For a long moment the woman merely examined her out of eyes so dark there was no delineation between iris and pupil, and then she looked to Bridger and said something in her own language, which Bridger, at first, didn't seem to understand. She had to repeat herself, and then Bridger nodded, the pale bristles of his hair gone translucent in the long shaft of sun leaching in through the door. “She says she'll have the Number Five,” he said, and then repeated himself in his high school Spanish.
They took the table behind the two women-What percentage of Americans were obese? Thirty percent? Was that the figure she'd read? — and Bridger got them their drinks. He was having “horchata,” she a Diet Coke, out of the can. The women behind them were hunkered over the table, their faces animated, inches apart, exchanging confidences-gossip-and Dana almost wished she could hear what they were saying about their husbands, boyfriends, their ailments and beauty treatments and the children who invariably disappointed them. Instead, she asked Bridger what the woman at the counter had said. “And why didn't she understand me? Wasn't I clear?”
He dropped his eyes. “No, it wasn't that. Or it was. She's-well, her English isn't too good-”
“Yes? But what did she say?”
He looked embarrassed-or reluctant-and she felt her face go hot.
“It was something insulting, wasn't it?”
“I don't know,” he said, and then he said something she couldn't make out.
“It was in Spanish?”
Instead of repeating it again, uselessly, he pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote the word out for her on the back of a paper napkin: “Sordomuda.”
Now she did flush. “Deaf-mute?”
He nodded.
What she wanted to ask was, “How did she know?” but instead she glanced across the room to where the woman sat perched on a stool behind the cash register, her head down, flipping through the pages of a Mexican tabloid; she wore gold earrings, the faintest points of light; a silver cross dangled from her throat on a silver chain. She was perfectly ordinary, like a thousand other women in a thousand other taco stands, Mexican restaurants and “pupuserias,” a woman who knew the feel of the mortar and pestle and the consistency of the “harina” paste shaped to fit the hand and pounded flat between the palms. But who was she? Did she have a deaf son? A deaf sister? Was she deaf herself? Or was she just superior? Contemptuous? Hateful?
Everything was in stasis, but for the right arm of the cook-a man so small and slight he might have been the cashier's brother-which jerked rhythmically as he slid the pan back and forth across the gas burner. After a moment, she turned back to Bridger and signed, “How did she know?” but all he could do was shrug and hold out his hands. When their order came up, he went to the counter and brought back a paper plate and set it before her. The dish it contained didn't look like a tostada. For one thing, there was no shell; for another, no lettuce. Instead, what she got seemed to be some kind of organ meat in gravy and a wash of melted cheese.
“What's wrong?” Bridger asked, his mouth crammed with beans and rice. “Not hungry?”
Very slowly, with the tip of one reluctant finger, she pushed the plate away, and it wasn't worth the explanation. She let her hands talk for her: “No,” she signed, “not anymore.”
“You want to drive?” he asked her. They were standing in the street outside the restaurant, the car glazed with the sun. It was hotter than she'd expected, hotter inland than she was used to on the coast. The heat drugged her and she didn't see the woman watching her from behind the window of the “taqueria” or the pair of lizards chasing one after the other through the dust or the drift of yellowed claw-like oak leaves at her feet. She didn't want to drive. She wanted to stare into the screen and shut out all the rest and she let her hands tell him so. A moment later, the town was behind them and only the vibration of the steel-belted radials, riding on air, told her they were moving.
Six
There were two bona fide bedrooms in the condo, one for Madison and one for Natalia and him, as well as an extra half-bedroom, what the real estate lady wanted to call a sewing room. Or a nursery. “Or”-with a look to him, coy and calculating-“a home office, an office away from the office. For when you get tired of all those patients.” It wasn't much, not a whole lot bigger than the cell he'd shared with Sandman at Greenhaven Prison, but it had a view of the bay and the big stippled pyramid of Mount Tam, and Natalia had found him an oak desk, a pair of matching file cabinets and a Tiffany desk lamp on one of her far-flung antiquing forays. So it was an office. He hooked up his computer and his printer and did business here, reserving the computers at the public library for highly sensitive transactions, the things he didn't want to risk having traced. Madison wasn't allowed in this room, for obvious reasons, and he frowned on Natalia coming in to appropriate a pen or a pair of scissors, though once, when he'd forgotten to lock the door, she'd slipped in naked and put her hands over his eyes. She didn't have to whisper, “Guess who?”
He was in the office now, at his computer, Natalia treating herself to a morning at the spa and Madison off at day camp, and he was doing a little research. It was the kind of thing he was good at, better than good-he'd made a nice quiet living at it for the past three years now, and if there was the occasional glitch, like that time in Stateline when he'd been up all night at the blackjack tables and he was wired and burned-out and maybe a little drunker than he thought, he had it covered. Post bail and walk and let them come after somebody else, Dana Halter or Frank Calabrese or whoever. It was nothing to him, not anymore, and if he hadn't fallen for Natalia he could have lived in Marin for the duration, a doctor in a tailored suit and the calfskin duster he'd picked up last winter, “money for nothing and the chicks for free,” wasn't that how it went?
The first time, though, when he was Peck Wilson and in love with his four-year-old daughter-Sukie, Silky Sukie, he used to call her-the law was a clamp, a harness, a choke hold that cut off all the air to his lungs and the blood to his heart. Gina moved out on him and took his daughter with her, right back to the big Bullhead's house, and why? Because he was a son of a bitch, a rat, a scumbag, because he was cheating on her and no fit father and she never wanted to see him again, never. And if he ever dared to lay a hand on her again, if he ever even thought about it- What she didn't mention, what the lawyer didn't mention, was the way she'd come to treat him, as if he'd been hired for stud purposes only, to broaden the gene pool so the Marchetti dynasty could wind up with a granddaughter and heiress prettier than a queen and smarter by half than anything they could ever have hoped to produce. That, and to go on fattening the bank account by pushing himself day and night till his brain began to bleed out his ears. Without her, and with the unflagging bullheaded enmity of her father, Lugano went down the tubes within six months-the state came and closed the place up for non-payment of sales tax, which he had to hold out just to cover the suppliers-and the pizza place was reeling. But the divorce order, which he hadn't agreed with but was too tired to fight, specified the amount he had to pay for alimony and child support and laid out the hours-minutes, seconds-he could spend with his daughter. Okay, fine. He moved to a smaller apartment, ran the wheels off the car. There was Caroline, there was Melanie, and what was her name, that girl from the bookstore in the mall? On Sundays, he took Sukie to feed the ducks at Depew Park or to the zoo at Bear Mountain or they hopped the train into the city to catch the opening of the newest kids' flick or to see the Christmas display at FAO Schwarz.