An hour later, they were among the beaded curtains and half-blinded strands of Christmas lights inside Café Magnolia. They sat at opposite sides of the same wonky laminate table—with its chipped, beatific face of Our Lady of Guadalupe—which they’d claimed as their favorite fifteen years before. The same woman, Ana Maria, brought Charlie his huevos rancheros and tortilla soup. Eve could see Charlie’s face relaxing, as if his smug, urbane mien were bound up by a series of internal ties, undone by the invisible fingers of chipotle spice and fatty queso that fluttered through Café Magnolia.
As Eve carefully shelled her boiled eggs and Charlie bolted his beans and tortillas, Charlie attempted to scandalize his mother with some of his New York tales. The boys he had dated. Terrance, Christopher, Bradley—on and on. Charlie was putting on a real show of his New York self, come alive once the cloistered dimness of Café Magnolia eliminated the desert outside, restoring him to a Brooklyn atmosphere. At one point, Charlie actually told Eve, “That boy has a body like forked lightning.” Eve couldn’t decide if Charlie was telling her these things to make a point, to try to squeeze a few vindicating drops of conservative disapproval from a mother who in truth had always enjoyed an outsider’s pride at having a son whose unorthodox romantic inclinations she’d never once questioned. Or was this only the way he now told his stories to people he liked? She tracked his eyes, looking for the answer, but they were turned up and away, as he held forth into the mid-distance, as if his stories took place only in his mind (a mother could hope).
Eve was trying now to do the thing she knew a mother ought to do to a child’s reports of his adult life. She tried to nod along encouragingly; she tried to remind herself of the perfectly rational conclusion she had come to over the years, that Charlie had no choice but to leave and make a life for himself away from the traumas of his late childhood. And yet, that insecure girl Eve still carried inside her wouldn’t be persuaded. That needy teen even still worked the gears and pulleys of Eve’s heart, manufacturing her own conclusions: that it was not the Big Bend that Charlie had needed to flee. Like Jed and Eve’s own father, it was just Eve herself who Charlie had wanted to escape.
“Well, that’s enough salaciousness for me,” Eve said.
Charlie’s face fell, as if, chastened, he might actually be ashamed. “There’s something I haven’t told you yet,” he said.
“All right.”
“It’s not the hugest deal. Promise you won’t make a huge deal about this, okay?”
“Tell me what it is first.” Eve was feeling suddenly afraid.
“The thing is just that I need to borrow some money.”
“Money?”
“The green stuff? With the presidents on it?”
“You need to borrow money for what?”
Charlie made his furniture-hefting sigh. “You have to know that things haven’t been going so well. With the writing, I mean.”
“And money figures into this how exactly?”
“I’m behind on rent. A few months. I owe some money, Ma. That’s it. That’s my whole story. So help me God.”
Eve glanced at his arm in the cast, his lower lip, still as thick as a gherkin. She held a hand to her face. “You owe money to who?”
“Don’t freak out. It’s not even so much. It’s only five thousand. Nothing next to what I’ll get when I finish.”
“Five thousand. Are you insane? I mean it, Charlie. I think you must be mentally ill to be asking me for five thousand dollars right now. Do you think I choose to drive that car? That I choose to live in that house?”
“All right.”
“I’m sorry, but no. No! Why should I finance something I never wanted you to do in the first place?”
Charlie considered the plaster on his wrist and tucked his arm away, like an embarrassment.
“I don’t know, Ma. Maybe you’d do it to support your son.”
Honestly, she couldn’t help pitying the boy a little, but Eve had thought and thought about it; she had even listened patiently to Charlie’s many caffeinated diatribes about his “work,” but all she had ever been able to register was the troubling possibility that Charlie had taken after the worst of his father, making of New York City his own profitless cabin. And she could locate no explainable reason for Charlie’s project other than the obvious and appalling fact of his use of their family tragedy to kick-start a career.
“Typically,” Eve told Charlie, “in financial negotiations, you don’t berate the lender. Anyway, I don’t have it. Even if I could, what, enable you, I don’t have it. How about you ask your father for once?”
“Don’t be cruel.”
“I’m being realistic.”
“Yeah, right. Like Pa would have the cash. It’s a wonder he can keep himself fed.” Charlie’s face went a little purple. Pa: the first time he had said the word to his mother, possibly in years. “And, anyway,” Charlie said, surprising her by grabbing her hand, “I’d never turn to the dark side, no matter how much dough Darth Vader offered me.”
“He’s not Darth Vader, Charlie. He’s just a sad little man who can’t help himself.”
“So now it’s Pa you are suddenly standing up for?”
“No,” Eve said. “It’s not.”
As chance would have it, Eve did have the money. According to her last statement from West Texas Savings and Loan, her account contained $7,817, and she had another fifteen hundred headed her way, five hundred from the governor’s fund, a thousand if she could only make her eyes focus on the absurdist parables of Jesus Is My BFF, in which the savior offered advice to the teenager contemplating an offered joint, a sweating can of beer, a racy post on social media. But Eve possessed other numbers, too, which she had so often felt for, like scabs. More than five years was how long Charlie had been gone. Nine times was how many times he had phoned her in the last twelve months. Nearly two thousand now: that was how many times she had visited Crockett State in Charlie’s absence.
The next meeting with Margot Strout was scheduled for nine that morning, and by the time they left the café, Eve was horrified to find it was already 8:50. Outside, in the gathering heat, Goliath hacked and grunted, like a drifter prodded awake with a bully club. Eve was wondering if she should have told Jed about this meeting; she was more than a little furious at him for seeming to have no discernible interest in the aftermath of the wonderful thing he had witnessed with her. Out the windows, the dross chaparral and prickly pear studded the flat all the way to the end of the planet.
After a tetchy, silent twenty minutes, Charlie began to slither around in the passenger seat, contorting himself to reach for the phone vibrating in his pocket. He extracted it, looked at whatever flashed into its screen in the way he once looked, as a child, at a juice glass he had dropped and shattered. “What?” Eve asked, “Who is it?” In a trembling hand, Charlie turned its glowing face toward her, the name written in bright Arial font.
“Rebekkah Sterling?” Eve said. “Rebekkah Sterling is calling you now?” Charlie considered the phone for a moment, but the name vanished, the screen gone black. He shook the thing, as if it had malfunctioned.
“I guess she must have heard the news?” he said, as if to himself.
“How does she even have your number? You and Rebekkah are in touch?”