Boris Fishman - Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

“Only since you and Mom split,” the younger one replied to her father. Maya wondered if she was hearing a reprimand. Or he was. Behind the soft lips of youth, sharp teeth.

“Which left you with a calico cat with one eye and limited opportunity to express your mind ,” the older one said. “You don’t have an outlet .”

“Well, the university is certainly doing its job,” Marion said mournfully. “Alma and Celia,” he wagged his finger between the girls for Maya.

“That’s ‘soul’ in Spanish and German, the two sides of the family,” Alma, the younger one, said. She was still smiling, but Maya saw that she was worried about her father.

“Let’s flag you some coffee,” Marion Hostetler said.

“I should check on Max,” Maya said, glancing at the bathroom door, but remained on her stool. She looked longingly at a coffeepot crinkling on a hotplate by the short-order window. Marion had been right about the waitresses; Maya’s glance sent some kind of homing signal off in the one with the bank hairstyle, and she filled a cup for Maya and returned the pot to the hot plate without setting eyes on either the cup or the pot. It looked just like the coffee of Maya’s imagination, more brown than black.

Maya took a sip. It was revolting, but she made herself drink again. Marion looked inquiringly at the bathroom. “He’s my only,” Maya said. The English words felt good in her mouth — she had used them before, many times, but she liked the way they sounded now, here. “No sons?” Maya asked the man — Marion.

“Brothers,” Marion said. “Three of them. My mother pulled hard for a girl in my place — there were three boys already. She thought that if she settled on Mary, God would have to be a real SOB not to give her a girl. And out came I. Calling me Marion, that was revenge. Only she missed the Lord and got me instead. She refused to have any more kids after that. Stopped believing in God, too. But then I got only daughters. When she was dying, my mother said, ‘You get what you want, but not what you were planning.’ I tried to put it on her gravestone. No such luck.”

“Why?” Maya said.

“Rick. Rick is the car-dealership brother. He had them engrave a heart on the stone, and inside it, ‘Mother.’ Jesse did it — he’s a stonemason. And accessory. Jesse’s the second. One night I’ll have too much to drink and go in there and deface the thing. What can you make out of ‘Mother’? Other.”

“This coffee is disgusting,” Maya said.

“Come on, you don’t want any of that,” Marion said. He pulled a thermos from a pocket of his coat and poured some into a new cup from the tray. “The other middle brother made out the best. He farms coffee beans on a shady hill in Guatemala. Now you know every one of us.”

Maya smiled weakly. She felt soldered to her seat, by her fatigue and his talking. Working herself loose from the heavy fingers of both, she made herself slip off the stool — it was like another woman doing it, her legs were like stone — and laid her palm into the door of the bathroom.

“It turned into number two!” Max shouted from within. They all laughed at the counter, the girls looking up from the cell phone. Maya laughed, too, enjoying the moment — then wondered if they were embarrassing Max. When the man, Marion, laughed, the balefulness went from his eyes.

Maya returned to the counter. The diner clamored around them with the universal sound of forks on plates, water pouring into glasses, a laugh from one of the booths. Was it the surrounding emptiness that explained the unfamiliarly convivial feeling of the restaurant despite its godforsaken appearance — a huddling amity, exiles roped together on a crevasse at the edge of the world? She inhaled the thick aroma of the coffee; just the fog of it was tantalizing: leaves, a wood, autumn.

Marion waved his hands. “It isn’t hot anymore.”

“I walked away for a second,” Maya said, rolling her eyes.

“Hot,” Marion said. He took her cup for himself, and poured her a new one.

Maya sipped at the coffee. It brought her closer to sleep but loosened the strain in her neck. On the other side of their father, Alma and Celia stared rhapsodically at a cell phone. They were as square-shouldered as their father was lean. She imagined their mother in some kind of heavy robe that hid the ample folds of her figure.

“Max is adopted,” Maya said. She bolted upright. Her heart started pounding, lifting her fatigue. She looked over her shoulder: Max was still in the bathroom. She clenched her jaw to try to get some focus into her face. She was really letting herself get away from herself.

“Sometimes, I think they’re adopted,” Marion said, bending his head toward his daughters.

“You’re having breakfast with your daughters, I would say that’s a triumph,” Maya said diplomatically, wishing to return the conversation to comprehensible ground.

“They’re having breakfast with their cell phone,” he said. “I’m having breakfast with you.”

The bathroom door swung open, and Max stepped out. How especially frail he looked in the fierce light pouring in from the large windows. The light was all but coming through him. She set her coffee down on the counter.

“Finish your coffee,” Marion said. “We’ll get some juice for — Max.”

“We’re. .”—momentarily Maya struggled with the tense—“we’re being waited for.”

Marion nodded. “I see.”

“Mama?” Max said.

“Just a second, honey,” she said. “This man will tell us about a campground where we can stay tonight.” She tried to sound casual, but her ears were still ringing with the unnecessary disclosure she had made a moment before. She should have rushed out of the diner — Marion didn’t know that Max didn’t know and could say something carelessly. She tried to collect herself — for the tenth time in ten minutes. She turned to Marion. “I don’t know where we are,” she said. She felt the fright she had given herself in her body: Her tiny breasts swelled; her belly felt soft; her heart was beating.

Marion moved his eyes from Max to his mother, and considered her with that balefulness. “In a diner outside Badlands National Park. If you want to camp, there’s just one place. You go down 240 until it splits off. You’ll have gone past the park. But you stay on the road — it’s just 377 then. You can’t miss it.”

She thanked him and stood. She stood longer than she needed to. “Will you tell your brother how good a coffee he makes?”

“Enjoy this magnificent country,” Marion said.

+

Alex was on the phone. She could tell from across the road that he was speaking with his parents because he was speaking with extra volume. Was he reporting to them what had happened? “Already, Maya has acquainted herself with the law,” she imagined him saying. Her temples were aflame. She clutched Max’s hand so hard that he squirmed. She didn’t trust herself, crossing the road.

Alex paced the shoulder, as if he was in their living room. He could not sit and speak on the telephone at the same time. How tiny he looked splashed against the ridgeline, like an insect parading down its broad brown windshield. Only a little larger than the oblong white birds, which continued to leap as if they never lost hunger. The ridgeline looked as if it had grown in the warming rays of the sun, a sun-shower mushroom of rimrock and scree.

The sun was burning strongly and the stinging chill of early morning had gone. Maya knelt before Max and yanked off his jacket. The zipper wouldn’t give and she was too violent with it. The sun felt good on her face, and she lost a moment staring up at the sky, her eyes squinting at the light, Max’s jacket half off.