THIRTY
Jimmy whipped away the cover—like a magician!—On the last car in the garage. It was a snow white 1969 Chrysler 400 convertible with white leather interior, with three-foot fin s and what the lowriders called monster whitewalls, though his mother certainly never called them that.
It was her last car and Jimmy rode with the top down and good music on the radio over to Hollywood and then down to the 10 past Parker Center and Union Station, the sky still full on blue, and holding, in daylight, the diminishing moon.
Some days people are happy. There wasn’t any explaining it but today people were happy. They waved at the sight of the huge white car, big as a boat. Jimmy wore a light green jacket that looked like ’69, like a college man in ’69, and they were happy with him, too.
He waved back.
The traffic broke open, as it always did, just past San Bernardino, the long hill up to the wide-place-in-the-road town called Beaumont. Jimmy stopped for a Coke at a drive-in. He always stopped at the same place. It was usually only twice a month but the high school girl there knew him and the Mexican boys who did the cooking knew the car.
He sat on the red-enameled picnic bench out front. It was over a hundred and yet there was snow on the mountains behind them.
California.
The desert road, Highway 62, curved away from the Interstate just past Palm Springs, four-lane but wide open, the exit curving and canted so perfectly that at high speed it was like banking in a plane. Ahead, a pass through the mountains, into the high desert, through valleys named for Indians and spiked trees, past copper-colored hills and the Marine base.
Teresa Miles sat in the sun in a wooden chair being read to by a nurse who looked up and smiled as Jimmy walked across the grass toward them. The rest home—now they called it Extended Care—was very private and very pretty, three low adobe-style buildings the same color as the desert mountains around them. There was an oasis in the center of it, a few palms around a pond. It was restful. It was constant.
It was the kind of place that could keep a secret.
The nurse bent over and told Teresa Miles her son was there. She had her eyes closed. Her expression didn’t change.
It would be polite to say that the movie star still had the same magic in her skin, in the bones of her famous face, but it was gone, or almost gone. She was very white and her skin seemed much too thin, almost like the shell of an insect when the shell is left behind.
Like a woman who when her only son dies, steps off the roof of a hotel above Sunset, and she is left behind.
The nurse walked away.
Jimmy bent over and kissed his mother.
“I saw a coyote with two pups,” he said.
She opened her eyes but her expression didn’t change.
Jimmy sat on the grass next to her chair. A hawk turned circles in the sky over the oasis and then, just as he was noticing the grace of it, dropped onto something unseen in the brush.
He took the perfume bottle from his pocket.
“I brought you something,” he said.
Her hands were in her lap. He put the bottle in her hand. Her fingers tightened around it. Jimmy uncapped it. He touched the glass stopper to her cheek and, under the expanse of our sky, a little more life came back to her eyes.