The Forever Marriage (21 page)

“I mean it,” she said, because Jobe had not answered. He was simply staring at her. “What is it that makes you want to be here? Now. With me.”

He paused. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. Carmen glanced around to see if anyone was listening to their strange conversation, but the only other people on the porch were a group of raucous teenage kids who couldn’t have cared less. “It’s not logical. We’re very
different. But from the minute I met you in the park I felt like we were … connected somehow.”

Carmen snorted and Jobe looked down abruptly. Guilty? Hurt? She touched his narrow neck, where his pulse was. “No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just that I burned you and then I got blood all over your sleeping bag.” It still amazed her that she felt no embarrassment with Jobe, even about that. “Those didn’t seem like real bonding moments.”

“They were.” Jobe was using two long fingers to stroke one of her cold knees and it felt good. Not sexy, but good. “Right away, I felt like I’d met this person I was supposed to find. Like I’d gone to London …” He blushed.

“What?”

“Okay, this is the least scientific thing you’re ever going to hear me say. But it seemed like there was a reason I went to London with that dickhead, Tim. I was supposed to. I had to meet you, because we’re going to be together for the rest of my life.”

She would not realize until much later how oddly he’d phrased this.
His
life, not theirs. But right now, all she could think was that the time had certainly come. She needed to tell him about Rory; it could all be over. Or she could capitulate: fall into the warm ease he was offering her. His family, his life. There were only these two choices and she had to pick one.

There was a long quiet stretch. Even the teenagers were subdued. Then the wind swept in again, so hard it made Carmen’s cheeks sting. She ducked her head, laying it against Jobe’s shoulder, and his arm snaked around pulling her in tighter. Somehow, with this single movement, all of her was warm.

“Okay,” she said. Gently, the swing rocked.

When her father walked off the plane with a travel bag slung over one shoulder, he looked to Carmen young and unformed. Despite the year and a half of heavy drinking and the job he’d finally found at a
tire shop, which he’d told her had strained his back, Antonio had an easy, slouching gait. His color had come back; he must be eating better. Esme had told Carmen during one of their infrequent phone calls that their father had a girlfriend, but Carmen dismissed it: more of her sister’s disapproval and fretting. Probably, their dad had given some woman a ride while her car was being worked on. Esme had overreacted.

But on the way to the hotel in the car, which he didn’t even comment upon, he spoke twice of someone named Linda. He craned his head, looking around like a toddler in church. He’d left Detroit only a handful of times in the last twenty years, mostly to take his family on vacations to Florida. The East was unfamiliar. He found it cramped, he told Carmen, and toylike. All those narrow brick buildings and swinging signs and streets with barely enough room to park alongside the flow of traffic. It was hard to believe people really lived this way.

Antonio had never asked about her circumstances. This was good, actually, because they would have been difficult to explain. When Carmen had admitted back in August that she would not be completing school because her father had run out of money, Olive had waved her hand as if this were impossible. “It will be taken care of,” she’d said, the tense confusing Carmen.

“
How
will it be taken care of?” she’d asked Jobe. “I don’t understand.”

“My mother will pay the tuition.” He shrugged. “It’s hard not to be crass about this, but what you owe is like spare change to her. We’re talking about the U, right? Maybe four thousand to get you through the last year? That’s less than she donates to the local humane society.”

“Okay, I’m sorry, that did sound crass,” Carmen teased him, all the while a weight lifting away from her chest.

She hadn’t truly understood until late August, when Olive told her to “send for her things,” that she would be staying on in the Garretts’ house—like some sort of domestic exchange student—and using the BMW to commute.

Antonio had insisted on making his own hotel reservations, and Carmen was glad he still had that much pride. She turned into the parking lot of the Sheraton and got out, waiting for her father to retrieve his overnight bag from the back seat. He looked sober: steady and clear. Carmen wondered when he’d pulled himself together, and also why he hadn’t called her up remorseful, apologizing for what had happened at the tail end of her college years and asking if he could make it up to her—perhaps by sending her to graduate school. But neither of them had ever mentioned his drinking or the tuition he hadn’t paid or her lost senior year at Michigan. And it felt wrong to start now.

Earth movers grumbled and steel beams clanged in the distance. Baltimore was building a fancy new development on the Inner Harbor. What had been a slum with tent villages bordering the water was now becoming a baroque three-story restaurant complex with a nightclub and piano lounge. Jobe had promised to take her there the week it opened. Carmen pointed to a brand-new restaurant and told her father there was a life-size cherry-red Cadillac inside, hanging above the bar.

“So is he your boyfriend?” Antonio lit a cigarette and they hung outside the door of the hotel while he smoked it. “You don’t talk about him that way, but it seems like you’re going to marry him.” Carmen instantly felt relieved. He acted more like an uncle or an old family friend, but Antonio was still her father. He understood her. He would help her figure out what to do about Jobe. She opened her mouth and started to form the words,
I need to
…, just as Antonio dropped the cigarette butt and stepped on it and said, “Well, let’s get inside. I’m going to need a shower before I meet these future in-laws of yours.”

She lay on one of the two double beds reading the Baltimore city guide from the bedside table while Antonio took his shower. He burst out of the bathroom, handsome in his uniform of black jeans and cowboy boots with a white towel over his bare, muscled shoulders, letting loose a wet cloud of steam. “Should I shave?” he called. “Is it that sort of dinner?”

Carmen thought about Jobe’s full beard, Nate’s messy attempt at one, George’s ruddy cheeks. Her father stood in front of her, lean face shadowed, looking like some spaghetti Western movie actor—one of the sexy, filthy bad guys who would be dead by the end—and she felt an uncomfortable twinge of wishing for a man like this. Not
him
, of course. Though objectively she had to admit, sick as it was, she found her own father more attractive than she did Jobe.

“No,” she said to him. “You don’t need to shave. You look fine.”

Yet when they arrived at the house, Carmen was sorry. They walked through the door and into the large foyer and when she turned, Antonio suddenly looked silly and shrunken next to her. A cartoon mouse, with a funny, twirling, Mexican-style mustache, standing on his hind legs in the opulent lair of a cat.

George, who had flown in earlier that day himself—taking a limo back from the airport though Carmen was there with one of his cars—entered the room with one large hand extended. “Good to meet you, Tony. Scotch?”

“Sounds fine,” Carmen’s father said hungrily. She watched as he took the glass and tried sending him a message with her eyes:
Don’t bolt it
. Her thought rays were only moderately effective. By the time George turned around, shaking his own glass, making the ice cubes clink, Antonio had drunk at least half. His eyes were mellow and he’d begun to glow.

“For you, dear?” George asked and she shook her head.

“I’ll just get some water.” She backed out of the room and headed down the hall toward the kitchen. It was better not to watch.

“Is he here?” Olive asked, her back to Carmen as she slid a pan into the top oven. “Can you keep an eye on the Brussels sprouts while I go say hello?” She slipped her head out of the loop of her apron. “Just shout if anything starts to smoke.”

Carmen drew her glass of water and walked the perimeter of the cavernous kitchen. There was a boxed cake on the counter, Olive’s one concession: she was a great cook, she often said, but no baker.
Carmen circled again and this time she lifted the lid of the white bakery box. Inside, the cake was ice white and decorated with a combination of frosting roses and real ones in matching crimson. The calligraphy in the center said, C
ONGRATULATIONS
C
ARMEN AND
J
OBE
.

“I’m telling Mom,” said a voice behind her and she turned to see Nate. He grinned—a softer, shorter, more graceful version of his brother—and swung up on the counter. “You don’t want to snitch dessert before dinner. I did that one time when the ’rents were having these NASA guys over for dinner. Whoa! Talk about a bad decision. I was six years old and I still remember …”

“So what do you think this means?” Carmen interrupted. “Come here and look.”

Nate slid down and came up behind Carmen to peer over her shoulder. “I think it means they’re congratulating you.”

“Yeah, I got that. But for what?” She turned and he was still so close she found herself inside his spread arms. The boy blushed, just as Jobe often did. Carmen had seen the way Nate watched her, his expression full of curiosity and pain every time she wore something tight or—especially—the one time he’d come home from baseball practice and found her coming out of Jobe’s room. In fact, they hadn’t been messing around that day; she’d gone in to look for a book she thought she’d left there. But Nate acted as if he’d caught the two of them humping on the dining room table.

“I dunno, you’re graduating, I guess. Isn’t that what this whole dinner is about?”

“Yeesss.” Carmen wanted to believe this, but something was bothering her.

“How are those vegetables doing?” Olive asked, rushing in.

Carmen and Nate both jumped back from the box. “Oh, sorry, I forgot to check,” Carmen said. “I hope they’re not burned.”

Olive scowled and opened the oven. “Nope, just perfect.” Her face softened as she came toward Carmen and touched her cheek. “Your father is a lovely man but I think he’s a little nervous. Who can blame him? He feels like a stranger in his own daughter’s home. Why
don’t you go out and see if you can make him more comfortable? Nate will help me finish up in here.”

When Carmen stepped back into the living room she saw immediately that her father was not uncomfortable, he was drunk. Sprawled on the couch, coat open, belt buckle jutting out, he was listing for George and Jobe—who had materialized when she wasn’t looking—all his complaints about the manufacturing culture in Detroit.

“It’s the goddamn unions,” he said in a voice too loud for the room. “They mean well, but the rules have gotten so complicated you need a
book
just to know what’s going on. Real people get lost in a system like that.”

George was nodding in a fuddled way, Jobe staring down at his folded hands. When Antonio looked up and saw Carmen in the doorway he winked. “There’s my beautiful girl. Come sit next to me. I was just getting to know your boyfriend here.”

He gestured toward Jobe, who shot Carmen a guilty look, his sunken eyes large. She couldn’t help feeling sympathy.

It was a painful few minutes until Nate called them to the dining room. Olive was already standing near her place at the foot of the table. Though she insisted on cooking company meals herself, she hired a woman to serve so she could eat with guests. Carmen had grown used to this but wished now that she’d thought to tell her father; he’d assume—she knew immediately—that there was a staff of ten working behind the scenes.

There was a bottle of wine already open on the table with the cork resting alongside. George picked it up and began pouring, his long arm allowing him to reach all the way to Olive though he remained sitting. He gave Carmen and Jobe each a glass, skipped Nate, then served Antonio and himself, emptying the bottle, going back to Antonio twice to add a little more. Carmen pressed her hands to her thighs with frustration. She could envision her father flopped in his seat and snoring by the end of the meal.

“Cheers,” George said, raising his glass. And the rest of them followed suit. Even Carmen could taste how good this was: a dusty,
rich red wine with an odor she could swear she remembered from France.

The server came out from the kitchen with plates. At least she wore jeans and a Maryland T-shirt, rather than a maid’s uniform. Carmen hoped her father noticed. Then she glanced at the shapely woman whose nipples were visible, erect inside her bra, and hoped he didn’t. She’d never seen him drunk in public; she had no idea how he would behave.

“We’re keeping it simple tonight,” Olive said as Miss Maryland set down the dishes. “Just roasted duck and vegetables, then the salad course, then dessert.”

“Just the way I like it. I’m a meat and potatoes man,” said Antonio, nodding.

Everyone ate in silence for a few beats. Then Olive cleared her throat and said, “Before our wine is gone, I think we should all toast Carmen and Jobe.” She lifted her glass. “To their life together after graduation,” she said.

But for once, Antonio did not rush to pick up his drink. Instead, he stared at Carmen with an abruptly sober question in his eyes. She wanted to answer it but could not imagine how. Even if they’d been alone, she didn’t know what she would have said. She had acquiesced to something the other night, at the ice cream store, on the swing. Her deal was made. So she raised her own glass and turned from her father to smile brightly at Jobe.

It seemed now that Carmen spent most of her time on the phone, talking to people who sounded either extremely urgent or bored by the whole breast cancer routine.

First, there was Dr. Woo’s scheduling nurse who insisted chemotherapy should begin immediately. “You don’t want to give anything a chance to grow,” the woman said, as if there were a possibility that rhododendrons might sprout inside Carmen were she to waste too much time. “Doctor wants you to get in for treatment as soon as possible.” Then she gave Carmen a number to call where she ended up on hold so long that she gave up twice—hanging up in frustration—before finally getting through.