Jesse began to wail. I bent to pick her up, but T.R. was quicker. She picked the little girl up and set her in her lap; then, to my surprise, she lifted her T-shirt and expertly installed Jesse at her breast. Jesse’s wails were immediately choked off, soon to be replaced by soft sucking sounds.
It seemed as if life had become one unexpected activity after another. My daughter was calmly nursing my granddaughter right at my elbow; Jesse rested one of her tiny bare heels against my leg.
The Mexican teen-agers soon began to drift over; they stood in front of us, chattering and chewing gum, while Jesse nursed. Bo was squatting in the dirt some distance away, eying us balefully, or so it seemed to me.
“I wish I could nurse her,” the pregnant teen-ager said.
“You better just enjoy life while you can, Elena,” T.R. said pleasantly. “You’ll be nursing that one of yours any time. Ow, Jesse—please don’t bite. That tit’s not a cheeseburger.”
I glanced over and saw that Jesse’s pale blue eyes were watching me solemnly. She released T.R.’s large nipple for a moment and smiled at me. Then she greedily stuffed the nipple back in her mouth and resumed her nursing.
“Jesse don’t usually bite,” T.R. remarked. “She’s just not payin’ attention. Too interested in her new grandpa. Bo was a biter and still is—you watch, he’ll come charging over and try to get the other tit. He ain’t really interested in nursing, he just don’t like for Jesse to get it and him not.”
“He looks a little old to be nursing,” I remarked.
T.R. looked at me coolly, as if to say, What do you know about it?
“But I’m no expert on the subject,” I hastened to remark. “I probably shouldn’t even venture an opinion.”
She laughed. “You’re a funny daddy,” she said. “I thought you’d come over here all rich and famous and start right in pushing me around, like Big Pa did and every other man I’ve ever known. But you don’t look like you could push Jesse around, much less me.”
“I’ve never pushed a living soul around,” I said. It was true, too.
Bo suddenly came racing over. He flung himself at T.R.’s lap, but T.R. had been watching, and she expertly stiff-armed him.
Jesse turned slightly so she could watch her brother’s assault, but she did not release the nipple.
Bo kept trying, but T.R. just put her hand on his head and held him off.
“If you were a nice boy you could have some nursy,” she informed him. “But you ain’t been the least bit nice all day, so you’ll just have to wait till you feel a little more polite.”
Bo flung himself down in the dirt and began to kick and squeal. He was clearly a child with violent emotions. Two or three of the Mexican girls bent over and began to tickle him. At first he kicked out at them viciously, but gradually his tears turned to laughter.
Jesse had finished nursing. She lolled in T.R.’s lap, a picture of contentment. Occasionally she kicked my leg with her heel.
“Somebody told me Bo might be hyperactive, but I don’t know about that,” T.R. said. “I think he’s just mean, like his daddy. Bo may have got some wildness from that side of the family.”
“Where is his daddy?” I asked.
Once again she looked at me coolly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to pry. Don’t tell me if you’d rather not.”
“You sure back off a lot,” she remarked. “I don’t know how you’re gonna survive in this rough crowd you’re with now.”
“I’m just not used to interacting much,” I said. “But maybe I can learn.”
“Maybe you can, maybe you can’t,” she said. “I don’t know why you’d even want to interact with us.”
Then she looked uncertain.
“I don’t have too good a vocabulary,” she admitted. “Does interact mean be part of the family?”
“That’s what it means,” I said.
6
Bo kicked, squealed, and sobbed in the dirt for several minutes. The sight made me nervous, but T.R., Jesse, and the Mexican girls ignored it and went on with their lives. Jesse burped delicately and drifted into a nap. The Mexican girls took seats on some old milk cartons piled behind the little building and held a lively discussion with T.R. about natural childbirth. All of them, it seemed, were either pregnant or intended to be soon; T.R., a matriarch at twenty-two, was a source of wisdom to them. While they chattered, Bo stopped sobbing and went to sleep in the dust.
T.R. proved to be no advocate of natural childbirth.
“However you do it, it gets a little too natural,” she said. “Jesse wasn’t too bad, but Bo hurt like shit. I was yelling at them to kill me before they finally got him out.”
She handed Jesse, slumbering so deeply that she seemed to be boneless, over to me.
“The thing I like to top a banana split off with is some onion rings,” she said. “They take that sweet taste out of your mouth. Want some, Daddy?”
“Maybe I’ll just have one or two of yours,” I said. T.R. was about five ten and had beautiful legs. I felt a little awed at the thought that I had such a vigorous young woman for a daughter. I wanted just to look at her for a long time, not because she was beautiful but because she was my relation—my daughter. Since the death of my grandparents, nearly forty years before, I had had many relationships but no relations. Even at the pinnacle of my fame, when I heard people talking about their families I felt left out.
Suddenly a member of my family stood in front of me, stretching; another slumbered in my lap. The plain of my middle age, empty only two days before, had taken on unexpected contours.
T.R. let herself in the back door of the Mr. Burger.
“How come you never met T.R. before?” Elena, the most inquisitive of the teen-agers, asked.
“Her mother and I separated,” I said unhappily. “We just never met until today.”
I knew it wasn’t an adequate answer. What did explain twenty-two years of absence? My own fear of confrontation, increasing in increments every year that passed, explained it, but I didn’t want to have to put that into words Elena could understand, or even into words I could understand.
Elena, skinny except for her expanding belly, seemed to sense that she had exposed a nerve.
“But now you’re here so it’s okay,” she said, as T.R. came out the door with a heaping pile of onion rings on a paper plate.
“You can stick her in the stroller, if you want to,” she said. “Once she’s gone, she’s gone. I can hold her upside down and she doesn’t wake up.
“I’m the same way,” she added. “Both times I’ve been robbed I was just laying there asleep. Muddy took everything I had, both times. It wasn’t much, but it was all my little treasures.”
“Muddy?” I asked. “Is that a person?”
“Well, he’s sort of a person,” T.R. said. “Person enough to get me pregnant, anyway.”
“Oh, is he their father?” I asked.
T.R. was in the middle of an onion ring and didn’t immediately answer. She held out the plate. Several of the teen-agers took one, and finally I took one too; they were smelly and irresistible. Life at the Dismuke Street Mr. Burger had a balmy Neapolitan quality that I was beginning to like. One sat around dining al fresco on local delicacies while discussing the great issues of life with optimistic, not to mention animated, young women. It was just the way I had always planned to live.
“Muddy ain’t their father,” T.R. corrected, giving me one of her semi-severe looks. “He’s just Jesse’s father—if this business about genes is true, then it explains why Jesse is so sweet, ’cause Muddy’s basically sweet as pie himself, he just happens to be a burglar, and stealing’s what he does. He’ll tell you himself he’ll steal from anybody.”
“That’s not too nice,” I said. “Has he ever been caught?”
“Muddy?” she said, laughing. All the teen-agers broke into giggles. “Of course he’s been caught. He’s caught right now. He’s sweet and he’s a crook, but nobody ever
said he was smart. I doubt if Muddy ever broke and entered more than once or twice in his life that he wasn’t caught.
“The cops like him, though,” she added. “Muddy can charm anybody, but the main reason the cops like him is because he’s easy to catch. He gets a few months here and there, but Muddy’s never done hard time like Earl Dee.”
She stopped and waited, watching me. There was a certain testing quality in her look. Clearly she was ready to find out if I really wanted to know anything about her, or if I was just window-shopping in her life.
It was not the first such look I had ever seen in the eyes of a woman. Despite my many flaws, I was not window-shopping.
“Who’s Earl Dee?” I asked.
“Bo’s Daddy,” she said.
“Is he a criminal too?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t like you to lump ’em,” T.R. said. “Muddy’s just a little no-good lazy burglar who’s too worthless to work. He don’t mean no harm. Earl Dee’s a criminal. He’s up in Huntsville right now, doing five to fifteen for armed robbery, and it’d be worse if I hadn’t worked three jobs at once to get him a lawyer who could plea-bargain off the assault charge.”
“He doesn’t sound very nice,” I said.
“He ain’t, and it’s one reason I finally called you,” T.R. said. “It’s real crowded up in Huntsville. I think they may let Earl Dee out early, and if that happens I don’t want to be here.”
“You think he’d be a pest?”
T.R. chuckled, but it was not a merry chuckle.
“I think he’ll kill me,” she said in a flat tone. “He said he would if I ever went with another man, and now he’s found out about Muddy and Jesse. I don’t want to be where he can find me when he gets out.”
“I want the three of you to pack up and come home with me,” I said. “That’s what I’d hoped you’d want to do anyway.”
T.R. didn’t seem as cheered by my invitation as I had hoped she would be. Her flat tone went with a flat look, and she directed the look at me.
“I just met you,” she said. “I don’t know a thing about you. For all I know you might be worse than Earl Dee. He ’bout ruined my life, but at least he didn’t neglect me. You done that, and now you’re wantin’ me to think you’ll just take all my troubles away.”
“I don’t think I can take all your troubles away,” I said. “I don’t think anyone can do that. But I could try to make you a home for as long as you might want to stay.”
“I don’t think you like Bo,” she said, taking another tack.
“So far I can’t claim to have warmed to him,” I admitted. “He seems pretty fractious.”
“He’s a writer, that’s why he uses them odd words,” T.R. informed the girls, who had been listening closely to all this.
“On the other hand, I already love Jesse,” I said. “And besides that, I already love you.”
“Don’t even mention it, you’re way too late to be bringing that up!” she said. “You never sent me a single birthday present.”
“Oh, I sent them,” I said truthfully. “Your mother just refused them. I sent them every year until she told me she’d start burning them if I didn’t stop. After that I bought them but I didn’t send them. I just put them in a closet.”
“In a closet?” she asked. This revelation really surprised her.
“Yep,” I said. “Twenty-two birthday presents and twenty-two Christmas presents too, plus a few Easter baskets and stuff. They’re all in a closet at my house. You can see them when we get home.”
T.R.’s face reddened. It was clear she was about to cry.
“Did you really do that—get me them presents?” she asked in a quivering voice.
I nodded; it was true. Every year I had gone ahead and got the presents, feeling hopeless but doing it anyway, always asking a salesclerk what a little girl, or in time a not-so-little girl, her age might want. They were all in a closet at Los Dolores: Barbie dolls, doll dishes, makeup kits, a ten-speed bike, etc.
“By the way, how is your mother?” I asked, to ease the moment.
“I thought you said you’d talked to her,” she said. “I thought you said she told you she’d burn my presents.”
“I did, but that was several years ago,” I said. “I just wondered how she was.”
“She died when I was twelve,” T.R. said. “Cancer got her.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “I guess it was longer ago than it seemed when we had our conversation. I’m sorry, T.R.”
“My dad, he’s got cancer now,” Elena volunteered conversationally.
T.R. put her face in her hands and began to sob. Tentatively I put my arm around her. In a moment she turned and clung to me, sobbing. For the first time in my life I felt my daughter’s tears on my neck. That was fine, but in shifting position slightly, I almost dislodged the slumbering Jesse; she began to slide out of my lap. I raised one knee a little and just managed to stop her. T.R. sobbed and sobbed, seeming to grow larger and wetter the more tightly she clung to me. I felt as though I were embracing a giant, while at the same time trying to keep a midget—Jesse—from falling to the ground. The leg that I used to stabilize Jesse soon began to cramp.
Also, Jesse kept sliding—her movement was almost imperceptible, but she was sliding. Fortunately, T.R. stopped sobbing just before Jesse went over the trembling precipice of my knee.
T.R. wiped her face on the bottom of her T-shirt.
“I wanta go to your house,” she said. “I wanta see if you really got me all them presents.”
“I got them, they’re there,” I assured her. “As far as I’m concerned, we can go right now.”
7
“First I gotta finish my onion rings before they get cold, though,” T.R. remarked. “That’s one delay. Then we gotta go by the jail and see Muddy, he’d never forgive me if I moved away without lettin’ him have one last glimpse of his baby girl. I know Dew will wanta come, Dew’s always ready to go places, but Sue Lin’s a different matter. Sue Lin may take a little persuading.
“They live with me, you know,” she went on, offering me another onion ring, which I took—I was getting the sense that my new family life was going to require more fuel than my old lonely life.
“We’re sharing the rent, I can’t just run out on them,” she added. “How big’s your house?”
“Oh, it’s quite large,” I said gamely. “There’s room for everyone.”
“In that case you better come too, Elena,” T.R. said. “You’ll need some help with that kid, when it comes, and anyway Jesse loves you, she ain’t gonna like going off and leavin’ you.”
“Okay, I can be the baby-sitter,” Elena said happily.
The rest of the teen-agers had skipped off to talk to some somber young men who were bouncing a tire in the back of a pickup near by. If they had stayed around I felt sure T.R. would have asked them too.
“I’m gonna go ask Sue Lin,” T.R. said. “It would be pretty hard to do without Sue Lin. She’s about the only person Bo likes.”
“Bring her, by all means,” I said. Bo was still asleep, but he was beginning to twitch. T.R. was right that I didn’t like him, although I knew it was ridiculous to judge a grandchild on such short acquaintance. Perhaps he’d grow up to be a theologian rather than an armed robber, but I doubted it. At first blush the thought of taking Dew, Sue Lin, Elena, in addition to T.R. and the kids, had seemed a bit much, but a moment’s reflection persuaded me there might be safety in numbers.
Besides, what a stunning surprise it would be for Godwin and Gladys when I drove up with four young women, one of them black, one of them yellow, one of them brown (not to mention pregnant), and one of them my daughter.
“The problem’s Granny Lin,” T.R. said, when she came out. “She’s kind of fuzzy in the head from all them days floating around in a boat and starving and stuff. I think we better just take Granny Lin too, she’s not much bigger than a chicken. Otherwise Sue Lin will never budge and Dew won’t either. I sure ain’t up to l
eavin’ every single person I know, even if there is that closetful of presents. And if I stay down here, Earl Dee will kill me, or if he decided to hold off on killin’ me he’d try to put the kids to work making child porn or something—that’s the direction Earl Dee’s mind runs when he ain’t off beatin’ the piss out of some poor turkey working in a 7-Eleven somewhere. Seems like we oughta just gather up Granny Lin and go. It’s a pretty good bunch of us—that’s why I was hoping you’d bring the airplane.”
By my count we were up to eight passengers, but Dew, Sue Lin, and Elena were skinny, and the kids were tots. Granny Lin was said to be no bigger than a chicken. Only T.R. and I were large. It seemed to me we might all fit in the Cadillac.
“We can fit,” I said. “We just might have to send a moving van for your possessions.”
“There ain’t no possessions,” T.R. said. “Muddy just stole everything we had three days ago. See that pickup where those kids are bouncing the tire? He hauled off the bed and the TV set in that—the bed his own child was sleeping in—that’s how good a burglar Muddy is. He brought Jesse back, but not the bed. We’re lucky he left us the clothes on our backs.”
“This is the person you want to visit in jail?” I said.
“Sure, so what?” T.R. said. “He was just out of money and needed to buy some marijuana,” she said. “Muddy gets real bad headaches if he don’t smoke marijuana. Our old TV only got two channels anyway—it was all just junk, what he stole. So far I never owned nothing in my life that wasn’t junk. If I didn’t have Muddy to steal it, I’d have to pay somebody to haul it off, sooner or later.”
“I guess that’s a healthy attitude,” I said.
“It’s a don’t-give-a-fuck attitude,” T.R. said in her flat voice. “I got more to worry about than a few crappy possessions. I got Earl Dee to worry about. I don’t even want to work my shift, I’m gonna see if I can get one of the girls to take it. What if Earl Dee got out yesterday? He could come walking right up any time.”
She reached down and scooped Bo out of the dirt, where he was napping. He began to whine and rub his eyes.