“What’s in Bisbee, Arizona?”
This question met with a long, irritated pause, during which Wylie reinserted the dipstick, drew it out again, and examined it, scowling all the while. I leaned against the side of the car and waited.
“Bisbee, Arizona,” he finally said, “is what’s in Bisbee.”
“I never would’ve guessed. You’re being kind of annoying, by the way.”
“Well, you would know.”
“Wylie.”
“Lynn.”
I crossed my arms. Wylie slid his scrawny body under the car and started tinkering around down there. I sat down in the driveway, my head still swimming a bit in the aftermath of drinks and sex and sleep, and looked up at the sky. The moon was fat and sagging. Far down the block a couple of dogs were barking at it testily from their yards.
Wylie’s feet stuck out from beneath the car, the toes of his sneakers pointing and flexing as he shifted his weight. I could hear him grunting. Across the street Mrs. Sandoval’s rock lawn gleamed in the moonlight. Near my right hand a cockroach sped across the asphalt, and I shuddered and stood up. Our house was dark, and my mother was in there sleeping.
“Wylie,” I said to his grimy shoes, “Mom really wants to talk to you.”
“I know.”
“Why don’t you sleep over?”
“I can’t.”
“Just stick around for breakfast. Fifteen minutes, so she can see you. A cup of coffee.”
“I don’t drink coffee,” he said.
“Yeah, like that’s the point.”
A clanging, rusty sound came from under the car; then Wylie said, “Shit!” and scooted out with oil on his face. “See what you made me do?”
“Sorry,” I said, and laughed.
He gave me a mighty scowl and stood up, then closed the hood of the car and started gathering up his tools.
“Wylie?”
“I can’t talk to her.”
“Why not?”
“Because she doesn’t understand the kind of life I’m trying to live. She can’t admit that I’m an adult making serious moral choices.”
“Those are your actual reasons?”
“Plus she nags me all the time.”
“You could stand it for fifteen minutes.”
He thrust the tools angrily into a backpack and shouldered it. When I touched his arm, he flinched. His skin was darkly tanned, his face drawn, and his wrist was hardly thicker than mine.
“No, I couldn’t,” he said, then strode down the driveway, his back slouched under the weight of his backpack. He looked like a thirteen-year-old heading off to school. Above him, the sky had already begun to lighten in preparation for sunrise. Two condos down he turned around. “If you absolutely have to drive the car,” he said, “take care of it.”
“Okay,” I said. He kept walking, and a minute later I heard the same angry dogs raise another, accelerated alarm — this time, I was pretty sure, about him.
The sun and my hangover together woke me at seven. For a while I just lay there on my back, looking up at the white ceiling and wondering if everything I remembered from the night before was a dream. Did Wylie really come back? Did I really drink martinis with a man I hardly knew while an aging waitress sang karaoke songs she wrote herself? Did I really have sex in a motel room, more than once?
“Oh, my God,” I said out loud. I could feel the night’s imprint on my body: the parched throat, the sensitive skin, a few memories in other places. Down the hall I could hear my mother moving around, the fizzle of the shower, and then some dish-clanging in the kitchen. I was surprised I usually slept through this racket.
I found her sitting at the table, tapping her spoon precisely at the dome of a soft-boiled egg.
“Good morning,” I said. She looked tired and wan, I thought, her skin even whiter than her office blouse.
She looked up, dropped her spoon, and made “I’m having a heart attack” motions over her chest. “Isn’t this a sign that the world’s coming to an end?” she said. “You getting up before noon?”
I poured myself a cup of coffee and watched her scoop out neat spoonfuls of egg and slip them gracefully into her mouth. I’d forgotten how much she liked these rituals — place settings and cloth napkins and square meals. An egg cup next to a slice of toast and a glass of juice: it was like a breakfast commercial.
“So, guess who I saw last night.”
“Someone who kept you out until quite late, that much I know.”
“It was only midnight.” I cleared my throat. “Wylie came by. Late last night or early this morning. I heard him in the driveway and went out to talk with him. He’s doing all right. He mostly seemed preoccupied with oil in the car. He really loves that Caprice.”
Relaying this news — even though Wylie came back on his own, and not due to my efforts — gave me a sense of accomplishment I hadn’t felt in quite some time. I sat back and waited for the inevitable kudos. Instead, she took her breakfast things into the kitchen and rinsed them in the sink.
“He’s been in Arizona,” I added, “but now he’s back.”
When she finally looked at me, her face was taut with anger, and her voice came out a whisper. “I cannot believe you let him just stop by and then prance right off. I cannot believe you didn’t wake me up, that you didn’t strap him down with rope.”
“Mom,” I said.
“This is not a gas station.”
“I know.”
“It’s not a place where you check the oil and leave after five minutes.”
“I understood what you meant the first time.”
“I am very disappointed in you,” she said.
I sat there staring at my coffee cup. My throat hurt, my head hurt, the hair on my head hurt. I didn’t know what to say.
She took her purse and left, just like Wylie had.
Alone, I tried to find comfort in my usual routine — TV watching, ice-cream eating, et cetera — but couldn’t sit still. In Brooklyn I’d passed whole days without moving ten feet, but now I roamed around the far reaches of my mother’s condo for less than half an hour before deciding I had to leave. I put on my sunglasses and headed out into the day.
Angus’s hat was on the passenger side, neatly folded in half along its sweat-stained brim. I crammed the Sinatra tape inside it and threw them in the back, where I wouldn’t have to think about either one.
On the streets of Albuquerque, young guys in lowriders with family names calligraphed on the back windows were cruising around, bass lines pounding from their stereos, staring harshly at drivers whose cars bore different family names. Skateboarding kids were taunting children on foot. I noticed huge, disheveled crows hanging out on all the power lines and stray dogs meandering down the dirt alleys, skulking against walls and crossing streets heavy with traffic. At an outdoor coffeehouse a homeless man was busing people’s tables, whether they were done or not, then begging for change. Everybody I saw was suntanned and squinting.
My first stop was the university library. I wanted to look up the artist of my father’s paintings — as I’d come to think of them, even though I couldn’t remember him ever talking about them — and see whether there was any information about Eva Kent’s life and work. At the computer I went through the usual rituals — my father’s name, his book on the screen — before proceeding to my scholarly tasks. There was a reassuring familiarity to the stacks of torn scrap paper by the terminals, the useless stubby pencils, the Library of Congress classifications. I was in my element, or as close to an element as I had.
I rummaged through the sections on New Mexico artists of the later twentieth century, flipping through journals and small-press books and leaflets for any sign of her name.
Two hours of looking yielded exactly one item about Eva Kent, a 1978 magazine article about a show at the High Desert Gallery that contained none of her work. But scattered throughout the article were pictures taken at the opening-night reception: men in mutton-chop sideburns, women in dirndl skirts and turquoise squash-blossom necklaces. Everybody was smoking and looked drunk. One black-and-white photo showed two men laughing their heads off on either side of a lithograph; behind them, frowning slightly, was a woman. The caption read: “Ernesto Salceda, Bruce McGee, and Eva Kent.”