Joy Williams - Honored Guest

“Farther,” June said. “A farther bush.”

He came back with the napkin and put it on the table.

“James,” Abby said, “is that blood?”

He picked it up again and refolded it.

“Maybe we should have eaten it,” Howard said. “You know, so as not to waste it. We should find its nest and eat that too. The Chinese eat nests.”

Penny frowned at him. “I am sorry,” she said. She dabbed at the plate of fruit she had been feeding Emily. “What is this, guava? Or papaya? One of them upsets her tummy.”

Another pitcher of margaritas appeared from somewhere. It was a very well-run place. Gardeners swept the walks quietly with palm fronds tied to sticks. One of the swimming pools had the heads of a hundred ivory-colored roses floating in the deep end.

“You’re great kids,” Caroline’s father said. “Really, you’re terrific kids.” Clearly, his spirits had taken more of a beating from the hummingbird incident than his wife’s. “You’re fine kids. Caroline, you have fine friends,” he said.

All the visiting parents liked to pretend that the young people were charming. It was funny seeing this, all of them pretending this in their own way. The children were exhausted by the parents’ vigor, they felt wearied by their presence. They were repelled by the parents’ dedicated interest in them, they were astonished. Will we ever be this blind, do you think? they’d say. No, they agreed, they could not imagine themselves being this blind …

They were all starting off in their twenties. Each had come separately to this colonial town in the bowl-shaped valley beneath the three volcanoes and found one another here. Each of them remembered their first solitary days in town and then the speed with which they became involved in a life with the others, their friends. And they still wondered how this had been accomplished, and how much of it they had each been responsible for. They felt that here their lives were now beginning.

At the same time, they felt it was possible that their actual lives were still waiting for them, and that it involved different people. This was something they found themselves thinking about more and more, usually with unhappiness, as the parents kept coming.

Holy Week and its enormous, numbing spectacle was over for another year. The great obligation was over. The great anda borne by the penitents had been stored. The dyed sawdust and fresh flowers that had covered the streets in elaborate designs before being mangled by the penitents’ feet had been swept away. Everyone loved Good Friday — betrayal and trial and cruelty still having the power to captivate — but Easter was a letdown. The promise of Easter was the same old promise. The town was hot and quiet, and everyone was still a little drunk.

Abby and June were having breakfast at one of the cafes that faced the park. The fountain was not operative this morning. Usually water plashed from the stone nipples of a trio of heroically sculpted women, but today they stood inactive, though still with their mysteriously withdrawn expressions as they held their lovely breasts. Workmen in boots rooted around in the water beneath them.

“I think your parents are cute,” June said. “They’re not like Howard’s. Poor Howard.”

“I spent ten to two with them yesterday,” Abby said. “Then I took them to the market and my mother would say about anything, ‘Is this the best price you can give me? Is this the best you can do?’ In English, of course, slowly, in English. Candles, bananas, those tiny bags of confetti, everything … She bought me lightbulbs, she insisted. ‘You have all these dead lightbulbs,’ she said, and I said, ‘Mom, we can buy these in the store, we don’t have to be bargaining for them in the market.’ Then I had to spend six to nine with them too, back at the hotel. And that Parker! He had to run across the cobblestones, and of course he falls down and practically tears off his kneecap. Finally, I cracked. I said, ‘I’ve got to have a day off. I can’t have another meal with you for a while, I just can’t,’ and my father said, ‘We aren’t taking out taxes.’”

June laughed, but then she said, “What did he mean?”

“Maybe he said withholding,” Abby said. “It was a joke. Like I thought it was a job, my being with them.”

“Oh, that’s funny,” June said. “That’s what I mean. They’re not that bad.”

“I can’t believe they adopted that child and then named him Parker,” Abby said. “Where did that name come from? My mother reminded me that I had promised to take him tonight so they could go out to dinner by themselves.”

“When my mother was here and I was with her at the bank?” June said earnestly. “And I was sitting there looking at my mother in line to get money? I had an epiphany.”

“Really,” Abby said.

“It was … my mother will always love me.”

“That’s an epiphany?” Abby said.

“It wasn’t a thought. It was like …” June trailed off. “Your mother will always love you too, forever, no matter what.”

“Isn’t that amazing,” Abby said. “Really, it’s amazing, if it’s true.”

A young Guatemalan boy wearing filthy green shorts with a broken zipper and a Chicago Bulls T-shirt came into the cafe holding three glass Shangri-La bottles by the neck. Then they saw Caroline walking by with her brown long-legged dog on a rope leash.

“Caroline!” they cried together.

She joined them, dragging the dog in with her. He had been neutered not long before, and he had a plastic basket on his head so he wouldn’t rip his stitches out. The stitches should have been taken out by now and the basket removed, but Caroline was putting it off even though the Indians laughed rudely at the sight of them. Neither Abby nor June would have been capable of walking a dog around town with a basket on its head.

“Can’t we take that off the poor thing?” Abby said.

“I know, I know, but then he bites his fleas,” Caroline said. “I’ve got to give him a bath first.”

The dog smacked the basket against the table leg and lay down with a thump. He was an odd little dog with large dewclaws and a strangely malformed mouth. Caroline had bought him in the market for two quetzales, about thirty-five cents. She took excellent care of him in a somewhat unbalanced way and was always trying to improve him. Caroline was an artist, she had always been an artist, things just came to her sometimes. She was thin, almost ascetic-looking, and had a temper.

Abby continued to look at the dog, at its long fawncolored legs that seemed so breakable. Pets made Abby feel discouraged. In the run-down motel where they all rented rooms by the month, the guardian had an aged, arthritic parrot who was brought out on a stick every morning and left to hobble around on a broken bench beneath some banana trees until dusk. Sometimes June would gently spray him with water from the hose, which seemed to neither distress nor delight him, Abby didn’t know why she bothered. The motel also housed some members of a street band, who were seldom there, and a morose man with a bulging vein in his forehead which appeared to beat incessantly. He made a living from his fortune birds — three yellow canaries in a bamboo cage that would tell your future by selecting a small rolled piece of paper from a pinewood box. The tiny prophets’ names were Profeta, Planeta and Justicio, and they seemed happy and untroubled. The motel was not far from the parque central and was next to one of the town’s many ruined cathedrals, the rubble from one of the cathedral’s walls making up part of the courtyard. The rooms were small, dark and cold, but each had a perfect view of Agua, the most beautiful of the volcanoes.