Mayor Cabrera exhaled.
“It’s still an adventure, right?” The boy laughed falsely.
“Let me ask you something,” Mayor Cabrera said. “Someone asked me this question and I need an answer: Where do we all go wrong?”
The boy looked out at his friends. He repeated the question under his breath, turning a dial on his watch. “Thinking that because you want something and it’s a reasonable thing to want and you make proper preparations and you deserve the thing, that you’re going to get it.”
Mayor Cabrera pushed aside his can of nuts and rested his elbows on his desk. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “That’s not bad.”
Mayor Cabrera watched the boy shuffle back outside, the door dinging as it closed behind him. Mayor Cabrera had never, as a young man, wanted anything. He’d never been as crushed about anything, as a youngster, as these young people here. He’d never made preparations. He’d glided through the years blindly and then lucked into a better life than he’d known existed, his life with Tam. That life had been taken away. Now Mayor Cabrera distracted himself, and when he wasn’t distracted he sulked. He’d lost Tam and it was his own fault that along with her he’d lost his sister-in-law and his niece. He was still sulking. He was shuffling around in the hotel parking lot of his life.
Mayor Cabrera understood that he could not pursue Dana, if he was indeed going to pursue Dana, until he made things right with his family. Dana was a woman Mayor Cabrera had fallen in love with, not a quick fix for the ills of his life. He didn’t want to use her to patch over holes he’d been allowing to widen for over a decade. Dana would make his days ornate, but at present his life had no foundation. He was as much a drifter as any of the poor dusty souls that bunked down in the motel for a night, cheap whisky in tow, and then disappeared the next day just before checkout time.
Mayor Cabrera hung an OUT TO LUNCH sign on the lobby door. He went to his car, passing the sad teenagers, and pulled out of the lot. He drove to the feed store and got what he needed from inside, waving a quick hello to the owner but keeping moving, and then he drove across town at exactly the speed limit and parked along the curb in front of his sister-in-law’s house. He rolled up the windows for no reason. His sister-in-law’s mailbox was leaning to one side in a way that seemed precarious. Factions of weeds were jutting up all throughout the yard, looking like scorched bouquets. Part of Mayor Cabrera was afraid to go inside and face his sister-in-law, but now that he’d committed to doing it he could already feel his shame dissipating. The shame wasn’t from making a mistake, it was from lacking the fortitude to fix it.
Mayor Cabrera rose from the car and opened his trunk and threw the bag of chicken feed over his shoulder. He marched up to the door, lightheaded but certain, and knocked. After a minute he knocked again. She was home. There was no car in the driveway, so Cecelia was gone, but her mother had to be home. The kid had a car and the parent didn’t. Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law had sold her car about a year ago, to a man who lived outside town and bought used cars for no purpose except to collect them. He didn’t scrap them for parts or fix them up. Mayor Cabrera thought he heard something inside the house, but no one came to the door. He tried the knob and it wasn’t locked, so he pushed the door back a little and called out.
“Who is it?” his sister-in-law asked. She wasn’t alarmed, and the matter-of-factness in her voice was familiar to Mayor Cabrera. She’d never been alarmed, in the old days.
Mayor Cabrera found his breath and announced himself. He called out his first name, Ricardo.
After a silence, his sister-in-law said, “The mayor himself? Gracious, what an honor.” She told him he better come on in, if he was sure he had the right house.
“I’m just looking for a spot to set down this feed,” he said.
He ducked to get the bag through the doorway. He could hear the TV now. The scent of the place was familiar. It didn’t smell clean but it smelled wholesome, like old, simple things. Mayor Cabrera paused in the hallway and looked through a half-open door into what had to be Cecelia’s room. It was her room, he remembered. There’d once been a crib in it. Now her bed was made and a Rubik’s Cube sat on her pillow. The walls were bare. A guitar was lying across the desk, next to a tape recorder.
Mayor Cabrera walked through the living room, nodding hello as casually as he could, and let the bag come down and meet the kitchen floor. He could see the chickens scratching around back there, out the window, working their necks. He’d heard about the birds from his sister-in-law’s neighbors, a young couple that had moved out of Albuquerque because there were too many rules and regulations and now seemed to be rethinking their decision. The chickens looked healthy enough, he supposed, or at least they looked the way chickens usually look. Mayor Cabrera stepped back into the living room and leaned over to perform a stiff hug, his sister-in-law sunk into a wheelchair, then he took a seat on the couch. She didn’t really need a wheelchair, did she? There wasn’t anything particular wrong with her legs. Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law had him framed in an airtight smirk. He asked her if she always left the door unlocked and she said locking the front door was Cecelia’s department.
His sister-in-law was skinny, but Mayor Cabrera had prepared for worse. She wasn’t any skinnier than the skinny sister who worked at the gas station. Not that she looked healthy. Her hair was like straw. Her hands seemed heavier. She was the same person, though, the same defiant glint in her eyes. She held the remote for the TV poised, but didn’t change the channel. A show about the movies was on. People were waiting to give their opinions. Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law was looking at the TV, but she wasn’t paying attention to it. She was trying not to look at Mayor Cabrera, trying to leave the ball in his court. He wondered if she had any idea Lofte was in trouble, any idea she was a woman in decline living in a town in decline.
Mayor Cabrera asked how Cecelia was doing and his sister-in-law said she wasn’t around much. She had her classes, of course, but she’d invented a bunch of other ways to stay away. She’d taken a job on campus. She was in a band, though it seemed like maybe they’d broken up. Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law didn’t blame her daughter. She didn’t blame her one bit for steering clear of the house.
“She’ll come back to you,” Mayor Cabrera told her.
“One day she’s going to drive over to Albuquerque and never come back,” his sister-in-law said. “She’s smart enough to get tired of walking back into this house with me waiting on her. Forget Albuquerque, she’s going to drive down into Texas, or worse.”
Now on the TV they were showing pictures of actresses from ten years ago and then the same actresses today. Everyone was agreeing they looked better today.
“You should’ve been around,” said Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law.
“I know it,” he said. “I’ve handled things about as badly as possible.”
“There’s no one else to talk to about the things I want to talk about.” Mayor Cabrera looked right at her. “I’ve wasted a lot of time,” he said. He and his sister-in-law were breathing the same close air.
“Who used their time real well and who didn’t is not something I want to talk about.”
“A debacle, I think they call it. The last bunch of years.”
Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law shook her head, as if in bitter disagreement with herself. She looked him square in the face. “I miss her so much,” she said.
“Just as much as the day of the funeral sometimes.”
“And I have a hard time remembering her face.”
“I try to forget it but I can’t.”
“There was no way around missing her but you didn’t have to make me miss you too.”