I thought about Lore’s direct stares and intrusive questions, feeling unfaithful to Duke at the memory of all I’d revealed to her about my family, things I hadn’t told him in our five years together. Lore was going to extract payment for her stories, and already I knew—I would never refuse.
“Charming,” I said finally. “But not in a superficial way. More like because she doesn’t seem to care whether you like her or not.”
“Huh,” Duke said. “Sounds like someone else I know.”
“Me?” I laughed, though my initial pleasure quickly turned to sadness. “I’m not like that at all.”
“Whatever you say,” Duke said, a smile in his voice. “Hey, I’ve got to start the meat. Be safe, okay? And call me later.”
I packed my laptop bag and checked my bank balance. Goddamn it. My credit card auto-payment had gone through, and I was about to dip into overdraft, which made my chest tighten no matter how many times it happened. Unexpectedly, I found a loose twenty in my bag, enough to pick up coffee and breakfast tacos from Stripes, which Lore had said were her favorite. I’d smiled politely. Gas station tacos? God help us. At least they were cheap.
But the barbacoa and chorizo con huevo were simple and flavorful, the tortillas thin with a delicate dusting of flour. We ate on the back patio, where Lore’s gardening gloves rested on the table, dark and fragrant with soil, while her black Lab pretended not to be intensely interested in what we were eating.
Crusoe. She’d named her dog Crusoe, after Andres’s nickname for her. So many years later, Lore still wanted the reminder of Andres. This told me she’d loved him.
“Lore, have you had other relationships since”—I chose my wording carefully—“Andres died?”
Lore offered Crusoe the last several bites of barbacoa, which he ate gently from her hand. “No.”
“Not one?”
“Not one.”
“What about sex?”
Lore gazed at the bougainvillea that poured over the back fence. Her profile was somber, her face shaded as though with a widow’s veil. “Not that, either.”
Thirty years, alone. “Why?”
“I was greedy. I had the love of two good men at once. And it destroyed them both.”
Something nagged at me. Inside, Lore’s house was orderly and minimal, with its white walls and placid gold-framed watercolors. But the front yard had those barely tamed English roses, and back here, glossy-leaved climbers covered the fence, palms sweeping like women’s skirts in the breeze. Lipstick-pink bougainvillea and what Lore told me were oxblood lilies, Mexican mint marigolds, and petunias surrounded a small, fenced-in veggie garden. The house and the yards seemed to belong to two different people.
“So now you’re, what? Punishing yourself?” I asked.
Lore folded her greasy foil into a neat triangle. “Not punishing. Evening the scales, maybe. How many men have you loved?”
And so the morning went, the two of us like the calmest, most precise butchers, applying our blades with just enough pressure to separate flesh from bone. After a while, I could predict when Lore would ask me a question—always right after she revealed something particularly private or painful about herself. After she told me about feeling like she was erasing—almost killing—her family in her phone calls with Andres, she asked how I would most like to die. I was surprised to have an answer ready: any way but how my mother went, here one moment and gone the next, her body scooped out and hollow.
“What about you?” I asked.
“Motorcycle crash,” Lore said, no hesitation.
After a slapdash lunch of Oscar Meyer turkey sandwiches, Lore said, “Let’s go for a drive. You should see the places you’re going to write about.”
Her voice was almost scolding, as if I should have suggested it myself, which I would have, if she’d given me the chance.
“And DF.” She turned left on McPherson Road, then swore in Spanish as a car with Tamaulipas plates cut in front of us. “Do you plan to go there? What about learning Spanish?”
Lore’s reference to Mexico City as “DF” still caught me off guard—I’d had to Google it yesterday. Now, I almost laughed. An international trip? A language course? I’d be lucky if my card wasn’t declined at the gas pump on my way home. And why would I need to learn Spanish if I was going to write the book in English? But Lore was giving me dubious sidelong glances, as if suddenly questioning her decision to work with me.
“Yes,” I said. “Definitely. Eventually.”
“Are you going to write the book as me or as you?” she continued.
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
She gestured out the windshield. We were leaving behind the FINANCED BY and OPENING SOON signs, the digital billboards for plastic surgery—Dream it, Achieve it!—the strip malls that looked like movie sets, a diminutive French Quarter and Times Square, places trying to be other places. A few miles south, the homes were older, with burglar bars, well maintained, the dry grass trimmed, vehicles tucked into carports with tin roofs. A little farther and all the signage was in Spanish. Brick buildings cracked, fissures snaking through homes and businesses as if an earthquake had juddered the foundations. Only a few miles separated Lore’s country-club-adjacent home from leaning chain-link fences, El Bufalo Pawn, back seats of cars propped on peeling front porches. The income disparity was staggering.
“This is my city,” she said. “My home. When you write it, is it going to feel like my home, or like some place you came to see for a weekend?”
I was an outsider, Lore meant. Sometimes, though, it takes an outsider to see things clearly. To tell the truth.
“Honestly?” I said. “Probably both.”
Lore grunted.
“Why did you stay here, after?” I asked. “Why didn’t you start fresh somewhere else?”
“We were in the worst recession to hit Laredo in God knows how long,” she said. “Our house would have sold for pennies on the dollar, if it sold at all. Besides, the cuates were starting their junior year. All their friends were here. How could I take away the one stable thing left in their lives?”
It was one of those strange contradictions that drew me to this story, to Lore: love and duty had kept her in Laredo, but they had not kept her from leading her double life. How did she decide between right and wrong? When to sacrifice and when to claim what she desired, no matter the cost?
Lore slowed as we drove through El Azteca, her childhood neighborhood. I looked out the window at Spanish colonials with yellowed stucco walls and missing clay shingles; tiny Pueblo-style homes the same color as their dirt front yards; two-story neoclassicals with white columns and rusting burglar bars, probably installed midway through the area’s decline.
“The Spanish were the first to settle here,” Lore said, gesturing. “Only a few families, sometime in the 1700s. It was a part of ‘New Spain’ at that point. Then Mexico won its independence from Spain, and Texas from Mexico, before it became annexed to the United States. That’s when the river became a border. It used to be just a river.”
I nodded, though Lore’s swift tour of history only made me aware of how much I needed to learn.
Eventually, Lore parked in front of a small, weathered white clapboard house on a narrow street cluttered with twenty-year-old cars. “The house was left to all of us when Mami died,” she said. “My sister, Marta, and I alternate cleaning it once a week, and my brothers rotate yard duty. Eventually, if none of the grandchildren want to live here—which they won’t—we’ll make the repairs and sell it, but for now . . .” She shrugged. “We can’t bear to see it go.”
We climbed out of the car, and I followed Lore beyond the house to a weed-choked creek hardly more than a drainage ditch. When Lore was a kid, she said, there were a few spots where small waterfalls formed. She and her siblings used to play here for hours, returning home with their skin layered in salt and silt, clothes and shoes covered in burrs.