“How is Luis? Is he married?” This was how I pictured everyone I knew from high school who’d stayed in Albuquerque: living in a prefab house in one of the new West Mesa suburbs, with a brood of children playing on a swing set stuck crookedly into the rock lawn. It was unfair to generalize, but on the other hand, it was generally true.
Francie threw me a sideways look. “Luis? No. I don’t think he’ll ever settle down.”
I wondered what not settling down implied about someone who’d lived in the same town, surrounded by his entire family, for his entire life.
“Listen, honey, your mom’s waiting for you with her friend, so I’ll let you go.” She kissed me on the cheek and left.
I went behind the counter to my mother’s office, asking myself what Francie meant by “friend.” Then, in the moment before she stood up, I saw her blush and knew the answer.
“Lynnie,” she said, “you remember David Michaelson.”
The burly man turned and smiled at me under his mustache. He was wearing a navy-blue suit whose jacket sported Western piping and pockets. He also had on cowboy boots, and it was the boots, for some reason, I remembered first. Before my father died we used to live next door to the Michaelsons. Their two boys, younger than Wylie and me, were sports stars of some kind.
“Hello,” I said, shaking his large hand.
“I invited David to lunch.”
“Good. Great,” I said.
“New Mexican okay?”
“Excellent,” I said, smiling hard.
We left the refrigerated offices and headed down the street to a restaurant, surrounded by the heat and noise of the traffic. Behind me, the thick heels of David Michaelson’s cowboy boots made knocking sounds against the pavement, and I could hear him whistling under his breath, a sprightly, unidentifiable tune. I wondered if the real reason my mother wanted me to come home was to reintroduce me to David Michaelson. I wondered what had happened to his wife and his athletic children.
Inside, we sat quietly as our drinks were served. I’d ordered a frozen margarita, my mother an iced tea. David Michaelson sat back in his chair and took a large slurp of Coke, crunching the ice in his mouth. He was heavier than I remembered; his stomach strained against his light-blue, snap-button shirt and bulged over a square brass belt buckle that was practically the size of my head. With the belt and the mustache and the chest he reminded me of some early, imperious monarch: Henry VIII of the Wild West.
I took another long sip of my drink. “So you’re a lawyer, right?” I said.
“Yes, that’s right,” he said.
My mother smiled at me.
“What kind of law do you practice?”
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that,” he said with a shrug. “Corporate, mostly, but whatever I can get my hands on. A client’s a client, that’s what I like to say.”
“We weren’t sure if you’d remember David,” my mother said.
“Of course I do.”
Silence fell. I didn’t know what to say about the wife and the athletic children. The waitress brought a basket of chips to the table. Half my margarita was already gone.
“What about Wylie?” my mother said. “Did you find him yet?”
“I went to his place, but he wasn’t there.”
“I don’t like this,” my mother said.
David Michaelson reached over and rubbed her arm, his expression at once sensitive and plastic. I remembered the boys’ names, Donny and Darren, and their sport, hockey. Throughout the arid winters they’d get up at five in the morning and trundle out to the car, lugging enormous duffel bags with their pads and sticks and helmets, as if they were traveling to some distant part of the country, where such materials would be required.
“David thinks we should consider an intervention,” my mother said.
“I thought that was for alcoholics and drug addicts.”
“It’s for anyone in trouble,” he said, then picked up a chip and snapped it cleanly between his teeth. “And your mother seems to think that Wylie’s in trouble.”
“He doesn’t eat, he quit his classes, he lives with nothing— you should see his apartment, Lynnie.”
“I saw it.”
“I thought you said he wasn’t there.”
“Some guy was,” I said as the waitress arrived, balancing plates of enchiladas on a manhole-sized platter. I shoveled some food into my mouth and burned my mouth on the cheese, then gulped down the rest of my margarita in an attempt to ease the pain. The result was horrible, like an enchilada Popsicle, a bad idea for a food item if ever there was one. The waitress asked if I wanted another drink, and I nodded gratefully.
David Michaelson took a long, prissy drink of Coke.
“You should drink some water with that, Lynn,” my mother said. “Or else you’ll get dehydrated.”
“I’ll be fine, Mom.”
“You’ll thank me later if you drink a glass of water right now. You’ve forgotten how dry this climate really is.”
“I know, Mom.”
“Just drink some water to appease me.”
I rolled my eyes and drained half a glass.
“Who was there — that Angus person?”
When I nodded, she leaned forward, ignoring her food. “He’s the person I hold responsible.” Anger lent her eyes a sharp, even light. “You should hear how Wylie talks about him. Or used to talk. He’s changed since he got involved with that whole group.”
“What group?” I said. “Changed how?”
“Wylie used to be. . well, you know how he was,” she said. She began to fiddle with her food, teasing the sauce with her fork. “He had his ideas about the way things should be run, of course. But he was a good boy. I know that sounds like a motherly thing to say. But.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “That he isn’t a good boy anymore? What are you talking about, exactly? Has he turned to a life of crime?”
“You know what she means,” David Michaelson said in an ingratiating tone.
“No,” I told him, “I really don’t. He might not have the loveliest apartment or be going to law school, but besides that I’m not sure I see what’s so wrong with his life.” I started in on the second margarita.
My mother glanced down, wielding her knife and fork as if she were about to commence a delicate surgery; and then the muscles in her face contracted, bringing all her wrinkles into relief, the bones of her face growing prominent beneath her skin. She looked sad and fragile and old. “I wish he’d call me,” she finally said, and took a bite of refried beans.
After lunch I once again shook David Michaelson’s hand.
“Enjoy your visit here, Lynn,” he said, leaning, it seemed to me, on the word “visit.” I swallowed, with some effort, and thanked him. My mother squeezed my hand.
At a red light, the driver next to me sat lovingly picking his nose. The desert dropped away from the highway in pale brown layers, thin shrubs of cactus dotting the ground, dim blue mesas sleeping at the edge of the horizon. The world looked scorched and brittle in the glare of the afternoon sun. As the cars in front of me inched forward, I read from bumper to bumper. WICCANS HAVE MORE FUN, one sticker claimed; I also learned that GUN CONTROL MEANS HITTING YOUR TARGET and IT’S A DESERT, STUPID! I turned on the radio, listened to the weather forecast — hot and sunny and dry for the next week, for all weeks, for the indefinite future — and asked myself where the hell Wylie was.
I parked the Caprice in my mother’s driveway. Without her in it, the condo had the vaguely liberated air of childhood days when I’d stayed home sick from school. Aside from the tchotchkes on the mantelpiece, my mother had mostly stored away the things from our old house, and I wondered what she’d done with it all. Not just the furniture or my father’s books and clothes, but the smaller items: his diploma, say, or the Nambe dish he kept spare change in, and which I always stole from, and which he knew and tolerated. Other knickknacks also had been dispensed with: candlesticks and planters, the flower-shaped clock, even art that used to hang on walls. There was a kind of ruthlessness to her decorating scheme, as if she’d turned her life into a hotel room. But she couldn’t have gotten rid of everything.