“You sure you don’t want coffee?” Murphy asked. “I just got a new batch of Ethiopian.”
“Is this your family?” I said, raising my chin toward the framed photo of a blonde woman and a blue-eyed kid with their arms around each other. I was trying to shame Murphy a little bit, point out that a sixty-some-year-old married guy shouldn’t be acting like this.
“Yes, that’s my son. And that’s my sister,” he said. “My ex moved to Seattle four years ago, so my sister is helping me raise him.”
Well. I stuffed my hands in my pocket, did a little math in my head. “He looks about the same age as my son,” I said, careful to leave the surprise out of my voice.
“How old is yours?”
“He just turned thirteen. He’s in the seventh grade.”
“What school?”
“La Contenta. Yours?”
“Same.” He looked me in the eye for the first time, and smiled. He had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, a bit on the long side, but combed back neatly behind his ears. “Maybe they know each other,” he said.
“I doubt it.” Miles hadn’t made any friends; that was part of why he resented us for moving out here. “It’s a big school.”
“That it is,” he said. “Does your son like baseball? We have a standing game on Saturdays in the community park. He’d be welcome anytime.”
“Oh,” I said, a little taken aback. I had tried to strike up a conversation with the moms at Miles’s school, and they’d seemed friendly enough, but their interest had cooled when they found out I couldn’t chaperone the seventh-grade field trip or volunteer at the spring book fair or cover a table at the fundraising picnic. Several of them were stay-at-home moms and the rest had nine-to-five jobs, so they could arrange these activities around their schedules. But I couldn’t, not with my line of work. When I suggested Ray could take my place, they looked baffled. Why would a man want to do the bake sale? Of course, they didn’t come out and say it like that; they just went ahead and did the bake sale without telling him about it. “Thanks, Murphy. I’ll tell Miles about the game.”
“Okay. And I’ll let you know if we find anything more on that paint. Sometimes it takes them a few days to narrow it down to a specific model.”
Leaving Murphy’s office that morning, I took the long way back to my desk. I didn’t want to run into the sergeant and have him ask me for an update unless I had something solid to give him. All I had were three paint chips, one of which the forensics lab in San Bernardino had already dissolved into gas. Nothing more than thin air.
Jeremy
It was a pretty little house with two Adirondack chairs out front, a wind chime hanging from the eaves, and a wooden rail fence surrounding the yard. Fierro used to call it The Ranch. Time to go back to The Ranch, he’d say when we went bowling. He’d make it sound like he was sorry to have to go so soon, even though his eyes smiled with anticipation at being with his new wife, in their new house. In the driveway now was a silver Mustang coupe, every inch of it smashed, dented, or scratched. A side mirror sat in a pool of shattered glass, reflecting the moonlight. The name FIERRO had been recently peeled off the mailbox, leaving its ghost outlined in gray tracks. I walked up the little concrete path and knocked on the front door.
From the other side came the sound of someone flipping up the peephole, looking, hesitating. Finally, the door opened. “What’re you doing here?” Mary asked. Under her red hair, her eyes were red. She was in a white tank top that showed the tattoo on her upper arm. Death before dishonor. She’d gotten it as a welcome-home surprise for Fierro, a celebration of his Bronze Star, but he’d hated it. Asked her why she’d ruin her beautiful skin like that.
“You okay?”
“No, I’m not okay.” Her voice cut like glass.
“Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”
“He scared the shit out of me, trashed my car, and the whole time he was laughing about it. He couldn’t even let me have this one thing, this one little thing. Fucking asshole.”
I’d never heard her curse. She was one of those girls who said fudge and shoot and darnit, and whenever anyone around her cussed, she’d blush for them. Fierro had been so charmed by this, he’d proposed to her on the last day of his second R&R. Wait until you get back, Sergeant Fletcher told him when he heard about it, don’t make the same mistake I did. But Fierro wouldn’t listen, he was crazy about her. She was nineteen, enrolled in cosmetology school, dreaming of working on a Hollywood set someday. This is the girl I’m gonna marry, he said. And he did.
“I’m sorry, Mary.” I was trying to think of a graceful way to ask her to drop her complaint, see if she could accept some kind of payment for the car, but when I touched her arm, she pulled back from me with fear in her eyes. I was startled, and took a step back from the threshold myself. Something about the way she looked at me made me feel tainted, as if Fierro’s crime said something about me, too. But just because we’d been in the Marines together didn’t mean we were the same. Whatever troubled Fierro had started long before he’d gone to war. Surely she knew that. Still, the look in her eyes stopped me from bringing this up. “Listen,” I said after a minute. “Change the locks.”
“Yeah, I know. Locksmith left an hour ago.”
“And get a dog.”
“That’s it? That’s your advice? Why don’t you tell him to leave me the hell alone? If you really wanted to help, that’s what you’d do. Keep him away from me.”
“I already told him this, Mary. He wouldn’t listen.” Again, I felt the heat of her rage. I saw how badly I had miscalculated, coming here to try to fix things. I was only making them worse.
A gust of dry wind blew across the street and a piece of glass fell from a window of the Mustang and crashed on the driveway. Mary glanced at it, then fixed her green eyes on me again. “You know, if someone had told me five years ago that you’d be the one with a steady job and going to college, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
I wanted to tell her that I wouldn’t have believed it, either. Five years ago, Fierro had landed a job in security at the Indian casino in Morongo, while I had to get by on roofing work whenever I could find it. Five years ago, I’d gotten so drunk at their wedding that I’d thrown up in the water fountain where rose petals had been set to float. Five years ago, I couldn’t have put a name to the bridesmaid I woke up with the next day at the Travelodge, her blond hair a tangle of ornate pins and glitter against my chest. I lost a year, maybe a year and a half, like that, just drifting, trying to fill the hole in me that I thought the war had left, until I realized it was the same hole I had gone into the Marines to fill in the first place. I was living with my sister at the time, and she kept telling me to go to church and stop drinking so much. Promise me, she begged, promise me. I’d kept half of that promise. Some weeks later, I was driving back from a roofing job when I noticed a billboard advertisement for the police academy in San Bernardino.
Maybe that feeling of being out of place would eventually clear up for Fierro, just as it had for me. But he needed to work at it. “He can get better,” I said.
“Yeah, well. Good luck with that. I tried. I’m done trying.”
And with this, she pushed the door closed.
Nora
In my memory, the cafeteria at Yucca Mesa Elementary was immense, but that evening it seemed small and cramped. This was an illusion, of course, because the cafeteria hadn’t changed; I had. Folding chairs had been set up in a dozen neat rows, but nearly half the seats were already taken, and sweaters and scarves marked the spaces that were being saved. In the center aisle, an old man in a Dodgers cap was mounting his camera on a tripod. I followed my mother down to the front row, where Salma sat alone, staring at her cell phone. We kissed each other on the cheeks. “Where’s Tareq?” my mother asked Salma.
“Emergency tooth repair.”