Since Friday, she has felt changed, as if some scratchy scrim has lifted, leaving her soft and bare to the sky. For the first time, she feels equal to the task of dying.
She’s supposed to be printing certificates of commendation for the members of a high school basketball team in Grant County, but the names on the list before her won’t stay put. The tumor is an insistent pressure on the top left of her head, and when she ignores it, it nudges her gently, like a blind old cat.
Yolanda sets the list of basketball players aside. Her hands rest quietly in her lap. Above her, the light buzzes and an indistinct conversation down the hall drifts toward her.
She closes her eyes, placing herself again in the bar on Friday. The heavily lacquered tables sticky with spilled beer and barbecue sauce, the red plastic baskets, the yeasty, greasy smell of beer and fries, the man’s arms encircling her.
Why does the body continue to yearn? Even now. Friday night she’d thought the magic of that kiss was her own allure, but maybe the magic came from him. Maybe he really was a goblin with some uncanny power, maybe he kissed girls in bars all over New Mexico and planted the memory of himself in them like a magic bean.
Girl. She has to laugh. How can Yolanda, terminally ill at age fifty-five, still think of herself as a girl? Surely this is a sign of a failed personality.
That kiss made her feel profoundly sexy, sexier than she has in decades. Maybe sexier than she’s ever felt, because even if Anthony pushed her against the refrigerator, the car, the malformed trunk of the globe willow tree in the backyard, even if Yolanda found herself gutted with desire, there was always something missing. She hadn’t yet understood that she would never be enough for him.
All the men over the years. Yolanda is so tired of the vigilance, the effort: having to be always alert for romantic possibility, seeing herself through other people’s eyes, finding after the whole rigmarole of grooming and dating and seduction that she doesn’t want the person she’s won over. Yolanda won’t get what she longed for all those years—love and romance, the grand culmination, the quiet aging companionship—but what she has isn’t so bad. Her house, her bedroom, her gleaming dressing table with the pink brocade bench, the smell of Pledge and the dusty burning vacuum smell, her son and granddaughter and the baby in the living room with the television. Maybe all she ever really wanted was to be led around a dance floor and a single kiss on the side of her neck. Except that now she wants another.
At five fifteen Amadeo makes it back to the Capitol and walks down the ramp into the garage. He’s calmer now, the drink muffling the world.
He’ll sleep on the way home to avoid his mother’s disappointment. She is not the type to press him or reproach him; her shoulders will slump, and her face will be drawn, and that will be bad enough. Tonight he can apologize, promise to do better.
His mother is waiting for him, as they planned, but not at her car. As his eyes adjust to the dim, flickering fluorescence, he realizes that his mother is standing by Monica Gutierrez-Larsen’s car, and that Monica Gutierrez-Larsen is there, too, sitting on the bumper. His toolbox is on the hood, all packed up.
The two of them aren’t talking. Monica scrolls through her phone. Yolanda clutches herself, small and shamed.
For a moment he considers fleeing back up the ramp.
“Oh, mi hijito,” his mother says as he approaches, and her voice is so sad he wants to pull her into his chest to comfort her, but she’s across the parking garage and the car is between them. Monica Gutierrez-Larsen rises, and the two women watch him.
The chief clerk is now wearing sneakers with her suit. They’re lightweight and neon, expensive, and he gets a flash of her in performance gear running on trails. Her face is unsmiling, but she seems to be watching him with curiosity.
“Where have you been?” His mother’s voice is strangled. She’s shaking.
“We’ve been trying to call you,” says Monica Gutierrez-Larsen. With one finger—the nail buffed and painted a neat pale pink—she pushes his cell phone across the hood toward him an inch. “Guess you left in a hurry?”