Behind me, the cabby was pulling my suitcase from the trunk. He set it in the dust beside me and said something in Spanish. I fumbled for money, grateful to be able to look away from the old man’s eyes for a moment. The cab wheeled around in another cloud of dust and left me there.
The man took my arm in one hand and my suitcase in the other. ‘You must be hot and thirsty. I’ll fix you a drink while we wait for your mother.’
‘I guess she’ll be surprised to see me,’ I said. I tried to ignore the tears that had started to spill over. I wasn’t even sure why I had started crying.
He wrapped a warm, dusty arm around my shoulders. ‘Take it easy now. It’ll be okay.’
I could not stop. The tears seemed to come of their own volition, through no fault of mine, and his voice seemed very far away. The bandanna he gave me smelled of dust.
‘I’ll make you something to drink and you can tell me about all this.’ He turned me around gently and started me walking.
‘Sorry…’ The word caught in my throat and I couldn’t say more.
‘Nothing to be sorry about,’ he said, and he kept his arm around my shoulders. He led me across a central plaza and into one of the huts. The curtain that blocked the doorway fell closed behind us.
His hut was a single whitewashed room, furnished with two lawn chairs, a cooler, a footlocker, a small folding table that served as a desk, and a hammock that was looped over the hut’s center beam and pushed to one side of the room. Half the hut was filled with cardboard boxes, picks, jacks, and shovels.
He made me sit in one of the lawn chairs, rummaged in a footlocker for plastic cups, and then in the cooler for a bottle of gin. ‘I’m Anthony Baker,’ he told me. ‘Call me Tony. If you’re Liz’s daughter, you’ll drink gin and tonic.’
I nodded and tried to smile. I was having no more success now than I had had outside. The smile kept twisting on my face and turning into something else.
Tony poured two drinks and fished in the bottom of the cooler for ice cubes. I studied his face when he handed me a glass. He looked like someone’s favorite uncle. He sat in the other lawn chair and rested his drink on one knee, his hand on the other.
‘Do you get many unexpected visitors?’ I asked.
‘Not many.’
I took a sip. The drink was strong and tasted faintly of melted ice and plastic. ‘Sorry to take up your time,’ I said.
‘No problem. I’ve got plenty of time,’ he said. ‘That’s one thing archaeologists come to understand. We’ve got time. The ruins have been here for thousands of years; they’ll wait a little longer.’ He studied my face over the rim of his glass. ‘Being in the Yucatán for a while will change your view of time. The people who live here think like archaeologists. Two thousand years ago, their great-great-grandfathers burned over a plot of land in the monte and planted corn with a digging stick. This spring, Salvador will burn over a plot of land in the monte and plant corn with a digging stick. People who work on such a grand time scale don’t worry so much about how long it takes to have a drink with the daughter of an old friend.’ He shrugged. ‘You stay here a while, and you learn that attitude. You learn to take your time.’
I looked down at my drink, turning the plastic glass in my hands. ‘I had to talk to my mother,’ I said. ‘I know I should have written or called or something, but…’ I shrugged. ‘It’s pretty weird just showing up here with no warning.’
‘Some people say it’s strange for a grown man to spend his summers digging in the dirt. Personally, I try to avoid making value judgments.’
‘I should have written first,’ I said.
‘I don’t see that it’s a real problem,’ he said. ‘We can always string another hammock. You can learn to sleep in a hammock, can’t you?’
I nodded.
He took the empty glass from my hand and poured me another drink without asking if I wanted one. I was taking my first sip when I heard footsteps outside the hut, a knock on the wooden doorjamb. ‘Hey, Tony,’ a woman’s voice said. ‘What’s this about a visitor?’
The blaze of light when the curtain was lifted aside blinded me for a moment. I blinked, staring toward the figure in the doorway.
My mother’s hair had more white in it than I remembered. Her hair was damp, the tendrils curling on her neck as they dried. She carried a towel slung over her shoulder.
She was frowning. I tried to smile, but once again, I had lost the knack. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Surprise.’ I stood up, feeling awkward. I did not know what to do with my hands. She looked worried, I thought, in that first moment. Startled and worried, not angry.
‘Diane?’ she said. ‘Are you all right? What the hell are you doing here?’
Tony was making himself busy, pouring another drink.
‘My father’s dead,’ I said. ‘He died two weeks ago.’ I did not cry and my voice was steady. I waited for a reaction, but my mother’s expression did not change. She sat down on the edge of the footlocker.
‘I see,’ she said.
‘He died of a heart attack.’ I was talking too fast, but I could not seem to stop. ‘I wanted to talk to you. Dad never wanted me to talk to you. I thought 1 could come and stay here for a while.’
‘Here?’ She still looked worried, a little puzzled. ‘For a while,’ she said. ‘I suppose you could.’
‘She could take the place of that student of mine who cancelled,’ Tony said, handing her a gin and tonic. ‘Don’t you think? We’ll teach you to sort potsherds,’ he said to me.
I was watching my mother. She nodded cautiously and accepted the drink that Tony had mixed. Did she look relieved? Annoyed? Concerned? I could not read her face.
‘Do you want to do that, Diane?’
‘I’d like to try it,’ I said. ‘I promise I won’t be in the way. I’ll be no trouble at all. Really.’
Tony sat in the lawn chair and my mother sat on the footlocker and they talked about which hut I would stay in, which work crew I would be assigned to, and other inconsequentials. I held my glass and watched my mother’s face and hands as she talked. For the moment, I relaxed.
Before dinner, my mother took me on a tour of the central part of the ruins. She walked at a brisk pace, talking about people who had been dead for over a thousand years. She seemed quite fond of these dead people. As she walked, she looked at the rocks around us, at the trees, at the ground beneath our feet. She did not look at my face – she did not seem to be avoiding my eyes; she just found the rocks and trees and barren ground more interesting than me. Her straw hat shaded her face. She wore khaki pants and a baggy long-sleeved shirt.
We walked past a low wall and a crumbling fragment of an archway. ‘The old church,’ my mother said. ‘The Spanish built it with Indian labor and the Mayan temple stones.’
She spoke in fragments: short bursts of information, a verbal shorthand that eliminated the little words that slow a sentence down. Her way of speaking seemed to match her general attitude; she seemed to be overflowing with the willingness to act, to start new projects, to finish up old ones, to clear jungles and build pyramids. She was a head shorter than me, but I had to work to match her pace.
‘Just found an interesting possibility over there,’ she said, gesturing vaguely. ‘Underground chamber, I think. We’ll start working on that Monday.’
The sun reflected off the rocks and I was grateful for my sunglasses. The sky was an uninterrupted blue; no clouds, no hope of shade. Even the jungle did not look cooclass="underline" the trees looked thirsty and worn. The path was flanked by mounds of rubble from which trees sprouted.
‘You’ll need a hat,’ my mother said, glancing at me. ‘Keep the sun off, or you’ll end up with a stroke. You can pick one up in the market.’