Six
From the moment Teresa boarded the pickup, she expected to see Cheno coming up the street, and every figure walking along threatened to be him, only to end up being no one at all that she knew. Dan Watson drove with such leisure that she wondered if he didn’t already suspect that she’d been waiting for someone, and she did her best not to appear nervous, her hands tucked underneath her knees, the guitar resting between them. When they rounded the corner toward her street, she seized at the thought of Cheno waiting at the door, even though it was something he’d never done. The street was bare. The way her pulse raced and eased when she discovered this alarmed her. She was doing nothing wrong.
Dan Watson kept the truck running after Teresa pointed to the green door. “Right there?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered. “I live above the bowling alley.”
He peered up at the window, the blue curtains hanging. “I didn’t know that was up there.”
She opened the door. “Well, thank you for the ride.”
“You working tomorrow?”
“I am. Today was my day off.” She stepped out of the truck and held the door.
“Can I pick you up for lunch?”
She pressed the guitar against her. “Well …”
“Noon? Is that when Carson lets you off?”
“How do you know I work at the shoe store?” she asked, both astonished and a bit amused.
“Small town,” he said. “How’bout it?”
Something told her that she was supposed to hesitate, but the words bubbled on their own. “I’d like that,” she answered.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Noon it is.” He reached over the bench seat to close the passenger door. “I’ll see you then.”
Teresa scurried up the steps in the dark hallway, and for the remainder of the afternoon she lay on her bed and watched the room tilt from deep yellow to the orange of the west. She kept expecting to hear Cheno’s voice from the street, her windows open to break the heat, but by now she realized he’d been kept at whatever fieldwork he’d been given for the day. Still, she wanted to hear his call, his tiny knock at the foot of the stairs, but as evening came, she thought more and more about Dan Watson and found herself not wanting to see Cheno at all. She let the violet come as her mother had done in the past and didn’t turn on the light. From below, she thought, maybe Cheno would see the dark window and think she’d gone to bed early.
She ate in the dark—a simple dinner of leftover beans heated gently on the stove, and two tortillas. She drew a glass of water from the tap. She thought of Dan sitting down at a table in a large white house, plates and plates of food, and the silhouettes of his family gathering round.
When even the violet light disappeared, Teresa showered to cool herself off before sleep. She stretched her little radio closer to the edge of her bed, its cord extended as far as possible, and turned on the dial. The face of the radio glowed amber, now the only light in the room. She lay on the bed and listened, irritated by the announcer, but then grateful for his information: he told her the names of the songs and the singers singing them, and each time one caught her attention, Teresa closed her eyes and listened hard. She tried to memorize the words, even though they floated past too quickly, and caught lines here and there when they repeated as a chorus. Men cooed together sweetly, standing behind the one singer as if to help in his pleading: that was how men sang. Songs of pleading and promises, tomorrows, wedding days, and love eternal. All of them in voices so high pitched that they sounded nothing like the men downstairs: they sounded regal, silky, like looking at cigarette smoke but not having to smell it.
Downstairs, she thought she heard the faintest of knocks, and she reached over to turn down the radio. She heard it again, a timid one-two, and then the pause that meant Cheno was waiting, looking up at her window, and wondering if he should knock again.
She wanted to raise herself up on her elbows and look down from the window. He’d come all that way. It was so late. She could feel him waiting. But on the radio, a new song started. It was a man. And all evening, whenever a man sang, she pictured Dan Watson. If a woman sang, Teresa imagined herself. Even the backup singers had a role, two or three Dan Watsons behind her in complete harmony if the song required it, or sometimes two or three versions of herself, in different-colored cowgirl skirts, with Dan playing a guitar and all three versions of herself reaching out to him from the single microphone.
Downstairs, she could hear Cheno’s footsteps give in to his indecision. Her heart ached for him a bit as she pictured him walking the streets of Bakersfield, dark now, and she lay back down on the bed. Sleep wasn’t going to come tonight, not the way her eyes closed and she saw visions of the pickup truck or the ham-and-butter sandwich Dan had served her or his hands pressing her fingers on the fret board. She reached over and turned up the radio, listening awhile before finally noticing the balance struck by the DJ: sometimes a song would be low and quiet, the love lost, but then a girl group would come up next and chirp like birds about the wonders of a simple smile. They sang as if none of them had ever sat in a dark room with their mothers. They sang as if they always answered the faintest knock at the door from someone too timid to admit his own love. They had voices like sunny mornings, full of a hope so assured it wasn’t really hope anymore.
Could she ever sing like that? She wasn’t sure. But Teresa couldn’t manage the songs of desperation either. She had nothing within her that could match that complete loss of hope. She was alone and she was lonely, but she was not her mother. Could she make it up, imagine that pain? Which song could her mother sing, which one could most truthfully speak to what she carried inside? She wondered how much of one’s life mattered in giving a song conviction, how much could be heard by a stranger who looked at you knowingly. She closed her eyes and imagined herself singing with Dan. They would have to be, she told herself, happy songs. Unless she thought of Cheno. Then it would be different.
The hours passed and Teresa drifted into sleep, too heavy into it to reach over and turn off the radio. She woke when a ballad came on, so hushed and strange, as if Cheno himself had stolen into the room and started singing for her. Her sleep confused her, this voice and the words being sung. The voice registered defeat and weariness and surrender. She woke enough to picture Cheno and then a whole company of boys she had seen around Bakersfield. The dull, gangly son of the shoe store owner; the two high school boys who rode their bicycles together in the mornings, both of them rail-skinny and sporting thick black glasses. That voice could come out of any one of them in complete sincerity, she thought, but her mind floated back to Cheno.
“That was Ricky Nelson’s hit from last year, ‘Lonesome Town,’” said the announcer at the end of the song, and Teresa thought to reach over and turn off the dial. But she had loved this warm weight brought on by music as she tried to sleep, and she closed her eyes, hoping for another moment like it. She drifted in and out of sleep, at one point hearing a different announcer, with a voice barely a whisper, saying that it was nearly two in the morning, and for a brief moment she dreamed of rising to look out the window to see what Bakersfield would look like at that hour, who else the announcers were keeping awake, the stars above the dark city. That was her at the window, naked, and the men at the corner grocery store looking up but not whistling, as if seeing her like that at night was a gift they knew they shouldn’t question, just behold.
Morning trucks began coming around four o’clock, only a single engine now and then, but enough to wake her and open her eyes to the sky lightening to indigo. The radio kept playing. By the fourth truck she peered out at the corner to look for Cheno, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and sure enough, she saw him haggling with a driver, his white T-shirt almost glowing in the dawn light. When she saw him jump into the bed of the truck, she watched the brake lights disappear down the road, his head turning back to look at her window, and she wondered if he saw her. She rose soon after and took her time preparing her blouse and skirt for work, making coffee and two slices of toast. She bathed again to get rid of the night’s sweat, dried her hair, and put it up in a bun. It was only seven, still two hours before she had to be at work, but she gathered her purse and descended to the street.
At the foot of her door, as soon as she opened it to the morning, she spotted the little jar. She bent down to pick it up. A Gerber baby-food jar, filled to its brim with toasted pumpkin seeds. She held it in her hand for a moment before placing it in her purse along with her apartment key. It was hardly any weight at all, but she could feel the little jar like a stone in her purse, almost pulsing with Cheno’s long patience at her door the previous night. This wasn’t right, the way she was behaving, and sooner or later, Teresa knew, she would have to say something to Cheno. But what, exactly, when all she knew was the uncertain fluttering deep in her own throat at every thought of Dan Watson.
She headed to the shoe store in a roundabout way, wondering if she was in love. She lingered by a sale display of laundry detergent, nail polish, and floor wax at the drugstore and found herself dreaming of using them in a large, beautiful home with Dan’s pickup parked in the driveway. Across the street, she was surprised to see the barber shop not only open but busy—she could see the men waiting in chairs, reading the morning paper, and could even hear the soft buzz of a radio report. Married men, all of them, she suspected, maybe even what Dan would turn into later on, and when she thought this, she spied one of the men looking up from his newspaper, his eyes lingering on her.
She walked away from his gaze and went to the record shop down the street. She studied the album covers pasted up against the windows, Elvis Presley and Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra, the black discs hanging down from the ceiling on fish-line, each of them with colorful labels that Teresa regarded as if they were jewels. The logos, the rich colors, even the company names: Chess, Atlantic, Peacock, Imperial, Sun, Decca, Mercury, Capitol, Cadence. Since no one was on the street, Teresa said the names aloud, wanting to hear how grand they sounded, each with its own singularity and suggestion, and she stood there dreaming about which life she’d rather have: one with Dan and the pickup in the driveway, the other where she could arrive at one of those studios in an elegant car, the microphone waiting.
To ask for both, she thought to herself, was greedy beyond words. She thought of Cheno, if he daydreamed while yanking nectarines from the branches, what he asked the sky for.
In the bottom of the corner display, she noticed the name Ricky on one of the album covers. She had to lean down to look at it, at him. There he was, a black-and-white picture, but she guessed that his hair was brown, rich and deep, and he looked back at her with eyes she could not guess the color of. Maybe blue. Maybe green. But the long lashes! Casting shadows almost, and she studied the rest of his face—his lean nose, the faint bit of stubble, his eyebrows leaning in to each other, the way his left eye seemed to signal a different kind of feeling: the regret she had heard in his voice last night. That was the eye she focused on, as if she could feel his longing, as if she could fall in love with it and alleviate it. Didn’t Cheno have it, too? And yet why couldn’t she fall in love with him? She put her hand on her purse, feeling the small weight of the jar of pumpkin seeds. Ricky’s bottom lip jutted out thick and full, the upper one much thinner, his mouth holding in a perfect line, capturing who he was—a singer—and how everything that mattered about him centered on the moment he opened that mouth.
For hurt to matter, she thought, you had to be beautiful. She thought of Cheno’s small frame scrambling into the bed of the pickup truck. She thought of Dan Watson, how even he lacked the long lashes and strange eyes of Ricky Nelson. She thought of her father, whom she had never met, and wondered how handsome he was to lure her mother all the way to Texas.
Cars rumbled by more frequently now, so Teresa made her way to the shoe store, waiting outside the doors. Mr. Carson had not yet arrived, nor had Candy, her co-worker. Sunlight warmed the sidewalk. She could feel the heat in her shoes. Mr. Carson was always early, so by the time his Oldsmobile approached the store, she knew it was probably eight thirty.
He parked fastidiously, poking his fat head from the car window to peer down at the painted lines on the asphalt. He locked the car with his key and approached, a paper cup of coffee in one hand, a small white bag in the other.
“You,” he said, searching for the key to the store. “What are you doing here so early?”
He was genuinely surprised, Teresa could tell—there wasn’t a hint of malice in his voice. “Just a few minutes is all,” she replied.
“Well, don’t expect to get off early,” he said, holding the door open for her. The giant round oak clock read twenty minutes to nine, and without needing to be told, Teresa walked quietly to the back of the store, through the archway blocked off with a thick beige curtain, and to the aisles and aisles of boots and sandals.
She and Candy had a small worktable near the back door, all of the inventory ledgers neatly stacked, the single rolling chair waiting. The floor was cement, and all day came the echo of their clicking shoes as they searched for a requested pair from the stock shelf, or the scrape of the ladder being pulled into place. A second phone could be accessed from their desk, its bell to be answered by the third ring if Mr. Carson failed to get it at the front of the store. A large floor fan, for the moment, sat turned off. The room, Teresa realized, was actually quiet for once. She listened to the silence, the clock’s tick, the slight creak from one of the shelves settling, everything so faint she could hear the shuffle of Mr. Carson’s newspaper out front as he turned the page, then the quiet again, as if he were thinking.
She knew Candy had arrived when Mr. Carson’s deep-throated but friendly voice greeted her, a little muffled because he’d been caught with his mouth full. The two exchanged morning banter with an unforced pleasantry, something he rarely did with Teresa.
It was not yet nine. Candy finally parted the thick beige curtain and walked across to their worktable. She smiled wanly at Teresa but did not say good morning, passing a few minutes shuffling papers, and when the clock finally struck nine, she turned to Teresa with a clipboard and a stack of salmon-colored index cards.
“Will you do the inventory of the shoes on those racks over there?” Candy pointed to the far wall. “We’re getting a shipment sometime next week, so Mr. Carson is planning to put those ones on sale.”
“Of course,” Teresa replied, taking the clipboard and then going over to the worktable for a sharpened pencil. It would be slow and tedious work, checking each of the boxes, noting the condition of each pair of shoes—some of them had lost their shine after being tried on so many times—but it would keep Teresa occupied until lunchtime.
Fifteen minutes passed in quiet. They were intolerable, lunchtime forever off. This is what it was to be in love, Teresa thought, her heart possessing complete control, allowing her neither rest nor distraction, relentless and constant as a star. She looked at the clock yet again, the long hours until noon.
She was on the ladder when she heard Candy’s footsteps approaching, and she looked down in time to see her appear at the front of the aisle, arms crossed.
“You were here so early today,” Candy said. It had not been a question, but she looked up at Teresa with a measure of genuine curiosity. But there was something else, too, Teresa saw, a vague shadow of suspicion.
“I was up at dawn,” she told Candy. “I didn’t sleep very well last night, so I ended up leaving my apartment very early this morning.”
“You have a record player?” Candy asked.
“Well … no, I don’t,” Teresa answered, but now her admission felt almost like a defeat, like when the salesman at Stew-art’s Appliances had approached her the one time she dared step inside, the way he had asked her, “Are you interested in purchasing this television, miss?”
“I have one,” Candy said. “Pricey.”
“I’d imagine so.”
Candy moved fully into the aisle now, her arms still crossed in front of her.
“You going to buy one someday?”
She looked down at Candy, unsure of how to answer. “Maybe I’ll save for one.”
“They’re expensive, you know. Did you know you have to buy needles all the time? Or else they scratch your records if they’re not sharp enough.”
“For the record player,” Candy answered, her mouth opening a little in surprise when Teresa looked back at her blankly. “The arm on the record player,” she explained. “It has a tiny needle that fits exactly—exactly—into the groove of the record.”
“I see,” said Teresa. They remained looking at each other, Teresa on top of the ladder and Candy at the bottom, arms still folded, the silence drawing longer, more awkward. She realized then that maybe Candy had seen her in front of the record store.
“All of that—the needles and the records—starts to add up. That’s a lot of money for a salesgirl,” said Candy.
“Who bought yours?” Teresa asked.
Candy’s arms tightened in their fold. “A boy I’ve been seeing.”
“That’s generous of him.”
“He’s a sweetheart,” said Candy.
Though she was on the ladder and above Candy, Teresa felt vulnerable and intimidated, as if it were not Candy at the bottom of the ladder but Mr. Carson’s awkward teenage son, trying to look up her skirt. Candy’s banter was odd—she rarely spoke to Teresa except to give orders.
“I saw you,” Candy finally said. “In front of the record shop. I was on my way to get a couple of doughnuts for me and Mr. Carson and I saw you standing out by the window.”
How long? she wanted to ask Candy. Teresa pictured her standing across the street the entire time, silently watching, with hardly anyone else around to notice either of them. She imagined seeing herself as Candy had, looking at a still figure admiring the glacial turns of the records hanging from fishline, the shimmer of the window, and how easy it was to guess what she desired.
But there was nothing—was there?—in Candy making note of her standing in front of the shop. Teresa looked down at the clipboard and the salmon-colored index cards as if they might give her an idea of what to say. Candy, though, spoke first.
“You stand in front of store windows a lot,” she said.
Teresa swallowed. “I like to watch the variety shows at lunch,” she said calmly.
“The singers,” said Candy. “I didn’t know you sang.”
“Well, I don’t—”
But Candy interrupted. “I saw you yesterday, too. Riding in Dan Watson’s truck.” She looked up at Teresa, and the tone in her voice was unmistakable: accusatory, yet not mean spirited, a flat statement that dared to be denied, as if she were confronting Teresa with an empty cashbox, wordless, yet with the facts in hand, a fact that needed to be explained.
“He was taking me home,” Teresa said cautiously, the words feeling too deliberate. She knew immediately that she would not be able to say either too little or too much.
Candy already had a story in her head, standing there in her pleated purple skirt, a thin gold bracelet shimmering on her wrist, her blue blouse with a stitched pattern on the collar, a sheer pink scarf knotted at the side of her long throat. She shopped at department stores rather than make her own clothes from Simplicity patterns from TG&Y—that much Teresa could tell just by looking at her, though in truth she knew nothing about Candy. Candy gave her things to do, instructed her as if she were the boss when in fact they were hired to perform the same tasks. A pretty girl who shopped at department stores, who owned a record player, was being courted by a sweet boy, and yet somehow still wanted more and could not hide it.
Teresa knew she shouldn’t say any more, but she wanted Candy to know and not know at the same time: “He plays guitar and he’s teaching me,” Teresa said, and the moment she said it, she realized for the first time that maybe her own life could be an existence that others could dream about. That everyone, at one time or another, stood near a window and looked out, imagining a life that was not their own. “How do you know him?” she asked, because she wanted to ask the questions now, not just answer them.
“Everyone knows Dan Watson. Just like everyone knows Mr. Carson. Just like everyone knows everyone here.”
“No one knows me.”
“I know you,” said Candy, but both of them knew it wasn’t so. All she knew was that her name was Teresa and that she stood outside store windows for a long time and that the most handsome man in Bakersfield had opened the door to his pickup truck to give her a ride home.
Mr. Carson’s heavy, lopsided footsteps sounded at the entrance to the storage room, and that finally broke Candy away from the aisle. She eased back toward the desk as if she had never carried on a conversation with Teresa, simply going on with the business of the morning, and though Teresa could not see Mr. Carson, she knew Candy’s demeanor had worked. “Oh, there you are,” she heard Mr. Carson say, and then he began discussing a matter for the front desk.
Teresa went back to her inventory. I know you, she kept hearing as she counted out pairs of sandals she remembered having ordered a year ago. I know about you, she imagined Candy saying, and there it was—just the additional word, the single key and the lock turning for a door that revealed everything about Teresa in glaring light: her father gone, her mother following, money scarce, the men below her window whistling. I know all about you, she tried, this time her own voice saying it, repeating it, as she counted out white shoes favored by the nurses at the hospitals, tasseled flats in elderly beige, pink canvas sneakers, dancing shoes with glittery straps and heels as thin as expensive vases. I know, I know, I know, as she wrote her counts onto the salmon-colored index cards, the morning passing along torturously and Candy not saying another word to her.
I know. But Candy didn’t. Here was a pair of shoes like Candy’s, a modest pump, the heel barely off the ground, dark brown and plain, no intricate patterning. Teresa glanced at the price on the box and wondered how much Mr. Carson would reduce it—a single pair left, but maybe she could afford it if it went on sale. Women like Candy purchased such shoes throughout the year, the price not too high for them. Candy had a record player and could walk into that record shop and buy every Ricky Nelson song she desired, a different version of his beautiful face on the sleeve any time she wanted.
Teresa continued her inventory but noted more and more shoes she wanted to buy for herself, taking a single index card and jotting down the styles she would pay attention to later. She held them up for inspection: spectator shoes, stack heels, plain Mary Janes and ballerina flats, espadrilles and pumps. All of these for Candy, all of them purchased for her by the sweetheart boy she was seeing. The noon hour crawled closer, and the closer it came, the more she thought of Dan, the things she could have with him, and she felt an impatience that she didn’t have them already. When she came across a single pair of cowboy boots—chocolate, the left one scratched badly at both the tip and the heel, a ring of delicate brown roses etched around the mouth—she took one out of the box and held it up as if it could be broken. How unfair of Candy to want more than she already had. Teresa glanced at the shoe size and knew it would fit, then checked the other one to make sure they were a matching pair, as she was supposed to. There was only one pair of the boots left, meaning Mr. Carson had sold them well, but this box had been stuck near the top of the rack, its cover a little dusty from waiting.
Teresa held still, listening for Candy before she even knew what she was actually doing. The floor fan had not yet been turned on and she waited for some kind of signal of Candy’s presence in the silence of the storeroom—a shuffle of paper, Candy’s shoes against the cement floor, a cough against the dust in the air, but the place remained quiet. The longer the silence went on, the more Teresa hesitated, and she strained for the bells of the front door or voices or the telephone. Nothing came. The longer she waited, she knew, the greater the chance she would never have the boots.
She stepped off the ladder with the boot box in her hand and walked down the aisle, listening. Candy was not at the desk. Teresa stopped momentarily and listened once more. The clock read twenty minutes to noon; the lunch hour was finally arriving. She bent down to get one of the large paper bags with sturdy twine loops, carson’s printed on both sides. Briskly, she unfolded it, as if she were going about her business, but after one more glance at the beige curtain leading to the front of the store, Teresa slipped the boot box into the bag and walked quickly to the rear exit, the door leading out to the alley and the garbage cans, and there she tucked the bag behind one of the trash bins, inconspicuous, where she would pick it up after work.
It was that easy. When she turned back into the storeroom, it was still empty, Candy nowhere in sight. Teresa was surprised at how calm she was, how she could mask herself in the same way Candy had when Mr. Carson had come searching for her earlier in the morning. She made herself look busy, as if all she’d done was sharpen her pencil and gather more index cards. By the time she ascended the ladder again, Teresa had only the vision of the clock in her head, the small amount of time left before lunch and Dan’s soothing presence.
“Teresa,” she heard Candy call out. “There’s someone here to see you.”
She stood on the ladder, waiting for Candy to round the aisle and find her directly, but Candy wasn’t budging. Her voice came from the front of the storeroom, edged with jealousy.
“Teresa?”
“Coming,” she replied. She shuffled down the ladder and walked toward the beige curtain, where Candy stood waiting.
“You should probably tell him,” Candy whispered, “that Mr. Carson would prefer visitors to wait outside.”
Teresa pulled aside the curtain, and there he stood with his hat respectfully in his hands, Dan Watson in a pair of dark jeans and a plaid shirt he must have just purchased, the creases still evident where it had been folded. She could not hide the smile on her face, the previous evening’s dreaming and the morning’s long walk now wiped away, Dan Watson just as handsome as she remembered him from yesterday, his brown hair wet and freshly combed. The hat, she realized, was a measure of respect—he hadn’t actually worn it, judging by his hair—and when she recognized the gesture, she found herself catching her breath.
But Mr. Carson looked over to her and held her gaze long enough to bring her back to her senses. He stared at her as if she should have known better, though there were no customers in the store.
“Are you ready for lunch?” Dan asked.
“Yes, but at noon sharp,” she answered, almost swallowing her words. “Mr. Carson?” She approached the sales counter, putting her hand on it when Mr. Carson did not look up from his work. “Mr. Carson, this is Dan Watson.”
“He’s introduced himself,” Mr. Carson answered, not looking up. “I knew his father.”
“Yes, sir,” Dan said, a little uncertainly.
“You can go at noon on the dot,” Mr. Carson said, not looking up. He finally raised his head and, without a trace of hesitation, said to Dan, “I don’t like my employees to be picked up at the front door, especially in front of customers. There’s a door in the alleyway.”
“Yes, sir.”
“She gets an hour lunch and cannot be late.”
“Yes, sir,” said Dan. He backed away toward the door, Mr. Carson’s fingers back on his ledger, and Teresa watched him exit.
She was about to turn to the storeroom when Mr. Carson spoke.
“Never again,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she said, and pulled aside the curtain. Her meekness gripped itself into a flush of anger at Mr. Carson’s behavior, the embarrassment at being ordered to be picked up from the back alley when she’d seen Candy leave from the front many times at the end of the day, her sweet boyfriend picking her up.
“Don’t be late coming back,” Candy said as Teresa gathered her purse. “I can’t go to lunch until you return, you know.”
“Of course,” she replied, and headed for the back door, wanting to turn back to see if Candy was eyeing her, relieved that Dan had not yet driven up the one-way alley, a skinny passage of broken pavement and splintering utility poles, trash cans, and yellowing weeds. Her Carson’s Shoes bag sat exactly where she’d put it, pristine, and without a second thought, she took it up by its looped handles.
“What you got there?” Dan asked her when she climbed in.
“I’ve been saving for something special,” she said, one hand still on the loops of the bag. The lie slithered out too easily, and she turned to look at him as if he suspected her. She took a peek at the side mirror, half expecting to catch a glimpse of Candy bursting out the back of the store, her deed discovered.
“We can get a burger,” he said, “since you don’t have a lot of time.”
“That sounds wonderful,” she answered. He flicked the signal to turn left. “But could you take me home first?” she asked. “To leave my package?”
“It’ll be safe in the truck.”
“I’m sure it will. But I don’t want to have to carry it home later. And I don’t want to bother you with keeping it for me.”
“It’s not a bother,” he said.
“No, really … ,” she said, and already she could feel the heat of her own protest, as if he would immediately suspect what she had done, what she was willing to do.
“Sure thing,” he said, flicking the signal to turn right instead.
Dan drove along the streets at a comfortable pace, Teresa nervously clutching the bag. I know you. I know about you. People went about their business the way they did every day. She looked out at them as the truck eased on by. She couldn’t get to the apartment fast enough. It would be one thing to get inside her room with the package from Carson’s, but this panic was going to be much harder to shake.
“I hope this isn’t going to be a quiet lunch,” Dan said. “You’re like a mouse.”
She clutched the bag handles one more time, took a deep breath, and then eased her hands, letting go. “It’s been a long morning,” she said.
The truck stopped at an intersection, and into the crosswalk came a woman in a brilliant yellow blouse and fitted gray skirt, elegant and unhurried. She was escorted by a tall man in a crisp white shirt, though he wasn’t holding her arm. They crossed in front of the truck, the woman turning to acknowledge Dan’s patience, and Teresa saw him give the woman the slightest nod. Teresa watched them go. How easy it was for a woman like that: the lack of complication in her life was almost an air around her. Someday, Teresa thought, the beauty of a marriage like that would come to her as well, like opening a window, and there would never be a feeling of being watched or judged, stared at in envy or suspicion or even desire. If anyone looked at her, it would be from admiration.
Such a grand plan to dream like this. Why wouldn’t love come easily? They eased onto her street. The Mexican men on the corner spotted her in the truck, though Cheno was nowhere in sight. Something inside her stirred at the thought of him, the inevitable moment when she would have to tell Cheno how things had changed.
The Mexican men stared at her as Dan parked the truck, and she realized they would be the ones to tell Cheno, even if it wasn’t the truth the way she would tell it. Dan kept the motor running and she went to the door, package in one hand, key in the other. They followed her with their eyes. They knew her. They knew about her. They knew all about her.