Afterwards, walking over to the house to celebrate, the others were in fine spirits. “All right,” Kevin said. At least something was going well. “That look on Alfredo’s face when Oscar zapped him—ha.” Fine. Fuck him.
In a deep voice Doris said, “‘Do you object to knowing the legal status of your suggestions?’” She laughed out loud.
Tom was there at the house, sitting with Nadezhda and Rafael and Cindy and Donna by the pool. Kevin and Doris told him all about it. Kevin downed most of a dumpie of beer in one swallow. “So much for messing with our hill!” he said.
“Come on,” Tom said. He laughed. “It only means they’ll have to change their strategy.”
“What do you mean?” Kevin said.
“They were trying to lay the groundwork for this development before they proposed it, to make things easier. Now that that’s failed, they’ll probably propose the development anyway, and try to convince the town it’s a good thing. If they can do that then they can say, Hey, we need more water, we need different zoning. If the general concept has been approved then it’ll happen.”
“So,” Kevin said, staring at the dumpie of beer.
“Hey, it’s still a good thing.” Tom slapped him on the arm. “Momentum, you know. But it’s a battle won, not the war.”
Four days later Kevin heard that Ramona was back in town. He heard it from Stacey down at the chickenhouse, accidentally, as Stacey was talking to Susan. That he had heard about it like that frightened him, and he jogged home with his package of breasts and thighs, desperately trying not to think about it. That she was back in El Modena and hadn’t told him, hadn’t come by his place first thing….
He got home and called her up. Pedro answered, went to get her. She came on. “I hear you’re back,” Kevin said.
“Yeah, I just got in this morning.” She smiled, as if there was nothing unusual happening. But it was just before sunset. Her eyes watched him guardedly. “Why don’t you come over and we can talk.”
He blanked the screen, rode over to her house.
She came out and met him in the yard, and they turned and walked down the path toward Santiago Creek. She was wearing jeans worn almost white, frayed at the cuffs. A white blouse with a scoop neck.
Suddenly she stopped him, faced him, took up his hands in hers, so that they hung between the two of them. Curious how held hands could make a barrier.
“Kevin—Alfredo and I are going to get back together. Stay together. He wants to, and I want to too.”
Kevin disengaged his hands from hers. “But…” He didn’t know what to say. Couldn’t think. “But you broke up,” he heard himself saying. “You gave it a try for years and years and it didn’t work. Nothing’s changed except you and I got started. We just started.”
“I know,” Ramona said. She bit her lip, looked down. “But…” She shook her head. “I don’t want it to be like this.” She looked off to one side. “But Alfredo came down to San Diego, and we talked about it for a long—”
“What?” Kevin said. “Alfredo came to San Diego?”
She looked up at him, eyes bright in the twilight. “Yes.”
“But”—a twist in him, ribs pulled in—“Well shit! You said you were going to get away from us both and think about it and that’s what I thought you were doing! And here you were off with him!”
“I meant to get away. But he followed me down there. He found out where I was staying and he went down there, and I told him to leave but he wouldn’t, he refused to. He just stood out there on the lawn. He said he had to talk, and he wouldn’t leave, all night long, and so we started to talk, and—”
Kevin took off walking, fast.
“Kevin!”
He ran. Around a corner he felt the muscles in his legs and he ran even harder. He sprinted as fast as he could for over a minute, right up Chapman and into the hills. On a sudden impulse, the instinct of an animal running for cover, he turned left and crashed up through the brush, onto Rattlesnake Hill.
He sat under the sycamores and black walnuts at the top.
Time passed.
He stared at the branches against the sky. He broke up leaves, stuck their stems in the earth. Occasionally he thought of crushing lines to say, in long imaginary arguments with Ramona. Mostly he was a blank.
Much later he tromped down through cool wet midnight air to his house, weary and heartsick. He was completely startled to find Ramona sitting on the ground outside the back door of the house, head on her knees.
She looked up at him. She had been crying.
“I don’t want it to be this way,” she said. “I love you, Kevin, don’t you know that?”
“How can I know that? If you loved me you’d stay with me.”
She pressed her hands to the sides of her head. “I… I hate not to, Kevin. But Alfredo and I have been together for so long. And now he’s really unhappy, he really wants us to be together. And I’ve put so much work into making that relationship go, I’ve tried so hard. I can’t just give all those years up, don’t you see?”
“It doesn’t make sense. You tried hard all those years, right, and it didn’t work, you were both unhappy. Why should it work now? Nothing’s different.”
She shivered. “Things are different—”
“All that’s different is you and I fell in love! And now Alfredo is jealous! He didn’t want you, but now that I do….”
She shook her head, hard. “It’s more than that, Kevin. He was coming over on my birthday to say all the same things he said afterwards, and he didn’t even know about us.”
“So he says now.”
“I believe him.”
“So what was I, then? What about you, what do you want?”
She took a deep breath. “I want to try again with Alfredo. I do. I love him, Kevin, I’ve always loved him. It’s part of my whole life. I want to make it work, so that all those years—that part of me—my whole life…” Her mouth twisted. “He’s part of what I am.”
“So I was just a, a, a kind of crowbar to get Alfredo’s thinking straight!”
Tears welled up in her eyes, spilled down her cheeks. “Not fair! I didn’t want this!”
Kevin felt a grim satisfaction, he wanted her unhappy, he wanted her as miserable as he was—
She stood. “I’m sorry. I can’t take this.” She started to walk away and he grasped her arm. She pulled free. “Please! I said I’m sorry, please don’t torture me!”
“Me torture you!”
But she was the one running away now, her white shirt a blur in the darkness.
His satisfaction dissipated. For a while he felt bad. Surely she hadn’t wanted things to come to this. She hadn’t planned it.
Still, he got angrier and angrier at her. And Alfredo, going down to San Diego to find her! Fucking hypocrite, he hadn’t cared for her when he had her, only when he didn’t, only when it looked like he might lose her. Jealousy, nothing more; jealousy. So she was a fool to go back to him, and he got even angrier at her. She should have sent Alfredo away when he showed up in San Diego, if she wanted to be fair! Instead a talk with him, many talks, a reconciliation. A happy return to some San Diego bed.
He couldn’t sleep that night. A dull ache filled him. Other than that he couldn’t feel anything.
Two days later the Lobos had a game. Kevin showed up late. He coasted down to the field and dropped his bike. Ramona biked in right behind him, and everyone else was already paired off and warming up, so without a word they put on their cleats and walked out to the outfield, to throw a ball back and forth. All without a word.