Shelter (9 page)

10

Both of you.
Carlos’s words ran in an almost continuous loop inside Alma’s head, making her warm and tingly from the top of her head to her toes, which were currently being pinched inside her black leather stiletto-heeled boots. At each new frustration the day provided, she thought about Carlos loving her. Her and the baby. And it made it all just a little more tolerable.

She’d dressed in her favorite gray slacks and a loose, blousy white sweater. Her black motorcycle jacket, heels. Makeup, flawless hair, understated, silver jewelry. She thought she looked damn good. Her lipstick matched her pale pink nail polish.
But none of that seemed to matter to anyone but her.

“Ma’am.” T
he woman in the half-moon glasses on a beaded chain behind the front desk at the high school seemed annoyed that she had to call Alma “ma’am.” “You’re gonna have to apply
online
,” she stressed the word like it was something she should have already known. “You’ll need to go through screening and submit to a background check. It’s a whole process and we don’t handle that here in the office.”

If this wasn’t her third stop of the day, Alma might have smiled, thanked the receptionist, and left without a fuss. But she was determined to go home employed today.
“But, if I may ask, why don’t you handle that here?”

The woman propped a hand on her beefy hip and sighed. “Because I’ve got a lot to do and I don’t have time to background check
substitutes
.” Again with the making regular words sound like curses.

“Thanks anyway,” Alma said with a fake smile. So much for having been a good student putting her ahead. No one seemed to remember who she was and even if they had, she wasn’t sure it would have been of any benefit. She punched through the double doors with her shoulder, her resume and relevant info clutched to her chest against the stiff wind that was rattling through the parking lot, swirling leaves across the asphalt.

Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten yet today. She made a mental note that eating was no longer about her own growling stomach, but being healthy for the baby. Next stop: somewhere with food.

As she pulled out of the school lot, she did a mental rundown of her failures so far that morning. They hadn’t been hiring office staff at
The Journal
, and she didn’t have the published writing chops yet to get herself a job as a writer. Neither of the insurance agents she’d popped in to see needed sales reps. Barnes & Noble was accepting applications, but had already done their holiday hiring and didn’t think they’d be giving her a call. After that, she’d decided to scale back her criteria. Which had led to more disappointment because neither Red Lobster, Olive Garden, nor Longhorn had been in need of hostesses.

She drove without a lot of thought and ended up in a parking spot in front of the Silver Plate Café: a trendy little nook with wifi and hot coffee at the end of a shopping center that contained a Publix, a pet store, and several clothing and knick-knack boutiques. She hadn’t been into the place for months, but she thought she remembered them having really great bread.

A waitress sat her in a window seat at a table for two and took away the extra set of silverware when she indicated that she was alone. Alma ordered a bowl of minestrone soup and half a Monte Cristo sandwich, Sprite instead of her usual Coke to avoid caffeine. She watched the shoppers move from store-to-store, most of them women since it was the middle of the day, some with small children or babies. Her mother had always told her that if she married well, she wouldn’t have to work for a living. Maintain her house and take care of her children without the nine to five grind. Even if Sam had still been alive, she would need to be working. She hadn’t married rich. She ate in reflective silence, pondering the tradeoff of love versus money. Could she have learned to love someone if he’d bought her an Escalade and draped her with diamonds? No, she didn’t think she could have.

“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress asked as she set her tab on the table. She almost sounded sympathetic, like she was sorry Alma had been eating alone. Or maybe that was just her imagination.

“Yeah, actually. Are you guys hiring?”

**

Diane was in the front yard when Alma pulled to a halt in the drive of her childhood home. The weak November sun was the color of champagne as it poured over the shrubs, mums and pansies. The lawn. Her mother wore her gardening hat and gloves and a button-up shirt and jeans that she had doubtless dubbed “old things” though they were spotless and unworn.

“Hi, Mom,” Alma called as she closed the door of her truck and walked around the hood.

Diane didn’t look up from the flower bed in front of which she kneeled. She had a garden trowel in one hand, a bulb of some kind that looked like a peeling onion in the other. “That damn thing is way too loud,” she said of the truck, like she’d said a hundred times before. The Silverado had been Sam’s idea – a nice big truck to keep her safe, and Alma had loved it – which meant that, of course, Diane hated it. “It needs a new muffler.”

“Muffler’s fine, Mom. It’s supposed to sound like that.”

She snorted and dropped the bulb in the hole she’d dug. The earth she pushed back over it was rich and black, it doubtless contained the perfect amount of nutrients thanks to constant composting and tilling. Her mother’s thumb was green, she’d give her that. The yard should have been on the cover of
Better Homes & Gardens
.

Alma had expected
a lecture of massive proportions, so the silence that stretched like the shadows that grew tall across the lawn made her uneasy. This was either the calm before the storm, or something worse: her mom had disowned her finally.

“I got a job today,” she ventured when the quiet sounds of the trowel in the dirt became too much to bear.

“Make sure you tell them you’re pregnant. Not everyone wants to see a girl with a belly spinning around on a pole.”

All the optimism and hope she’d managed to scrape together about her new waitressing position fell out of the bottom of her stomach. She sucked in a quick breath and the backs of her eyes were stinging before she could gather her emotions. Her hormones were raging – horny and on the brink of a meltdown at all times – and she was trying to manage that, but her mother’s sudden coldness had hit her like a physical blow.
She opened her mouth, and then snapped it shut again. She refused to have another outburst. That’s what Diane wanted: to prove she wasn’t stable and that she needed her mother to make her decisions for her. The crazier she looked, the harder her parents would push for her to move back in, go up to Tennessee with her aunt, and most of all, get away from Carlos.

She cleared her
throat. “Well,” she said, “thankfully that won’t be an issue. I’m going to be waitressing at the Silver Plate. I start tomorrow.”

“Oh. Well good for you then.”

This is not normal!
She wanted to scream. Mothers and daughters didn’t act this way except in stuffy old English movies in which daughters actually called their mothers “mother” in a way that all about title and had nothing to do with love and affection. When she was younger, in her teens, she’d always imagined that pregnancy would bring the two of them closer. Instead, it had driven a wedge.
Like Sam,
she thought with a shudder. Emotional walls fifteen feet  thick. She’d never known what he was thinking. Just like she played a guessing game with Diane.

She fished her keys out of her pocket and spun around, not wanting to subject herself to anymore of whatever might be flung at her next. But she heard the trowel hit the ground.

“How can you do this?” Diane demanded, voice shrill, and Alma glanced over her shoulder to see that her mother had her garden-gloved hands curled into fists at her side. Her expression was a mixture of anger and twisted-up sadness. “You’re happy going from a top-notch job to being a
waitress
? You’re just going to keep playing house with Carlos and pretend he’s Sam? That somehow,
any
of this is normal?”

“Yes, Mom, that’s exactly what I’m going to do,” she said and began walking again.

“He’s just a rebound, Alma!” Diane shouted as she retreated. “He can’t help you! He’s only going to wreck what’s left of your life!”

**

“My mom and Sam? Friggin’ long lost twins,” Alma told Carlos that night at dinner.

             
He paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, spaghetti noodles dangling off the tines. “What?”

             
She pushed her own half-eaten dinner away. “Sam was so closed off emotionally, just like Mom.” It was the first time, she realized, that she’d said anything negative about Sam since his passing, and instead of making her feel guilty, she felt empowered. She’d been holding those grievances in for a long time and hadn’t even acknowledged them as negative traits. But they were. And it was a relief to be able to pull them out into the light for her and Carlos to see. “Heaven forbid we actually
communicate
and
talk
about what’s eating at us. Much better to stew over it, make snide comments and hold it all in until it turns into cancer and kills us!”

             
Carlos looked like he wanted to smile, but wasn’t sure if he should. “See, this is bad. Because now I’m imagining Sam and your mom as twins in little matching overalls and shit.”

             
Alma snorted a laugh. “Now there’s a disturbing thought.”

             
“They always say women marry a man like their father, so maybe in this case, it’s just a little backward.”

             
“Or sideways and upside down.” She sighed, got to her feet and took her plate to the garbage so she could scrape the rest of her pasta into the can. “It’s just, why can’t she be even the least bit happy for my small victories, you know?”

             
He swallowed the bite he’d been chewing, took a thoughtful sip of his beer. Alma knew he was stalling on purpose. “I think she was banking on you being a published author. Being real successful and all that.”

             
“I know.” And she did. She frowned as she went to the sink and ran water over her dish. She used to bank on the idea of becoming a novelist too. And somehow that dream had run aground.

             
“When was the last time you wrote anything?” Carlos prompted.

             
“A year maybe.” She shrugged. “I’d been doodling some notes in the day planner at work, thinking on a story idea before…” Sam died, “but it wasn’t any good, wouldn’t have gone anywhere.”

             
“Aren’t you the one who told me that it didn’t matter what you were writing so long as you were writing something?”

             
She turned around and leaned back against the counter, hands braced on the edge of the sink. Carlos had a gentle, probing expression he flashed her between bites. That same sweet face he’d given her when she was a teenager. It had been amazing at the time to think that she was getting such great life advice from her parents’ gardener. Apparently, he was still comfortable with the role of camp counselor. “Yeah,” she felt a non-smile tug at her lips. “A much younger, dumber version of me told you that once.”

             
He smirked.

             
“But I can’t keep writing short stories and random vignettes. If I actually wanted to write a novel, I’d have to sit down and hammer out a hundred thousand words that had a plot, round, well-developed characters…” she held up her hands. “And like I have the brain power to do that.”

             
“You know,” he said, “I was in the grocery store the other day, looking for a new magazine, and you know how they have books in there too?”

             
“Mmhm.”

             
“Well there were all these romance-type books. The ones with the soft core porn on the covers - ”

             
A laugh bubbled up out of her throat and she covered her mouth with a hand.

             
“ – and I thought, ‘ you know, Alma could so do this’. You’ve got way more brain power than that,” he asserted, waving his fork at her before he tackled his spaghetti and meat sauce again.

             
Oh, Carlos,
she thought, still chuckling. He was downright magical sometimes. Always encouraging. “You think?”

             
“I know.”

             
A beat of comfortable silence passed and she watched him eat the meal she’d prepared. She’d made cooking a habit when she’d moved in with Sam. She’d not had much in the way of culinary skills and she’d been worried that grilled cheese and microwaved soup wouldn’t be good enough for her new husband. So she’d taken a cooking course at the Y and had poured through every
Southern Living
she could get her hands on. She wasn’t half bad now. And with Carlos, there were fewer of those deep silences in which she desperately tried to think of things to say that didn’t sound asinine. They just flowed, easy and calm. And as he popped the last bite of roll in his mouth, he actually brought his plate to the sink for her to rinse. And he dropped a kiss on her cheek while she did so.