Esther took her drink and thanked the bartender, a boy she could bookmark in her mental file of former students, from hair-spray helmets to pixie bangs, at Sycamore High (Go Lobos!). Beto Navarro, younger brother of Luz Navarro, who by all accounts raised him. This corner bar, the Pickaxe, could be straight out of that time too. For years students—herself included, back in the day—had snuck in here with fake IDs after school dances, reeking of knockoff perfume sprays and strawberry wine. Either that, or they drove out to the Drag, a patch of desert on the outskirts of town, and built bonfires out of wood pallets stolen from behind Bashas’. She had taught this boy and half the rest of them in this bar, too. All these teenage-now-adults roaming around town and showing up in her bakery, their faces and bodies broader and creased, their own teenage children in tow. She still pictured them with their soft cheeks and springy curls, so she was startled to see this boy’s retreating hairline, the deep lines around his eyes and mouth. Of course he was long out of short pants—she chuckled into her highball at this phrasing. Speaking of which, she should get herself some. Shorts. Or pants. She was wearing a full-length black polyester slip as a dress under a flannel shirt Sam had left behind, and she slithered half off the vinyl barstool, revealing a good breadth of pale plump thigh, before catching herself. “Whoa Nelly!” she said. At forty-eight, a few years into her second career as a bakery owner, she favored loose drawstring pants and flowery A-line skirts; as everyone in town knew, she was a smart, creative woman with her ducks in a row. At the very least, she usually wore clothes. This slippery slip business would get out. Oh well. Couldn’t be helped. Tonight, after getting a little stewed in the living room, staring at the newspaper and its awful news and at the square lighted windows of the guest house where Dani Newell was surely thinking about the same news, Esther was not thinking about clothes. She was thinking of flash floods, the speed at which the water gushed, whipping through the channels of the high desert like a comet, rolling mud and boulders with monstrous force. She was thinking about what it felt like to gasp for air. To be choked and held under.
Jess Winters. Bones in a wash, for Christ’s sake. Drowned, then. At best. Esther knew it was she. Had to be. The truth clicked into place like a well-oiled lock. That girl was no runaway, though Esther had once thought otherwise. The day Jess had showed up in her class, all wild brown hair and silver earrings and narrowed eyes, Esther had taken one look at her and sighed in both exasperation and pity. Capital T Trouble and Troubled. She’d thought she could see it a mile off. She was thirty then and more than a wee bit smug about how much she knew about the world. Thirty, ha! She’d been wrong, of course. Trouble had found Jess, but she was not the source of it. She was a smart, gorgeous kid with a bonfire of an imagination.
Righting herself on the stool, Esther ignored the bartender’s glance of concern. Since Sam moved out a month ago and ran off to San Francisco and married Kevin, a man not yet thirty (thirty!) he’d met online, her friends had adopted the same look. Iris circled her as if she were a wounded animal, poking her with offers of hot tea and walks. Iris didn’t ask questions. Iris knew she would talk when she was ready. Iris was maddeningly sane that way. Esther loved having an older friend. When she’d been a teacher, she’d always been the one shelling out advice. It was nice to be advised sometimes, to ask. Iris did say, “So what, Esther? So what if he’s making a mistake? So what? He’s in love.”
She twisted her rings, starting with the ones on her left pinkie and working her way across to the right pinkie, a nervous habit she channeled into jokes and mixing bowls. She glanced at the bartender. Beto Navarro. A boy, all grown up. Two young women at the end of the bar, probably Syc students—she didn’t know them or their parents—threw glances and smiles at him, tossed their glossy hair, and Esther watched him with new eyes. Yes. Handsome now, his gawkiness stretched into angularity, a lean ranginess. She watched the flexing muscle of his forearms as he squeezed a rag, and a little heat snuck in her belly. He was what, thirty-four, thirty-five now? Oh, his brother, that lovely Tomás. He’d died in the Gulf War—no, in the run-up to the war, in training. Humvee crash. What a terrible thing. Of course, people said that about her, too, having lost both parents when she was five and been raised by her grandmother. She remembered being happy when Beto started palling around with Angie Juarez and Rose Prentiss. Kid needed a friend. All of them had. She had always remembered him for his large forehead, how the skin seemed almost translucent, and she remembered, too, that he’d been a wonderful writer, his otherworldly stories underpinned by an almost painful beauty. No, he didn’t write much anymore, he told her. No, no kids of his own. Never married, nope, not him, he said with a laugh. She didn’t have to say, Me neither—everyone knew this about her. Everyone here knew her, or thought they did. He said he still worked at the auto shop with Angie. Still had the paper route twice a week, but picked up some weekend bar shifts to save up for vacation. “Keeps me young,” he said. He showed her a picture of his nieces, Luz’s girls. Luz still worked at the P.O.—with Maud, she thought. Esther had been at Maud’s house earlier; she and Iris had brought food and stayed with her. Maud had played with the burger and potato salad on her plate and then before the sun set, said, “I think I’ll hit the hay early tonight.” Esther took a large wallop of her drink, let it burn.
Staring at the bartender’s broad forehead and strong arms, as the twitch of heat intensified, Esther thought of herself at Jess Winters’s age, the only age Jess would ever be: seventeen, the age at which Esther had lost her virginity, an awkward, embarrassing event that catapulted her into life as a sexual creature. After that, she had warded off pregnancy with a potent cocktail of birth control, condoms, and long stretches of celibacy. She ticked off on her fingers the number of men she had slept with in her forty-eight years. Twelve. Like the months. Like the steps of AA. Like the apostles. The last one set loose a hacking laugh. So that was what she’d been doing in erratic bursts these past years: dating the apostles. The absurdity comforted her, and the tightness in her lungs eased. She decided she’d make the apostles her shtick, the way some people had six toes or had climbed Everest or could tie cherry stems in knots with their tongue. Sam would love it. She’d call and tell him when he and Kevin got home from their honeymoon.
“Beto, can I borrow your pen?” When he handed it to her, she grabbed a napkin from the fanned pile in front of her and scrawled down the rest of the apostles’ names, somehow still lodged in her brain from years of Sunday school indoctrination at the church not four blocks from this bar, in this town she’d never left. She held up the napkin with the twelve names and laughed. She laughed and laughed, falling forward until her forehead bounced off the padded bar rim.
“Ms. G,” said the bartender/mechanic/former student with the sexy forearms. “Hey. Hey. Ms. G.”
“I’m good, Beto,” she said. “It’s just Esther now. Maybe some water.”
She righted herself on the stool and ran her fingers over the list, transposing the apostles’ names over the real ones from her memories, trying to figure out how to construct such a joke.