He looked at his watch again. Something hit at his line but he ignored it.
He expected his son to understand but he didn’t know and he’d soon find out. Not a damn thing wrong with it. Liza had passed and Russell was gone and a silence had fallen over the place that kept him awake at night and the woman had put an end to that silence. He looked at the house and Consuela walked toward him. She carried a basket and her wide hips swayed and he admired the shine of her black hair even from far away. She approached and sat down in the lawn chair beside him, stretching out her legs and crossing her bare feet. In the basket were purple hull peas and she began to snap and shell them. He had arrived at a point in his life when he could more clearly imagine the end than remember the past and it didn’t matter where she came from because there wasn’t a goddamn thing wrong with it. He smiled at her and she smiled back.
He heard the Ford when it turned into the driveway. He couldn’t see the highway from the pond with the gravel road going up and then down between the highway and the house but he knew the sound from twentysomething years of driving it. From twentysomething years of fixing it. He watched the road and then the truck appeared and eased along the gravel. The truck had been so much a part of his life for so long that for a moment he felt as if he were watching himself drive toward the house. He smiled to himself and then the line hit again and he reeled in a big one. But he didn’t want to mess with it right now and there was plenty more time and plenty more fish so he unhooked the fish and put it back and then he sat down in the chair. He set the rod and reel on the ground and he crossed his legs and waited on his son to get out of the truck and walk on over.
I made it, he thought. It finally come on.
The house was a modest one-story that Russell had helped his father paint the year before the wreck. It sat at the front of twelve acres that was wooded with patches of pines and oaks that had become less dense over the years with each passing hurricane or tornado. There had once been cows and a few horses and a couple of acres of corn but Mitchell had given all that up after Liza died. He’d sold everything but the tractor he used to bush hog and the two-man boat he used to sit in out in the middle of the pond when the sun was low and the sky was lavender and there was that particular kind of loneliness that came with a fading day. The small pond was a hundred yards behind the house and had been stocked with catfish when Russell was a kid and had spent summers sitting on the same bank that Mitchell sat on now, drinking orange sodas and eating oatmeal pies. And now there was a new roof and a different porch swing and he wondered how much of this Russell would notice.
He watched his boy stroll along, looking around at the house and the shed and the barn and out toward the pond as if it were the first time he had seen the place. Russell had always been tall and thin but Mitchell noticed that his shirt hung on him as if it had been borrowed from an older brother. Russell walked along the worn path between the house and pond and when he was halfway Mitchell stood. Russell came across the pond bank and said how you doing old man and the old man grinned with his lips held tight to keep it from getting away from him and he gave Russell a solid handshake as if he’d just sold him a calf. Then Russell looked at the darkhaired woman who looked back at him with brown eyes.
“This here is Consuela,” Mitchell said. Russell nodded to her.
“Es mi hijo,” Mitchell said and he waved his hand toward Russell.
“Yo se,” she said.
Russell looked at his father as if he were an impostor. His father scanned him from head to toe. “You look all right,” he said.
“I feel all right.”
The woman dropped the peas into a pail. Russell pointed at her.
“That’s Consuela.”
“You said that.”
“She helps out some. Come on and sit down.”
They sat down in the chairs and Mitchell opened the cooler and took out Cokes for both of them and he set the halfpint in his lap. He handed Russell the can.
“Nice day,” Russell said.
“Hot, though,” his father answered.
They sipped their Cokes and stared across the pond. Not speaking for several minutes with the years having separated them from the things they used to talk about. Things like the rental houses that Mitchell owned or the cows that he bought and sold or the dinner Russell’s mother had just made. The dropped peas tapping the bottom of the pail was the only sound.
“She speak any English?” Russell asked.
“Sí,” she said.
“She picks it up here and there.”
“You too, sounds like.”
“Got to, I reckon.”
“I reckon,” Russell said and he grinned. “You’re a sly damn dog.”
“What you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“It ain’t like that.”
“Where does she live?”
Mitchell didn’t answer. Sipped at his Coke.
“You’re a dog,” Russell said.
“She lives in your old room out there over the barn.”
“I bet.”