Kirstin Valdez Quade - Night at the Fiestas - Stories

ELLIOT ARRIVED HOME that night after they’d all fallen asleep.

“Jesus,” he said and rezipped his coat. “It’s colder in here than outside.”

Monica swung herself into his arms. The night air clung to him, and she shivered.

“You’ve been sitting in here like this? God, you’re tough.”

Monica smiled, pleased, as he kissed her hair. “How was it?” She took Elliot’s jacket zipper in her fingers, pulled it down again and folded herself against his chest, breathing the cold, sour smell of wool and his week-old sweat, the dry scent of blowing dirt and sagebrush. “We missed you,” she said happily into his sweater. “We missed you so much.”

For nearly an hour, they stood outside — Monica stood, Elliot crouched — by the heating panel. Monica, lips and nose numb, held the flashlight while Elliot fiddled with the heater with gloved fingers.

“Did you find what you needed?”

One by one the stubborn screws loosened under Elliot’s screwdriver. “I checked out a bunch of deposits that looked promising. Lots of gravel, lots of sediment, but in the end, nothing datable.”

The relief she’d felt at his arrival drained, and now all the uneasiness of the day was upon her again. “You didn’t find anything you could use?”

“Monica, honey, it’s very complicated.” He paused in his work, looked at her over his shoulder. “You have to find the right cross-cutting relationships, the right exposure. If it were easy , we’d already have this figured out.” He spoke with forbearance, but she could see the irritation in his face. Hadn’t he just wanted to come home to his snug family? And now here he was in the cold while his wife judged, harassed, blamed.

Elliot turned back to the heating panel. “Shine it here.” The wind had died down, and the desert was oddly quiet. Out on the dark highway, the sign was motionless on its post.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She concentrated on holding the light steady. “It’s just been an awful day.”

At bedtime, Cordelia had asked, “Can I sleep with you and Beatrice tonight?”

“No,” Monica had said. “You have your own bed. And Elliot will be home.” She’d patted the mattress in the loft, and Cordelia, clumsy in her layers of sweaters and sweatpants, hauled herself up the ladder.

Monica kissed her daughter goodnight over the edge of the loft, descended, then stepped back up the ladder and placed her hand on Cordelia’s back. “Listen. Tomorrow will be better, sweet pea.”

Cordelia burrowed deeper into her sleeping bag, teeth chattering. “Okay,” she said, then fell asleep with her usual ease.

Now Monica said, “I did something stupid today.” She told Elliot about Amanda’s visit. “And then after her sales pitch, I gave her my dress.” Elliot’s hands cast outsized shadows against the side of the trailer. He frowned into the panel. “My best dress. Out of the blue. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Elliot held the screwdriver in his teeth and peered. “Hold on.” He seemed to be counting wires. Elliot pinched a wire in his fingers and looked up at her, his face lit by the edge of the flashlight beam. “Your judgment was impaired, maybe. Onset of hypothermia. I’m amazed you didn’t start a fire in the sink.”

“I shouldn’t have given it away. Or I should have given it to Cordelia. If anything, it belongs to Cordelia.”

Elliot shrugged. “You felt bad for the kid. It’s a just dress. You don’t even wear dresses.”

Once, when they were hiking, Monica had picked up a beautiful rock, worn smooth by some ancient creek and intricately marked, as if with a fine-nibbed pen. She’d handed it to Elliot, expecting him, the geologist, to see what made it beautiful. “Hm,” he’d said, glancing at it absently. “Limestone.” And with that both she and the rock were dismissed, while he returned to his thoughts about contact formations and pre-Cambrian flood plains. Monica’s feelings had been hurt, but she hadn’t shown it. His thoughts were simply on a grander scale than hers, concerned not just with the minutia of a single life, or even of their species; he was concerned with the life of the planet itself.

Elliot was right. What, really, had Monica given away? An old dress. A relic of difficult times. So why, then, was she angry?

“I should have given it to Cordelia,” Monica insisted, and she felt her voice rise. If she wasn’t careful, she might cry.

“She won’t remember,” said Elliot. “Kids don’t.”

Maybe Cordelia wouldn’t remember. It was possible. But despite being a child, Cordelia knew more about Monica’s first marriage than anyone else, knew how bad it had gotten and how long Monica had stayed. Cordelia never talked about those days or about what she’d seen, never discussed what it was like to hear her mother yelling and sobbing and smashing plates; a mother could almost fool herself into believing a child could forget these things.

It occurred to Monica that now Cordelia herself was the only thing left from that old life. When she’d taken off the dress today, Monica hadn’t even felt cold, so filled was she with the dark exhilaration of punishing Cordelia. In giving away Cordelia’s lovely, meaningless inheritance, she’d made an adversary of her seven-year-old daughter, and now even that she held against her.

The park was dark, the trailers asleep, except for Amanda’s, where the blue light of a TV glowed, shifting and desolate.

“I should go over there. I should go explain to Amanda’s mother that I made a mistake. Right now. Before they go to bed.”

“Monica.” Elliot laughed. “You can’t do that.”

“Of course I can.” Of course she could. She’d knock at the door, wait while Amanda’s mother pulled herself to her feet, switched on a lamp, and made her way across the carpet. Monica would step into the warm trailer, introduce herself, explain, and Amanda’s mother would fetch the dress. The interaction would be awkward, perhaps, but nothing Monica couldn’t smooth over, and it wouldn’t matter because Monica had the chance to make things right. “I’m so glad to finally meet you,” Monica would say. “Amanda’s always welcome at our place. And you, too. We should have coffee.”

“I’m going.” She pushed the flashlight at Elliot, but he wouldn’t take it. The beam danced across the dirt. “ Here ,” she said.

“Come on, Monica. Think about it. You’re going to go over there and snatch back something you gave to a little kid? That mother of hers is going to drop dead of a coronary any minute, and you’re going to go fight with her about an old dress in the middle of the night?”

“It doesn’t mean anything to Amanda,” Monica said, and as she said it she knew she wouldn’t go. “It doesn’t even fit her.”

“It doesn’t fit Cordelia, honey.” He put a hand on her leg, patted her briefly. “You’re not thinking.”

“What do you know?” Monica said with bitterness she hadn’t realized she felt. “You don’t even know Cordelia. You’re not her father. You’ve just met her.”

Elliot’s hands stilled on the wire. He turned, face wide open and hurt. “That’s not fair, Monica. I care about her very much.”

He wouldn’t be able to see her beyond the flashlight’s beam. Monica bit her lip, glad for the dark.

“That’s not fair,” he repeated.

Elliot returned his attention to the heater, and they stood in silence. Out on the highway a car passed. After a time he clipped a wire.

“Fixed.” He dangled a twisted length of wire in his gloved fingers. His voice was stiff. “The lead to the thermostat had corroded. The heat should kick in now.”

They’d make it up, she and Elliot, find each other under the covers as the chill ebbed around them. Outside, the wind would pick up again, and in Amanda’s trailer the television would flicker all night. In the morning, Cordelia would awaken early. She would look down from the loft at her family: her mother, her stepfather, and between them, arms flung wide, her little sister. Cordelia would forever feel on the outside, Monica saw, and Monica herself had put her there, because a person couldn’t live with that kind of reproach. It would only get harder between them, Monica saw that, too; Cordelia’s judgments would become more pointed, Monica would rankle ever more under her sharp eye. But Cordelia wouldn’t know any of this, not yet. Tomorrow, while her family slept below her in the gray dawn light, she would place her cheek back on the pillow and watch them, waiting for them to stir, and she wouldn’t even notice that she was finally warm.