Say Goodbye Page 6

  At six-thirty Grandpa Bill showed up to take her to dinner, and Laurie hustled him out the door before he broke down and invited her mother along. Then, when he stopped to hold the door of his pickup for her, she wrapped her arms around him. She’d thought about this every Friday she’d been away: catfish, yams, and roasted corn at the Clubhouse, Fifth Army Band veterans from Fort Sam Houston playing jazz in the corner by the ice machine, Grandpa Bill with a plate of ribs, beans, and greens, eyes closed, smiling.

  Unlike LA, San Antonio was not built around its freeways; the shortest route to the Clubhouse was on surface roads, through upscale Terrell Hills and Alamo Heights, then south into aging neighborhoods on the edge of downtown. Suburbs were the same across Texas and across the country, but urban San Antonio was the very essence of Tex-Mex: palm trees and red tile roofs looking out on acres of parkland, low-riders blasting conjunto and country-western, plywood shacks selling cabrito in the shadow of plastic golden arches.

  She’d thought, on the days when LA had seemed ugly, cumbersome, and painful, that she would slip back into San Antonio as if it were the perfect pair of shoes. And it was in fact comfortable, and full of still more memories: milkshakes from the Broadway Fifty-Fifty; pizza in her best friend Miriam’s car as they sat in Volare’s tiny parking lot; her first kiss, at her father’s company picnic; her first concert, Dallas’s Bugs Henderson, playing the Sunken Gardens when she was fourteen.

  They’d passed Incarnate Word University with its millions of Christmas lights and were only a few blocks from the Clubhouse when a street lamp highlighted the shaved place on the back of Grandpa Bill’s head.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “What’s what?”

  “On your head.”

  He sighed. “I had a couple of little growths taken off.”

  “What kind of growths?”

  “A couple of melanomas. No big deal.”

  “Grandpa, that’s cancer.”

  “Just a couple of little skin cancers. The doctor did it there in the office with a local anesthetic. I drove myself home after. The worst part of it is I have to have a lot of annoying tests for six months to make sure they got it all.”

  “Mom doesn’t know. Does she?”

  “I told her it was a wart. You’re not going to say any different, are you?”

  “If you let me talk to your doctor, and if he backs up your story, then I’ll consider it.”

  “I don’t want you getting yourself exercised over this. You can’t imagine the good it does me to know you’re where you are and doing what you do. If I got in the way of that, if only because you were worrying about me when you should have been concentrating on your music, I couldn’t forgive myself.”

  “Not the guilt, Grandpa,” she pleaded. “Anything but that.”

  The parking lot was full, as always, and they parked on North Alamo. Claudis, the owner, stood by the open back door, surrounded by fragrant white smoke from the 55-gallon pit. He was well over six feet tall and massively built, with hair and beard starting to turn white. He raised his eyebrows and jabbed one finger toward Laurie as she got out of the car. “Lord, girl, where you been?”

  She walked up to shake his hand, feeling a smile stretch her face. “California.”

  “No shit. You playing guitar out there?”

  “A little.”

  “You get famous, don’t you be forgetting your old friends, now.”

  “Not a chance. You’ll be catering my Grammy award party.”

  Inside, the band was tuning up. Laurie moved automatically toward an empty booth on the north wall, Alice’s station, then saw that Alice wasn’t there. She looked at Grandpa Bill, who said, “She’s been gone since July.”

  “What happened?”

  “Apparently one of her customers complained about something and she quit.”

  Laurie understood that she had no claim on Alice. They had no relationship outside the Clubhouse, Laurie herself had left for California with no warning, had abandoned her customers at the Bistro d’Bobbi just as abruptly. Still she felt the loss of one more silken strand tying her to the world.

  The band sat down to business, and Cecil, the keyboard player, caught her eye, winked, and without her having to ask for it, played the crisp, delicate runs that led the band into “Take the ‘A’ Train.” In the middle he took a Basie-style solo, one perfect, ringing note at a time. Take this train, the music said. Roll with this train and don’t look back.

  Feliz Navidad

  She didn’t get up until noon on Christmas Eve, and when she did, she found Corky sprawled in their mother’s recliner, watching junk sports on ESPN. “Hey, Sis,” he said, not looking at her. He’d dressed up for the occasion in a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt and a small, tasteful, dangling cross earring. His hair looked like he’d cut it himself with a pocketknife.

  She brought in her breakfast and ate at the coffee table, watching him watch the screen, curious to see if he’d actually start a conversation. The five years’ difference in their ages had seemed like an entire generation, a lifetime, when she was negotiating the social land mines of high school and he was still learning long division, and she’d been pressed into involuntary baby sitting at least once a week. It had left her feeling more like a mother than a sister. In the months she’d been gone, he seemed to have leapfrogged past her to some premature world-weariness. One arm dangled over the side of chair, the wrist intermittently twitching as he worked the remote control.

  “So how’s that apartment working out?” he finally asked.

  “Good,” she said. “I mean, it’s expensive, but it’s…safe. I’m glad you talked me into it.”

  “You needed to get away from that asshole.”

  “What about you? Mom said you lost your job.”

  “Yeah, like it fell through a hole in my pocket or something. I got fired, is what happened, ’cause I kept coming in late and calling in sick and all. ’Cause I couldn’t manage to give a fuck about photocopies. Excuse me, reprographics.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Fuck if I know. You are so lucky to have something you really care about.”

  “I guess. I’m still working shit jobs, just like you.”

  “Not for long. You’re too talented. Me, I’ll be doing it the rest of my life. I’ll be that pathetic old guy you see at the Stop N Go at midnight, one hand on the sawed-off under the counter all night long, trying to work up the nerve to empty the till and head for Mexico.”

  She didn’t know how to reassure him. He’d tapped into some deep reservoir of despair she’d never seen in him before.

  “Have you still got your place over by SAC?”

  “Nah. My shit’s all up in the attic, next to yours. I’m crashing on my buddy Ray’s sofa right now.”

  “What about, um, Angela?” She’d had to concentrate to come up the name of his most recent girlfriend, who Laurie remembered as bleached hair and a pretty face with eyes always turned to the ground in front of her.

  “I may be worthless, but I ain’t stupid. Even if she was up for taking me in, which I doubt, she’d end up throwing me out again in a few days. Whatever we got left is pretty goddamn shaky.”

  He was motionless while he talked, still in the way that a drawn bow is still, or a baited rat trap. The sympathy she wanted to feel for him seemed to evaporate in his presence.

  In the afternoon, her mother began her Christmas Eve tamales, a matrilineal tradition that stretched back for unnumbered generations, lately (and reluctantly) modified to use vegetable oil instead of lard and black beans instead of pork in a separate-but-equal batch. Grandpa Bill took up his accustomed place at the kitchen table while Laurie assisted, the house gradually filling with warm seasonal smells.

  Corky played his father’s part, numbing himself in front of the TV with Miller Hi-Life. By the time dinner was over and Laurie had seen Grandpa Bill to his truck, the recliner was horizontal and Corky was snoring quietly. Laurie’s mother th
rew a coverlet over him and turned off the lights and the TV.

  “Thanks for dinner, Mom,” Laurie said quietly. “Great tamales.”

  “I’m glad you liked them.”

  Laurie lingered another moment in the hallway. “Are you okay?”

  “Just tired,” her mother said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  It wasn’t that she and her mother didn’t talk. It was that the substance of the conversations hadn’t changed in years, only the details. “You look so thin,” her mother might say, or, “This California business isn’t really working out.” If Laurie mentioned Mazola Mike, the balding, oily, forty-year-old manager of her coffee shop, her mother might say, “Is that what you drove all that way out there for? To work in a coffee shop and play once a week in some bar?”

  In ninth grade, sneaking home late through the back yard, Laurie had recognized the smell wafting from her mother’s open bedroom window. Once past that momentous discovery, it had been easy to deduce the rest: a single joint every night at bedtime, supplemented with medicinal use at certain high stress periods—such as Christmas, when she would put off shopping until the last minute, then wander through the mall in cannabis fog, buying shiny things at the Imaginarium and the Nature Company.

  For her part, Laurie was happy with what she’d done on a microscopic budget, and she put the results under the tree the next morning. She’d found her mother a set of matching Art Deco ring, earrings, and necklace at an antique store in Pasadena. For Corky she’d gotten CDs by up-and-coming LA death-metal bands that had yet to score national record deals. For Grandpa Bill there was a history of LA jazz, lavishly illustrated, which he didn’t look up from for the rest of the day.

  Throughout Christmas afternoon people dropped by for a plate of tamales—neighbors, Laurie’s fifth cousin from Helotes, lawyers from the office where her mother worked as a legal secretary. Around seven o’clock, Laurie answered the phone and heard her father say, “Merry Christmas. Did you get your present?”

  “No…”

  “I mailed it last week. Better ask your mother.”

  She covered the mouthpiece and asked, and her mother did in fact come up with an envelope that looked suspiciously like it held a check, moving Laurie to equal parts hope and guilt. Inside, instead, she found words and music to a song called “Last To Know.”

  She picked up the phone again. “I found it.”

  “It’s…”

  “Shhh. I’m reading.”

  It was a story song, her favorite sort, with a natural voice and unforced rhymes, about a boy whose girlfriend was going to leave him rather than let him find out she was pregnant. When he does find out, though he’s the last to know, he makes her stay and marry him because he loves her and wants the baby. At the same time he has figured out what she knew all along, that it’s going to change everything, that it already has, and once again he’s the last to know.

  Though it was a story she’d never heard before, she was not so naive as to believe he’d made it up. She was touched by the lyrics at the same time that she felt disoriented and a little hurt that the singer—she made herself think of him as the singer—had entered into the marriage with so many reservations.

  “Sing it to me,” she said.

  “I wrote the music out…”

  “I want to hear you sing it.”

  “Besides which, I don’t even have a guitar, thanks to you.”

  “Please.”

  Eventually, hesitantly, he began to sing. It was good enough, she thought, that if he’d ever recorded it, he would at the very least have made it to where-are-they-now status.

  “Daddy, it’s wonderful.”

  “It’s the only song I ever kept, out of all the ones I wrote. I thought it was pretty good, except by the time I wrote it I didn’t have a band anymore and I didn’t know what to do with it.”

  “I do. That’s what this is, isn’t it? For me to sing?”

  “If you want it.”

  “I want it.”

  When she got off the phone, she read the song through twice more to fix it in her memory. Then, since no one was looking, she held it tightly against her chest.

  Class reunion

  She was scheduled to fly back on Tuesday. On Monday, when she got up, she found a note from her mother saying Rudy had called, with a local number under the name. Rudy had been a minor guitar hero in high school, possessed of more swagger than real skill, and had moved to Austin afterward to pursue a career in death-metal. The last time Laurie had seen him, more than a year before, he’d had dark brown hair to his waist and a shaved chest. She and Rudy had been friends and intermittent lovers until she’d gotten involved with Jack, at which point she’d lost track of everyone. Including, she thought, herself.

  She called and got his mother. Rudy was out, but he’d left directions for a party that night at Christian Walker’s house, one of the socialite kids from high school who’d always tried to hang with musicians. No, Rudy’s mother said, Jack wouldn’t be there, Rudy had made sure of it.

  A party, Laurie thought. Just the thing.

  She roamed the empty house, missing her guitar, knowing that if she had it she might never leave. It was so safe here. By working fifteen or twenty hours a week she could pay her own way and have enough left to help her mother with the mortgage. There would be barbecue at the Clubhouse every Friday, coffeehouse gigs in Austin an hour and a half away, and all the sleep she’d been yearning for.

  After dressing carefully in new jeans, antique silk blouse, and black blazer, she took her mother out to an early dinner at Aldino’s and then borrowed the car to drive to old-money Olmos Park, where Christian’s parents lived on Contour drive, as narrow and twisting as it was exclusive. The Walker house was fieldstone and high hedges on a block of scrub oaks and palms, lush December lawns, Spanish-style castles and drab brick blockhouses.

  The front door swung open to her touch, decanting shouts and high-decibel music and the fumes of beer and popcorn. She walked over hardwood floors and under vaulted ceilings to the sunken living room, with its walk-in fireplace and Victorian curved, padded, and skirted furniture. Two dozen people drifted in a great circle from the den to the living room to the kitchen. Laurie nodded to familiar faces with unremembered names, who nodded back. In the kitchen, she found a stash of Snapple in one of five identical plastic tubs, drowned in half-melted ice. Through sliding glass doors she could see the vortex of the party spin around the edges of the L-shaped swimming pool, where the obligatory Queen’s Greatest Hits played and dancers camped it up in their best Travolta style. She could hardly wait for the seventies to be over again.

  “Laurie?”

  It was Shawn Moore, heartthrob of MacArthur High in his day: six foot one, rumpled blond hair, track, tennis, family money, a nice enough guy who’d been lockstepped onto his career path since day care. Everyone knew Shawn; he only knew Laurie because of the way institutions turned alphabetical proximity into physical.

  “Hey, Shawn.” He stuck out an awkward hand and she took it, noticing at the moment of contact how his hair had thinned and his middle thickened, taking a sudden and irrational dislike to his expensive leather deck shoes and the white strip of T-shirt that showed under his polo shirt. “How’s law school? You must be almost through with it.”

  “Oh,” he said, turning still more awkward. “I guess you didn’t hear. I’m, uh, taking a break from that.”

  “What happened?”

  “My grades took a pretty bad slump last year. I just kind of, I don’t know, burned out, I guess. I’m going back. Next year, probably. I’ve been working for my old man at the dealership in the meantime.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “Are you kidding?” He said it with a bitterness that made Laurie want to run away. “So what’s up with you? Still in San Antonio?”

  “LA.”

  “No kidding? Hey, that’s right, you used to sing, didn’t you?”

  She had inadvertently ignited Shawn�
�s interest eight or nine years too late, now that he could no longer change her social status or perk up her self-esteem. It took her five minutes to extricate herself to the sweet cool air of the patio.

  She found Rudy on the far side of the pool near the beer keg, with Christian hovering nearby. Rudy had trimmed his hair to his shoulders and was wearing baggy olive shorts below his knees and a black Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. “Hey, Rude,” she said. “Hey, Christian.”

  Christian, in jeans and a brown sport coat, smiled vaguely and let Rudy thrust him aside.

  “Laurie!” Rudy threw slightly drunken arms around her, then stepped away for another look. “What you been doing in LA, starring on Babewatch or what? You are fully foxed out.”

  “Waiting some tables, playing some solo gigs. How about you?”

  “Doing good, really good. That whole Black Sabbath thing is happening again, we’ve been playing a lot, same lineup for four years now. This guy wants us to come to Houston and cut a record for him, I don’t know, maybe next month.”

  “Maybe next month” was Rudy’s “mañana,” and Laurie knew he didn’t have a record deal. It was, however, all he could talk about, and whatever interest he might have had in Laurie’s West Coast adventures evaporated next to the heat of it.

  She hadn’t meant to do it, hadn’t known it was happening, but apparently a low-grade fantasy had been simmering in her mind all day. She’d come to the party prepared to be seduced, if sufficient care and effort were taken. Sex with Rudy was only part of the distance she realized she’d been willing to go. Once, years ago, Rudy had wanted to abandon metal godhood and start a pop band with her, and she saw she’d been waiting for him to ask again tonight, and that such an offer could have become a reason to stay.

  She felt like a fool, like she’d fallen for a retouched photo in a catalog, and now the merchandise would have to go back. “Listen, Rudy,” she said, driving a wedge into the first crack in the conversation, “I have to circulate a little, but you hang tight, okay?”