Before crossing the border from San Diego to Tijuana, Ben explained that Carly’s grandparents had been married on Christmas Eve fifty years before. They’d hired a professional photographer to mark the occasion, and invited Ben and Carly to be part of the family photo, hence the more formal attire.
Over a hundred friends and family members were in attendance, also decked out in their finest, most of whom didn’t speak a word of English. While Ben and Carly posed for the photo, Sonny sat out the festivities at a long table in the banquet hall.
When Ben found her again, she was chatting with several other revelers and enjoying some delicious holiday fare.
“I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” he said.
“You don’t know much about me.”
He couldn’t argue that. “What are you?”
She finished off her tamale with a smile. “A woman. What are you? A space alien?”
“You know what I mean.”
“My mother is Guatemalan.”
He raised an eyebrow in surprise, and Sonny reacted defensively, having encountered this reaction many times. Her mother was of Spanish descent, but the majority of Guatemalans were native Mayans, marginalized to coffee plantations in their homeland, often used as farmhands in the United States. In San Diego, Guatemalan heritage was synonymous with cheap labor and dark skin.
“There are light-skinned Hispanics in Guatemala, just like any other Latin-American country,” she explained.
He held his hands up, claiming innocence. “I didn’t say there weren’t. I’ve just never met a blue-eyed Guatemalan.”
“And how many Guatemalans do you know?”
He smiled. “One. My gardener.”
“You have a gardener? You don’t even have a yard.”
“What I do have, he’s done an excellent job with.”
She smiled back at him, shaking her head at the extravagancies of the disgustingly wealthy.
“You take after your mom?”
“No. People tell me I look like her, but I don’t see it. She’s very pretty.”
“So are you.”
She just shrugged, not bothering to disagree. In her experience, when she tried to deflect a compliment, it was assumed that she was fishing for more. “She and my brother have dark hair. When I was a kid, everyone called me guera.”
“What does that mean?”
She couldn’t believe he didn’t know. Several of Carly’s relatives had been calling him the masculine equivalent of the word all evening. “It means light hair or skin. Or, in your case,” she added, for his hair was dark and his skin sun-browned, “white boy.”
“Oh. I wondered about that.”
“Why didn’t you ask Carly?”
“I don’t trust her translations.”
“That’s probably wise. She told her grandmother I was your fiancée.”
He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I knew it.”
“She’s made quite the turnaround. Was it less than a week ago she was warning me away from you?”
He glanced at his daughter, smiling and beautiful, posing for photographs with her grandparents. “Just wait. When she has her first fight with James, she’ll be cursing you to hell and lighting herself on fire.”
“You have a morbid sense of humor.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Maybe James is good for her. She looks happy.”
“He’s a fucking martyr,” he said sullenly. “If he were just some dumb jock, or a spoiled rich kid, like she is, I wouldn’t worry half as much.”
“You may be right. I think he cares about her, though.”
He didn’t dispute her. Instead, he brought her back to his original question. “So where’d you get the blue eyes, my little Guatemalan princess?”
“My dad, I guess.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t even know his name.”
“Isn’t it Moore?”
“No. That’s my stepdad.” She felt a twinge of guilt for deceiving him with the phony name, but she was telling the truth. Everett Moore had been her stepfather, and the thought of him made a darkness pass over her, like a cloud occluding the sun.
Ben must have seen it on her face. “Is he the guy?”
She didn’t have to ask what he meant, but she did. “The guy who what?”
“Who made you afraid.”
“He was one of them.”
Ben’s mouth made a thin, hard line. “Where is he now?”
“Why? So you can find him and beat him up?” She laughed, shaking her head.
“I feel protective of you, and you think it’s funny?”
“No. What’s funny is that you assume I need a protector. That tough-guy avenger crap is more about you than me, and it’s insulting. You want to make him pay for ruining your good-girl fantasy, for turning me into a real person with a lot of sexual hang-ups.”
He was silent for a moment. “So where is he?”
Her jaw dropped. “Did you hear anything I just said?”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“So, I think it’s bullshit. I’ve known you had hang-ups from the beginning. Who doesn’t? I still have nightmares about the Japanese girl with the Kung Fu grip. I’ve always thought of you as a real person-you saved my daughter from drowning, for Christ’s sake. And believe it or not, in my fantasies, you’re a bad girl.” His eyes flicked over her. “A very, very bad girl,” he emphasized. “Nothing has changed, except that now I want to kill your stepfather.”
“My brother beat you to it,” she said. “He’ll be paying for that mistake the rest of his life.” Upset with herself for giving too much personal information away, she made a nervous gesture from him to her, indicating their relationship. “Last night you told me this was about sex. No emotional involvement.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Sex continues to be my primary objective,” he said with a lazy smile, looking out at the open floor. “Let’s dance.”
She cast him a skeptical glance. The music had just started, and several other couples were already dancing. “You cumbia?”
“Does it involve a lot of thrusting and grinding against each other?”
She smiled back at him, amused in spite of herself. “No.”
He sighed in mock disappointment. “Let’s do it anyway.”
James borrowed some clothes and a duffel bag from his brother and left. He couldn’t face the idea of fighting off Rhoda, or anyone else, tonight. Stephen didn’t know it, because he’d been more interested in drugs than sex for years, but James had already been with some of the party girls who drifted in and out of his brother’s house.
On James’ seventeenth birthday, Arlen gave him a shot of whisky and a punch in the eye, saying that anyone who was still a virgin at his age was either queer or retarded. James was just a teenager, all hormones and attitude, with a lot of anxieties and even more to prove, so he set out to prove he wasn’t queer with the first girl he laid eyes on, in an awkward but consensual grapple against Stephen’s bathroom sink.
It wasn’t a shining moment of his life, but it was a breakthrough.
He’d known he wasn’t queer, but he hadn’t been sure he could have sex like a normal person after all he’d seen and done. James discovered that not only could he do it, he could enjoy it, with an empty heart and a blissfully blank mind.
His performances hadn’t been memorable, but neither had the girls, and at least he didn’t need money or violence to get off. Still, it had deepened rather than filled the void inside him, so he’d stopped going over to Stephen’s house looking to break up the monotony of his miserable existence by getting laid.
When Lisette Bruebaker showed up a few weeks ago, James hadn’t approached her with anything particular in mind. They’d laughed about playing seven minutes in heaven at her thirteenth birthday party. She was so pretty, so full of life, so much different than the intoxicated, hollow-eyed girls he usually saw at Stephen’s.
And she reminded him of Carly.
So when Lisette took him into Stephen’s closet, he followed her, and when she dropped to her knees to give him her own little version of heaven, he didn’t tell her not to. He just threaded his fingers through her hair and pretended she was Carly.