Four

Around town, she was known as Alicia’s daughter—Alicia, that woman who used to work at the café, the woman who left not long after the Bakersfield earthquake in 1952, boarding a bus, it was said, to go back to her ex-husband in Texas, leaving Teresa to raise herself. You remember a woman like that. Teresa had been almost seventeen at the time, just a year away from being a grown woman in the eyes of the law, but she learned quickly that people in Bakersfield had their own ideas about who she was and could be. Alicia’s daughter. That poor girl left alone. That girl who lived right above the bowling alley, a green door at street level opening up to a narrow, dark stairwell, the room at the top.

Her mother’s name got Teresa the job at the shoe store, not too far away from the café where her mother used to work. Her mother’s name kept her from being whistled at too loudly by the small group of Mexican workers who stood on the corner by the grocery store, the ones who had been too drunk to be picked up for work, too shy, too old, all of them watching Alicia’s daughter as she closed the green door behind her in the mornings and began her walk to work. Her mother’s name kept the attention of the waitresses who still remembered Alicia from her days at the café, the ones who watched her walk by and wondered how a girl so young, supporting herself, could have much to eat in that little room above the bowling alley. Her mother’s name, for at least a few years after her mother left, kept Teresa in a strange, collective safety, as if people in town knew they should keep a protective eye on her.

But things change.

People forgot her mother. The name Alicia hardly danced anymore on the tip of anyone’s tongue. New waitresses came on board at the café, some from Stockton, some from little places like Delano or Tulare, knowing no one in town. People had other things they wanted to remember, like what the five-and-dime looked like before the TG&Y moved in. People even forgot the earthquake, the terror of the tumbling brick, and the railroad tracks just out of town bent into a slithery S. Teresa herself grew past eighteen, past twenty, and by the time she was twenty-three, not many thought it was unusual that she had her own job and lived in a small room above a bowling alley, her one little window with a dim yellow light glowing at dawn, sometimes the curl of a pale blue curtain fluttering past the open frame.

She felt sometimes, as she closed the green door behind her and began her walk to work, that people had forgotten all about her, that they’d not only forgotten about her mother but about how her mother had left and why, and once they’d forgotten that story, Teresa would also disappear, like a figure into fog.

She liked thinking of herself this way, as if it were one of those winter mornings when the Bakersfield streets clutched the fog deep into the asphalt and her own steps dissolved into all that white without a sound. What could people possibly know about her now? What could they say, when the years had eroded their concern and she walked with near anonymity along the streets of Bakersfield, no one wondering anymore just how she was going to take care of herself?

You have, her mother had said to her, a very good head on your shoulders.

She could do, she realized, whatever she wanted. She was twenty-three and her own woman.

When had this idea bloomed in front of her? On one of her walks to work, no doubt, all those mornings, five days a week, sometimes six, when she came down the narrow stairwell in whatever weather. Every day the same thing, the Mexican workers on the corner, the initial whistles, then the fervent admonishment from one of the men to settle down: Cheno remembered her mother. He used to buy a work lunch when Teresa’s mother sold bean tacos or ham tortas during the summer months, Teresa collecting the coins. He knew they should treat her respectfully. Cheno, who was a little shorter than the rest of the men, neither the oldest nor the youngest in the group, the one without tattoos, who knew how to keep his white shirts white, who endured the taunts from the men when he rushed to defend her. She knew he was standing a little apart from the men, as if to guard her as she walked along the block, as if waiting for her to come back. But of course, by the time she returned home from work at the shoe store, the men on the corner had already dispersed, some because they’d been picked up as extra hands in the fields, the rest because the police had chased them away for drinking beer, even if it was in a paper bag.

She thought of Cheno at lunchtime, when she took some of her hour to walk over to Stewart’s Appliances. The store, with its shiny radios and washers and sewing machines, was only for people with money. So Teresa stood outside the enormous store with its plate-glass windows reaching all the way to the sidewalk—built brand new and shatterproof after the earthquake—and watched the television sets, six of them playing without any sound. All six sets played a lunch-hour newscast, sometimes flashing pictures of the stark white regal domes and pillars of Washington, D.C., or some other faraway place, and Teresa patiently waited until it was over and the 12:30 musical show came on. A woman sang. Always a different woman, but always the same posture, the same stance—hips angled over to the side and arms straight down, her voice slowly rising to a crescendo Teresa could never hear from behind the window. She stood watching these soundless lunchtime concerts, and anyone watching her knew that she was dreaming beyond the desolation of Bakersfield’s dusty streets to a stage like the ones those women occupied, or to the theaters glimpsed by the audience when the cameras cut away to the interior: tiny round tables and elegant glasses, rows and rows of plush-looking seats. Velvet stage curtains and a spotlight like a tender moon, the full force of all manner of musical instruments, and men at the ready to play them: guitars, pianos, drums feathered gently, saxophones held to the lips with almost unbearable hesitation. Teresa daydreamed as the women sang because she couldn’t hear them through the glass. But she knew it would be over when the women’s arms finally reached outward to the camera, as if pleading, as if asking a lover back or sending him away, their mouths rounding out to release a last note held so impossibly long that Teresa thought she heard a glimmer of it through the thick plate-glass windows.

On afternoons in the dark quiet of the shoe store’s stockroom, she’d think of her mother boarding a bus and she would think of the hills south of Bakersfield and the pictures she saw of Los Angeles. Her mother had been heading to Texas, but Los Angeles would be the first city she would see, and Teresa wondered if her mother would be moved by the city’s pageantry and decide not to continue. You’ll understand one day, her mother had said, when you fall in love. Her mother’s words stayed with her for a long time, like the embraces of the chanteuses on her afternoon viewings, full of longing and never letting go. They filled Teresa with both hope and sadness: She understood, as she slid box after box onto the dusty shelves of the storeroom, that she had to fall in love first before she could be any of the women with the open arms. She understood, too, that this same hope and sadness led her imagination to put her mother back on the bus for the long hours to Texas, what she thought would be the hot, dusty sands of the Southwest before the bus stopped with a hiss and the door swung open for her mother’s release. Her mother with the open arms and someone there to receive them.

So when Cheno appeared one evening, the only person on the corner as she arrived home from work, she waited for him by the green door to her little room above the bowling alley. They stood there talking for a bit in Spanish and she asked him if he had worked that day. He said yes; she could tell that he was lying but she appreciated the effort that he had made, his plain white T-shirt tucked inside his pants, a faint hint of bleach carrying in the air, mixing with the Lucky Tiger oil he used to slick back his hair. Even the way he had hesitated in crossing the street charmed her a bit: tentative, looking at her as if awaiting a sign from a distant star.

They talked for no more than fifteen minutes, her hand on her purse even though there was nothing to guard except her key, and when he parted, Teresa knew he would be back the next day. She let herself in and climbed the stairs, immediately going to the window to peek out, just in time to see his form make its way down the street and finally turn a corner, heading west, walking all that way to the side of town where men lived too many to a house.

The next day, when the Mexican men on the corner watched her emerge, the usual taunts began. “¡Ay, mi amor!” “¿Adónde vas con mi corazón?” She walked on but cast a quick glance to see if Cheno was in the group, attempting to quiet them. He didn’t catch her looking for him, but she was heartened by the uninterrupted catcalling, certain that Cheno had done no bragging of his own. That evening he appeared at the corner with two lukewarm bottles of soda, which he uncapped against each other, and this was the start of his small, edible gifts: candy bars and fresh peaches and cans of Kern’s nectar and dried apricots and shelled walnuts packed into an empty Gerber baby-food jar.

They’d eat these treats sitting on the curb in front of the green door leading up to her apartment, mostly in the early part of the week. The closer the days got to Friday, the busier the bowling alley became in the evening, and Cheno withdrew, as if he didn’t want to be seen by anyone. She liked this about him, as if their short evenings were a secret between them, despite meeting out in the open. As the days passed, her affection for him grew, the way his gentle fingers carefully handed over his latest gift, not wanting to touch and offend her, his round eyes taking her in like light. She began to notice mornings when he wasn’t at the corner at all, the catcalls uninterrupted, and these disappearances alarmed her at first, until she figured out that he was wheedling himself into more work. She left the curtains open one night so that the dawn light would wake her as she lay in her bed under the window. She hoisted herself up on her elbows to peer down, and sure enough, there was Cheno in the hushed violet of five in the morning with a few other hard workers, ready to go, and not ten minutes later, he climbed into a farmer’s truck and was whisked away, his head turning toward her apartment and his gaze steady on her window.

It wasn’t love. She knew that. But she liked the attention, wishing to herself that maybe time would transform her feelings into the kind of longing her mother had displayed, the longing that drove her back to Texas. When they had lived together, her mother had played old blues records with women singing the way only women could about love, love gone right, love gone wrong. Sixteen records that her mother cared for rigorously, searching for scratches, easing them back into their paper sleeves, bringing them out only when the mood struck.

Pull out the one with the red slip, her mother had told her one time. They sat on the bed, right underneath the window to catch the evening breeze, two glasses of water with ice long since melted. Man from Abilene, her mother had told her, a sad song, and the way her mother requested it, Teresa had known that sad music was something that you should listen to alone.

The crackle of the needle brought the easy strum of a guitar and a harmonica. Her mother hummed along but sighed and gave the singer space for her lament, not interrupting. The singer moaned, cursing Abilene, a whole story of pain that could have been avoided if she had ignored the deep brown eyes she still managed to sing about. The guitar strummed along, one beat after the other, a monotony, but easy to tap your heel to. Put it on again, her mother had said.

Outside, just like the morning Cheno rode off with his love-struck ambition, the street held violet and their rented room had darkened enough for Teresa to watch her mother close her eyes and listen to the song. Her mother had played that song hundreds of times, yet as their room darkened, Teresa made out the burn of her mother’s sorrow only by the sound of the song, the way she hummed a little louder when the lyrics matched her own life.

All of her mother’s records were like that in some respect, some speck of phrasing, some line or two that could draw out the mmm from her throat in confirmation. Again, her mother had said with a sigh, the violet of evening seeping into their room.

Teresa didn’t want to be like that. She watched the street corner begin to buzz with the approach of the Mexican workers and thought of Cheno. She could never be like her mother for Cheno. Love could not be a heavy darkness. It could not be violet light in a window, fading. She wanted love to be like the open arms of the women singers in the display windows of Stewart’s Appliances, all receiving and nothing ever lost.

It felt decisive, this feeling about how to control her own heart, and she set out to work as she always did, the catcalling and the stale dustiness of the storeroom and the glow of the TV sets in the store window all coming as familiar as ever. Days passed, and when Cheno didn’t appear, she began to miss his presence, the street bare of anyone when she approached her apartment in the early evenings. More and more days passed and she began to wonder if Cheno had left for more lucrative work up near Fresno, a silent room in her heart wondering if, in fact, another woman had caught his attention.

Whatever filled her about Cheno’s absence was neither anger nor loneliness nor regret, but she could not identify it, could not place words against what it was. Teresa sank at the possibility that the dark space inside her would spark into one of those emotions, a tiny match struck in the dark—how easy it would be to become her mother upstairs in that room with its single bed under the window and the empty kitchen table with two chairs.

When Cheno finally did appear, her relief came as a surprise. Even from two blocks down the street, she could tell it was him, the gleam of his white T-shirt, his small frame waiting patiently by her door. He’d returned after all, and even if it hadn’t been love that stirred within her, she sighed at the release of the mysterious grip within, grateful to have Cheno back.

The closer she walked to him, the more she could tell he was holding something, a large, bulky object, and when she crossed the last street and neared the apartment, she could finally make out the rounded curves of a small guitar that Cheno held in his arms.

“Un regalito,” he said, handing her the gift.

She took the guitar. “Where have you been?” she asked him in Spanish.

“Al norte,” he said. “Pueblitos.” He’d gone way north of Bakersfield, staying in small labor camps, following whatever crops he could and saving his dollars, and she knew his motivation without needing him to declare it. Even after presenting her with the guitar, Cheno kept his hand on the fret board, holding his fingers there as he told her about the day he’d seen her in front of a store window and how, after she’d walked away, he’d gone to see what she’d been watching. The show had ended, but he asked someone, who told him the young girl always watched the afternoon variety show to see the singers.

“But a guitar?” Teresa asked. “I don’t know how to play.”

“I’ll teach you,” Cheno said, his voice so sincere and small that Teresa could do nothing but smile and clutch the guitar to her chest, embracing it, before dipping her hand into her purse and extracting the key. She had no worries about Cheno doing anything untoward. Even as he followed, his steps feathered up, as if he were hardly there, as if he were floating, as if he had been down on the street corner as he’d always been, alighting with his small boots in the air and coming right through the open window of her small room, the light blue curtains parting for him.

How long did this go on? It had been late summer when he’d given her the guitar, her apartment still orange in the late evening. Cheno left whenever daylight started to go. She kept the guitar in the closet on his urging, covering it with a light cloth, and whenever he returned, he’d turn the instrument round and round in his hands, checking for cracks before handing it to her. He taught her a few chords and they’d share whatever treat he’d brought her—lemon drops or dried, sugared mango—as he listened to her practice, his patience infinite. She got to thinking, at times when she watched him demonstrate a chord she was finding difficult, that he was the only person who’d been in the apartment besides her mother, yet her mother’s dark presence was long gone, and as the months drifted into fall and sundown came earlier and earlier, she finally made it clear to Cheno that it was okay for him to stay a few minutes longer after she turned on the bare bulb in the center of the room.

You’ll understand one day, her mother had said at the bus station. When you find a man of your own, you’ll know why you’ll run toward him.

Teresa served him dinner once—just once—a small bowl of beans with onions and two corn tortillas, which Cheno ate with relish, his thanks never ending. He refused a second plate. It was getting dark, he told her, and it was best he got home. She watched him from the window as he went down the street, hurrying, and part of her wondered if his secrecy was meant to protect her, to keep anyone from seeing a strange man close the green door at the base of the stairwell.

She knew he was going to ask her to marry him. Not soon, but one day. What she felt for him was affection, not love: she liked the thrill of pulling him closer and closer, then the slight edge of relief when their guitar lessons were over for the night. There were days he stayed away and Teresa knew he’d gone back up into the northern parts of the Valley to make money, but even so, she didn’t want to leave the safety of her single room. It was hers and she was a twenty-three-year-old woman walking down the street and she was no longer Alicia’s daughter.

“Do you sing?” he asked her in Spanish.

She was about to say yes but realized that the songs she hummed to herself were all in English. She didn’t know how he would take this. “Sometimes.”

“Would you sing me something?” He took the guitar and, surprisingly, began to strum something she recognized, a Patsy Cline song. She laughed and shook her head, refusing, but he kept playing the chords over and over until finally she complied, the song she knew so well from the dim glow of the radio, which she left on at night to lull her to sleep. She sang “Walkin’ After Midnight,” casting her eyes over at the open window, remembering her mother and how the room had to be quiet when her records played, the only sound the pain in those women’s voices.

“Que lindo,” Cheno said when they finished.

“Gracias,” she answered, and she was not surprised when Cheno reached over and touched her hand. She could feel the thin plastic of the guitar pick between his fingers, his touch light and unsure.

“We should sing together,” he told her in Spanish.

“What song?”

“No,” he said. “I mean in public. At El Molino Rojo.”

“Why there?”

“So we can earn some money,” he answered. He kept his hand on hers, very light, as he would have done if he’d emerged from the secret shadow where he stood watching her in front of Stewart’s Appliances, reading her desires in the shows flickering across the screen, touching her shoulder. He was asking her for complicated reasons, Teresa knew—to fulfill her dreaming, yes, but also to make their work a joint effort, not just his own sweat in the field.

“But how?” she asked.

Someone on the corner had urged him to go audition at El Molino Rojo, where the bar owner let people sing for tips. Cheno’s plan was to go there on Tuesday afternoon, her day off from the shoe store, and meet her there once he finished whatever fieldwork he’d managed to get that day. She knew what side of town he was talking about, the avenue over on the west. Over there was El Molino Rojo. The Wild Horse. The Bluebird. The clientele went to the bars where they could pronounce the names. The signs in English glowed amber at night, an electric necklace of shimmering bulbs, some of them buzzing neon: the Fiddle, and Rosie’s with the namesake petals blooming in light. The Mexicans went to the cantinas with names beautiful and full of promise, even if the buildings were tucked away in the dark, no neon to speak of. El Club Diamante. El Paraíso. Teresa’s mother had spoken of cantinas in Texas with names that sounded just as regal. El Presidente. Las Angelinas. Saturday night the one night of the week for elegance, for the dress made from expensive-looking fabric purchased at the TG&Y. Such places! Such names! Why hadn’t the idea occurred to Teresa first, all those afternoons dreaming in front of Stewart’s, as if her mother had never given her stories about the cantinas up and down the state, over there near San Antonio, near Temple. La Lupita, La Conga. Even the little towns past the onion fields and the sweet potatoes had cantinas. Beeville, Kenedy, Mathis, and on to Corpus Christi. El Siete de Copas. El Espejo. El Gato Negro. El Peek-a-boo.

There was no reason, really, to go against Cheno. Women sang in bars like that. People watched them and listened. Old blues songs or honky-tonk or country or ranchera ballads, laments in the native tongue of the clientele. So she agreed to meet in front of El Molino Rojo the following Tuesday afternoon, her day off work, and when the day arrived, she pressed her white blouse and her denim skirt and smoothed her hair in the bathroom mirror. Then she picked up her small guitar with no case and no strap and went down the stairs, emerging into the white heat of the afternoon, the men on the corner too drunk by this time of day to notice her.

At the far end of Union Avenue, El Molino Rojo stood near an intersection, tucked in a bit from the road. The building was unassuming, a small shack with dark windows and a flat roof, rough wood siding, tall yellowed weeds growing along the edges of a gravel driveway, the bare signage scripted badly by someone’s shaky hand. Teresa walked across the gravel parking lot, even though the door to the building was shut, and ducked under the faint shade of the roof’s overhang. The street was quiet.

She put her hand against the dark windows, trying to see inside, and felt foolish about knocking. Cheno was nowhere in sight. Teresa rested the guitar against the wall and fanned herself. Her stomach gurgled with hunger and she wondered how long she should wait before turning around and walking back home.

A black Ford truck slowed and pulled into the gravel lot across the street. The driver shut off the engine, and the dust from the driveway settled as he stepped down and made his way to the front door. He was tall—Teresa could tell that even from across the street—and he rattled the heavy chains that served as a lock to the cantina before pulling the door open, its metal growling against the cement. He stepped inside without shutting the door behind him.

The street went quiet again. Teresa looked at the building’s sign: LAS CUATRO COPAS. Its door stood gaping open, as if it had swallowed the man forever. She could hear the ticks of his Ford pickup as its engine settled and cooled.

The man emerged from the dark interior. He was looking at her, finally raising his hand to shade his eyes as if it might help him see. Teresa remained motionless, embarrassed now that she was out in the open. The man stepped outside and began walking toward her, his boots crunching on the gravel driveway, not looking before he crossed the street.

Halfway across the parking lot of El Molino Rojo, he called out to her, “You waiting for Ed?”

Teresa didn’t know whether to shake her head no or speak to him, but he crossed the rest of the parking lot in no time at all. He glanced down at her guitar. “You waiting for Eduardo?”

“The manager, yes,” she said.

“That’s Ed, then.” His eyes remained fixed on the guitar. “You’ll be waiting for a while. He doesn’t come in until much later on Tuesdays. Nobody drinks this early on a Tuesday.”

“Oh,” she said, trying not to pause, as if to suggest that Ed had been expecting her. “I figured I would just wait for him.”

“You singing for him?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. “He’s got too many people already. Everybody and their mother thinks they can sing a song.”

She straightened a little when he said that, and the man took her posture for apprehension.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “It’s just that … well, I can’t tell you how many people show up and ask Ed to let them sing for tips.”

“That’s what I had planned,” she said, shaking her head in embarrassment.

“What’s your name?” he asked. This time, there was kindness in his voice, as if he recognized that he had been too brusque. His voice wasn’t just kind but apologetic. She looked up at him, his brown hair still singed with a light color on top from the summer days, his nose slightly sunburned.

“Teresa,” she said.

“You’re Alicia’s girl, aren’t you?” He shielded his brown eyes with his hand against the sun, but he studied her as intently as he had studied her guitar. “Yeah, you are—you look a lot like her in some ways. Around the eyes, I mean.”

“You knew my mother?”

“She worked with my mama at the café. Everybody knew your mama. She was a real nice lady. Did you know Mrs. Watson? Arlene Watson?”

She shook her head.

“I’m her son. Dan.” He stuck his hand out and she reached to shake it. Even though it was hot out, his hand felt cool to the touch, her hand tiny in his palm.

“It’s good to meet you,” she said. She tried to keep her hand light in his, not knowing when to let go.

“She around anymore? She didn’t pass, did she?”

“No. She had to go back to Texas,” Teresa said. “Family.” She spoke with a nervous hesitation, and Dan Watson seemed to catch the waver in her voice. She could tell that he already knew her whole story, but his face didn’t betray it.

He smiled at her instead and pointed at the guitar, and the way he smiled eased everything. “You want to sing for me?” he asked her. He leaned over and picked up the guitar with great care, holding it out to her. In his hands, the guitar looked like a toy, small against his frame.

Teresa shook her head. “I should be heading home.”

“Come on, now,” Dan Watson encouraged her. “Just one little song.” When she shook her head again, laughing, he stepped closer, nearly placing the guitar in her arms. “You can sing at the Copas if you’re any good.”

He held the guitar out to her. She thought of the women on the television sets at Stewart’s Appliances, the women not just singing anymore but speaking to her somehow, letting loose with their admonishments: this was why they held out their arms at the end of every song, they would tell her, because someone like him might reach right back.

“You want to go across the street? Have some water and rest a little while I’m setting up?” he asked. He had a hint of a singer in his voice, the way it rose and fell, yet still nestled in sincerity. He placed the guitar in her arms, and his brown eyes held hers for a moment before he backed away and began walking toward Las Cuatro Copas.

“Come on,” he called out, half turning, as he walked. After that, Dan Watson didn’t turn around again. He was tall, his back wide, his brown hair thick against the sun. The sound of boot steps on the gravel slowly faded as she watched him disappear inside the building.

She stared across the street at the dark opening of Las Cuatro Copas. Where was Cheno? Her hands clutched the guitar and she heard her feet against the gravel, and she found herself at the threshold of the bar, her eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness inside.

“That water’s for you,” Dan’s voice called out to her, but she couldn’t see him, her eyes still not acclimated. She stepped in, making out a long bar against the lefthand side, with stools padded in royal blue velvet. She reached for the glass, grateful to be out of the heat, the ice water stinging her lips. She looked up at a ceiling fan whirring, an old swamp cooler rattling high in the corner above the bar.

His boots sounded against the floor and he emerged from the other side of the cantina with a plate in his hand, the swinging door to a kitchen padded red with a diamond-shaped peep window. “I’m not much of a cook, but I can make sandwiches,” Dan said. “You looked hungry.”

“You didn’t have to bother,” Teresa said, but her stomach gurgled at the sight of the plate, and she held her hand over her stomach as if Dan could have heard it.

He stepped behind the bar and set the plate down, spying her empty glass and refilling it, even tossing the old ice into the sink and giving her fresh cubes. He pointed to the sandwiches as he poured himself a beer. “Go ahead and eat. It’s just ham and butter. That’s all the kitchen had back there that I knew what to do with.”

She took one of the sandwiches. The butter gave it an unusual taste, but Teresa didn’t complain, even though the bread was thick enough to catch in her throat. She had to swallow water with every bite.

“Aren’t you going to join me?” she asked.

“Oh, no,” he begged off. “You eat as much as you want; it’s all for you. But you’ll have to sing for your supper, of course. That’s the only requirement.”

She smiled at him as she took a bite, nodding her head in agreement. “So there’s a little kitchen back there?”

“Just basics. Nothing fancy. We cook a few things and bring them out to people with their beers. See the tables?” He motioned. “We’re a little less rowdy than Ed’s place. More dancing over there, more coming and going.” Dan tipped a thumb back to his mouth as if taking a drink. “Too much sauce over there sometimes. Gets out of hand. Very … worldly, if you know what I mean.”

“Worldly?”

“Things go on in places like that,” he said, sighing.

“Right across the street?”

“You’d be surprised what’s right across the street, no matter where you go.” He slid the plate closer to her. “Go on. It’s all for you. I already told you you’re singing for your supper.”

She took another sandwich and he busied himself behind the bar, washing glasses and counting beer bottles. She tried to eat as slowly as she could, and the thick, heavy bread helped, but before she knew it, her hunger had won over and the sandwich was gone. Almost as soon as Dan Watson saw the empty plate, he said, “So how about that song?”

From her seat at the bar, she could see outside to El Molino Rojo, across the street, but Cheno wasn’t there. She took a drink, the water having warmed some in the dissipating heat of the cantina, so it wasn’t too cold for her throat. The song she had practiced was one she had tried to recall from her mother’s record playing, a simple set of repeated chords, but now the idea of singing in front of someone besides Cheno felt ridiculous. “I’d be terrible,” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Come on, now,” Dan said. “I gave you a sandwich.”

She laughed. Cheno was still nowhere on the street. “I suppose,” she said, a bit defeated, yet somehow relieved that her number wasn’t going to be a real audition. She smiled at Dan’s good nature and bent down for her guitar, adjusting herself on the blue velvet stool and looking down at the strings in preparation.

“No, no,” he said. “Not there.” Dan pointed to the center of the cantina. “Over there.” He stepped from behind the bar and grabbed another blue velvet stool, handling it as lightly as he had the guitar, bringing it to the center of the room and setting it gently on the dusty floor. “Right there,” he called, then retreated toward the kitchen. She didn’t have time to imagine how the cantina might look at night, full of people, the sound of boots on the wood drowned out by song and laughter and chatter. A honey-colored spotlight came on from above. “Go on,” Dan called, but she couldn’t see him anywhere. “I can hear you.”

She laughed nervously but took her place, her stomach sinking and her hands beginning to shake. So this was what it was like to perform, to call out while everyone was hanging on your words. Her knees felt watery and wooden at the same time. None of it felt right: her posture, the honey light, her throat clearing but her voice sounding reserved, her fingers too jittery to focus. But she held them on the strings just as Cheno had shown her, and took a deep breath, imagining herself on the television sets at Stewart’s Appliances, remembering that the singers and the fiddle players and the horn section always faced the camera. So Teresa looked up, as if she were facing an audience herself. Ahead of her, on the opposite wall, a long horizon of mirror stretched from one end of the wall to the other. There she was, with her denim skirt and her white blouse, and the light coming down like hot honey. She was too far away from the mirror to see herself clearly—her features, her face, the way her eyes must have looked, confused and full of apprehension—but she was close enough to see that she would never be a distant figure to anyone in that cantina. She would be close enough to the patrons that the songs would mean something if she sang them the way she did in the quiet of her rented room above the bowling alley, and she could focus on the image of herself in the mirror if she didn’t want to look in their eyes, just the way she did with Dan Watson outside in the heat of the day, his eyes squinting to conceal what he was really seeing.

Seeing herself in the mirror, she suddenly felt calm, the idea of her singing not so ludicrous.

She began, her fingers already on the strings, and she strummed the first notes, watching herself in the mirror as the opening words came out of her mouth:

I had a man

In Abilene

Man of my dreams

But lowdown mean.

She was mesmerized by the sight of her hands caressing the guitar, her fingers moving in time over in that mirror and keeping up, but it lasted only a moment—Teresa felt the next notes getting away from her, and she stopped singing but kept playing. She had to bend her head to watch the strings, to concentrate, to remember the words and keep time.

Prettiest eyes

I ever seen

In Abilene.

The song had escaped her: her voice was clear, but her guitar playing lagged behind badly and she had to strum the chords between lines a few times to catch up. As she sang, her mind wandered to the ease of those women on the television sets, all of their energy focused just on the emotion of a song she couldn’t even hear through the heavy plate glass. They had it easy, she thought, struggling, her knees growing heavy from the guitar. She watched the strings, watched her fingers, but when she neared the last verse, she stopped playing the guitar and just hummed, looking up at herself in the mirror, focused entirely on the way she always wished she could see herself: poised, controlled, assured, brave. Not lonely, not frightened behind two locked doors, not longing for her mother, not longing for Cheno to be a different man, not opening her eyes to yet another morning of a life with no one in it, no money, her heart too heavy with worry. Her own image in the mirror showed this to her with such nakedness that she found herself singing as loudly as she could, and she surprised herself at how much lament she was able to muster, as if to make up for her uninspired performance, as if to sing out to herself in the mirror. She wanted to watch herself, but she found her eyes closing, her head rising up some as if the last notes knew on their own that they could slide out of the arch of her throat.

Dan clapped from his dark spot, emerging into her honey light, smiling so widely that Teresa could only believe he was doing so to make her feel better. She looked down at the guitar as if it were to blame, and as Dan’s boots sounded closer against the wooden floor, she felt foolish and sorry for herself. That was what she had seen in the mirror—her own deep need, all of her longing apparent—but nothing about it could be appealing. She thought of Cheno watching her in front of Stewart’s Appliances and had to look at the floor.

“Don’t put your head down,” Dan admonished her. “That was great.” Then he reached over slowly and tipped her chin up, one finger and tenderly. He didn’t keep it there, but Teresa wished he had, just as in the movie advertisement she’d seen outside the Fox Theater downtown, a woman with watery eyes looking up at a man, his hand on her cheek.

“Thank you,” she said, but she couldn’t look at him, at his brown eyes, nor back down at the guitar strings, so she went back to herself, over in the horizon of mirror, looked at herself as Dan Watson stood over her, his wide back, and the honey light coming down.

“You’re a good singer,” he said. “A sad voice sells a lot of beers.”

“Sad songs are good?”

“Oh, yes. Especially here. If you want to dance, you go over to Ed’s place. Get drunk and cry? Right here.”

Dan reached over for the guitar and she gently released it to him. Confidently, he started up the song again, this time with a bold, strong rhythm and none of her hesitation. She watched his fingers along the fret board, astounded. They were strong hands, agile, one dancing along the arm of the guitar with instinct, the other striding along with equal, easy fervor. “Your guitar playing needs a little work, though.”

She laughed, but he kept playing, smiling back at her. He wasn’t watching his fingers—he didn’t need to. Dan Watson was looking right at her, his brown eyes wide and inviting. “Sing,” he said. “Come on.”

What the song sounded like, now, was what she remembered from her days with her mother, and she didn’t need to close her eyes to make the words arrive. They came on their own, and because Dan Watson was now blocking her view of herself in the mirror, she looked at him as she sang. She kept her voice low, but the feeling was there, the sorrow. But now she was beginning to understand that such sorrow had a different shading to it, that it could lift into something else if she permitted herself to sink exactly into the whirl of Dan Watson’s brown eyes, the eyes the song warned about.

Teresa kept her voice low and the two of them carried through the song with an easy harmony that actually made her smile when they finished.

“I knew what song you were trying to sing,” Dan said. “My mama used to listen to it a lot.”

“So did mine,” Teresa said. “It was one of her favorites.”

“You changed the words around.”

“I didn’t remember them,” she admitted. “Or I remembered hearing it differently.”

“You start inventing words, that’s true,” Dan said, handing back the guitar. “Playing is harder than it looks. You practice a lot?”

“Not enough. I don’t know that much about how to play.”

“Who taught you? Your daddy?”

She couldn’t find the best answer, thinking of Cheno outside, wondering if he was searching up and down the street for her.

“You have a nice voice, though,” he said, reassuring her.

He stood smiling at her, and when Teresa couldn’t think of how to respond, she laughed nervously. He laughed with her but wouldn’t say anything more to help her out of the fluttering tension in her hands, her stomach, her throat. She looked down at the guitar and picked at one of the strings.

Dan reached over and moved her left hand to the fret board, positioning her fingers. “Right there. Bend this finger. Firm as can be.” Satisfied with her grip, he eased right behind her with one solid step and cast his arm over her shoulder. Not touching her, but close enough for Teresa to feel the soft fabric of his shirt. He helped her play the briefest of notes, just the beginning of something, unsaid and unsung and sad-sounding enough to warrant feeling that way, and then stopped.

Outside, through the open door, a vehicle sounded across the gravel, slowing down. The vehicle stopped and they could hear a door open and close. “That’s Ed,” he said. “Across the street.”

He stepped away from her, and Teresa rose from the stool to look out the door, but all she saw was the vehicle—another Ford truck—and Cheno nowhere in sight.

“Sing for me,” Dan said.

“That’s the only song I know.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, sing for me, not Ed.”

That’s how it begins, the women on the television told her. You have to open your arms wide first.

“I’ll play guitar,” Dan said. “Or someone else will. All you have to do is sing.”

Across the street, the door to Ed’s bar stood wide open, but it wasn’t a place she wanted to enter anymore.

“I can’t pay you,” said Dan quickly. “You can keep any tips, though.”

Had Cheno come and gone? She thought of what he might say when she presented this situation to him, but what made her dismiss him was the spark of her mother’s voice, the need when she sang along with those records, and what bloomed in Teresa was something close to forgiveness. Of course her mother would’ve boarded the bus to go back to Texas.

“Okay,” Teresa said, and nodded. “I’ll sing for you.” Then she froze. “You don’t mean tonight, do you?”

“No, no. Practice first. Practice as much as you want. In here, if you like. In the afternoons when I do the cleaning, so you won’t feel nervous.”

He made his way to the front door, picking up his keys from the top of the bar. “Unless you’re going to help me sweep up, maybe I should take you home right now before the drunks come in.”

“I can walk,” Teresa said. The old feeling came back: she wasn’t just worried about Cheno seeing her in Dan’s truck, but about the people in town, how a ride through the afternoon streets with the windows rolled down was far different from Cheno’s careful, tiptoeing courtship.

“It’s not a problem,” Dan said. “Come on.”

Seven years ago, when her mother had announced that money was too hard and that they would both board a Greyhound to Texas, where Teresa’s father lived, Teresa had said, I’m not going with you. Saying that had been like singing a song: opening her mouth and letting the sound crack through. She knew, even then, that Texas was not for her, that her mother wanted to go to the place where the records took her, the violet dark where Teresa’s father lived. She had said no, the static of the record turntable going round and round, and she couldn’t see her mother’s face when she said it.

Dan locked Las Cuatro Copas and made his way to the black Ford pickup truck, opening the door and holding it for her. Teresa looked across the street at the other bar, hoping to catch a glimpse of Ed or even Cheno, some opportunity to stop herself from her own falling, but the building only yawned back with its open door, Dan standing, waiting, his tall, wide-shouldered posture.

“Come on,” said Dan. “What are you waiting for?”

It’s your life, her mother’s silhouette had said, after a long silence between them, in the violet dark of their little room. You do what you want.