8
Socorro stopped just as she reached the halfway mark on the bridge. After rifling through her purse, she uncovered the tollbooth receipt and read the day to make sure it said jueves, her usual day to clean his house. She was putting away the slip of paper when she noticed something move out from under the opposite side of the bridge. A Border Patrol agent in a green-and-white jeep cruised along the bank of the river and stopped alongside another agent in a jeep headed in the opposite direction. The two men rolled down their windows and talked in their idling vehicles. After a while one of them handed the other a cigarette, then a lighter. Farther down the levee an old negro, wearing camouflage fatigues but no shirt, pushed a loaded shopping cart. The basket leaned to the right with all the crushed aluminum cans and piled blankets and pillows and empty milk jugs that dangled from that side. The negro used a crutch to help him with his bad leg, but the cart’s wheels kept getting stuck in the soft dirt and he had to jiggle the entire frame back and forth, side to side, until he freed it.
She stayed gazing down at the water through the chain-link fence. The current eddied in a couple of places, then continued forward, indifferent to people on the bank or the bridge that stood in its way. The sun reflected off the river in a way that made the water appear to be not quite as green and putrid as she remembered it.
A gust of cold air washed over her as soon as she opened the glass door. A dozen or more men and women waited in the two lines. An older female officer stood behind a computer station, scanning each card. She had dark pockmarked skin and grayish hair cropped as short as the male officers’. The men and women in line looked forward, some with their heads bent and their eyes cast at the floor, as if awaiting Communion. The first woman in line wore a pink blouse, a gray cardigan frayed along the bottom, a plain black skirt, and black cushioned shoes. She carried a plastic woven bag that held her purse and her work apron, which was tucked away to one side. How long do you plan to stay? the female officer asked. Just for the day, to shop, she answered. The officer waved her on and motioned for the next person, a young woman holding an infant with tiny studded earrings, to step forward. The officer asked if the child was hers. The woman said yes, that she didn’t have anywhere to leave her while she did her shopping. But the baby was born on this side, the mother assured her. From her purse she pulled out a plastic sandwich bag that held the folded birth certificate. The officer looked at the document, then at the mother, then over at the baby, as if the child might be able to corroborate the story. The officer halfway smiled and gestured for the mother and child to continue on. By the time Socorro reached the station, a new group of women had lined up behind her. The male officer only glanced at her card before motioning for her to continue on her way, even adding, “Tenga buen día.”
She felt a stitch of worry when she walked outside and didn’t see his car. They had kept Don Celestino in the hospital a few extra days to run their tests, and this would be her first time to see him since then. She calmed herself a few minutes later when he pulled up, then rushed around the car to open the door for her. For a second there on the curb she had thought he might kiss her on the cheek, as she had done in front of the nurse, but it was something that would maybe happen only once.
“But you feel all right?” she asked when they were back on the main boulevard.
“Yes, yes, one of my girls called as I was leaving the house. I shouldn’t have answered it, that was the problem. She likes to talk. This was the youngest one, Sonia.”
“She must be worried about you.”
“Even when I told her all the results came out fine,” Don Celestino said, craning his neck to get a better look at the exchange rate outside one of the casas de cambio. “You see why I didn’t want to tell them? And now she wants to check on me every morning. Finally I told her that I had to go, that someone was waiting for me.”
“Someone.”
“Eh?” An 18-wheeler had pulled alongside them.
“Someone?” she repeated a little louder.
“She knows that you come do the cleaning on Thursdays.”
“Then you told her my name?”
“Maybe when you first started. I can’t remember now, after all this time, five or six months. But they know you used to clean the house for my neighbor and that was how you came to clean here at my house.”
“Seven,” she clarified, after they had passed the 18-wheeler.
“Okay then, seven months, so you can see it has been a long time.”
“But already more than two months since the time we got together.”
He neither acknowledged nor denied her last statement and instead let it linger along with the gas fumes that had seeped in through the crack in the window.
They had been sitting in the car at least five minutes, maybe ten. He wanted to glance over at the console, but she might ask if he was in a hurry. Fiberglass siding covered the walls on either side of the carport, starting about waist high and leaving some space for a man to walk under, if he wanted to get out that way. Parked inside the carport, he could easily make out the ceiling through the exposed rafters. The carpenters had used longer nails on the roof than necessary, and now hundreds of rusty tips pricked through the ceiling and formed what looked like a bed of nails.
“I told my mother,” she said finally.
“All of it?”
“Enough, what she needed to know — how we met and how long ago, about your business, how you are, the things you say. She was only going to protest if I told her more.”
“Then you can imagine how it would be with these girls.”
“Girls.”
“To me they will always be my girls, no matter the age.”
“I even told my brother Marcos when he called,” Socorro said. “And now he wants to meet you when he can come to visit.”
“If we still talked, I could go tell my brother.”
He glanced at the side mirror and spotted his neighbor Mrs. Harwell across the street behind her locked gate. The old lady held up the hem of her dress as if she were wading through a flood, then looked up to see how much farther she had to go.
“You never told me you had a brother.”
“You never asked.”
“Because you made it like you were the only one left, that the rest had already died. Why would I ask if I thought you had no brothers?”
She could feel the feverish sweat forming on her neck and chest again, and she tried to find some relief by pulling away from the seat back. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he had turned off the air conditioner.
“With this one, it’s almost like that. He doesn’t call me and I don’t call him, that’s how it is. How could I go tell him about us if me and him haven’t talked in years?” He glanced into the mirror, and the old lady was now staring this way as if she had witnessed a crime and was trying to commit his license plate to memory.
“Even if you didn’t tell him, you could have told me you had a brother. What would it hurt to tell me that one little thing? Why keep it from me?”
“You say it like I did it to deceive you. But there was nothing to tell you. What could I say? I have a brother, but it’s like I don’t have a brother. I have a brother, but he is like a stranger to me? I have a brother, but he would never care to know about my life or who I spend my time with?”
She could hardly listen to him anymore. What she wanted was for him to turn up the air conditioner, but at the same time she didn’t want anything from him. It was just a little misunderstanding between them. Later, things would be fine again, like always. She knew this, and yet right then all she wanted was to get far, far away from him. She moved her face up closer to the air vent and left it at that.
“I never said anything about telling him.”
“Then?”
“Just why you kept it from me, Celestino, like it was a part of your life that didn’t concern me.”
He tried to brush a strand of hair from her face, but she leaned away from him. Even upset, she looked more attractive than he had imagined her this morning when he was hurrying to get to the bridge.
“Why would you care about some old man you have never seen?”
“Your brother.”
“Yes, all right, my brother, so now you know.”
“Yes, now I know,” she said, but somehow he had the feeling they weren’t talking about the same thing.