Book Three
17.
“YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU DON’T TRUST ANYBODY,” the girl in Albuquerque said as she fastened the blindfold over my eyes.
I didn’t think that was my problem exactly, but I was going along with it because she was cute and the way she’d always flirted with me on the commuter train made me feel like everything that was wrong with me and Sol was just wrong with Sol.
I’d missed the 5:34 evening train on purpose because I’d glanced behind me and knew she was going to miss it. We were at the bottom of the cement stairs on Central Avenue, cold wind against my face.
The girl in Albuquerque. Girl/woman. She must have been at least 35, but she dressed like a skater boy in her baggy jeans and faded black T-shirt. I wanted to know her name. She had coffee-colored skin, wore silver stud earrings, her eyebrows plucked into thin arches.
That’s all I asked – her name – and she didn’t answer me and that’s when she pulled out the blindfold and said, “May I?” and turned me around and told me what she thought my problem was. Trust. Not trusting anybody.
Now the girl in Albuquerque was pushing me down Central Avenue and I was blind-tripping forward. She turned me against the wind and then turned me around, pushed my back against a cold brick wall and nudged the blindfold off and leaned in to kiss me, her breath hot on my cheek. She had the prettiest brown eyes.
“I can’t,” I whispered.
“Can’t?” she raised those thin eyebrows. “You think I didn’t just see you miss that train on purpose?”
It hadn’t occurred to me that she might have seen me. Trust. “I have a girlfriend who wouldn’t like it.”
The girl in Albuquerque smiled at me. Her teeth were bright white and crooked. “And does your girlfriend still kiss you?”
I wished I was 21 or a bigger liar or somehow otherwise only partially responsible for my actions – for what might happen on a windy night in an alleyway in Albuquerque. I wished it badly.
The girl in Albuquerque was still close to me, still held me against the bricks. “Your girlfriend just owns you like that? Outright? It’s a waste.” She pushed me just a little harder against the wall. “I’m stronger than you,” she whispered.
I glanced at the curve of her bicep. “I can see that.”
“But I can take no for an answer.”
And I said, “Thank you.”
But now the girl in Albuquerque looked like she might cry. Thin, arched eyebrows. She said, “Why you got to thank somebody for acting right?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Don’t ever do that again. Thank me for doing something sweet for you.” She let go of me. “Don’t ever thank anybody for acting right.”
“Okay.”
She stared at me for a long time. “Promise.”
And I said, “All right. I promise.”
The wind and the bricks. All that cold felt like elation and I didn’t know what it meant, but something in my life had broken open. I trusted the girl in Albuquerque completely.
Strangers in alleyways had never really been my problem.
I GOT HOME to the shop late. The smell of onions and garlic frying on the camping stove. Maxito already asleep. Sol had made vegan tacos with Soyrizo and kept them warm.
She lit a candle.
“I got paid,” I told her. Enough to cover first, last and deposit on a cheap rental.
I knew it wasn’t illegal or neglectful to have a kid and share a bathroom with a bunch of Buddhists, but days in the shop had become all anxiety, waiting to see if Protective Services would come and investigate, waiting for a process server to appear with family court papers. Or maybe it would be my mother in the doorway waving her giant kitchen knife.
I would have just as soon moved back to Portland, but Sol wouldn’t hear of it. “The only good that’s come of all this is we got to New Mexico,” she whined.
So I sat with my plate of Soyrizo tacos, scrolled through rentals on Craigslist. Apartments in Santa Fe, houses in Albuquerque, trailers in the old mining town out Highway 14 and this: Rural and private. Click. A little adobe with its iron gate and turquoise-painted window sills. Nine hundred dollars a month. Twenty minutes out of town. A third of an acre. Room for the trailer and a trampoline and chickens if we wanted them. A place to hide and mend. A place to make macaroni and cheese and green chile stew. I already knew we would live there.
Saturday morning we drove out to the place, south on the freeway and a mile down the kind of road no one would drive down unless they lived there. Inside the house was all thick walls and tiles, vigas and skylights. Yes, thanks, we’ll take it. I handed over my first month’s visiting professor’s pay.
I CHANGED MY phone number and texted Leslie: If you talk to Mom, tell her I got a job at Lewis and Clark and moved back to Portland.
I updated my Facebook profile to show that I lived in Los Angeles.
When our acid-dropping live/work landlord asked where we were going, I told him, “New York.”
I felt like a fugitive on the lam.
Was I really doing all this to avoid my 90-pound dying mother?
Well, yes. Yes I was.