Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

“Meanwhile where does she sleep, this paragon?”

“Nah, Filipina.”

“And you two, have you been—”

“Ming. Cute, huh?” Dent drank from the bottle before pouring into his glass. “Took the upstairs room for her own, cleared out years of boy shit. Jesus won’t let nobody near her till there’s a ring on her finger. Twenty-two, looks fifteen. That’s the undernourishment.”

When, sitting down to dinner that night, Sean told Daisy about the girl, she said, “You’re kidding,” and made him tell the entire story again, then said, amused, “Poor thing. You know he lied to her. And do you think he ever sent his picture? He’s, what, a poorly preserved sixty, a drinker, a smoker, hobbling around on that leg, and he talks this child into leaving her home and her family, and now he won’t do the right thing?”

“His lack of any feeling for her came as a shock, I think. And in his defense he is leaving her alone.”

“Of course he’s terrified of any constraint on his drinking. Dylan Raymond, we are waiting for your father.”

Dylan put down the green bean he was trailing through his gravy and said, “Why?”

“Yeah, I think that’s maybe more to the point. Because she’s a born-again, and might start in on him.”

“Is she pretty?”

“He says she has drawbacks.” He bared his teeth. “Primitive dental care.”

“Oh, and he’s George Clooney.”

“But she’s sweet, he says,” Sean said, prolonging his bared-teeth smile. “Good-natured.”

Victor came to the table then in his signature ragged black T-shirt and jeans, his pale workingman’s feet bare, dark hair still dripping wet, and he stood behind Dylan, kneading the boy’s shoulders. “Who’re we talking about?”

“My mom is pretty,” Dylan announced, then waited with an air of uncertainty and daring — the kid who’s said something provocative in the hope the adults will get into the forbidden subject. Victor conceivably could have said What mom? He conceivably could have said You wouldn’t know your mom if you passed her in the street. He conceivably could have said That bitch. Sean knew Victor to be capable of any or all of these remarks, and was relieved when Victor calmly continued to rub the boy’s shoulders. Not answering was fine, given the alternatives. When Dylan started drawing in his gravy with the green bean again, his head down, he inscribed circles like those his dad was rubbing into his shoulders, in the same rhythm. How does he understand his mother’s absence? Sean wondered. Surely it’s hard for him that his father never mentions his mother, worrisome that nobody can say where she’d gone. Daisy has not made up any tale justifying Esme’s desertion. Sean understood the attraction of lying consolation; he felt it himself. The boy’s relief would have been worth almost any falsehood, but Daisy had insisted that they stick with what they knew, which was virtually nothing. Daisy said, “Yes your mother is pretty,” with a glance at Victor to make sure this didn’t prompt meanness from him.

Victor changed the subject: “Who were you saying was sweet?”

Ming had no demure, closed-mouth smile, as he’d expected from an Asian girl, but a wide, flashing laugh whose shamelessness disturbed Victor, for her small teeth were separated by touching gaps, the teeth themselves incongruously short, like pegs driven hastily into the ground. The charm of her manner almost countered the daredevilish, imbecile impression made by those teeth. Seated on a slab of rock at the beach, he peeled off his socks. Flatteringly, Ming had dressed for their date — not only a dress, but stockings and high heels —while he had worn jeans and his favorite frayed black T-shirt, but he figured this was all right, she would know from movies that American men complained about ties and jackets. Ming’s poise as she stood one-legged, peeling the stocking from her sandy foot, was very pretty, and the wind wrapped her dress — navy blue printed with flying white petals — tightly around her thighs and little round butt. Her pantyhose were rolled up and tucked into a shoe, her shoes wedged into a crevice of the rock. In the restaurant earlier Victor had observed her table manners and found them wanting. It wasn’t so much that she made overt mistakes as that she observed none of the grace-note pauses and frequent diversions — a smile, a comment — with which food is properly addressed in public, but instead chewed steadily with her little fox teeth. Her manner began to seem quick and unfastidious and he was curious about what that would translate to in bed. He had been trying not to think about going to bed with her, because he knew from what Dent had said — first to his dad and then, when Victor called, to Victor himself — that she was a virgin, and it seemed wrong to try to guess what she would be like, sexually, when the only right way of perceiving her was as a semisacred blank slate. Respect, protectiveness: he liked having these emotions as he slouched against the rock, the wind bothering his hair, the bare-legged woman turning to find him smiling, smiling in return. There: the unlucky teeth. Guess what, she’s human. He jumped from the rock and took her hand and they walked down the beach.

For nearly a year Victor was happier than his parents had ever known him to be, even after he was laid off from the mill for the winter. Not the time you’d want to get pregnant, but Ming did, and when she miscarried at five months, they both took it hard. “She won’t get out of bed, Dad,” Victor confided in a late-night call. “Won’t eat, either.” When he got off work early the next day Sean decided to swing by their place, a one-story clapboard cottage that suited the newlyweds fine except that it didn’t have much of a yard and lacked a second bedroom for Dylan; all agreed the boy should continue living with his grandparents. Two birds with one stone , in Sean’s view. Not only was the continuity good for Dylan, but once she saw she wouldn’t have to negotiate for control of the boy, Daisy was free to be a relaxed, non-meddlesome mother-in-law. Privately, Sean has all along believed he is better than the other two at relating to Ming. To Daisy, Ming was the odd small immigrant solution to the riddle of Victor, the girl who had supper waiting when he got home, who considered his paycheck a king’s ransom, who tugged off his boots for him when he was tired. The miscarriage was a blow, but such things happened. Ming was sturdy and would get over it. Basically Daisy was only so interested in anyone other than Dylan, and Victor — well, could you count on Victor to bring a person flowers to cheer her up? Or ice cream? Even if Ming won’t eat anything else, she might try a little of the mint chocolate chip she loves. Safeway is near their cottage, so Sean turns into the parking lot and strides in, wandering around in the slightly theatrical male confusion that says My wife usually does all this before finding what he wants, remembering Daisy had said they were out of greens, deciding on a six-pack of beer, too, craving a box of cigarettes when it was time to pay — that habit kicked decades ago, its recurrence a symptom of his sadness about the lost baby, and he was standing in the checkout line with tears in his eyes, recognizing only then that the girl thrusting Ming’s roses into the bag was Esme.

She seemed to have been trying not to catch his attention, and he wondered if she’d been hoping against hope that he would finish his business and walk out without ever noticing her. She could reasonably hope for that, he supposed: a job like hers could teach you that the vast majority of people walked through their lives unseeing. The checker was hastening the next lot of groceries down the conveyor belt, loaves of bread and boxes of cereal borne toward Esme as Sean hoisted his bags and said, “So you’re back.”