“That’s not funny.” I tried to control the tremor in my voice.
She was instantly remorseful. “Sorry, Leslie. I was just joking.”
I stared at her, then turned and took Eli into the daycare.
When I came back out, she was licking her fingers, crumpling the tinfoil in her other hand. “I’m really sorry,” she said.
“It’s fine.” I put the car into drive and turned onto Comanche, heading west.
Mary stared out the window as we pulled into the driveway on Riviera a few minutes later. “This it?” she asked, chewing on her lip.
“Yeah.” It was a single-story adobe in the style popular in the 1920s, with exposed vigas striping the wall over the garage and a painted teal gate standing slightly open. The latch was broken and I hadn’t bothered to fix it yet. There were a few succulents lining the front walk among the multicolored stones that took the place of a lawn, and the neighbor’s desert willow cast rippling shadows over them. I thought, as I always did, how much Albuquerque yards looked like aquariums waiting to be filled with water. I remembered being twelve, lying on the ground outside, covering my ears while above, an airplane passed through the clouds like a far-off nurse shark. I’d watched it, listening to the tidal noise of my own breath passing through my nose.
Mary kept quiet as we passed through the gate and into the front hallway. It smelled musty inside, like all dark houses in the desert, cut with a chemical lemon scent from when I’d scrubbed the tiles a month ago. No one had been here; it hadn’t faded.
I dropped the boxes next to my dad’s La-Z-Boy in the sunken living room and went to hang my purse on the hook by the door. I remembered my mother hanging her purse on this hook years ago, and how elegant I’d thought she looked, lifting it with two fingers just as she left the house. “I thought we’d go through his records and books and give them away,” I said. “There’s a used bookstore not too far down the road.”
“You’re not going to keep any of them?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t even know what’s in here,” I said. “He never played any of it, just collected.”
“You know, there’s, like, a vinyl resurgence,” she said, sitting on the carpet in front of the pinewood bookcases and running her hands along the faded album spines. “You could probably sell some of these on the Internet or something.”
“I mean, feel free to take one if you like it,” I said, crouching next to her. I tilted my head. These books were so familiar to me, and yet I’d never read them the entire time they’d been here—some of them longer than I’d been alive. The tattered red-and-green capitals of The Recognitions; the pale blue of Red Sky at Morning; the ugly off-white of Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories. I took out Myra Breckinridge and paged through it.
“Your dad sure liked to read, huh?”
I glanced at her. “I don’t know. I think he liked to have them there for people to see more than he liked to read them. I never saw him open most of these.”
“Did you read any of them?” She was picking through the records too carefully, dropping them in the box one by one.
“No,” I said. “I never did. I don’t read that much.” Dave bought me audiobooks for the car. Otherwise I read mostly magazine articles and the news and Facebook. Opening a real book—holding it up in bed—felt farcically virtuous. I could never tell if I liked it or if I only liked the picture I made. I remembered my manners and cleared my throat. “Do you? Read much?”
She smiled, her eyes locked on the album in her hands. “Sure. I read sometimes.”
“What kind of stuff do you like?”
Mary pursed her lips. “I like to challenge myself to read five important books a year. For self-improvement. Last year I read Middlesex. And I was reading a book this month by a woman named Mary Carson. No. Mary Karr. But I left it behind.”
“You can take whatever you want from here.” I grabbed a handful of books and fitted them into one of the cardboard boxes. “I’m dropping them all off at Menaul otherwise.”
“I don’t think they’ll fit in my duffel,” she said, running her fingers over the spines. “I’m gonna have one of these someday. A big old shelf to show I’m not just looks.” She grinned at me and went back to adding records to her own box, one at a time. After a minute she said, “What was your daddy like?”
“Um,” I said. “He was a decent guy.” One of the books clipped my fingernail and I winced and stuck it in my mouth, continuing, muffled, “It was hard to be really close to him, you know, because he was already pushing sixty when I was a teenager, and he got sick right after that. I spent a lot of time taking care of him.” I went back to adding books, heaviest at the bottom, more carefully this time.
“What did he look like?”
“Hang on.” I unfolded my legs and stood up, going over to my dad’s study opposite the living room. On top of the old secretary was a photograph of him and my mom on their wedding day. He had an enormous blond mustache and no hair on top. Her hair was a feathered, backcombed pageboy in the Princess Diana style, and she wore a high-necked powder-blue nightgown of a wedding dress. She looked so young next to him, like it was her first dance.
I brought the photo to Mary. She laughed as I put it in her hands. “He looks like Ron Burgundy.”
“Who’s that?”
She shook her head at me. “It’s from a movie. Never mind. Your mom was cute. How old was she here?”
“Twenty-six.” Something about her silence made me keep talking. “She was pregnant with me in this picture.”
Mary looked up in surprise. “Really? Wow. Shotgun wedding?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, telling the truth. “She was only one or two months along, so maybe she didn’t know until after.”
“You look like her,” Mary said, setting the photograph on the carpet.
“My dad used to say that.” After his first surgery, he was on pain medication almost all the time. It helped give him some respite from the open wound in his neck and the persistent, wracking cough that made it hard for him to swallow food, but it also sent him swimming out into a kaleidoscopic half reality. He called me Chrissy a lot. It made me sad, and then a little angry; he spoke to me-as-Christine in the absent imperative: Get me my chair, Chrissy. Leave me with my nurse, if you please, Chrissy. I hadn’t even remembered he’d talked to my mother that way until he got sick and mixed us up. Then it came creeping back: what a tight ship he’d run then, how silent we all were.
I looked around at the room. The long thin bars of light coming through the blinds had slid toward the wall, signaling noon’s approach.