Parting by Sara Guittar

I was leaving town, by God, and there was nothing anyone, especially aunt Mari could say about it. The tone of her voice rose and fell, straining at all the vowels, as if they were too big or too important to hold in. “Family, that is the stuff that’s important. If you leave, then…” The words were always accompanied by an indistinct hand motion, sailing up and back through the air, dangerous to any cousin who happened to be doting behind her, looking for food. What would happen, I couldn’t ever figure out, nor did I ever ask. She just made me sit down at the kitchen table and the subject changed to church, as quickly and fluidly as her hands swirl above the stove— “Did you see the Andersons? Look at the girl, crazy, isn’t it? How she’s changed….” So much would be left unsaid, but we were fluent in this halting communication, bounding from the important stuff to the latest gossip at church. My aunt was always cooking something, the kitchen always smelled of corn, animal fat, and spiced meat, though no one could ever be sure what was bubbling in her pots. I would be seated at the cracked wooden table, listening to the salacious gossip and never changing anything. This had been going on for years. It wasn’t any wonder I had never left town. I kept learning about family scandals, and for whatever reason, that was enough to keep me interested. I was a glutton for gossip.

It was a four-dollar an hour job at the cash and carry grocery store, completely dead-end as my mother would have it, but I sat at a dingy counter from eight in the morning until six in the evening, a favor to the family who couldn’t pay me much. The nephew had run out a month ago, widow’s gossip flying that he was probably heading toward Uvalde to be someone bigger than he realized was possible for him to be here. Everyone thought the same way at one time or another in our town. I have always felt that way but somehow I couldn’t ever leave. There was always someone holding me here. Aunt Mari holding to her mission to make me a good tejana girl and marry me off as soon as possible to a good ranchman, so I don’t resort to sinning in the back of a revamped Chevy to the next pretty boy who makes a pass at me. She didn’t have to know that wasn’t a concern anymore. My mother was constantly scampering off to live her next big dream with men I had never met. If I left, she wouldn’t know where to find me because she always came back to her sister’s. So that’s where I stay. It was a lot to leave behind, everyone I know and care for, in exchange for a greater world than this town. So instead, I sit at a tired little store at an overgrown corner of a quiet street and wait for all the regular customers to come in. There is never anyone new. People leave my town, they don’t move in.

The first customers are always the ten or twelve ladies Mari knows from church, old women that rose early and went to mass every day, dressed in simple black dresses and shoes. I repeat the morning gossip to them as they move through the familiar, dusty aisles, and conversation fills the little store. Then the ranch hands come in to pick up ranch things, and maybe some lunch, but they never speak a word except for hello and goodbye. Then the young and middle-age mothers, who can’t care about the gossip, count out change and then ask uneasily to put a bit more on the tab while their children dance in the aisles and plead for popsicles. A last call around five-thirty arrives in the form of sullen but not impolite teenaged children, old enough to drive and sent to pick up a can of chilies or a cut of beef from the back. I close the store; waving at the butcher I went to high school with until he dropped out to finish his father’s career as the local meat man, and glancing at the dusty and forgotten toys tucked under shoe polish and cigarette lighters in a foggy glass display case. Outside the air smells heavy and humid, a welcome change after the frosty air conditioning, and the streets are quiet save a roar of engine or bark of a dog as I walk home.

Mari’s house is a frigid tornado of activity. I have lived there for ten years, since my mother decided to begin her adventures in her little grey car, plastered with Texas bumper stickers and a Virgin Mary hanging from the rearview mirror. I inhale one last breath of the warm, sultry air before I step inside little house. Mari is cooking and the kids are sprawled on the carpet, absorbed in the television. I step carefully around them and one is alive enough to sputter out a disinterested hello that I know better than to answer. I move though the tangle of legs to the kitchen and roll my sleeves up to help Mari stir something.

Later that night, the house is quiet. The pipes have stopped clamoring, the air conditioning shut off and the windows open wide to let in the cool dark air. I’m waiting for a phone call. It always comes in the middle of the night, when the stars are high and everyone immersed in their dreams. I learned early on that it is better to not fall asleep, to keep myself awake and listen to the breeze moaning softly against the drafty walls of the house, through the cracking paint and gently rotting boards and the insect-nibbled screens. My mother knows that I am usually awake at this hour because I inherited my love of the night from my long-gone, barely-missed father. He kept me up, so long ago, by tickling me with fern branches and cattails. Right before I fall asleep, my body still tenses, waiting for the phantom brushings of plants. The phone pierces the still night and I grab it on the first ring.

Her voice echoes boisterously through the earpiece. “Hey darlin’! How have you been?”

“Mom. Where are you? And you be quiet. If you yell any louder you’ll wake up Mari.” I throw a glance toward her bedroom door a few feet away. I realize that there’s no way my mother’s voice could fly that far but for some reason it doesn’t matter.

“Oh, don’t you worry ‘bout her. She’s just getting more ornery with old age.”

“Like you aren’t?”

“Respect your elders, girl,” she growls. A pause. “So how have you been?”

I sigh wearily. “Fine. I can’t sleep. The job is going okay.”

“You need to go get yourself a man. Then you’ll sleep fine.”

“Oh, Mom. Come on.”

“No, really. That’s the secret. Enough sex and you’ll fall asleep just great.”

“Mom, I really don’t want to have this conversation right now!” The phone falls silent and I worry if she hung up on me. It wouldn’t be the first time she had done so. I try to make amends. “So, where are you?”

“Houston.”

“Mom! You said you wouldn’t ever go back there.” Her boyfriend was in Houston. Not a nice man, either.

“So I lied. It’s not the first time I’ve been here.”

“No, it’s not.” I fall quiet again, and I wonder if this is the limit of this conversation tonight. I want her to come home, to come back to me, but the words catch in my throat, stuck beneath my vocal cords. And the silence continues.

“Well, mija, I’ll talk to you later.” There’s a door slam in the background, the man must be back again.

I force the words out. “Bye, mom,” and the phone clicks dead in my clammy hand. I sigh, hang the phone gently back up on the wall, and lean back on the worn brocade sofa. Moonlight filters through the gauzy, faded curtains and I can’t stop whispering our conversation over and over under my breath. I tell it breathily to the empty living room four times, wondering as I do every time my mother and I talk if this will be the last words I’ll hear from her. I force down my frustration into my stomach and leap from the worn sofa. Ten minutes later I’m out of the house, driven awake from frustration and a lingering sense of abandonment. I stride carelessly across the deserted streets, my heels clicking violently on the cracked, baked pavement, disturbing the feral cats that cling to the bushes and hedges. I walk for two miles before I realize I’m at the edge of town. The moon is setting above the horizon, bulbous and yellow, and the town glows from the light reflecting off of tin roofs and plexiglass windows. I deeply breathe the air, the lush smell of decaying plants and baked earth floating around me. Everything is distant and there isn’t a car in sight. I can see the horizon stretched out all around me, marked by low tress and cacti. I am home, as much as I may not want to be, as much as I want to leave and tear myself away. If I don’t leave, every day will be the same. Someday Mari may get a nice boy to marry me, someone who will be surprised that I have been in the backseat of Chevy and enjoyed it, and who will want me to raise his boys just like him, into strapping, taciturn ranchmen with rough hands. They might love me, but I’ll always wonder what could have happened. I wander back into town slowly, sucking in the night air as if it were my last breath, storing it deep inside of me for a time when I’ll never have it. I drink in the small, slightly dilapidated homes and the overgrown grasses by the edge of the non-curbed roads. Soon, I’ll leave. A little more money, then I’ll leave.

The lost nephew returns a week later. The patriarch of store, moving slowly to stave off an impending heart attack, glides through the door, his oiled moustache gleaming in the dusty light. He walks with a thumb looped by his belt buckle and his heels clicked gently on the old linoleum floor. I am reorganizing the tab sheets, posted on a small bulletin board, behind the counter.

He walks in front of me and adjusted his hat. He glances once down at my task and lays his hands on the counter. “Mija, my nephew came back this morning.” There is an expectant pause from him but my hands don’t stop sorting.

“Okay. I’ll finish the day.” I hold in a sigh and swing my eyes up toward his, which are examining the forgotten toys in the display case.

He stretches across the counter and shakes my hand. “Thanks for all your help.” His entire arm swings toward the butcher in a friendly wave and he glides out the door, the bell jangling behind him.

The store fell silent again except for the whirring of the air conditioning and the occasional rapping from the back butcher’s table. I stare after him for a moment, and then finish reorganizing the tab sheets. I put each one up on the board, firmly tacking the thin paper through the new cork. My hands sink to my sides and I sit down to wait for the sullen children to filter in.

I close the store for the last time late. Everyone has gone and the customers are tucked away in their homes. I linger over the cracked counter and the toys. Gingerly, I pick one up, a bright orange water gun, pristine and unused, still encased in the factory packaging, but covered in a layer of dust from years of disinterest. I slip it into my handbag, next to my keys, and turn away. I flick the lights off quickly, two switches at a time, and padlock the door shut behind me.

I amble back to Mari’s, my handbag swinging around my hips, and pass the cat-inhabited bushes without a glance, staring instead at the dusty, warm road in front of me and breathing deeply. When I reach the little, frigid house, an old car with Texas bumper stickers is swung in the driveway, a little crookedly, and an older woman sits on the stoop, smoking a cigarette languorously. I pause for the briefest of moments and then walk up to the base of the steps and stop.

“Aren’t you going to give your mother a kiss?” She asks, twisting her words around the cigarette that is clenched between her teeth.

I shrug. “I wasn’t going to, but now that you mention it…” I oblige her, moving in quickly and kiss her once on the cheek before backing away, down the steps. “What are you doing here?”

The cigarette is rolled around between her fingers, studied through a fresh plume of blue smoke. “It was time to visit. Besides, you sounded tired on the phone. I felt a little guilty.”

“No, Mom. I was fine,” I said brushing it off with a shrug.

“Well, you didn’t sound fine. So now I’m here.” She bit out sharply. “So what is it?”

“Nothing, Mom. I was just tired.”

“Hm.” Her eyes narrow and her lips pucker around her cigarette as she inhales the smoke. “I thought otherwise.”

“You’re not always right, you know.”

“I know. I thought this time was different.”

“Well, you’re wrong.”

“I see that.” She stands suddenly and stamps out the cigarette under her boot heel. “I’ll be going then.”

“What? You just got here!”

“I had some food, I visited Mari, you don’t want me here, so I’ll just be on my way.”

“Mom…”

“What? What do you have to say for yourself?” She starts to the car and turns sharply. “You wanna come with me?”

The words are lodged in my throat. Mom would have heard from Mari that the nephew was back, that I was jobless. I could leave. The thought sings in my head, finally leaving and finding a job, a life, outside of this town. I waited a moment too long.

She strides toward the car and yells loudly over her shoulder, “You don’t want to be stuck here! It’ll eat you alive! You think this town is great, but it’ll turn on you, just as it turned on me. Fate plays a cruel game, mija, best not leave it all up to her.”

I stand on the crumbling and dusty sidewalk, the fire ants swarming over the pavement, as she swings the car and lights another cigarette. With a four-fingered sardonic wave, her thumb looped under the top of the steering wheel, she revs the engine and backs out slowly, watching for animals and children, and pulls away. I wait for a few moments on that sidewalk, until the roar of the engine fades completely, and go inside. Mari’s is waiting for me just inside the door, as if she had been listening to our conversation.

“You saw your mother?” She asks.

I nod. “Mari, about what she said—“

“Quiet.” She interrupts me. “She left for a reason, entiendes? She wanted more, a better life. I know you want that too. We all do. Just go. You’ll never do it otherwise.” She shuffles away toward the kitchen, her shoulders hunched. Her voice cracks, “I’ll write you the gossip.”

Standing still for a moment, I follow her and hug her from behind, wrapping my arms around her small body as she weeps. Another moment and she pulls away, hands me a dishtowel, and I dry the dishes for the last time. That evening, I watch television with the kids, on the floor and tangling their limbs with mine as we watch cartoons and giggle, and I fall asleep early. If the phone rings, I wouldn’t have heard it.

The next morning, I move efficiently throughout the house, gathering my belongings and stuffing them into one of the children’s duffel bags. I linger over frames with faded pictures, trinkets my mother had brought me, and old clothes full of memories. I end up cramming everything in until the zipper stretches and threatens to give out. In the living room I hug Mari once more and take one last look around the little house and fill my nostrils with the scent for the last time.

I turn out the door. All I carry with me is the air deep in my lungs of the only life I have known as I stride down the streets, past the old houses and new cars. The heavy duffel bag stretches my arm toward the ground, conspiring with gravity in a last-ditch effort to keep me from leaving, and I arrive at the bus station, breathless and enthusiastic, twenty minutes until the next arrival. I sit down next to a young ranchman and wait.