Valley Fever (19 page)

“I can't believe that.”

“What's not to believe?”

“Is it Elliot?”

“Of course. Don't be an asshole.” There was the clank of trays in the kitchen, the scrape of a spatula. The small chef had finished with apricots and begun to peel roasted garlic.

“This is the best thing that could have happened,” I said. “Everyone but you can see you're in love with him.”

“I don't know about love,” she said. “I'm not in love.”

She would not put on her wide smile. I tugged, gently, one of her blond spirals. “You,” I said.

“I don't know how I'm going to begin to explain this to people.”

“Who do you have to explain to?”

“My brother,” she said, her mouth wobbling into a grimace. Bootsie rarely mentioned her brother. “Plus all my customers who think they know me.”

“Everyone in town knows you guys are sleeping together.”

“Fucking,” she said. “Everyone in town knows we are fucking.”

“There's no such thing as a secret in this town.”

“Why, what happened to you?”

“You're infatuated, then. That can lead to love, you know.”

“I'm not infatuated,” she said. “He's just really great in bed. He smells good and he's into stuff I'm into.”

“Well, this is good news,” I said.

“It's really good news,” said Bootsie. “I've met someone who doesn't make me reflexively want to get an abortion.”

“Where is he?”

She laughed. “I think it makes him feel funny to have knocked up the boss.” At the bar, she lit up a cigarette and sprayed water into a rocks glass for the ashes. “He said he has to stay in tonight and grade papers. Suddenly there are a lot of papers to grade.” She shook her head. Bootsie took almost nothing very seriously.

“Don't smoke,” I said.

“Don't be so bossy,” she said. “You were always bossy, Ingrid Palamede.”

“But come on.”

“All our mothers smoked an occasional cigarette,” she said, voice down, as if the kitchen staff might hear her. “You were born with all your limbs, weren't you?”

It was never any use arguing with Bootsie, or even making observations. Suggesting Bootsie might do one thing would ensure she did the other. “I did have childhood scoliosis,” I told her. “And allergies.” My mother's smoking had been limited to Aunt Jane's party-time extras.

“Correlation is not cause,” she said. “You should read up a bit on Hitler and his position on smoking. Then talk to me about having a couple of cigarettes.”

“What did he say?”

“Hitler?”

“What did Elliot say when you told him?”

“Maybe he went numb.” She squinted at me a little. “Get yourself a drink. I hate when people sit at my bar and don't drink.”

“A baby.” I went behind the counter and poured myself a glass of wine from an open bottle in the refrigerator. “It's almost like you're an adult.”

“I know!” she said, inhaling. “Good thing my father died before he could lose all his money.”

“Or have any other children.”

“God, really, we're all so fertile,” she said, exhaling a straight stream of smoke toward the tile that spelled
BOOTSIE'S
. She dropped the cigarette into the glass. “There,” she said. “Half.”

“Have you told anyone? Does George Sweet know this yet? Does your staff? Don't tell anyone you're pregnant until you quit smoking.”

She pinched my arm and came close. “Did you come here to see George Sweet?” she whispered. Her breath smelled like apricots and fresh cigarettes.

“I came to see you.”

She gave me a long left-eyed wink. Bootsie could wink slowly or quickly without moving any other part of her face, like a cartoon. “I'm not telling anyone,” she said. “Everyone can find out on their own. Obviously.”

I said, “Who tends the bar when Elliot isn't here?”

“I do,” she said. “I had another girl but she was stealing. Everyone steals in this business, Ingrid.”

“Any business,” I said.

“Sure.” She rested her elbows on the bar. “When I opened this place, all I wanted was a diner where the farmers would come. Then I got the liquor license. And then I got ambitious. I wanted to use things like almonds and persimmons in all the dishes.”

“Apricots.”

“Yes. I wanted to use apricots.” She smiled. She tapped her index finger on the bar. “All the years I spent resisting this place, when Fresno was home the whole time.”

“You wouldn't know that if you hadn't left.”

She nodded. “We had a good time, didn't we.”

“For a while we did,” I said.

“I mean we had a good time here. Playing soccer. Hanging out at the river.”

“Sure.”

The cook brought her a bruschetta piled high with fragrant tomatoes and ribbons of basil. “I could have opened a hot dog stand out of a cart on a corner and I'd be happy to be back here,” she said. She bit into the toast. “Oh, my God, Arturo, brilliant.”

“The valley smells like home, especially this time of year,” I said.

“Do you want one of these?”

“All we eat at home is toast.”

“Is that no? Arturo, bring one more, will you? Not toast like this,” she said.

“I mean I like toast. Yes.”

“You know, all those girls still live here,” she said. She meant the girls we hung out with in high school: Muffy Levin, Kitty Urbano, Phyllis Tainter. “They're all married to accountants. They're all very Junior Leaguey. Grosgrain headbands, fund-raisers in the backyard. You know.”

I did know. “You could have opened one of those hot dog carts like they have at the football games in LA, with the peppers and onions grilling on the side and the bacon wrapped around the dogs.”

“No,” she said. “One like in New York, with the hot dogs sitting in steamy water all day and big vats of mustard. I would have made it fabulous. I would have had all sorts of smoked relishes and things, and I'd sell bottles of soju.” She licked her fingertips. “Your idea of the world is larger than mine,” she said. “When I think of the world away from here, all I think of is New York.”

I laughed. I felt so much smaller than Bootsie. Since I'd come back from boarding school when I was sixteen, all I had wanted was to be a bit more antagonistic, a bit more contrarian, a bit more like Bootsie. “New York is all there is, anyway,” I said.

“I want another one of these,” she whispered. “Arturo, will you bring me one, too?”

Arturo oiled the bread with a brush and put another slice on the grill.

“Listen to this,” I said, pulling out the bar chair next to me.

“I'm not going to sit. I can't sit.”

“Okay, so listen to what happened.”

“Oh, I heard. Your guy went to work for Griffith.”

“How did you hear that? How did you know I was going to say that?”

She opened her mouth wide, as if she were coming in to bite my face. “I hear everything,” she growled right next to my ear.

I moved away. “Really, where did you hear that?”

“Customers,” she said. “Like you say, nothing is private in this town.”

“Nothing is a secret, I said.”

“Oh, boy.
Nothing is a secret
,” she recited. “Does this mean you're going to stick around for a little while?”

“Why would I stick around?”

“To help out. I know how these things work, princess.”

“I was going to anyway.”

“Ha. I knew he would get you. I knew it when I saw you in here with Anne, before we even spoke. I could see it in your vulnerable demeanor.” She lit another cigarette. “Where is my staff?”

“He didn't get me. He needs my help.”

“They always need our help.” She wrapped her bomb of hair tightly into a rubber band, took keys from under the counter, and unlocked the front door. “Alicia!” she shouted toward the kitchen. “Is Alicia here yet?”

“I don't think she's here,” Arturo said.

“God,” Bootsie said to me, “is it hard to show up at a certain time? Is it hard to just be in the place you're supposed to be?”

“This is an existential question.”

“You may have to help out here, too,” Bootsie said.

“I don't wait tables.” All the awful jobs I ever had, I managed to never have to wait tables. I would have been terrible at waiting tables. I have no patience and I don't care if people are happy or not.

“It's better that you can help your dad now instead of when he's dead. I'm not being funny. I wish I hadn't waited until my dad was dead to come home and look after things. I mean, what was the difference?”

“I know.”

“Have I said that before?”

“I don't think so.”

“It's in my head all the time,” she said. “I'm never not thinking that. He was such a jerk, you know, but I was kind of a jerk, too.”

“Like what happened with us,” I said.

She knocked the tip of a freshly lit cigarette against the glass, tapping and tapping until there was ash. The air-conditioning kicked in, high, and made its low chugging motor sound. “Maybe.”

“If he were around, you wouldn't have come back at all. He would have sold the land or figured something out so that you could go on living your life where you were. It's the surprise element, that's how they end up needing us.”

“I wasn't happy, anyway,” Bootsie said then. “I thought I was happy, but I was always just one bad step away from a nervous breakdown.”

“I think that's where I am now,” I said.

“Well, then, welcome home,” she said, smiling. She put a cocktail glass in front of me and moved behind the bar to mix liquor. “Try not to get pregnant.”

 

15.

“Maybe you need a gin and tonic,” I said the first morning Dad didn't get out of bed. I had read online that gin and tonics cured stomach ailments. I had been spending a lot of time awake at night, online, looking up cures for pain. I discovered, for example, that the symptoms for a broken heart are almost identical to the symptoms for pancreatic cancer: nausea, weight loss, an abdominal pain that radiates through to your back. If you make the mistake of looking up “physical effects of a broken heart” online, you'll learn that the searing feeling you get in your chest is actually a breaking down of the lining of the heart due to the stress of sadness that, in extreme cases, causes death.

“Or vodka with grapes,” I said.

Dad never got so sick he didn't get out of bed. Dad could have had bronchitis in the middle of October, and he often did, but he'd still go to work. No hangover, no grief, no broken ankles or chest pains could keep Dad from work, which, as far as he could see, cured everything.

“No booze,” he said.

“I'm kidding.” I was not really kidding.

“You should go to the doctor,” Mother said. She lay next to him in one of her gauzy white nightgowns with the thorn holes all over it. “Why do you never go to the doctor?”

“Which doctor?” Dad said. Dad didn't think there were any reliable doctors but orthopedists, because they patched up your broken bones. “Some quack?”

“The tummy doctor. Some normal doctor who tells you what to do.”

“Doctors. I feel fine today anyway.” He couldn't lift his head from the pillow.

“You don't look like you feel fine,” I said.

“It's an ulcer, probably,” Dad said. “I have this seaweed potion your mother told me to drink.”

“What seaweed potion?” I said.

“It restores the nervous system,” Mother said.

“Have you had a test? Did you drink barium and all that?” I asked.

“Drink barium. God, no,” said Dad.

I said, “I have never heard of seaweed for an ulcer.”

Mother said, “It's easily digestible vitamin B.”

“I think you should eat an egg,” I said.

Dad said, “Everything goes away eventually. You either die or you get better.”

“Daddy.”

I sat at the edge of the bed. Dad hurt too much to be propped up. When you've spent a good part of your life scrubbing tanks and digging up tree stumps and bent over trimming vines, a little pain between your shoulder blades can go on for a long time before it makes you pay any attention.

I said, “I'm going to call Dr. Epstein and see if he can take X-rays of your chest.” Dad sent farmworkers with shingles and head colds and pregnancies to see Dr. Epstein, the team doctor for the Fresno State Bulldogs.

“It's the same cough Felix has got and Masterson has got, and half my men have got it,” Dad said.

“Miguel and his wife have both got it,” Mom said.

“It's not just a cough,” I said. “It's your stomach, too. That's how bone cancer starts.”

“It's how bone cancer ends,” Mother said.

“If you haven't got a cough, you're not working hard enough,” Dad said.

Mother agreed. It didn't help when she agreed.

“A cough and a stomachache have never kept you in bed, Dad.”

“Don't get old,” he said.

I said, as I was supposed to, “You're not old.”

Mother said, with her fingers softly on his face, “You have no lines.” Then she turned to me. “I take good care of him.”

Dad said, “This is what forty years of marriage to your mother looks like.” He grinned his small grin.

Both of them had loose skin and spots on their hands. There were times, like right now, that evidence of their age frightened me.

“Let me call Dr. Epstein.”

“I'll call him myself,” Dad said.

I said, “I'm not leaving the house until you call, and those phones are going to ring all day with men trying to rent your machines.”

“I see,” Dad said. “I see how you operate.”