Nidia added, “She hurt her leg. Her hip, I mean.”
“A fall?”
She nodded.
“So how’d you”-I didn’t want to say the first thing that came to mind, which was, draw the short straw-“become the one who goes south to take care of her?”
Nidia said, “It’s something I’m good at. That was my job for a long time, taking care of a man who was sick.”
Serena hadn’t mentioned that. “Sick with what?” I asked.
“Cancer,” she said.
“What happened to him?”
“He died,” Nidia said. “It was… it was very sad, he was-” She turned her face toward the window, and I knew she was fighting back tears. I focused back on the road, averting my eyes. She wasn’t really thinking of the cancer guy, of course. She was thinking of Johnny Cedillo, whom I deliberately hadn’t brought up, thinking it still too raw a wound.
Then she spoke again. She said, “Adriano was smarter than anyone I’d ever known. He studied math for a living, but not math like people usually think of it. Adriano’s work was the kind of math you can’t even really use. I asked him why he was interested in stuff like that, and he said it was like being an explorer in the desert, places no one had gone yet. He liked being out putting his footprints in sand no one had ever walked in before.”
Nidia wasn’t crying, but she was speaking quickly, as if she was distracting herself from her grief with trivia about the cancer patient.
“You guys talked a bit, then, it sounds like,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I was working for him for a little more than a year. At first I just came over to make some meals, clean up his apartment. But then he got sicker and needed someone living there, so I moved in.”
“Where was his family?” I asked. “There wasn’t anyone to help take care of him?”
“No,” she said. “He had a brother who died, and his mother was already dead, too. His father was still alive, but they didn’t…”
“Get along?” I supplied.
“Maybe,” she said. “And he never got married. Adriano didn’t have a life like most people had. His mind was different. He just wanted to be a-what’s the word? Like a student, but even more serious about it…”
“A scholar?”
“A scholar,” she said. “He wanted to understand the universe, everything about it. I think God knew that. God took him early so he could finally have all the answers he wanted.”
God apparently had a protracted, painful way of curing intellectual curiosity, but I didn’t say that.
nine
The following night took us through New Mexico, and then, aided by a short roadside nap, I pushed on until we crossed the little handkerchief-corner of westernmost Texas. Maybe my desire to get us over the state line before quitting for the day was symbolic. I was Texan by birth, though I couldn’t remember my early days there. So, around five, Nidia and I were rolling into El Paso.
I decided to spend a little more money on a hotel, checking us in at a place with a pool and some restaurants nearby. We needed somewhere nice. It would be Nidia’s last night in the States, and I was so tired from driving that my eyes felt gritty. I intended to get a long, long sleep tonight. Starting tomorrow, we were going to drive days instead of nights, and I was going to slow our speed way down. Herlinda had warned me about getting into a dustup with Mexico’s police, and I’d taken her words to heart.
Nidia and I brought our things in from the car, into a room where the air conditioner was already working hard, exhaling frigid air to keep the Texas heat at bay. I bought a Diet Coke from the vending machine, poured it over ice, and laced it heavily with Bacardi. I drank while sifting through my clothes, looking for something to wear in the pool. I hadn’t brought a suit, but right now, even though it was still about ninety degrees outside, the thought of a long soak appealed to me.
“Want to come?” I asked Nidia, but she shook her head quickly no.
I slipped my feet into a pair of rubber flip-flops. “Be thinking about what you want for dinner,” I said. “It’s your last night in America. There must be something you’ll miss.”
She nodded seriously, as if I’d posed her a study question for an exam later. I drained the last of the rum and Diet Coke and left.
There were too many little kids in the pool for me to swim laps, but I dived into the deep end, then opened my eyes and navigated around them until I came up for air in the shallow end. Then I sat on the steps, body half in and half out of the water, tipped my head back, and closed my eyes. Though it was nearly six, it felt like midafternoon. We were only a few weeks past the summer solstice, and the sun was fairly high in the Texas sky, the heat maintaining its midday levels.
When I opened my eyes again, I saw a guy looking my way. He was sitting on one of the lounge chairs, but he hadn’t come here to swim or sunbathe. He was dressed in business casual, dark trousers and white shirt, no jacket or tie. He was around thirty years old, with an athletic build and close-cropped dark hair that looked like it would curl if allowed to grow any longer.
“How’s the water?” he asked, unashamed to be caught watching me.
“Come in and find out,” I said, and raised my hand to rub my birthmark lightly, a gesture I thought I’d outgrown.
“Can’t,” he said. “I didn’t bring anything to swim in.”
But he got up from his seat and walked to the water’s edge, and sat on his heels to test the water temperature with one hand. I tried to decide how I’d describe his face to someone else: It was clean-shaven and soft, but not in a way that suggested flab or weakness, more like the slight jowliness of a mastiff or a Great Dane, that actually connotes strength. His eyes were Mediterranean, deep-set and heavy-lidded in the way that looks like world-weariness to a casual observer.
“You from Texas?” he asked me.
“California,” I said.
“I’m heading across the border into Mexico tomorrow,” he said. “Just into Juarez City, on business. It’s my first time. I hear there’s no real good time to cross; the traffic’s always backed up at the border. Have you heard anything about that?”
I shook my head. “I have to cross tomorrow, too, but I haven’t really thought about traffic. It’ll take the time it takes, I guess.”
We spoke a minute or two longer. I said I was on a “summer road trip” with a friend and left it at that. It was pleasant, after Nidia’s alternating politeness and silences, to be talking easily with another American. I wondered if his friendliness was just that, or if it was the beginnings of a pickup.
“Well,” he said, “drive safely tomorrow.”
Just friendliness, then. “You, too,” I said, and watched as he walked back to the pool gate and disappeared from my view.
“There’s a storm coming, and the people of this sleepy town…”
The TV was flickering with the sound low. I’d tuned it to the Weather Channel, waiting for the local forecast, but at present, the screen was filled with images of tornadoes wreaking havoc in the Plains States. Nidia was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her nightgown, her hair wet from the bath, watching the TV. I was rearranging the things in my backpack, putting what I needed in easy reach. Earlier, we’d had dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. I was ravenous, though I’d done nothing more strenuous than driving, and ordered a barbecued half-chicken and a baked potato and salad. I persuaded Nidia to have a real American meal on her last night here: a hamburger, fries, and a milkshake, the kind that came with extra in a tin cup on the side.
Still half listening for a change to the forecast for Texas and northern Mexico, I dug my passport out of the duffel bag and transferred it to my messenger bag, where it’d be more convenient in the morning. Nidia, of course, not being a U.S. citizen, only needed her Mexican birth certificate and a photo ID, not a-