A short story from Ploughshares
A section of the newspaper, rolled into a tight cone and flaming at the top, stuck out of the cook’s ear the first time I saw him. This was early June, in Corpus Christi, Texas, when I was sixteen and had been hired as the delivery driver for La Cocina Mexican Restaurant. The cook was sweating. He sat cross-legged on the stove in the kitchen, eyes and fists clenched, with two waitresses beside him. One of the women was dribbling salsa into plastic to-go cups. The other fanned the blue-black smoke away from the cook’s face with a laminated menu.
The night before, I’d called about the ad in the paper and was told to show up the next morning for an interview. My father made me wear his pink tie, his only tie, though I’d just expected to fill out an application and learn that I lacked adequate experience. Aside from helping out at my father’s pawnshop, I’d never held a job. But there’d been no paperwork at La Cocina, no discussion of previous employment. The owner asked if I had a valid driver’s license, a reliable car, any moving violations or outstanding warrants. She asked if I was an honest person, and I said, “I try to be.” The answer seemed to surprise and please her, as if I’d solved a riddle that had stumped other drivers, then she told me to go into the kitchen and ask if there were any orders yet. She also told me to tell the cook that if another customer complained about the menudo tasting like beer, she’d call immigration.
When the waitress fanning the smoke saw me, she said, “Bathroom’s down the hall.”
“I work here,” I said.
The cook’s head was parallel to the floor, the smoke from the newspaper ribboning toward the grease-blotched ceiling. He wore a mustache and a V-neck t-shirt. A half-empty beer bottle sat next to him on the counter; he reached for it without opening his eyes and brought it into his lap. The kitchen smelled of cilantro and eggs and burning ink.
I said, “Mrs. Martinez just hired me.”
“You’re white,” the other waitress said. Her eyebrows were penciled on. Both of the women looked tired to me, fierce and old. She said, “Ay dios mio. Affirmative action at La Cocina.”
The cook mumbled something no one understood. The flaming newspaper made me think of the downtown curio shops where old women rubbed oil on your palms to predict your future.
The cook said, “Am I being fired again?”
“Fired,” the waitress said, eyeing the burning newspaper. “Now he’s a comedian. Now he’s Cheech and Chong.”
“I’m the new delivery driver,” I said. “My name’s Julian. Everyone calls me Jay.”
“Julian,” the cook said. “Julian, what kind of car do you drive?”
“A Cadillac,” I said. The waitresses glared at me. I saw that the one holding the menu was a lifetime younger than I’d originally thought. It occurred to me that she was the other woman’s daughter. My father’s tie suddenly felt tight around my neck. An hour earlier, he’d tied it on himself in the mirror, then loosened the knot and slipped it over my head. Now I wished I’d left it in the car. I said, “It’s a convertible Fleetwood.”
“The King of the Cadillac line,” the cook said.
“Exactly.”
“Julian, when I own this restaurant — ”
“Ay dios mio,” the older waitress said and took her tray of salsa cups out of the kitchen. Her daughter rolled her eyes and started fanning the smoke again. Her hair hung in thick spirals, her nails were glittery vermilion. She said, “Carlos, Jay’s worked here for two minutes and already you’re starting with your fantasies.”
Carlos raised the beer to his lips and awkwardly tried to sip without disturbing the newspaper in his ear. I wanted to ask why it was there, but also wanted to act unfazed, like I encountered such things daily. When Carlos couldn’t manage a drink, he extended his arm behind him and emptied the bottle into a pot of simmering menudo.
“Julian,” he said, “when I buy this restaurant, you’ll deliver tacos by limousine.”
The Caddy was cream-colored, a 1978 Brougham. Whitewalls, chrome, power windows, locks and mirrors, and leather seats and a retractable antenna. Even at thirteen years old, the Fleetwood wasn’t a car my family could normally afford—my father drove a Datsun pick-up, my mother a Chevy hatchback—but an old woman had pawned it and when her loan expired, my father brought the keys home. Things had already soured in their marriage by then, but my mother had always coveted a convertible, and my father knew her boss drove one, so he must have hoped that a luxury sedan could turn things around for our family, deliver us to a different destiny.
He was the manager of Blue Water Pawn, and he believed everything you’d ever need would eventually float through the pawnshop doors. My mother’s opal earrings and pearl necklace, her espresso machine and electric range and Tiffany lamps, my ten-speed bike and computer, my cordless phone and bowie knife and Nikon camera, all of it had once belonged to someone else, and either the owners or the people who’d robbed them had sold the stuff to Blue Water for pennies on the dollar. My father once paid twelve bucks for an acoustic guitar that had belonged to Elvis Presley, and he gave it to my mother for one of their anniversaries. I’d been forbidden from telling my friends about the guitar, but I regularly bragged about it. Sometimes I lifted it from its fur-lined case and strummed its strings.
That the Cadillac came through the pawnshop surprised everyone except my father, and for a while that surprise buoyed my parents. Every couple of weeks they soaped the car with sponges and waxed it until their reflections emerged in the hubcaps. They took it to open-air restaurants on the Laguna Madre, and on weekends they drove into the hill country with the top down. When they returned the seats were littered with pine needles and mesquite leaves, the floorboards dusted with sand like confectioner’s sugar. Once, they stopped at a rest area outside Austin and had someone snap a photo of them with my Nikon. They’re wearing sunglasses, leaning on the Fleetwood with the tawny hills rolling into the horizon behind them; the landscape looks like a solemn, arrested wave, and studying the picture closely, you can almost sense that my mother is poised to tighten her scarf around her hair and walk out of the frame for good.
On the second anniversary of the night she moved to Arizona with her boss, my father calmly walked outside and cut the Fleetwood’s ragtop into ribbons with my bowie knife. When he came back in, he said, “Pop quiz.”
Ever since I’d started high school he’d been quizzing me: Name the capital of Delaware. What was the shortest war in history? Who invented wallpaper? When I botched the answers—I’d never answered one correctly—he’d say, “Time to hit the books.” My father had his GED.
I couldn’t tell if he knew I’d watched him shred the vinyl, so I tried to act casual. I was also worried he’d ask me about my mother. She called me every other month, but sometimes my father answered before I could reach the phone. I hadn’t heard from her in a while, so we were both anticipating her call.
I said, “Ready, professor.”
“Tonight’s prize is a 1978 Fleetwood Brougham, the King of the Cadillac line.”
I didn’t know what he’d done with my knife. Maybe he’d stabbed it into the steering wheel or one of the whitewalls. My father twirled the keys around his finger. He’d been trying to unload the car for two years.
He said, “What’s the beginning of wisdom?”
I knew the answer immediately. A bronze plaque with the words engraved on it hung in his office at Blue Water. I said, “The beginning of wisdom is the acquisition of a roof.”
“Touchdown,” he said and chucked me the keys.
Later that night I walked by his bedroom and heard him crying. His door was closed, but his sobbing was hard enough to carry into the hall. His room wasn’t the one he’d shared with my mother—he’d converted the master bedroom into a storage space and pushed his bed into our old study—though when I pictured him, I couldn’t help imagining the furniture as it had been before she left. I saw my mother’s vanity under the shuttered window, saw my father trying to muffle his weeping with one of her tasseled pillows.
“Jay,” he said through the door. “Jay, are you out there?”
“Just returned from my maiden voyage, professor.”
For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me, thought maybe I hadn’t spoken at all. Then he said, “I left the paper on the counter.”
I wondered if this was a new kind of quiz. I said, “Ready, professor.”
“Roofs cost money. I’d say it’s time you found gainful employment.”
“Right away,” I said. I thought he’d say something more, or that I would, maybe I love you or thank you or I’m sorry Mom hasn’t come home, but finally I just walked into the kitchen and read the classifieds. I called La Cocina because a delivery job would afford me more time in the Caddy.
The Caddy was cream-colored, a 1978 Brougham. Whitewalls, chrome, power windows, locks and mirrors, and leather seats and a retractable antenna. Even at thirteen years old, the Fleetwood wasn’t a car my family could normally afford—my father drove a Datsun pick-up, my mother a Chevy hatchback—but an old woman had pawned it and when her loan expired, my father brought the keys home. Things had already soured in their marriage by then, but my mother had always coveted a convertible, and my father knew her boss drove one, so he must have hoped that a luxury sedan could turn things around for our family, deliver us to a different destiny.
He was the manager of Blue Water Pawn, and he believed everything you’d ever need would eventually float through the pawnshop doors. My mother’s opal earrings and pearl necklace, her espresso machine and electric range and Tiffany lamps, my ten-speed bike and computer, my cordless phone and bowie knife and Nikon camera, all of it had once belonged to someone else, and either the owners or the people who’d robbed them had sold the stuff to Blue Water for pennies on the dollar. My father once paid twelve bucks for an acoustic guitar that had belonged to Elvis Presley, and he gave it to my mother for one of their anniversaries. I’d been forbidden from telling my friends about the guitar, but I regularly bragged about it. Sometimes I lifted it from its fur-lined case and strummed its strings.
That the Cadillac came through the pawnshop surprised everyone except my father, and for a while that surprise buoyed my parents. Every couple of weeks they soaped the car with sponges and waxed it until their reflections emerged in the hubcaps. They took it to open-air restaurants on the Laguna Madre, and on weekends they drove into the hill country with the top down. When they returned the seats were littered with pine needles and mesquite leaves, the floorboards dusted with sand like confectioner’s sugar. Once, they stopped at a rest area outside Austin and had someone snap a photo of them with my Nikon. They’re wearing sunglasses, leaning on the Fleetwood with the tawny hills rolling into the horizon behind them; the landscape looks like a solemn, arrested wave, and studying the picture closely, you can almost sense that my mother is poised to tighten her scarf around her hair and walk out of the frame for good.
On the second anniversary of the night she moved to Arizona with her boss, my father calmly walked outside and cut the Fleetwood’s ragtop into ribbons with my bowie knife. When he came back in, he said, “Pop quiz.”
Ever since I’d started high school he’d been quizzing me: Name the capital of Delaware. What was the shortest war in history? Who invented wallpaper? When I botched the answers—I’d never answered one correctly—he’d say, “Time to hit the books.” My father had his GED.
I couldn’t tell if he knew I’d watched him shred the vinyl, so I tried to act casual. I was also worried he’d ask me about my mother. She called me every other month, but sometimes my father answered before I could reach the phone. I hadn’t heard from her in a while, so we were both anticipating her call.
I said, “Ready, professor.”
“Tonight’s prize is a 1978 Fleetwood Brougham, the King of the Cadillac line.”
I didn’t know what he’d done with my knife. Maybe he’d stabbed it into the steering wheel or one of the whitewalls. My father twirled the keys around his finger. He’d been trying to unload the car for two years.
He said, “What’s the beginning of wisdom?”
I knew the answer immediately. A bronze plaque with the words engraved on it hung in his office at Blue Water. I said, “The beginning of wisdom is the acquisition of a roof.”
“Touchdown,” he said and chucked me the keys.
Later that night I walked by his bedroom and heard him crying. His door was closed, but his sobbing was hard enough to carry into the hall. His room wasn’t the one he’d shared with my mother—he’d converted the master bedroom into a storage space and pushed his bed into our old study—though when I pictured him, I couldn’t help imagining the furniture as it had been before she left. I saw my mother’s vanity under the shuttered window, saw my father trying to muffle his weeping with one of her tasseled pillows.
“Jay,” he said through the door. “Jay, are you out there?”
“Just returned from my maiden voyage, professor.”
For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me, thought maybe I hadn’t spoken at all. Then he said, “I left the paper on the counter.”
I wondered if this was a new kind of quiz. I said, “Ready, professor.”
“Roofs cost money. I’d say it’s time you found gainful employment.”
“Right away,” I said. I thought he’d say something more, or that I would, maybe I love you or thank you or I’m sorry Mom hasn’t come home, but finally I just walked into the kitchen and read the classifieds. I called La Cocina because a delivery job would afford me more time in the Caddy.
When I’d worked at Blue Water, the man who stocked the Pepsi machine would brag about free lapdances when his route took him to The Landing Strip out by the airport, and a customer — a young guy who delivered newspapers and always pawned his fishing rod — said he’d twice happened upon a married couple having sex in their front yard, but most of my deliveries went to construction sites or businesses where women wore suits and bifocals: banks, other restaurants, a fabric store, a podiatrist’s office. Mornings were our busiest time, and there was usually a lunch rush, but by mid-afternoon our phone stopped ringing and Mrs. Martinez tallied our receipts. I swept and watered the potted ivies and ferns behind the cash register.
At the end of my first week I asked Melinda — who was Alma’s daughter and a year older than me — why we didn’t stay open for dinner. She said, “The only ones that come after lunch are wearing suits.”
She was wiping down the tables before I flipped the chairs and balanced them on the Formica. When Melinda leaned over to spray the surface, I saw a butterfly tattoo on the small of her back.
“Suits? You mean, businessmen?”
“Health department suits,” she said. “If we fail another inspection, they’ll chain the door.”
Before I’d left with my last delivery, Carlos had been chasing a roach around the kitchen, swatting at it with a menu. The stove was gummy with caked-on lard and I’d watched Alma drink from the milk jug before pouring a glass for a customer. I said, “I guess a flaming sports section in the cook’s ear could be considered unsanitary.”
“Aire de oido. Like an ear infection. The smoke draws it out,” she said.
“I know. My father — ”
“How do you afford that car?” she interrupted. She was scrubbing the seat of a booth, trying to remove dried enchilada sauce. There were no more chairs to upend, so I was just waiting, watching her butterfly. She said, “Carlos says you sell drugs, Mama thinks you have a trust fund. I haven’t asked Mrs. Martinez because she’s all pissed.”
“How do you think I afford it, Melinda?”
She plopped herself into the booth and looked me up and down. I tried to puff out my chest, and hoped she wouldn’t notice my ears, which I knew turned red when I got nervous. She sucked in her cheeks, pursed her lips, squinted. Alma rolled a bucket and mop into the kitchen.
Melinda said, “You sell Avon. No, you mug old ladies. No, you’re a hot-rodder. You won it in a midnight drag race.”
“Close,” I said, trying to sound serious. I remembered what my father told our neighbor when he asked about our new riding lawnmower. “I won it in a poker game.”
She laughed so loud that Mrs. Martinez poked her head out of the office and whipped off her glasses. “Melinda, have you started making the hot sauce?”
“Ya mero,” she said. After Mrs. Martinez closed her door, Melinda said, “So, drugs or trust fund?”
Why I answered her the way I did is still a mystery to me. The words surprised me as much they did Melinda. I said, “The car was my mother’s. She died two years ago. I inherited it.”
Melinda squinted at me again, studied me in a softer way than before. I was waiting for her to react — to accuse or curse me, or start laughing again — when Carlos began singing in the kitchen. It was a Spanish song I’d heard playing on his transistor radio earlier that morning. Melinda continued assessing me. I stared at my shoes, at the restaurant’s chipped linoleum.
Sliding out of the booth, she said, “Losing that pink tie after your first day was a good call. You look more like yourself now.”
“You just met me,” I said.
“Does that matter?” she said.
“Maybe not.”
“You’re cute,” she said. “Especially when your ears turn red.”
I never repaired the roof on the Caddy, and after a month of delivering tacos, I’d forgotten my father had ruined it. Summer in Corpus is glomming. Thick, viscous heat, and there’s no rain unless a hurricane is churning in the Gulf, so I just left the top down. I enjoyed smelling the baking asphalt, the far-off briny bay. When I saw someone I knew, I saluted them from behind the wheel. Or I turned up the stereo and pretended not to recognize them.
In July, Mrs. Martinez catered a wedding in Portland, the little shrimping town across the ship channel. It took me two trips to deliver all the food — 200 enchiladas, vats of beans and rice, and bags of flour tortillas that I had to stash in the trunk. (A bag had flown out of the backseat on my first trip. When the wind lifted it into the night, it looked like a jellyfish swimming in black, black water.) By the time we’d set up the buffet it was ten o’clock. I’d thought I might drive Melinda home, but she had to serve coffee to the guests. She said, “If you stay, you can ask me to dance.”
“I don’t know how to dance,” I said.
“Then stay and you can ask me not to dance.”
I spent the next hour pacing outside the reception hall, pretending I’d just married Melinda. I stole glances at her serving flan and leaning down to ask if people wanted decaf or regular, and the simple fact of her knowing my name amazed me. The prospect of meeting her after dessert sent my heart kicking. I wondered if she was a virgin, if she knew I was. I almost vomited into a pot of azaleas.
When I looked up, Mrs. Martinez was standing over me, telling me to drive back to Corpus and make sure Carlos had locked up. The last time he’d been in charge of closing, he’d polished off a fifth of tequila and pushed each of the refrigerators into the dining area. She said, “Next morning, what do I have? Rotten food and a cook in the hospital with a hernia.”
“Can Melinda come with me?”
Mrs. Martinez touched my cheek. She said, “Sweet Jay. Melinda just left.”
As I drove back, moonlight marbled the slatey sky and the bay under the Harbor Bridge stretched out like an endless expanse of deep, rich soil. I imagined Melinda riding beside me, her long hair whipping around us. I heard her small laugh that always reminded me of a sparrow bouncing into flight. With the Caddy coasting along Ocean Drive, I could almost feel Melinda reaching for my hand across the smooth seats. I’d only kissed one girl at a homecoming party, and I’d been too nervous to enjoy it. Our teeth knocked and scraped together, and her mouth tasted of meatloaf and wine coolers; after a few minutes of kissing, she fell asleep and I tiptoed out of the room, feeling simultaneously relieved and despondent. I thought Melinda’s mouth would taste of cinnamon. “Melinda,” I said aloud. “My Mexican lover.”
I thought nothing of the few fat drops of rain that pelted me, nothing of the first thunderclap or the shudder of pink lightening or the heavy, muscular-smelling air that precedes a storm. But within a mile, rain was bouncing off my dashboard and drenching the seats and pooling under the accelerator. The windshield wipers sprayed the water back into my eyes and face, and the Fleetwood fishtailed around corners. Out of dumb instinct, I flipped the switch to raise the roof. The hinges lurched and moaned, a low steel-on-steel grinding like a hurt animal, and eventually the jagged strips of wet, ruined vinyl slapped down against me. I was a mile from home, but with the blurring rain and the wind pushing water over my windshield, I could only inch forward. I had to pull over when I couldn’t see the lanes. The ragtop draped over my shoulders, like I’d gotten stuck in an automatic carwash.
When I unlocked our front door, the phone was ringing. I’d heard it when I was hustling up the slippery driveway, but I’d figured it for the sound of traffic sloshing by. My father’s antique grandfather clock — another boon from the pawnshop — was about to hit midnight. For a beat, I allowed myself to believe Melinda was calling, but I knew better. In two years, my mother had never grasped the time difference between Corpus and Phoenix.
When I picked up, I heard, “Julian. This is Carlos, the cook from La Cocina.”
I hadn’t even said hello. I’d almost fallen trying to answer before the phone woke my father, and I was shivering in my soaked clothes. A puddle formed around my shoes.
“Is everything okay, Carlos?” With the storm, I’d forgotten to check the door at the restaurant.
“I’m calling to say we’ve never had a better driver. When I own the restaurant, I’m going to give youÉ” His voice trailed off, and it sounded like he was knocking a bottle against his forehead, trying to jog the word he wanted. I thought he might say promotion or raise, but he said, “A trophy. When I own La Cocina, I’m going to give you the blue ribbon.”
My teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. I said, “Thank you.”
“Julian,” he said, “the true reason I’m calling is for a small favor.”
A ride, I thought. Through the front window, I could see the Fleetwood parked by the curb. In the streetlamp’s amber glow, with the rain streaming over its body, the car looked immaculate and reposed. The upholstery was getting ruined and I was to blame, but seeing the car like that, I felt an inexplicable pride.
Carlos said, “What I need, what I really need, is for you to bring me an accordion.”
“An accordion?”
“This is life or death. I truly need this instrument,” he said. “I wonder if your mom or dad plays the accordion, Julian. Maybe they have a spare.”
“We’re not a very musical family,” I said.
“Because here’s my idea,” he said, then took a long pull from his drink. “When I own the restaurant, we’ll have girls posing by the door in Santa costumes. They’ll wave in customers. Or maybe they’ll be naked except for Santa hats, and they’ll play carols on accordions.”
“The health department might frown on that, Carlos.”
He knocked the bottle against his head again, then drained it and dropped it in the trash. I heard him pop a top with a bottle opener. Sounding suddenly sober and grim, he said, “Julian, you’re right. Even with pasties, we’d be in trouble.”
“Unfortunately.”
“You’re an idea man, Julian. Manager material. When I’m the boss — ”
The line went dead. I was about to call Carlos back when my father said, “How was the old girl tonight?”
I didn’t know how long he’d been behind me. He was leaning against the sink, wearing pajama pants and no shirt. The scar where he’d had his gall bladder removed looked like a centipede on his stomach. I said, “That was Carlos, from work.”
“The cook calls you at midnight?”
“He was drunk. He wants an accordion. I told him to check Blue Water.”
My father wasn’t listening. He was peering over my shoulder, seeing the Fleetwood in the rain. Wet tallow leaves were stuck to its hood like leaches. The tattered roof looked like a busted garbage bag.
Our air-conditioner cycled on. I crossed my arms over my chest, which only made me colder.
My father said, “Pop quiz.”
“Ready, professor.”
He fixed me with his eyes again, then averted them to the car. He said, “What happens when a yacht fills with water?”
The question seemed deceptively easy, so I considered each word individually. Yacht. Fills. Water. But I couldn’t think of any answer beyond the obvious one. I said, “It sinks.”
“Touchdown,” he said. Then he left me alone, trembling.
Carlos had gone outside after the phone went dead; he thought lightning had struck the shopping center; the floor and walls had jolted, like an earthquake. But there’d been no more lightning, just gusts of wind that blew the rain sideways and sent shallow waves rippling over the dark parking lot. He was about to return to the restaurant when he saw the downed telephone pole, then after he shelved his hands over his eyes, he recognized the car smashed under it, heard its weak, droning horn and saw the headlamps shining dimly through the darkness. The driver was a college student named Whitney Garrett, and if Carlos hadn’t carried her to his truck and driven her to the ER, she might’ve died.
I’d taken the morning off to bucket out the Caddy’s floorboards, but that afternoon Carlos recounted everything. He was frying flautas, dancing around the kitchen with his spatula and beer. He said, “Cook saves princess, earns handsome reward.”
“How handsome?”
“Julian, by the looks of Mama Garrett, I won’t need to borrow your accordion again.”
“Carlos, I don’t own an accordion.”
He slid the flautas onto the plate, spooned on extra rice and beans, then rang the bell for Alma to take the order to her table.
Carlos said, “Yet. You don’t own an accordion yet.”
* * *