Bret Anthony Johnston

They lived in a section of Corpus called The Cut, a neighborhood crowded with rusted, broken-down cars and dirt lawns and boxy tract houses. If the stop signs hadn't been stolen, they were spray-painted with looping gang tags. White-shirted men anchored street corners; women sat on porches and rocked crying babies. A German Shepherd lunged against a chainlink fence as the Caddy crawled by, and the air was tinged with mesquite smoke, someone barbecuing or burning branches. A young girl was pinning wet sheets to a clothesline. The streetlights were flickering to life when I saw her, and in the darkness, it looked like she was raising long flags of surrender.

Carlos was doing figure-eights on a BMX bike in the middle of his street. He looked like a child learning to ride without training wheels. When he saw me, he laid the bike on the curb and sauntered to the Fleetwood. He'd holstered a beer bottle in each of his front pockets and he gave one to me. We leaned against my rear bumper, watching the night sky thicken.

“A toast,” he said. We raised our bottles. “To La Cocina. May she rest in peace.”

He'd been working day labor, taking the bus across town each morning and waiting outside Home Depot until someone hired him to clear brush or build a fence or fix a toilet. Melinda had started school again, and Alma was cleaning houses. No one had heard from Mrs. Martinez. That day, Carlos had helped a crew dig up a Country Club yard and install a sprinkler system; he'd worked for fourteen hours, then called me when he came home. He finished his beer and lobbed it at a trashcan, missing by a foot. He held his arm in the air like a basketball player after a jumpshot and I smelled his sweat. The odor wasn't foul, just that of a body after a day's work. It smelled vaguely of La Cocina, of the last summer.

“A wig store moved into our old space,” I said. “It's kind of sad, I guess.”

He nodded twice, shoved his hands in his pockets and stared into the darkness. I guessed he'd visited the restaurant, too, and was remembering the old days, but he said, “If I owned a wig store, I'd have full-bodied mannequins instead of the little heads. I'd leave them naked except for the wigs. That way, when there were no customers, I'd have something to look at besides hair.”

“No health code violations in that,” I said.

Down the street a man pushing a rickety snowcone cart argued with a teenager. The teenager whistled a hard, sharp whistle, and the man trundled away. I took a drink of my beer and tried to think of a way to ask if Melinda was home.

“Julian, driving the King of the Cadillacs out here was maybe not your best idea,” Carlos said. “Two weeks ago, they shot a deaf guy because they thought he was making gang signs with his hands.”

I'd heard the story at Blue Water. After the shooting, my father took each of his pawnbrokers aside and told them to be vigilant about background checks before selling guns. But standing with Carlos, I wasn't scared, and I hadn't been afraid navigating the streets. The world seemed random and unknowable to me, but not utterly cruel, not terrifying. Sometimes circumstances put you face to face with people you never thought you'd see again, and with that possibility in mind, you could make a life.

“Pop quiz,” I said to Carlos. I'd turned around and was unlocking the trunk. I said, “Why did I rush over here tonight?”

“Julian, if I owe you any money — ”

“You don't,” I said. “Guess who I ran into.”

I took my tarp out of the trunk. I'd handed Carlos my beer and when I looked up at him, he was scratching his head with it. He said, “Julian, I'm not so good at tests.”

“Mrs. Garrett. Whitney Garrett's mother,” I said. “She came to La Cocina trying to find you. I was up there, looking in the window.”

Carlos swigged from my beer, then swallowed hard and swigged again. He said, “Julian, are you fucking with Carlos?”

“She wanted to thank you for saving her daughter. She wanted to give you your reward,” I said. I lifted the case from my trunk and clicked open the latches. In the violet moonlight, the strings shone like spun silk. The fur-lined case looked like a jewelry box.

I said, “For you, Carlos.”

“A guitar,” he said.

“It used to belong to Elvis Presley,” I said. “It's worth — ”

“She must have known I love music. Maybe I said something at the hospital.”

“Probably,” I said. “You were probably trying to take her mind off the accident.”

“Carlos knows how to comfort the ladies.” He admired the guitar at arm's length, then held it close and strummed an open chord, then another and another. When the notes died away, I suggested he sell the guitar and put the money toward starting his own restaurant. He said, “Julian, I'll never sell this.”

“Where are we going?” Melinda said from behind us.

She'd climbed over the door and into the driver's seat of the Fleetwood. Behind the wheel, she looked exhausted and beautiful, just as she had on the day she'd told me Carlos was her stepfather.

“Field trip in the Fleetwood!” Carlos sang.

He jogged around the front of the car, strumming his strings. He set the guitar on the backseat first, then lowered himself in beside it. I sat in the passenger seat. I must have ridden that way when my mother owned the car, but I couldn't recall ever sitting there before. With the night sky starless and heavy above us, those days seemed part of another boy's life. I didn't know what to say, and had I spoken, I wouldn't have recognized my own voice.

Melinda fixed me with her eyes. I thought she was waiting for me to pass her the keys, but even after I did, she kept looking at me.

“Hey, you,” she finally whispered. Then she winked and cranked the ignition.

She hung a U-turn and wound her way out of The Cut. She headed straight for the freeway and floored the gas once she hit those clean wide-open lanes. She took the car to speeds I never would, the speedometer needle trembling toward eighty, eighty-five, ninety. The streetlamps whizzed by like comets. Carlos was strumming and singing in the backseat, but I could barely hear him over the engine and the air whooshing around the windshield. Melinda's hair swirled wildly and the scent of her honeyed shampoo wafted. It seemed we were floating.

I'm not sure when I realized she was driving to La Cocina, or when I realized she didn't know the restaurant was gone. Maybe I knew it when she exited the freeway doing sixty and it felt slow as walking. Maybe it was when she braked at an intersection and the speed had left her giddy enough that she leaned over and kissed me so hard and long that drivers behind us laid into their horns. Maybe it was when I looked back, worrying Carlos would be angry, and found him fast asleep, cradling the guitar. Or maybe I realized it when the night sky opened and the rain poured. Before I could stop her, Melinda flipped the switch to raise the roof. I thought of how disappointed my father had been by my neglecting the ragtop and how I'd been avoiding him because it shamed me, too. With the rain drumming on the hood and streaking the glass, I thought of him finding the house empty tonight. I'd never disobeyed him like that before, but now I thought he'd forgive what I'd done, maybe even approve of it. As a new pristine ragtop eased down and the rain grew quieter and quieter, I saw my father working those many nights in his garage: He's stretching the vinyl taut over the roof's ribs, riveting the corners, oiling the hinges. He's listening to the intricate music of longing and weeping when he must. He's watching the clouds. He's waiting and waiting, wiling away the hours until a storm gathers and his son can appreciate the painstaking labor of hope, the coded, sheltering lessons of sorrow.

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