At this moment I see John Urberoaga stroll through the front door, the cousin or maybe brother of our Realtor, Rosemary. John looms large in my mythology of the town but I doubt we’ve had a conversation longer than two sentences. He was at Grandpa’s funeral and like almost all the men in the room I saw him wipe away a tear when Davis Birgeneau sang “That Old Rugged Cross” and played the guitar. I feel the tiny flair of feeling that comes from recognizing someone, but it fades as quick as it came.
He walks past our table and stops to cluck at Honey with big-man friendliness and I smile at him and say hello and he stares at me for a beat until I prompt him with my mother’s name. “Jeannie’s daughter. Frank and Cora Burdock’s granddaughter.” “That’s right!” he beams at me and his large presence his belt buckle are enough to subdue the bleating Honey. “You know Rosemary’s sure been workin’ on gettin’ that place sold.” “Well, no rush,” I tell him. “Rod up with you?” he asks. I feel suddenly threatened by being narced on but I don’t know why my taciturn uncle Rodney, patron of the mobile home, shouldn’t know I’m here, in fact I don’t know why I didn’t just call him to tell him myself. “Not this time,” I tell him, “but I thought it might be nice to get the, um, cobwebs out,” and he nods. The proper maintenance of immovable property or cars or livestock is a central concern to citizens of the high country. The great sorrow of my aging grandparents was seeing the disorder that crept into the town, shaggy lawns strewn with toy limbs and decaying copies of the Paiute Recorder. Rusted lawn mowers, sweatpants in the market, cars with rusted tailpipes—their lawn stayed pristine, their Buick polished, their small finances in impeccable order. I am looking a little down-at-the-heels myself, I realize. I am wearing a maternity shirt and Honey has smeared a substantial portion of the stew all over. But I am keeping cobwebs out of the house and the water moving in the pipes.
I shouldn’t be snide. The reason Honey and I are sitting pretty all things considered up in Deakins Park is that good old Uncle Rodney cares enough to keep the place maintained, to keep the water in the pipes, while my helpless disdain at the bourgeois mysteries of property maintenance would probably leave the town with another rusted-out mobile home. Uncle Rodney, never married, lives in a nice cabin outside Quincy, many basins south and west of here. He has worked for the Forest Service his entire life and has a very long-term off-and-on relationship with a surprisingly bubbly woman named Helen who works at a quilt shop of the sort that Quincy is cute enough to sustain. He and my mom had not a lot in common except their happy memories of summers at the lake and winters in the snow, girl scouts and boy scouts and high school hijinks and bridge nights with drunk parents letting the kids run free. In the end what she wanted was to get out, to get Elsewhere, and Rodney won’t even come to San Francisco except for when Honey was born. (“Not a city person,” he told Engin when we met him.) But he never made a peep when my mom got the house, and now he keeps the water in the pipes for me.
John Urberoaga doesn’t ask me where Honey’s dad is which seems curious and I wonder whether it is some sense of social nicety and not asking what don’t concern you or whether it just had not occurred to him to have any curiosity about my life which I suppose would justly match the general lack of curiosity I have about his and he ambles off to a table with his wife and Honey is now struggling so much to get down onto the floor that I know we’ve got to go and I crane around for the jokey server to bring us the check and she laughs at Honey and says “She’s feisty” and it soothes me. I hate being an archetype—woman struggling alone with fractious baby—but it really does feel horrible and a little humor delivered with a deft hand can go a long way. Too much sympathy and help is bad though, it’s very obligating.
In the parking lot Honey is frankly obstreperous. The absence of sidewalk on the highway back to the railroad tracks makes me anxious about the prospect of navigating it with Honey on her uncertain legs but when I pick her up she loses her mind, struggling and crying and pushing against me with her small fists. I put her back on the ground and she sits down abruptly and then flings her head straight back onto the pavement and then screams furiously in pain and rage. I scramble to pick her up and put my hand on the back of her head saying “No no oh no.” I hold her tight while she struggles against me, her sobs eventually giving over to little yells issued at an interval of three or four seconds. I turn to face the fields to the east of the Golden Spike should anyone come out and see me having not the least amount of success controlling or comforting my hysterical baby who is still trying to hit me. “Be a calming presence for your distressed toddler,” some baby blog whispers to me, and even though I reject categorically the idea that she is yet a toddler I hold her body to me and rub my hands on her hot back and say as soothingly as I can, “Hey. Hey, Honey. I know, sweet baby,” and it actually seems to be working, first she stops struggling and then she finds the place to put her wet face in the crook of my neck while I whisper to her and dust the gravel off the back of her head and I feel she is tired, that’s what it is, she is very very tired. Then she leans away from my body and smiles into my face, plucking at the front of my shirt where the stew is with both hands. “Daaaaah,” she says to me, her eyes wide and wondering. “Daaaaaah,” I say to her. I carry her home, heavy heavy, too heavy for me to carry with my flabby muscles atrophied by administrative tasks, but we make it over the train tracks into Deakins Park and she keeps one arm slung around my neck and her eyes on the horizon like a princess alert on her palanquin.
She is sticky with stew and dust and so she goes back into the bathtub and then she goes into her almost-too-small pajamas and before she goes into the Pack ’n Play in the dark of the closet we scramble up onto the big bed with her milk and Goodnight Moon and I lean against the pillows with my knees up and she leans against my knees with her legs on either side of my waist and she begins to chat happily and conspiratorially to me in non-words, just babbling cheerfully like a brook. She puts her hands on my breasts and pulls at my shirt and pats my face and tells me all sorts of things I don’t understand and I think this is the happiest moment of my life not only because of the smile on her face the smallness of her body the love for me she communicates with her entire being but because of the almost erotic knowledge that soon she will be in bed, the whole evening ahead of me without her.
I put her in the Pack ’n Play and all the happy time on the bed vanishes without a trace and she is miserable again and I try to soothe her and then I say good night and leave while she wails with her hands on the netting of her cage. I remember that she is sixteen months old today.
Then I remember the bottle of Popov and the orange juice and I make myself a screwdriver and sit in the Wi-Fi zone of the porch smoking and listening to her faint cries through the screen door. I send Engin a generic greeting on WhatsApp and then I google “banging head against ground,” the little wheel turning as the phone strains to hang on to Cindy’s signal in the Paiute night. I feel my anxiety reach through the screen to comingle with the anxiety of the BabyCenter mothers, various in its particulars but always with the same root—let it not be serious, let it not be serious. Or perhaps some of them do want it to be serious. When I was younger I used to wait for something dramatic to happen—my period to come, my mother to die. Both things eventually happened and neither of them brought any glamour to life I can say with certainty. But if something happens to Honey I will die I will die I will die.