I took a white-knuckled drive up the 5 freeway past all signs of civilization, past subdivisions, up a bifurcated mountain and back down it. The bestfuckingthingever drank gas like a frat boy drank beer at a kegger. Everything was dead, flat, dry. Then it hit. Castaic.
All the garage doors faced the street like mouths stretched into a closed grimace. Front yards that had not been flattened by concrete were neglected and brown or tamed and green with sad blowup snowmen and fat, jolly Santas. Everything in the unforgiving landscape was scorched by the sun. Even the mountains ringing the town looked compacted under the weight of the sky. Or maybe that was just me.
Big girl pants.
Maria Souza-Faulkner had two settings: Park—which meant she was passive, sweet, and slept seventeen hours a day—and fourth gear—which meant she was in full-on rage with an eye to wiping the world of sin. Kevin had suggested she was bipolar. I’d laughed not because he was wrong, but because she’d never do something as sensible as see a doctor to figure out why she was crazy. Dad had loved her through all of it, so obviously she saw no need to fix what was functioning just fine.
Her house, a one-story beige box with a two-car garage and a front door set back twenty feet behind it, had fallen out of repair. Dad wouldn’t have allowed that. He’d spent his time in the States painting, plastering, and gardening. The young citrus he planted had a few leaves on the twiggy branches, and the front lawn looked like an infield. I didn’t know how long she’d been stuck in park, but judging from the look of the place, it had been at least through the beginning of the summer.
My mother answered the door in a long polyester thing that fell over her curves in a way that was modest but sexual. Like me, she had a body that was hard to hide, and unlike me, she kept trying. She was a Brazilian beauty my dad had met on some unholy peacetime mission. She was five eleven, in her early fifties, and she had darker skin than mine but the same dark eyes and hair. She was Catholic as only a South American girl could be, and that was the rub. She believed in the infallibility of the Pope and the virginity of Mary long after anyone else with a brain had moved on.
“Hi, ma.”
She hugged me, and after a second, I hugged her back. She held on longer than I thought she would. Maybe the visit wouldn’t be so bad. We’d just forgive each other. She moved out of the way, and I stepped inside.
She saw the car. My immediate reaction was to make excuses for it. It was borrowed. I was returning it. I didn’t ask for it. Then I decided to shut up. I didn’t come to fight, and I didn’t come to lie. She closed the door without saying anything.
The house was hermetically sealed against the desert heat and dust, and the artificially cooled air was stale and thin. Everything was beige. Dad had hated beige, but my mother insisted. When she insisted, she got what she wanted.
Well, everything permanent was beige. Whatever had been moved in was a color, and a bright one. African masks and Mexican blankets. A hand-carved teak partition blocked a window draped in Ikat fabric. Stacks of travel books stood in front of the stuffed bookcases. It looked as if my mother had gotten the shit stamped out of her passport.
“You came,” she said.
“Yeah.” The couch had a pillow on one end with a case that matched the bed sheet balled up at the other end. She was sleeping on it, probably regularly.
“I don’t think we can save the house,” she said.
I had a speech prepared, so I spit it out. “I didn’t come because of the house. It’s not that I can’t move or get an apartment or whatever. I just find it hard to believe you’d let the place go. I got worried about you.”
“Oh, Monya,” she said, calling me by my grandmother’s name. “All this way for nothing.” She put her hand on the doorknob.
That was her. She’d kick me out and waste away rather than admit there was a problem. Though she seemed healthy, if older, I could tell sunshine and butterflies weren’t the order of the day. “Come on, Mom. I’m here. Make me some tea.”
Her hand slipped from the knob. She glanced out the window at the white Jaguar as if she didn’t trust it and didn’t like it. As she walked me to the kitchen, I saw more third world knicknackery and clean, beige rectangles spotting the walls as if old pictures had been removed.
It wasn’t until she indicated my seat that I realized what those rectangles represented. They were where the pictures of Dad had been. She’d kept them up after he died three years before, but now they were gone.
As she put a copper pot on the stove and got out a mug with I LOST MY HEART IN BELIZE scripted across it, everything became clear. The tchotchke. The missing pictures of Dad. The depression. The multiple mortgages.
“Still waitressing?” she asked.
“Yep. You still doing the books for the church?”
“What’s his name?” she asked, not answering my question. “You didn’t buy that car on a waitress’s salary.”
“I don’t make a salary. I make tips.” What kind of answer was that? That was the answer of a woman ashamed of who she was, and I’d given that up. “His name is Jonathan. I hope we’re not going to argue about it.”
“As long as it’s not that other guy. I didn’t like him.”
“Does yours have a name?” She didn’t answer, just dicked with some floral canisters that may or may not have been full of expired tea. “Mom, is there anyone out here you can talk to? The priest? Someone in the choir?”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Is it the rector that dumped you?”
“For the love of all that is holy, Monya, that is—”
“A totally reasonable assumption. Except for the obvious world travel that’s happening. You’re sleeping until after noon, so I know you’re not working for him. You can’t talk to anyone, and all your friends are there.”
“I don’t want to.” The teapot whistled.
“I’ll be gone in a few hours. So you might as well tell me.”
She put the mug of hot liquid in front of me and left the room. I started to follow, but I saw her open a door in the china cabinet. She crouched down, rummaging through old dishes and cookbooks, until she came up with a brown paper expanding file. I sat back down, and she slapped it in front of me.
She said, “This is what you came for. All my paperwork. Take it. No, I don’t want to lose the house. I love that house as much as you do. If I didn’t love it, I would have sold it and kicked you to the street for being an insolent, disrespectful bitch two years ago.”
“Don’t hold back, ma. Tell me how you really feel.”
She didn’t say anything else, but she didn’t laugh and forgive me either. That was it. That was what she’d wanted to say. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I didn’t get crushed under the weight of her disapproval. But she was right. Despite my initial protestations, I wanted to save the house.
“I’m sorry about whatever-his-name-is,” I said. “It looks like you guys had a good time together.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.” I unspooled the string from the felt disk and flipped open the envelope. I don’t know anything about finance. Numbers only interested me insofar as they related to sound vibrations, but once I spread the papers across the table and stacked them into a narrative I could get my head around, one thing was abundantly clear.
My mother had blown about three quarters of a million dollars traveling the globe.
The house I lived in had been purchased for ninety-five thousand in the mid-nineties and paid in full twenty years later with my dad’s life insurance. But Echo Park had been in the nascent stages of a renaissance when my parents bought it. Since then, more and more people like Dr. Thorensen had moved in next to artists, Hispanic families, and gang members.
According to a bank located in Colorado, my little house on a hill was worth six hundred fifty thousand dollars. I knew that because my mother had cashed out every dime, and then some, piggy-backing mortgages and loans. She’d attempted to squeeze almost another hundred grand in equity out of the thing when I’d had those permits opened. As if there would be actual improvements.
She’d bailed on her job in February. She’d been at that church since I was in high school and had a salary good enough to cover all her obligations. Without that job, it had all tumbled on her. I imagined the gentleman in question was the cause of her slide.
“You’re a goddamn genius, ma.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“You know you’ll never pay this back?”
“They won’t miss it. It’s a bank,” she said.
“It’s about four banks. Mom, Christ—”
“Mouth.”
“I can’t even get my head around what to do.” I collected the papers. I wanted to slam and bang them to illustrate my annoyance, but they only made shuffling sounds. “Can you just tell me what happened? You didn’t raise me to do stuff like this.”
She put her fists on her hips. “Like what?”
“Stealing. This is stealing.”
“Not if I let them have that house.”
“It’s not worth seven hundred thousand dollars.”
“The appraisers said it was, so it is. Things are worth what experts say they’re worth. People like us, we’re nothing. Our opinions don’t mean anything. And you agree. In your heart, you know it. You think the house isn’t worth anything because you love it, and if you love it, it’s garbage, right? Well, how much would you pay for it? Huh? How much for your father’s trees? How much for the porch your father and I sat on after you were in bed?”
“Mom—”
“How much for the kitchen where I cooked for you? How much for the side door you snuck into after curfew as if I didn’t know? Or the bathroom where I miscarried two babies? How much is it worth, Monya? Even that cracked foundation your father promised to fix a hundred times before he shipped himself across the world. That house was where I waited for him. Where he wasn’t when I found out I had cancer. How much would a stranger pay for those years? If my life there wasn’t worth seven hundred thousand dollars, what was my life worth?”
I couldn’t take it any more. Her face was red and strained. Her voice hit a crescendo, and I had been a neglectful, insolent bitch. I bolted from the chair, put my arms around her, and let her cry. “It’s okay, ma. We’ll fix it.”
“I can’t. I tried everything.”
“I have friends who are lawyers. I can—” I stopped myself. I could have them look at the paperwork, maybe explain the situation. But Jonathan would offer to buy the house, no doubt, and I didn’t want him to. I didn’t want to go down a road where he bailed out my family, then my friends. I didn’t want him to trade Jessica’s financial distress for mine. I could soothe my mother for the moment, but in the end, we’d have to let the house go. I’d tell Jonathan I was okay with it, pretend as though it wasn’t a big deal.
A call came in. Still holding my mother, I slipped the phone out of my pocket. Margie. I missed it by a second and put it back in my pocket while it went to voice mail. “Let me see what I can do.”
She sniffed and stood up straight. “There’s nothing to do. I’m sorry you have to move.”
“I’ll live.” I waved it off, but I knew I wasn’t convincing. “I should have been here for you. Come around more often.”
“Yes. You should have.”
“I’m sorry.” A text blooped on my phone. My mother and I looked at each other.
“This the man with the car?” Her tone did not bode well for an intelligent conversation. If I had just learned to stop calling myself a whore, my mother hadn’t. She was in park, but that could change on a dime.
“No, it’s his sister, probably.” I looked. It was a text from Margie, as I expected.
—Where the fuck are you?—
The next one came immediately after.
—He’s bleeding into his chest.
Bad suture ripped tissue—
It took me sixty seconds to say good-bye to my mother, promise I’d do my best for her, scoop up the papers, and get in the car.