"My mother and father are going to San Antonio. Did you know that?"
"Abuela told me."
"Abuela?"
"My grandmother. Dona Alicia."
"Why do they call her that?"
"They don't call her Abuela. Fernando and I do. It means 'grandmother' in Spanish. They call our abuela 'Dona Alicia' as a mark of respect."
"I'm going to marry Randy," she said.
"I seem to recall having heard that somewhere."
"That will make Randy part of my family."
"Yeah, I guess it will."
"What I would like to do is patch things up between you and Randy."
"There's not much chance of that, Beth," he said seriously, and their eyes met again.
He averted his quickly, and very carefully poured the two glasses full.
"Starting with you being part of our wedding," she said.
"Not a chance."
"There's going to be an arch of swords outside the chapel. I'm sure Randy-you're classmates-would love to have you be one of the…whatever they're called."
"Beth, for Christ's sake, no. I can't stand the sonofabitch."
"I thought you didn't use that term. You preferred 'bastard.'"
"I didn't say I preferred it. I said that I wasn't a sonofabitch because my mother was the antithesis of a bitch."
He met her eyes again, averted them, picked up his martini glass, and took a healthy swallow.
"But you don't mind being called a bastard?"
"I am a bastard," he said, meeting her eyes. "There's not much I can do about it."
"A bastard being defined as someone who is hardheaded? Arrogant? Infuriating? And revels in it?"
"A bastard is a child born out of wedlock," Castillo said.
"I don't understand," she said. "Your parents weren't married?"
He shook his head.
He said: "The estimates vary that between fifty thousand and one hundred fifty thousand children were born outside the bonds of holy matrimony to German girls and their American boyfriends-some of whom were general officers. I am one of those so born. I'm a lot luckier than any of the others I've run into, but I'm one of them."
"Because of your father, you mean?"
"No. Because of my mother. My father was only in at the beginning, so to speak. Because of my mother. My mother was something special."
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked.
"I don't know. Possibly in the hope that it will send you fleeing before this situation gets any more out of hand than it is."
"I want to hear this," she said. "Does my father know?"
"Your father is a very intelligent man. He's probably put it all together by now. Or your mother has. Or Abuela told them."
He took another sip of his martini.
As Beth watched, she said, "That's your second you're gulping down, you know."
"I can count. And as soon as you leave, I will have the third."
"I'm not leaving until you tell me. What happened?"
"When my father finished flight school, they sent him to Germany, rather than straight to Vietnam. They tried to do that, send kids straight from flight school over there. The idea was that they would build some hours, be better pilots when they got into combat. And while he was in Germany he met a German girl, and here I am."
"The sonofabitch!" Beth exploded.
"No. Now you're talking about his madre-my Abuela-and she is indeed another who is the antithesis of bitch."
"He…made your mother pregnant and then just left? I don't care if you like it or not, that makes him a sonofabitch in my book. Oh, Charley, I'm so sorry."
"Hold the pity," he said. "For one thing, we don't know that he behaved dishonorably. For one thing, he didn't know she was pregnant. He did promise her he would write, and then never did. It is entirely possible that had he written, and had she been able to reply that she was in the family way, he would have done something about it. I like to think that's the case. Genes are strong, and he was my grandparents' son. But he didn't write, he didn't know, and we'll never know whether or not he would have gone back to Germany when he came home from Vietnam"-he drained his martini glass-"because he didn't come back from Vietnam."
"Your poor mother," Beth said. "How awful for her."
"And it's not as if my mother had to go scrub floors or stand under Lili Marlene's streetlamp to feed her bastard son," Castillo said, just a little thickly. "She was the eighteen-year-old princess in the castle, who'd made a little mistake that no one dared talk about.
"Her father, my grandfather, was a tough old Hessian. He was a lieutenant colonel at Stalingrad. He was one of the, quote, lucky ones, unquote-the really seriously wounded who were evacuated just before it fell. He was also an aristocrat. The family name is von und zu Gossinger. Not just 'von' and not just 'zu.' Both. That sort of thing is important in the Almanac de Gotha."
"You sound as if you didn't like him," she said.
"Actually, I liked him very much. He was kind to me. What I think now is that he wasn't all that unhappy that an American, a Mexican-American with a name like Jorge Castillo, had not come back to further pollute the von und zu Gossinger bloodline."
He met her eyes again, quickly averted them again, and reached for the other full martini glass. She snatched it away before his hand touched it.
"You've had enough," she said.
"That decision is mine, don't you think?" Castillo asked, not very pleasantly.
She glowered at him. Then she put the glass to her mouth and drained it.
"Not anymore, it's not," she said.
"You're out of your mind. You'll pass out."
"Finish the story," she said.
"How the hell am I going to get you home?"
"Finish the story," she repeated.
"That's it."
"How did you wind up in San Antonio?"
"Oh."
"Yeah, oh."
He shrugged. "Well, my grandfather and my uncle Willi went off a bridge on the autobahn, and that left my mother and me alone in the castle."
"Why didn't your mother try to get in contact with your father?"
"When he didn't write or come back as he promised, I guess she decided he didn't want to. And I suspect that my grandfather managed to suggest two or three thousand times that it was probably better that he hadn't. I just don't know."
"How did you get to San Antonio?"
"Oh, yeah. Well, you've heard that good luck comes in threes?"
"Of course."
"A year or so after my grandfather and uncle Willi went off the bridge, my mother was diagnosed with a terminal case of pancreatic cancer."
"Oh, God!"
"At that point, my mother apparently decided that wetback Mexican relatives in Texas would be better than no family at all for the soon-to-be orphan son. So she went to the Army, which had been running patrols along the East/West German border fence on our land. She knew a couple of officers, one of them a major named Allan Naylor."
"General Naylor?" she asked.
When Castillo nodded, she added, "He's a friend of my father's."
"I am not surprised," Castillo said. "Anyway, Naylor was shortly able to tell her the reason that my father had not come back as promised was because he was interred in the National Cemetery in San Antonio." He paused, then-his voice breaking-added: "So at least she had that. It wasn't much, but she had that."
Beth saw tears forming. Her own watered.
He turned his face from hers and coughed to get his voice under control.
He then asked, "If I take a beer from the cooler, are you going to snatch it away from me and gulp it down?"
"No," she said softly, almost in a whisper.
He took a bottle of Schlitz from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap. As he went to take a swig, raising it to his mouth, he lost enough of his balance so that he had to quickly back up against the counter.
Without missing a beat, he went on, "So…so one day Major Allan Naylor shows up in San Antonio, nobly determined to protect as well as he can the considerable assets the German kid is about to inherit from the natural avarice of the wetback family into which the German bastard is about to be dumped."