time. Which, by the way, I keep thinking about.”
“I wish I could invite you to share my place, but there’s barely room to turn around if you leave toenail clippings on the floor. Which of course I don’t do. But if I did you could smack me with a wooden spoon, which coming from you I’d probably appreciate.”
“Can you really cook?”
“Yes indeed. And maybe I can’t promise you a satellite dish on your roof, but I wouldn’t take up much space ’cause I’m not very big and all my belongings fit in a couple of those handkerchiefs my sisters always made me carry. Can’t you decide now? I’m getting real anxious, especially since I’m fighting an old compulsion to propose marriage right this minute.”
“Before I decide,” Nell said, “do you know of any good support groups for stage mothers?”
CHAPTER 28
The next day, El Día de los Muertos, the mother of the thief, Pepe Palmera, honored his memory at the graveyard. She brought flowers, and a photo of him that she’d put inside a cheap pewter frame. She gazed at his photo for a long time that day.
The mother of Porfirio Velásquez Saavedra, a.k.a. Juan Soltero, spent the day praying on her knees to the Virgin of Guadalupe while a mortician negotiated with family members for the price of a splendid funeral, as befitting his position.
Abel Durazo’s mother did not put out a bottle of beer or anything else for her son’s ghost. She was so shocked and grief-stricken to have learned of his murder that she was disconsolate, and refused to leave her bedroom.
The mother of Jaime Cisneros baked some sweet breads for her lost little boy. Also, she put out a few of his favorite toys, along with his asthma inhaler, even though her husband said that it seemed foolish to leave an inhaler for their dead son. Jaime’s twelve-year-old sister, Socorro, swore that she saw Jaime that night, walking along the path that leads from Colonia Libertad to the north, and crawling through the hole in the fence like thousands before him.
EPILOGUE
Three months after the resolution of the strange and baffling warehouse theft conspiracy that led to the deaths of two Americans and four Mexicans-during the first weeks in office of the forty-second president of the United States-the new owner of Green Earth Hauling and Disposal received a communication from Sacramento inquiring about some waste that had been manifested from NAS North Island but had never arrived at a disposal site. The mid-level bureaucrat in Sacramento was informed by telephone that the load of waste had been stolen along with the waste handler’s copies of the manifests, and that the stolen load included a drum of Guthion from Southbay Agricultural Supply.
That same civil servant then telephoned Burl Ralston at Southbay Agricultural Supply to ask why in the hell he’d mailed them a donation to the American Red Cross, but not his manifest copy for the Guthion that later went with the stolen truck. Burl Ralston explained that his entire office had been disrupted by his secretary being off sick, and that he’d sent all sorts of documents to the wrong places and made a thousand stupid mistakes with paperwork. He guessed that his copy of the Guthion manifest had probably gone to the American Red Cross and was now lost forever.
Burl Ralston apologized, and told the civil servant that he was seventy-four years old, and was making so many mistakes he thought it was time to retire to a little place he was thinking about buying in Mexico, just south of Rosarito Beach. He told the bureaucrat that with the NAFTA agreement apparently a done deal, the Baja Peninsula might just end up being a kind of Mexican Riviera. And that any sharp American would be wise to take advantage of the Mexicans while he still could.