To open the refrigerator: a simple, self-evident act. Like raising a window or flipping on a light, it was the type of gesture that went unquestioned, unnoticed when Caridad lived in the converted orchard office with Gray. But here in Mama’s kitchen on a Saturday morning in early September, sunlight streaming through windows to illuminate, even clarify, Caridad’s movement, Felicia nevertheless had to ask, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“What’s it look like I’m doing?” Caridad shut and pulled the door wide again to demonstrate. At her side, two-year-old Miles gazed with her at the chilly contents: dewy jug of Borden skim milk, clouded Tupperware containers, egg carton, Imperial margarine, Miracle Whip, the pink squadron of Tab cans arrayed on the shelf above the vegetable crisper.
Felicia arched a brow. “Why?”
“Do I need to give you a reason?”
“You need to have a reason. You can’t just keep opening the fridge and letting all the cold air out for the hell of it. Some of us actually pay the electricity bill around here.”
Caridad slammed the refrigerator door shut. Jars and bottles chinked against one another with the force of this. Miles squinted up at her, and she took his hand, tugged him toward the kitchen door that led outside. “Come on, buddy. Let’s walk over to the little market. We’ll get some animal crackers.”
“You know, you really shouldn’t give him so many sweets.”
Caridad stopped short, her pulse throbbing in her ears. “Felicia.”
“What?” Felicia flung the word down like a gauntlet.
Miles’s gaze darted from his mother to his aunt and back again.
“Nothing,” Caridad reached for her bag, a gray pouch with a long strap looped on the back of a chair. “Let’s go, son.”
“Wait, Mama,” Miles said. “I need my purse.” He dashed to Caridad’s childhood bedroom, the room they now shared.
Felicia snorted, and it was Caridad’s turn to cast out a terse, “What?”
Her sister shrugged, but when Miles reappeared in the doorway bearing a yellow patent-leather clutch with pink applique daisies, she said, “Boys don’t carry purses.”
Baffled, Miles glanced at the bright handbag he held. This was the vinyl purse he had begged for the last time he and Caridad visited a toy store. In it, he kept the purse’s accessories that had been packaged with it—plastic compact, lipstick, and comb—along with Bee-Bee, a small doll with a plastic face pinched into a permanent scowl.
Miles’s lips twitched, ready to smile or frown, as soon as he figured out if his aunt was teasing or scolding him.
Mama scuttled into the kitchen, her slippers rasping over the linoleum. She glanced from Caridad to Miles, noting the purses. “Where’s everybody going?”
“We’re going to the store, ’Buela,” Miles said, “for a snack.”
“Don’t we have food here?” Mama heaved the refrigerator door wide. Mist rolled from the shelves as she surveyed their contents. “We have cheese and yogurt . . .” She slid out the drawer to the produce bin. “There are apples, carrots, even celery. How about some grapes, m’ijo?”
“Felicia doesn’t want us to open the refrigerator,” Caridad said.
Her sister shook her head. “That’s not what I—”
“But how can you see what’s inside,” Mama said, “without opening it?”
“I’m just trying to save energy.”
“Tía says boys don’t carry purses,” Miles added.
Mama looked down at Miles, clutching his yellow purse. “Well, no se.” She smiled at her grandson. “But you have a very beautiful purse. I have always wanted a purse just like that, so bright and yellow, like a splash of sunshine. Oh, it’s so shiny!”
“Want to know what’s inside, ’Buela?”
“Tell me, m’ijo.”
Miles crooked his index finger, summoning her closer. Mama leaned toward him, leaving the refrigerator door ajar. Fans whirred within to replace the escaping cold. Caridad shot her sister a sharp look.
Felicia wheeled away, strode out of the kitchen.
“I got Bee-Bee in here,” Miles whispered. He opened the clutch, so his grandmother could peek inside.
Mama pointed at the doll. “Pee in a pot.”
Caridad was puzzled for a moment, but then she said, “You mean pea in a pod?”
“I wish I had thought of that,” Mama said, “a purse to hold my babies, so they’d always be together and none of them would ever get lost.”
Beaming, Miles nodded at his grandmother.
That afternoon, Caridad drove along Burbank Boulevard, her silver Honda Civic gliding past Balboa Park and its nature preserve toward her store in Encino. The quiet hum of the engine and the traces of the new upholstery scent that lingered months after she’d bought it filled her with the unfamiliar pride of ownership. Most of all, she appreciated its reliability. Unlike the Fiat, the Honda neither stranded her nor died out while idling at red lights. The compact car had been more expensive than she’d hoped—she’d be paying for it for the next five years—but Caridad needed dependable transportation for work and to get Miles to daycare on weekdays.
Car payments, insurance, those trips to emergency rooms, and the battery of tests before Miles was prescribed an effective anticonvulsant—medical expenses from the time before she had benefits—prevented Caridad from moving into her own place with Miles. But now that she was a salaried bookstore manager, Caridad was finally paying off debt and saving money. She’d also begun contributing toward household expenses, even if this was not sufficient (in Felicia’s opinion) to cover electricity. She had hoped to save enough for her and Miles to move out of Mama’s house a year from when she moved in. The morning’s irritation now fading, Caridad wished she had more compassion for her sister, who’d understandably chafed at the adjustments, the sacrifices she’d had to make when Caridad and Miles moved into Mama’s house.
Big-bellied geese sailed up over the park, pulling skyward all at once, expanding and contracting their wings in unison like synchronized swimmers. The airborne birds then reversed direction while maintaining a tight formation. At a stoplight, Caridad rolled down her window to watch the geese, marveling at such collective purpose. Their sleek bodies now formed a chevron comprised of precise check marks against thick frothy clouds. If creatures with thumb-sized brains could coordinate with one another to execute such a pattern, why couldn’t she and Felicia spend more than few minutes together without friction?
A horn blasted behind her. The signal had flashed green. After Balboa Park, traffic on Burbank Boulevard grew denser, so Caridad focused on driving. Though she’d improved, she was still far from an accomplished driver. Caridad scooted the seat so close to the dashboard that she hunched over the steering wheel, nearly hugging it to her chest while peering tensely through windshield. She drove just under the speed limit, often tapping the brakes. Other cars swerved around her, angry-faced drivers glaring, sometimes flipping her off or shouting obscenities as they passed. Her store loomed just a few blocks ahead on the left. The neon sign was unlit during the daylight, but the store’s name in its trademark script—Periwinkle Books—appeared at the top of the strip mall’s marquee. This was Caridad’s second store to manage, voluminous in contrast to the tiny shop she ran in North Hollywood for a few months after Dora quit. Periwinkle Encino was the shopping center’s anchor store, and it housed the regional manager’s office.
Caridad pulled into the parking lot, wondering if Alvin and Val—her assistant managers—had set up the Halloween display and whether they had gotten all the received books shelved. She doubted it. Alvin would, of course, have an excuse for not doing his work. With a smirk on his handsome face, he’d insinuate that Caridad was somehow to blame. “Oh, you wanted me to shelve the receiving, but I’m sure you told me to receive the shelving,” he’d said when she’d given him verbal instructions. “I wondered about that because it looked like everything had already been received, so I didn’t have anything to do, and I was kind of bored actually.” After that, he’d misplaced the to-do list she’d written out for him, complaining that she should have put it where it wouldn’t get lost. When she taped her instructions up in the back room, he claimed a breeze had snatched the list off the wall and whooshed it out into the busy street. “I would have been hit by a car if I’d have chased after it,” he’d told her, his tone aggrieved. Alibi Al, Caridad privately called him.
Still, he was an improvement over Val, a pasty-faced woman who wandered the store like a baffled spirit. Though often in the store even when not scheduled for work, ghostlike Val never accomplished much, as if she lacked the substance to do more than drift about and moan. When Caridad pointed out her lack of productivity, Val’s long nose quivered and her mild eyes filled with tears. Caridad had inherited both assistants from the woman who’d run the store before becoming a regional manager in the Midwest. If her predecessor had earned a promotion despite being freighted with such incompetents, Caridad felt challenged to do the same. Still, she wished she could fire them both, and she spent many satisfying moments imagining this. “In different ways, you are both worthless and annoying. Therefore, I must let you go,” she’d say. “Good-bye and good luck.”
Apart from Alvin and Val, Caridad’s staff wasn’t entirely incapable. Her receiving clerk, a sulky British girl who wore grubby neon-green ski pants, worked steadily, if mutely, to absorb all shipments into inventory. The salesclerks on the floor appeared sane and hygienic. But last week, Vera, the regional manager, who usually left hiring up to Caridad, had been impressed with a walk-in applicant, a former lawyer named Walt, who’d turned up on Caridad’s day off. Vera had hired him on the spot. As Caridad completed the new-hire paperwork, she wondered what kind of lawyer settles for a minimum-wage job as a salesclerk. Upon meeting Walt, Caridad had her answer: the babbling and paranoid kind—with sweaty palms, facial tics, and spittle that flew from his lips as he raved about conspiracies and cover-ups. Now Caridad would have to let him go. “Clearly,” she’d begin, “this job is beneath your level of education and experience.”
Despite steeling herself to deal with shenanigans from Alibi Al and Val and to terminate the former lawyer, Caridad was infused with energy as she parked her car. Invigorated, she strode past the yogurt shop, the gym, the fondue restaurant, and the Assertiveness Training Institute. She often regretted that her store was near such a place; customers often stopped at the bookstore after sessions at the Institute, eager to try out their newfound pushiness. Her step grew brisker as she approached the entrance to Periwinkle Encino, her store, the anchor, “the jewel,” as Vera often said, “in the crown of the region.” Though this metaphor strained her imagination, Caridad was proud of the place and thrilled to step over the threshold, sounding the chime that sent clerks scurrying when they glimpsed her entering the store.
This particular Saturday afternoon, Vera swooped up front to greet Caridad, towing a suit-wearing man in her wake. He was as tall as a basketball player, though too thin and gangly for any kind of sport. In fact, he seemed disjointed, comprised of mismatched body parts. His smallish bald head sported large ears, oversized hands flopped at the ends of his thin wrists, and his long neck and head preceded his torso as he loped giraffe-like behind Vera. The regional manager wore a pink floral-print dress with a full skirt, a matching fabric-covered belt cinching her waist. In coral lipstick and pearl earrings, Vera looked nearly attractive, despite her spiky white-blond hair, pebbly eyes, and toothy grin.
“There you are,” Vera said, as if she’d caught Caridad hiding in the store. She turned to the tall man. “This is the store manager, Caridad Kessler. Caridad, this is Eric Heinz, our VP of marketing and sales.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Caridad said.
He grasped her hand, squeezed it once. “Likewise.”
“Eric’s here to see how we’re doing with the shelving markers.”
Caridad flashed on the plastic brackets she and her staff had jammed onto the edges of various shelves, snapping these on by banging them into place with thick dictionaries or Bibles. The shelf brackets labeled sections already indicated by bookcase signs and placards hanging from the ceiling. Again and again, the damn things had to be pried off with a screwdriver, also smacked repeatedly, and then—bam, bam, bam—reinstalled whenever book volume shifted and sections expanded or contracted to accommodate this.
The VP stooped to peer into Caridad’s eyes. “What kind of impact,” he said, “do you think the shelving markers will have on customers?”
“Well,” Caridad began, thinking A) none whatsoever and B) what a stupid question. “That’s hard to say.”
Eric Heinz emitted an abrupt honk of laughter. He clapped her on the back. “Wise woman here,” he told Vera. “Keeps her cards close to the vest.”
“We’re heading out to lunch at the Melting Pot,” Vera told Caridad. “Care to join us?”
“Thank you, but I’ve already eaten.” Caridad had lunched with her before. Vera always requested separate checks, and the fondue restaurant was too pricey for Caridad. “Nice meeting you,” she told Eric Heinz. “Enjoy your lunch.”
As soon as Vera and the VP stepped out the door, Alvin sprang out, bearing the store’s ledger, as if he’d been skulking behind bookcases, waiting to ambush Caridad the moment Vera, whom he feared, had gone. “That guy,” he said, without preamble, “the one you’ve been seeing—remember he bought all those books a few weeks ago?”
“Yes?” Caridad covertly admired Alvin’s glacial blue eyes, his high cheekbones and full lips, the single obsidian curl arranged on his forehead like an upside-down question mark.
Alvin produced a small rectangle of paper from the ledger. “His check bounced.” His dewy complexion glowed, his arctic eyes gleaming. He waved the check in her face. “Insufficient funds!”
Shouldn’t attractiveness make life easier for people? Caridad thought of Alvin and then of Felicia. Shouldn’t the good-looking be less inclined to meanness?
“Do you have a picture of him for posting in the ‘deadbeat gallery’?” Alvin asked.
“Have you called to collect? It’s probably just an oversight.”
“Doesn’t matter!” Alvin grinned. “Store policy—we’ve got to post his mug. I’m going to redeposit this first thing Monday. If it’s flagged again, he’ll pay double overdraft fines. At the bank where my wife works, that’s twenty bucks a pop.”
Caridad groaned. “I’ll cover the check. Just give me a minute to get settled in back.” She turned for the stock room. Near the true crime section, Walt’s breathy voice lofted over the stacks, rambling about JFK, the CIA, and the mafia. She glanced down the aisle. An elderly woman was backing away from the former attorney, an uneasy look on her face. Caridad turned to Alvin, who was trailing her with the ledger. An expression of malice had transformed his face into a cruel mask, a look Caridad had grown accustomed to seeing on him. “Oh, and send that ex-lawyer to the back room,” she said. “I need to talk to him.”
Caridad waited only a few minutes for Walt in her makeshift desk area, a corner of the long receiving counter that held a fluorescent table lamp, an adding machine, legal pads, and a jar of pens. She sat on a wheeled rotating stool at this “desk” where she balanced the books, completed paperwork, and interviewed job applicants. With Walt’s wary approach, inspiration struck, and she told him that some men in dark suits had come to the store asking about him. Ashen-faced, Walt resigned at once. Caridad issued his final check and sent him on his way, planning to complete the paperwork later.
During her dinner break, Caridad perched on the spinning stool and folded Walt’s redundancy report into an envelope. Letting people go is really not so bad, she thought. She tossed the envelope into the outgoing mail basket and opened the coverless paperback, a “stripped” copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy that she’d pulled from the recycling bin. At first glance, she’d been intrigued by the novel’s structure with subheadings that transmitted the narrative: “The Maiden,” “Maiden No More,” “The Rally,” “The Consequence,” “The Woman Pays,” “The Convert,” and “Fulfillment.” Why, the first five sections could be the story of her life. But a few nights ago, Caridad had blinked back hot tears as Tess christened her baby, naming him Sorrow, just before his death: “So passed away Sorrow, the Undesired.” At this, she’d put the book aside to check on Miles. Relieved by his deep breathing, she’d kissed his warm forehead. Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady had also lost her child. How handily Hardy and James disposed of infants borne to their heroines! As if raising a child, even on the page, proved beyond their creative faculties, or else these great authors were intent on denying Isabel and Tess even a sliver of satisfaction: no pleasure in sex and no joy in motherhood. What punishers they were! Caridad couldn’t bear to imagine losing her child.
“I could never let him go,” she murmured. Caridad found her place in the book and read until the regional manager cracked open the door connecting the back room to her office to poke her head in.
“I know it’s your break,” Vera said, “but if you’ve got a minute, something’s come up.”
Caridad marked her place in the novel and followed Vera into the adjacent room, a real office with a true desk and a blotter, on top of which the matching belt to her pink dress was now snake-coiled next to a box of tissues.
Vera flopped onto her chair, a padded ergonomic thing that swiveled, rolled, and even reclined. “I had to get rid of Sully today.”
“What happened?” Caridad pictured Barb Sullivan, the frumpy woman who managed Periwinkle Studio City, banished from the Studio City store in the way Tess was cast off by Alec d’Urberville. Her nickname—Sully—was sadly apt. Sullen was how Barb came across if one did not know her story: her high school teacher husband whom she had nursed through colorectal cancer and who, after going into remission, began sleeping with his students. Sully had caught him in their bed with a tenth grader, and now he was serving time for statutory rape. For last year’s white elephant gift exchange, Sully had drawn Caridad’s name, and at the holiday party, she’d given Caridad an envelope stuffed with strange confetti: Barb’s wedding portrait scissored into tiny bits.
“After lunch,” Vera said, “I took Eric to her store, and the place was a dump.” She snorted, wearing a look on her face that was both indignant and defensive. “There were magazines on racks that should have been returned weeks ago. She had a beach-reading display in the window, for Christ’s sake! And it’s nearly October! Sully never even bothered to install the shelf brackets. They were still in the shipping box. ”
“She’s been kind of overwhelmed since her assistant quit,” Caridad said.
“That assistant was running the whole show. Sully does nothing.” Vera pantomimed tearing out her spiky hair. “Still, I would have finessed things with Eric. I would have told him about her husband and whatnot, but she got all pissy when he asked about the brackets. She actually said they were ‘a bunch of useless crap.’”
Caridad nodded. The brackets were a bunch of useless crap.
“No way could I finesse that.” Vera’s eyes shone and her nose reddened. “I really had no choice.” She plucked a tissue from the box nearby and honked into it. “So here’s the thing. I need a manager to take over that store and cut costs so Studio City shows some kind of profit.”
Caridad placed a finger over her lips, suppressing the joyful yip rising in her throat. She would unload Alibi Al or Val, maybe even both since Periwinkle Studio City needed a manager and an assistant. “So, Alvin?”
“Are you insane?” Vera’s small eyes bulged in disbelief. “I wouldn’t trust that little turd to run a lemonade stand.”
“Then who—”
“I bet you could whip that place into shape.”
“But Studio City does half this store’s volume.” Caridad knew well that managers’ salaries were based on sales in their stores. “I can’t afford to take a cut in pay.”
Vera shook her head. “You don’t get it. I want you to run both stores. You’d be a dual-store manager, first in the region. It’s not a pay cut. In fact, you’d get a pretty big bump, making just about what Sully earned on top of your salary at this store. Interested?”
Though she understood that earning “just about what” Barb Sullivan made would be the part of the cost cutting that Vera intended for the smaller store, Caridad performed quick calculations. How much would she need to move out with Miles before the year’s end? She stared as if transfixed by that coiled pink belt. Its fabric-covered buckle made a squarish snake’s head, the silver prong its unforked tongue. “I might be,” she said.
“Books,” Daniel told her that night, “are really nothing.”
This struck Caridad as absurd, especially since he’d just kited a check for a stack of “nothing.” When he made such declarations, Daniel reminded her of Miles, who would throw out his arms and cry, “The moon is a balloon!” Or, “Leaves are letters from the trees!” Daniel even looked like Miles in this moment, and Caridad was often moved by his impulse to define the world that had shaped him in harsh ways as a child. But irritation over the bad check now trumped that tenderness.
After Gray moved to Colorado, Daniel began visiting her at the bookstore when she worked evenings. Lonely and flattered by his attention, Caridad warmed toward him over several weeks, and one night in June, he persuaded her to follow him home. By the time she transferred to the Encino store, she had the habit of stopping by his apartment on Saturday nights when Miles was asleep at her mother’s house. Over the past few months, intimacy made them closer and more comfortable with one another, and Daniel grew so relaxed and confident in her company that he again became voluble and persistent in pushing his views.
He now picked up the book that had fallen out of her bag when she’d tossed it on a chair near the door in his apartment. “A novel is less than dust. Don’t you see?” Daniel held up the coverless paperback. “Soon books will be like those prehistoric etchings found in caves. A handful of archaeologists might get excited about them, but most people won’t give a damn. Machines are the future. Copiers, fax machines, computers are just the start. Technology is the next phase in human evolution. That’s what will last until the end of civilization.”
Though Caridad had just shrugged off her sweater, she reached to pull it back on, to leave and perhaps not return. But then the week would drag on, the routine of bookstore and home, home and bookstore. By Saturday, her flesh, the very epidermis and nerve endings at the surface of this tingled, aching for touch. Skin hunger—a craving she experienced as powerfully as thirst—propelled her to drive through dark streets to this apartment week after week, where she could slip between Daniel’s cool sheets to satisfy her longing, if only for a short while.
Caridad set her sweater aside. “By the way,” she said, “your check bounced—the one you wrote to the store last time. I used all the cash I had to cover it.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“Alvin was ready to redeposit it. You would have been charged bank fees twice.”
“So what? It’s just money—checks, bank notes—just slips of paper used for getting stuff,” Daniel said. “In the future, we won’t even have that. We’ll be able to type in codes on a keyboard to get what we want.” He pointed to his computer.
Nearly every time she visited, some new possession appeared in his apartment. In the dining area, a stereo system with sleek speakers stood near barbells arrayed on a rack, neglected now and furred with dust. Against one wall, an oversized television loomed, in front of which modular taupe cubes were stacked to form seats. A glass-top coffee table stood before these.
On the walls, Daniel, having resurrected his desire to paint, had hung his own canvases. These were mostly blank expanses, in Caridad’s estimation, though they were impressively large. “Gesso on Gesso,” he’d told her when she’d asked about the work. “It’s a series. That’s One, Two, and over there, behind the artificial palm, that’s Three.” Caridad moved from one to the next, studying each. The second was more interesting than the first for a wispy cobweb connecting it to the ceiling, and the third was most interesting for the shadows cast on it by the plastic palm. Caridad had struggled for a tactful response to the work. “No one,” she’d finally said, “could have painted these but you.”
“It’s all imaginary,” Daniel told her now. “Money, books, even art—none of it is real, or, I should say, none of it will be real in the future, so why should it matter now?” He sank into a seat before the coffee table and gathered the envelopes scattered on it. “Know what these are?”
“Your mail?”
“Bills, all bills—MasterCard, Sears, Neiman-Marcus, Texaco.” He ripped one open, then another and another, reading from their contents randomly. “Please remit, second notice, final notice, remit, remit, late penalty, and on and on. None of this means a thing to me because it isn’t real, so why should I care about a bounced check? What are they going to do? Come after me? I’ll make a big sale before then, get a huge commission, and pay everything off.”
“What about the late fees?” Caridad asked. “What about interest? You’ll wind up paying more for things than they’re worth.”
“I can always declare bankruptcy.” Daniel clasped his hands together behind his head and leaned back, his legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles. “It’s just money. Like I said, it’s not real.”
“It’s real to me. You bounced that check in my store. I paid to cover it.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He shook his head. “None of it.”
At first, Caridad wanted to believe he had changed almost as much as he longed to convince her of this. He was her son’s father. Maybe they might be together one day—a family. But this hope, like his commitment to change, had been all but forgotten, set aside like the dusty barbells. Daniel now reminded her of Alec d’Urberville proclaiming his newfound faith to Tess, whom he had raped and impregnated at the start of Hardy’s novel. “You, and those like you,” Tess had told Alec, “take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow . . .”
“In the future,” Daniel continued, “everything will be different. Nothing we have now, nothing we want now will be the same.” He spoke in a smug way, as if he alone had such foresight.
She stood, pulled on her sweater, and shouldered her bag.
Daniel sat upright, eyebrows raised, his eyes wide. “What are you doing?”
“I’m leaving,” Caridad said.
“You can’t leave. You just got here.”
“I have to go.”
Daniel’s face darkened, his eyes grew dull. “You can’t.” He rose to block her path to the door, but when he spoke again, he softened his tone. “Are you upset because I said nothing we care about will matter in the future, that nothing is real?”
Caridad sidestepped him.
He caught her, reeled her close. “You’re real. You and me—we’re real. We’ll always be real. I want to be with you. All the time. That’s real.”
“You can’t say what’s real and what isn’t,” she said. “You can’t tell me what matters and what doesn’t.”
“So you just get up and leave and that’s it?” Daniel’s voice was low. “Like I don’t know about Miles?”
His body radiated heat, a sour feral odor. She jerked away.
Daniel clasped her arm. “You think I couldn’t prove it with a paternity test and sue you for visitation, even custody?” His fingers tightened, digging into her wrist.
The modular pieces, the monolithic television, the glass table, and the blanched canvases on the walls now swerved, rising and sinking like carousel horses. Caridad’s former coworker Lisa was undergoing a bitter divorce in which her estranged husband was fighting for full custody of their daughter. (“These days,” Lisa had complained, “fathers usually get whatever they want from the judges who are—guess what?—men, and a lot of them divorced, too.”) Caridad took in Daniel’s Oxford shirt, his cashmere pullover, his wool slacks, and his leather loafers. She glanced down at her faded work pants and scuffed gym shoes, noting these differences the way a judge might. Still, she struggled to wrench free.
“You’re not going anywhere.” Daniel grabbed her handbag, yanking it. The purse upended, spilling its contents. Caridad dropped to her knees to gather what had fallen out. The paperback novel landed near Daniel’s feet. He scooped it up.
Caridad’s dizzying dread flared into rage. “Give that back.”
“Now I have your attention.” Daniel held open the book while she jammed wallet, tissues, pens, and receipts into her purse. “Your precious book here—you really believe there’s something in this for you?” He flipped through the pages. “All the underlining, and what’s this? Little notes—‘violation, buried Sorrow, remember this, never forgive and never forget.’” His eyes bore into hers. “This is about me, isn’t it?”
Caridad snorted. “Not everything is about you.”
Daniel turned the book over, revealing a sketch of Hardy on the final page. “Oh, so I’m not all that, but this old bald guy, this dead guy is? Like he has some great message for you?”
“He does,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” He cocked his head, a sarcastic smile on his face. “What’s that?”
“People don’t change. They just get sicker and sadder and older, and then they die.”
As if deranged, Daniel began plucking out the book’s pages, shredding these into small bits that drifted like snowflakes onto Caridad’s head and shoulders. “Now what does he say, huh? What’s the great message now?”
Caridad, still crouching, inched for the door. Daniel reeled her up by her hair, and when she was standing, scalp aflame, he trapped her in his arms. She writhed and twisted, kicking and elbowing him. He laced his fingers at the back of her neck, his thumbs on her throat. His grip tightened, cutting off her voice, her breath. Caridad made herself go limp. Her muscles loosened, her legs folded. She closed her eyes as if unconscious, and Daniel released her to the floor. Through the shadowy mesh of her lashes, she spied him striding toward the window and cranking the blinds shut. Caridad grabbed her bag, shot to her feet, and burst out the door. Footfalls bounced behind her, but she was already charging through the courtyard when Daniel pounded down the steps behind her. He was shouting, calling her back even as she slammed into her small car. With quaking fingers, she churned on the ignition and zoomed out of the parking lot, whooshing past Daniel, a hollow-eyed blur in the periphery.
As she sped toward the freeway, she approached a police station near the park. She nearly pulled over to file charges and have him arrested, but remembering her broken nose, that endless night, and its useless aftermath, Caridad accelerated toward the on-ramp, silently blessing Felicia’s neurotic insistence on paying for an unlisted phone number. Daniel would have no way to find her. In minutes, she merged onto the freeway, thinking of the book she’d left behind and imagining how the story might turn out. Tess, of course, would marry good Angel Clare in “Fullfillment,” and Alec d’Urberville would live out his wretched life in despair.
By Monday, Caridad welcomed the routine of work. Daniel, likely worried that she’d have him arrested, wouldn’t dare confront her at the store. Since the paperwork to process her promotion would take several days, the week passed like most others, but for one unexpected encounter. On Thursday, she experienced what the deejay on the oldies station called a “blast from the past” when Noah—Jorge’s best friend—wandered into the bookstore. Caridad noticed him at the same time he saw her, otherwise she would have slipped into the back room and waited until he left the store. Noah had gained weight and regrown his rust-colored beard, now streaked with silver, and his eyes were more recessed in his thickened face. Bearing a cash drawer to the back room, Caridad acknowledged him with a nod.
“Do you work here now?” Noah asked.
She bobbed her head again and issued a tight smile. “How’re you?”
“I am well,” he said.
“How’s Geraldine?”
Noah averted his eyes from the cash drawer, as if Caridad were holding a platter of fresh dung. “Geraldine is also well. She’s completed the program and now works as a veterinary nurse-practitioner at West Valley Agricultural.”
Caridad pictured Noah’s wife wearing a lab coat while jamming together the sex organs of farm animals. “And Jorge—how’s he?”
“I must say, since you split up, his work has really flourished.” Noah cast her a sidelong glance. “For one thing, he’s stopped thinking small. No more clay pots, cookie jars, and the like. Now he’s making ten-foot installations, tremendous things.” He waved toward the magazine racks. “Any day now, I expect to see his work featured in Artforum.”
“That’s nice.”
“And you?” Noah fixed Caridad with an accusing look. “Have you worked here since finishing your degree? When did you graduate again?”
Caridad’s cheeks stung. “I actually got a little sidetracked.”
“A little sidetracked.” Noah laughed. “One is either sidetracked or not.”
“Yes, well, I have to get back to work, but it’s good to see you. Give my best to Geraldine and Jorge,” she said, sure that Noah could barely wait to give them her very worst: the spiteful lowdown on how she had dropped out and was now working in retail. She might as well be tending fowl or milking cows like Tess of the d’Urbervilles. “My life,” as Tess told the privileged Angel Clare, “looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances . . . I feel what a nothing I am.”
“I will be sure to do so.” Noah made his way toward the travel books as if to underscore that he was going places, while she was not. Caridad longed to call after his dumpy, round-shouldered back: I’m about to become a dual-store manager—the first in the region! And my car is nearly new! But this temptation struck Caridad as more pathetic than raking out chicken coops. She slunk to the back of the store, holding the cash tray against her midsection like a cigarette girl, a bit player in a black-and-white film, the coins chinking with each step.
On Saturday night, Caridad closed the store with Alibi Al. Since he’d learned of her promotion to dual-store manager, Alvin didn’t bother to conceal his contempt. He’d ignored the full cart of new books to shelve and spent much of his shift erecting an architecturally startling display of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone—a table arranged with helical spires twisting around one another, an intricate arrangement sure to domino-topple the first time a customer reached for a book. Clearly, Alvin had read the recent issue of the company newsletter, in which regional managers named their three favorite titles. Vera had listed The Dead Zone, The Dead Zone, and The Dead Zone as her trio of best-loved books. “There,” he told Caridad when he’d finished. “Make sure to take all the credit when Vera sees this.”
At the register, Caridad shook her head. “She wouldn’t believe me. No one could have built that but you.”
“True.” He folded the step stool he’d been using.
The phone on the counter blurted a half-ring, and then a full ring sounded, followed by another. “Leave it,” she told Alvin. “We’re closed.”
When she turned to unlock a cash drawer, Alvin barreled past her to snatch up the receiver. “Periwinkle Books,” he said. “How may I help you?” He went silent as a flat voice buzzed from the receiver. “Yes, she’s right here. Hold on.” Alvin cupped the mouthpiece. “We’re not supposed to take personal calls on the business line.”
“Then hang up.”
Alvin stubbornly held out the phone to her.
Caridad reached around him to press the switch hook.
“Well, excuse me.” Alvin’s face paled, but his voice was haughty. “I forgot that your word is god’s law now—”
“Alvin, you can go,” Caridad said, “and after I count down the drawers, I’ll fill out your redundancy report. Or you can stop talking, cash out your drawer, and count it down in back.”
Wordlessly, he closed down his register, yanked out the drawer, and stomped off.
The phone rang again and again. Neither she nor Alvin answered it, though Caridad lifted it to hang up once more, and then she left the receiver off the hook. Over the past week, she’d thought of the many bills littering Daniel’s glass coffee table. Despite the contrast between his new suits and her worn work clothes, Caridad had money in the bank, but more than that, she had her mother, her sisters, and Gray. She had resources he lacked. If Daniel fought her for custody of Miles, she would win with these—she had to win.
Just before she turned out the lights and exited the store for the night, Caridad replaced the receiver on its base. As she locked the door from outside, the phone began ringing once more—a strident but muffled sound from where she stood, like the insistent cry of a solitary bird, shrieking and shrieking from some faraway place.
When Caridad returned home, she found Felicia in the kitchen, filling the teakettle. Though it was nearly eleven, her sister was still dressed in Levi’s and a sweatshirt, even wearing the chanclas she usually kicked off the moment she stepped indoors. “Ah,” Felicia said, “look who’s here. The weekly rendezvous canceled, I presume.”
Caridad hung her purse on a chair. “What are you talking about?”
“Every Saturday night, you’re out until one or two in the morning. You think I haven’t noticed?” Felicia’s lovely face looked haggard. “I know you have something going on. I only hope it’s not with that motherfucker who broke your face. You’ve got to be smarter than that.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Caridad said, stunned that Felicia had not flung this in her face when they bickered. “It’s over now.”
“You and Espie must have some tag-team arrangement. It’s like you take turns tormenting me. Now, apparently, it’s her turn.”
“What’s going on?”
Felicia twisted off the tap and set the kettle on a burner. “It’s like a chemical spill between her and Reynaldo. It’s fucking toxic over there—total hell for Mimi. That’s what I was trying to tell her tonight. She got all bent out of shape and said I should leave. As usual, whenever I try to help you two out, I get my head bitten off. No one wants to listen to me.”
Caridad reached for her sister’s shoulder, stiff as Sheetrock under her palm. “I know.”
That night Caridad dreamed of riding in a car driven by a dead man named Thomas. He was an older man, a white man in his fifties or sixties. He wore a crisp dress shirt, a checked tie, and a gray tweed blazer. His head was egg-shaped, neatly balanced above his starched collar. Short wavy hair receded from his forehead, dark brown but grizzled about the ears. His face was smooth; his black eyes deep set, embedded in folds of flesh under bristly brows; and his straight nose broadened at the nostrils, just above a thick handlebar moustache. She knew him and she didn’t. He had the look of a sensitive, even delicate, man, but Caridad was sure he was once hardy. Though his dress and moustache signaled a much earlier era, Thomas had just died. Eyes open, he gazed off into the middle distance as if absorbed in lonesome thoughts.
Caridad was in the passenger seat beside him on her way to get ice cream for Miles. The car slowed, drifting from lane to lane. That’s when she noticed the deceased driver, but she didn’t panic. Instead, Caridad treated this as a practical problem: How does one go for ice cream in a car driven by a dead man? She nudged his foot off the gas pedal and clasped the steering wheel when a faraway bomb detonated with a muffled boom, a percussive blast that was followed by another and another: Bam, bam, bam.
She jackknifed to sit upright, fully awake. Miles snored softly in his bed nearby; the room was otherwise cloaked in shadowy silence. Then an explosive bang shook the walls, and Caridad jumped. The banging continued. She kicked off bedding and rushed to the kitchen. Someone was pounding on the back door. The overhead light snapped on, and Felicia, in a bathrobe, appeared at the threshold, making her way toward the entry. “What the hell?” Before Caridad could stop her, Felicia pulled the door wide.
Esperanza burst in, bearing a sleeping Mimi over one shoulder. “What took you so long?” she whispered. “I knocked and knocked like forever.”
Caridad took her niece from Esperanza to settle her in bed with Miles, her sisters’ low voices emanating from the kitchen.
“What happened?” Felicia asked.
“I did it,” Esperanza said. “I finally did it, and I’m never going back. I swear, not ever.”
Mimi groaned as Caridad lowered her into the bed beside Miles, who’d curled toward the wall. She tugged the blanket out from under Mimi to cover her. Caridad tucked her in, and the little girl released a long sigh. It stirred the air, whooshing like a wing stroke in the still and darkened room.