Wendy Hornsby - Telling Lies

“Don’t push it.” Jaime laughed. He gave Rafael a hand out of the chair. “You tell your mother to bring you here before you go south for lettuce. No matter what.”

“I will.”

“Good. Lupe’s cooking chorizo. You better hurry and get some before this TV star goes in and eats it all.”

Clutching the Dodgers hat to his head, Rafael paused to give Jaime a quick, shy hug before he ran to find Lupe.

“You’re such a softy,” I said. “You fix their teeth, fill their bellies, feed their self-esteem. I hope you have a few paying customers.”

“Not enough,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to have ten thousand dollars, would you?”

“Not on me,” I said. “Or anywhere else. I’m paying retail for Casey’s braces.”

“Casey,” he sighed. “God, I haven’t seen her for so long. How is she?”

“She’s fine, Jaime. She’s with her dad for the holidays,” I said. “How are you?”

“How am I?” He went over to the sink and began lathering his hands. “At the moment, I feel old. Ever since Max called last night, I’ve been thinking about Emily, and the old days, the people we knew, the vision we had. I vowed I would always keep the flame alive.

“Max kept talking about old friends, old shit we’d gone through together. I finally had to say to him, ‘Twenty-two years is a long time. Who can remember so far back?’ Yesterday, I probably wrote December twentieth eight or nine times, before I made the connection. How could I forget what that date meant to us? It started me thinking. Time and again, Em and I risked so much, but I think I’ve forgotten that thing that was so damned important to us. Maggie, I think it’s young people who are meant to fight the good fights. And I’m not young anymore.”

“You’re just tired.”

“God bless you.” He smiled. “If I had said all that to Emily, she would have diagnosed some hormonal skip and given me a chemical adjustment. But Maggie, the problem is in my heart. If you put your hand on my chest, you wouldn’t find anything beating in there.”

“Jaime,” I said.

“More proof,” he said, slowly drying his hands in a white towel. “Old men get morose. I’m morose.”

“You’re not old. You’re not morose.”

“What then?” he demanded.

“Simply, grief,” I said. “How much did Max tell you?”

“What he knew-not enough. How is Em?”

“No change. I called the hospital from Max’s car about an hour ago. Mom and Dad are with her.”

“How are they?”

“Numb,” I said. “Emily called them yesterday and told them she was bringing someone home for Christmas. Someone very special.”

“Who?”

“She didn’t say. They decided she was getting married again.”

“Ouch,” he said.

“Didn’t she call you?” I asked. “She seems to have called everyone else.”

“She called. I wasn’t here yesterday was my day up at the Tahquitz Reservation. She left a message with Lupe. I never got back to her.”

“Did you try?”

He started piling used instruments on a tray and tidying up, and making a lot of noise doing it.

“Jaime?”

He sighed as he dropped the tray beside the small sink. “No. I didn’t call her back.”

“Still hurts, huh?”

“Bleeds,” he said.

“Max said something bizarre last night.”

“Not unusual for Max.”

“He said Emily had been behaving so strangely that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had shown up with Marc.”

Jaime grew very still. He looked at me the way a parent looks at an idiot child, baffled, worried, fond.

“How have things been with you, Maggie? You’ve had a pretty full dance card yourself lately: divorce, teenage kid to raise alone, big job, earthquake through your living room. Now Emily. Adds up to a lot of pressure.”

“I’m fine, Doctor Freud.”

“There’s no way around it, Maggie. Marc died in Vietnam twenty-two years ago.”

“Identification mistakes were made all the time. We both know deserters who came back to the States and disappeared into the underground.”

“It’s a tempting idea, Mag, but it won’t wash,” he said. “Marc knew we loved him unconditionally. Thinking from your head only,” he said, “is it in any way possible that Marc is still alive, and in all that time he never contacted us?”

“I can’t think from my head only right now,” I said. “You may feel empty inside. But if you put your hand on my chest, you would certainly find the heart beating.”

Jaime sighed and covered his face. He seemed to be over-come. Then I saw a slow smile curl around the edges of his lips. “What?” I said.

“If I put my hand on your chest, my love, I wouldn’t be looking for your heartbeat.”

I laughed. “You’re not old yet, Jaime.”

“Maybe there’s hope. Okay kid, either hop into the chair and let me look at your teeth, or come into the kitchen for some of Lupe’s chorizo and eggs.”

“How about just coffee, black.”

“Not in Lupe’s kitchen.”

He took my hand and led me, and it felt very nice, very familiar. But nothing more.

Jaime had been my first adolescent crush. I was about fourteen when Emily had brought him home to meet the family. He had been a lot like her, a head taller than the crowd and full of fire. In comparison, the pimply-faced boys my own age seemed incredibly dull and immature. Jaime was unfair competition.

Seeing Jaime again after a space of time, I saw that he was attractive, but I didn’t feel it. For one thing, he smelled like a dentist. I’m sure now that when I was fourteen, I fell for Jaime primarily because he was Emily’s boyfriend. She had weaned me on competition.

Being with him again, I realized how much I had missed Jaime, and how much Emily had lost out on. But you can never know what happens between two people. I know for a fact that there are many intelligent, discerning souls who still believe that my ex is a wonderful man, and that I am an idiot for cutting him loose. They may be right on both accounts. Doesn’t make me wrong.

Lupe was just seeing Rafael out when we walked into the kitchen. She cleared the boy’s dishes from the table before she set in front of us plates heaped with a mixture of scrambled eggs and fried chorizo sausage. It was a spicy, greasy-looking mass. My stomach was as iffy as my head, and there was no way I could eat the stuff. I took a hot tortilla from the basket on the table and used it to push the eggs around my plate.

Lupe watched to make sure we were eating, then picked up a broom and went out the back door.

Jaime swallowed his mouthful. “Lupe will know if you don’t eat anything,” he said.

“Could be.” I put down the tortilla and looked up at him.

“So?” he asked.

“I saw Aleda last night.”

“Max told me.”

“What else did he tell you?” I asked.

“That he was worried about his car,” he said. “If he’d been sober he wouldn’t have given you the keys.”

I smiled. “If I’d been sober, I wouldn’t have asked for them.” He poured me fresh coffee. “How did Aleda look to you?” “Ragged. Older.”

“Too bad. She was such a doll. Everyone was in love with her.”

I held the warm cup to my forehead, a small comfort. I had to push the plate far enough away so I couldn’t smell it.

“Do you believe in coincidence?” I asked.

“Now and then.”

“On December twentieth, Emily is shot and Aleda Weston comes in out of the cold. Suggest anything to you?”

“Old wounds,” he said. “If you keep picking at them, they never heal.”

“Whose old wounds?”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Try,” I said. “I asked Aleda who would hurt Emily. She said, ‘Any of them.’ Tell me who she meant.”