A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

“The Bronx,” she repeats. “My father is the super for a group of buildings, and my mother owns a store.”

Jealous, or worried she’s leaving him for the murderer’s brother and two kids, the aunt’s husband calls every twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, despite the great laugh, Ricardo is hyper — he never stops moving, except when he’s eating smelly papaya and blowing explosive farts.

On the Delaware Memorial Bridge, after the fifth phone call from her husband, the aunt breaks down: “It’s too much for me, I can do no good for anyone. Everyone wants my attention — I don’t know why men can’t take care of themselves, why they can’t cook something to eat. … He works in a restaurant, you would think he could cook. … I am only one person. I cannot be there for everybody all the time. There is nothing left of me. I work for someone else, and then I come home and work for him, and then my parents need my help, and my husband says I’m not fun anymore. I used to laugh and go to the beach and play with him — or watch him and his friends race remote-control cars. …” I nod, hoping she’ll keep talking as I cross the bridge. I don’t know why, but I worry she’s going to jump out of the car and throw herself over the guardrail — I wouldn’t blame her if she did.

“He can’t share me with anyone. In my dreams I run away, I get a job taking care of a very old man who likes to sleep all day and have oatmeal for dinner and oatmeal for breakfast. He has no teeth, so he can’t bite me. The man falls in love with me and his family is glad — okay, not really glad, but I pretend they are. We have a wheelchair wedding and he takes me to a spa that I already have the T-shirt for — Canyon Ranch. I got it from my cousin who cleans houses, who got it from the lady she works for, who was doing ‘spring cleaning.’ He takes me to Canyon Ranch for our honeymoon and says, ‘I knew you would be happy here, because your T-shirt told me so.’”

She goes on and on. I’m nodding and listening, occasionally offering a compassionate “uh-huh,” or “I can imagine that would be difficult.”

Somehow, in the back seat, the kids know better than to interrupt; it’s like a curtain of quiet has fallen over them, and they play video games with the boy.

We go from Delaware into Maryland, slip past Baltimore, and then are in downtown Washington, D. C. I take them on a quick tour of the Capitol, the World War II Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Lincoln Monument, Iwo Jima Memorial, and the White House.

As we go from place to place, I fill everyone in on the history. At one point the aunt stops me and says, “Why do you think my history is different from your history? I was born here.”

“But your family came from somewhere else,” I say, lamely.

“So did yours,” she says, and she’s right.

The husband calls a half-dozen more times, and just before we’re about to get back on the road towards Virginia, the aunt announces she’s decided to go home; she gives me Ricardo’s medication and writes out the instructions on how and when to give it.

“What exactly is it for?” I ask.

“It’s to help him think at school,” she says. “But when it wears off, he’s cranky and bouncing off the walls — I like to send him outside.”

We say goodbye and put her on a train in Union Station with a souvenir FBI baseball hat from the terminal gift shop. The aunt seems relieved to be dismissed, and the boy happy to be with Ash and Nate.

We continue on to Williamsburg, arriving just before supper. The children quickly get into the program. Ash wants to dress in a costume of the time period. While I’m in the process of renting her one at the Visitor Center, Nate leans in and says, “Save yourself the trouble, buy new and avoid lice; besides, she won’t want to give it back.” And so I do. I buy her the dress, and then she wants the Pilgrim shoes — which in the old days were neither left nor right — and so we buy those, and the boys want tricornered hats and wooden guns, which seem safe enough until they start using them as bats and fencing foils. We visit Tarpley’s Store and the post office, where Nate buys old newspapers and various legal documents and proclamations, while Ash collects quill pens and powdered ink and I play the role of human cash machine. Every time I buy something for one of the kids, I have to buy something for the others as well. Whenever I take my wallet out, they come running like ducklings, but, curiously, Nate wants very little. Instead of stuff, he repeatedly says, “I’ll take the cash,” and I give him ten or twenty bucks. For Ashley it’s something from the silversmith, and then something from the pottery place, and then a candle for her art teacher, and, and, and. I find myself wondering what a period cash machine would look like — someone posted in the center of town squatting on sacks of gold coin?

I have my own dim memories of coming here long ago, recalling that at Yorktown I got a black wooden spear with a rubber arrowhead end and later used it as a fishing rod. We have dinner at Ye Olde Pub and attend an evening performance in which we’re all taught to dance the Virginia Reel.

“Usually we have one room and our parents have the other,” Ashley says as she surveys our very large room at the lodge.

“Well, this time we’re bunking together,” I say, and no one says anything more.

I’m less stressed staying in a hotel than I would be at home. I don’t have to worry about cooking and cleaning, and it feels as though I’ve got backup: housekeepers armed with extra pillows and towels, and the elderly concierge who never comes out from behind his desk but does a decent job of getting us tickets to everything from dance performances to farm tours and munitions experiences.

Ricardo is fascinated by the breakfast buffet. “It’s like a breakfast party,” he says, “like potluck at the church, you go around and take whatever you want and then you go around again and again.” I give him his medication, and he washes it down with ten pieces of bacon, four pancakes, one half-bowl of cereal, a large scoop of scrambled eggs, and some kind of cinnamon-swirl Danish. Nate and Ashley, used to cafeteria dining from school, stick to cereal and fruit, and I admire their moderation.

Ashley decides we should more fully live in the time period and wants us to move around the hotel room by candlelight. Nervous about fire, I agree to flashlights only after dark. With quill pen and ink, we write each other letters and messages, seal them with wax, and deliver either via express mail, folding them into paper airplanes and throwing them across the room, or by the slower pony express, Ricardo riding his wooden gun-pony, which runs only every fifteen minutes.

Each kid seems to gravitate naturally to a part of our quarters, carving out his or her own turf. For Ashley, the bathroom is “her office,” Nate claims the actual desk in the room, Ricardo operates out of the minibar, which I ask housekeeping to empty — later, I find soldiers stationed in each of the little spaces where the liquor used to be. My personal zone seems to be half of the queen-sized bed which I share with Nate. In the middle of the night, I wake to find us face to face, his night breath sweet, his expression open.

Ashley is quiet, often in her “office” texting or having long late-night conversations with a school friend. I find her asleep on the floor, still holding the phone, her head resting on the bath mat.

“I must have taken a catnap,” she says when I wake her up.

“While you were talking?” I ask.

“A friend was reading me a story,” she says.

“Don’t your friend’s parents have rules about how late she can stay up?” Ashley shrugs. “What about all the long distance?”