She leaned against the table and let herself cry.
The next morning, someone at the hotel took her to the First Interstate Bank and waited while she set up an account. Later, she walked in her sandals to the Fashion Show Mall, which appeared much closer than it was. At Bullock’s, Honorata stood and looked at the mannequins wearing low-cut metallic dresses and long blond wigs, then bought two pairs of pants, three blouses, and flat leather shoes. She found a travel agent in the mall, and booked a ticket. The agent had to call the bank, because she had only temporary checks.
Jimbo phoned on Thursday. The hotel operator asked her permission to put the call through. She trembled but said yes. She would not have been able to say no. Also, Jimbo knew her uncle. Her uncle was with her mother.
“Rita. Thank you for answering.”
“My name’s Honorata.”
“Honorata. I’m sorry. I thought you’d like Rita.”
She was silent.
“I’d like to see you. I don’t want it to be like this. Could we have dinner?”
She didn’t want to have dinner. She wanted him to go away, and she wanted to imagine that he had never existed. But she said, “Okay.”
“I’m staying at Caesars. There’s a beautiful restaurant here. I could send a car. At seven?”
She wanted to say that she would get there herself. But even these words would not come out of her mouth.
“Yes,” she said finally.
Jimbo wanted to get married.
“I always wanted to get married, Honorata. We got started badly. Your uncle . . . your uncle cheated us both. But I’d like to start over. Please.”
When he spoke, she was afraid. Her lungs swelled as if they would burst from her chest, and yet she felt as if she couldn’t get enough air. She struggled to speak.
“I don’t want to marry you.”
The room swayed around her, and everything looked blurry. It was a physical effort to say this. To resist. Her heart beat frantically.
“I understand. I’m older than you. I’m not very good looking. But I’m a kind man. I want a family. We could have a family.”
Honorata closed her eyes because she did not want to look at him.
“I don’t want a family.”
“But you said—”
“I didn’t write those letters. I didn’t say anything. I don’t want a family. I want to go home. I want to see my mother.”
It was easier now. Now that she had started. She didn’t have to do what he wanted. She didn’t have to please him.
“You should go home and see your mother. Then come back. There are so many opportunities in the United States. It would be easier for you to stay if we were married. You could bring your mother here.”
“I want to go home.”
“Of course you can go home. I can make the arrangements tonight. But after, please, Honorata, please give me another chance.”
He looked stricken. Honorata didn’t know how he could be saying these things. They frightened her. She wanted to forget the months in Jimbo’s home, the sound of him opening the door to her room, the squeak of the bedframe as he climbed in. She remembered his hands, slippery on her back in the bath. She heard his steady snoring, asleep beside her. The gap between the shutter and the sill would slowly lighten, from deep gray to silver to white, and he would get up, or take her one more time and then get up. How could he imagine this meant something to her? How had she endured it?
“I love you, Honorata.”
She looked straight at him, but in her mind she was thinking of the woman in the casino, of June, in her pink jacket and high ivory heels.
“I never want to see you again.”
He stared at the ornate candlestick on the table, and she slowly removed the ring from her finger. Her voice trembled.
“If you contact me, I’ll . . .” She didn’t know what she would do. “I’ll call the El Capitan.”
She said this, and the floor did not crack open, the ceiling did not fall, he did not stand and strike her. He looked at his plate, and he fingered the leather folder that held the bill, and it was possible that his eyes were wet. Honorata didn’t know, she couldn’t look, she could hardly breathe. She had said what she wanted to say, and she got up fast, leaving the ring beside the plate, afraid to hand it to him. Then she walked as quickly as she could across the great glittering room; she wouldn’t be able to say it again, she had never said something like that before in her life. Would he rise up, would she take it back, would the planet stop spinning? She, Honorata, had dared to resist.
19
Coral had been teaching for four years, so she both was and was not surprised at the letter. It arrived in July, and explained that the district would be adding portables to her school, and that she would now be teaching music in portable number five. The unit was undergoing renovation, but all expectations were that it would be ready for occupation a week before school started.
She called the district and tried to get someone to tell her a little more. She was pleased to hear it would be large—larger than the music room that had doubled as a stage in the cafeteria—but sorry to hear that it had been built “thirty, well, at least thirty” years ago. She asked about air-conditioning, and from the careful way the woman answered, she gathered that the unit had a swamp cooler, which “works really well in our desert environment.”
Whatever.
Still, she was unnerved when she saw the unit. There were six portables, and number five was set down right where the kids played hopscotch, four-square, and cat and mouse. The top of the hopscotch frame—a rectangle with the word Home—angled out from the bottom of the unit, giving one the slight sense that the portable, like Dorothy’s house, had fallen from the sky. It was a dirty beige color, with dents in the aluminum sides, and a rickety-looking set of stairs leading to a pressboard door that was also painted beige. The whole unlikely heap appeared as if it had been dumped in a vat of dun paint; there wasn’t a pipe or a hinge or a fitting that was not the same drab color.
That night, Coral met her friend Paul and some of his buddies for a drink at the Elephant Bar. The place was loud, and Coral tried to avoid the glass eyes of the gazelle head mounted on the wall near her. Paul’s college friend Koji was in from Tokyo—he was going to be doing some work in Vegas—and the guys were in high spirits. Coral told them about the beige portable, and though she meant the story to be funny, her voice shook, and her eyes started to water.
“Okay, that’s one drink too many for me.”
“They’ll do anything to kids here,” Paul said. “My nephew just got told that he’ll be in double sessions until at least December. He has to get up and go to school from six to noon, but his sister is at the elementary school from nine to three. So my sister has a week to work something out with her boss.”
“Can you paint the portable?” Koji asked.
“Great idea!”
“I don’t know,” said Coral. “I’ve never seen one painted.”