When Roy’s mother returned from her birthday trip with her companion Nicky Roznido, Roy asked her how it was and she said, “Everybody in Mexico carries a gun.”
Roy was eight years old and his mother was twenty-nine for the second time. She didn’t look thirty, she said to her friend Kay, and she saw no reason to admit to her real age until she absolutely had to.
“I was twenty-nine until two years ago,” said Kay, “when I turned thirty-eight. I admitted it to Mario and he told me he didn’t care so long as I looked good to him. I asked him what he would do when that day came and he said he’d have to buy a younger wife.”
Kay and Roy’s mother snickered and Roy, who was in the room with them, asked Kay, “Did Mario buy you?”
“He knew what he was getting when he married me,” she said. “Be smart, Roy, don’t ever get yourself into a situation where you’re paying for more than you can afford.”
“Cut it out, Kay,” said Roy’s mother. “He doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”
Kay had flaming red hair and green eyes with black dust smudged around them. She was wearing a double strand of tiny pearls and diamond rings on the third fingers of both hands.
“Your mother’s right, Roy,” she said, and smiled, displaying more teeth than he could quickly count accurately. “Don’t listen to me, it won’t matter, anyway. Everyone makes their own mistakes.”
Kay returned her attention to Roy’s mother and said, “Come on, honey, I’m going to buy you a fancy lunch to celebrate your return from that awful country. Did Nicky have to shoot anybody this time?”
After Kay and his mother left the house, Roy went into his room and lay down on the bed. He could hear thunder but it was far away. He thought about what Kay had said about everyone making their own mistakes. He knew she meant something other than giving a wrong answer on a test. Roy remembered the morning his mother threw her second husband, Des Riley, out of the house. He was six then and his mother had said, “We won’t have to listen to his bullcrap any more, Roy. That one was a mistake.”
“Was my dad a mistake?” Roy asked her.
“No, Roy,” she said, “I was just too young to know what I was doing.”
His mother was really thirty now, not twenty-nine. How old did a person have to be to not be too young? If his father were still alive, Roy would ask him. It was not a question, he decided, that his mother could answer.