Could she ever sing like that? She wasn’t sure. But Teresa couldn’t manage the songs of desperation either. She had nothing within her that could match that complete loss of hope. She was alone and she was lonely, but she was not her mother. Could she make it up, imagine that pain? Which song could her mother sing, which one could most truthfully speak to what she carried inside? She wondered how much of one’s life mattered in giving a song conviction, how much could be heard by a stranger who looked at you knowingly. She closed her eyes and imagined herself singing with Dan. They would have to be, she told herself, happy songs. Unless she thought of Cheno. Then it would be different.
The hours passed and Teresa drifted into sleep, too heavy into it to reach over and turn off the radio. She woke when a ballad came on, so hushed and strange, as if Cheno himself had stolen into the room and started singing for her. Her sleep confused her, this voice and the words being sung. The voice registered defeat and weariness and surrender. She woke enough to picture Cheno and then a whole company of boys she had seen around Bakersfield. The dull, gangly son of the shoe store owner; the two high school boys who rode their bicycles together in the mornings, both of them rail-skinny and sporting thick black glasses. That voice could come out of any one of them in complete sincerity, she thought, but her mind floated back to Cheno.
“That was Ricky Nelson’s hit from last year, ‘Lonesome Town,’” said the announcer at the end of the song, and Teresa thought to reach over and turn off the dial. But she had loved this warm weight brought on by music as she tried to sleep, and she closed her eyes, hoping for another moment like it. She drifted in and out of sleep, at one point hearing a different announcer, with a voice barely a whisper, saying that it was nearly two in the morning, and for a brief moment she dreamed of rising to look out the window to see what Bakersfield would look like at that hour, who else the announcers were keeping awake, the stars above the dark city. That was her at the window, naked, and the men at the corner grocery store looking up but not whistling, as if seeing her like that at night was a gift they knew they shouldn’t question, just behold.
Morning trucks began coming around four o’clock, only a single engine now and then, but enough to wake her and open her eyes to the sky lightening to indigo. The radio kept playing. By the fourth truck she peered out at the corner to look for Cheno, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and sure enough, she saw him haggling with a driver, his white T-shirt almost glowing in the dawn light. When she saw him jump into the bed of the truck, she watched the brake lights disappear down the road, his head turning back to look at her window, and she wondered if he saw her. She rose soon after and took her time preparing her blouse and skirt for work, making coffee and two slices of toast. She bathed again to get rid of the night’s sweat, dried her hair, and put it up in a bun. It was only seven, still two hours before she had to be at work, but she gathered her purse and descended to the street.
At the foot of her door, as soon as she opened it to the morning, she spotted the little jar. She bent down to pick it up. A Gerber baby-food jar, filled to its brim with toasted pumpkin seeds. She held it in her hand for a moment before placing it in her purse along with her apartment key. It was hardly any weight at all, but she could feel the little jar like a stone in her purse, almost pulsing with Cheno’s long patience at her door the previous night. This wasn’t right, the way she was behaving, and sooner or later, Teresa knew, she would have to say something to Cheno. But what, exactly, when all she knew was the uncertain fluttering deep in her own throat at every thought of Dan Watson.
She headed to the shoe store in a roundabout way, wondering if she was in love. She lingered by a sale display of laundry detergent, nail polish, and floor wax at the drugstore and found herself dreaming of using them in a large, beautiful home with Dan’s pickup parked in the driveway. Across the street, she was surprised to see the barber shop not only open but busy — she could see the men waiting in chairs, reading the morning paper, and could even hear the soft buzz of a radio report. Married men, all of them, she suspected, maybe even what Dan would turn into later on, and when she thought this, she spied one of the men looking up from his newspaper, his eyes lingering on her.
She walked away from his gaze and went to the record shop down the street. She studied the album covers pasted up against the windows, Elvis Presley and Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra, the black discs hanging down from the ceiling on fish-line, each of them with colorful labels that Teresa regarded as if they were jewels. The logos, the rich colors, even the company names: Chess, Atlantic, Peacock, Imperial, Sun, Decca, Mercury, Capitol, Cadence. Since no one was on the street, Teresa said the names aloud, wanting to hear how grand they sounded, each with its own singularity and suggestion, and she stood there dreaming about which life she’d rather have: one with Dan and the pickup in the driveway, the other where she could arrive at one of those studios in an elegant car, the microphone waiting.
To ask for both, she thought to herself, was greedy beyond words. She thought of Cheno, if he daydreamed while yanking nectarines from the branches, what he asked the sky for.
In the bottom of the corner display, she noticed the name Ricky on one of the album covers. She had to lean down to look at it, at him. There he was, a black-and-white picture, but she guessed that his hair was brown, rich and deep, and he looked back at her with eyes she could not guess the color of. Maybe blue. Maybe green. But the long lashes! Casting shadows almost, and she studied the rest of his face — his lean nose, the faint bit of stubble, his eyebrows leaning in to each other, the way his left eye seemed to signal a different kind of feeling: the regret she had heard in his voice last night. That was the eye she focused on, as if she could feel his longing, as if she could fall in love with it and alleviate it. Didn’t Cheno have it, too? And yet why couldn’t she fall in love with him? She put her hand on her purse, feeling the small weight of the jar of pumpkin seeds. Ricky’s bottom lip jutted out thick and full, the upper one much thinner, his mouth holding in a perfect line, capturing who he was — a singer — and how everything that mattered about him centered on the moment he opened that mouth.
For hurt to matter, she thought, you had to be beautiful. She thought of Cheno’s small frame scrambling into the bed of the pickup truck. She thought of Dan Watson, how even he lacked the long lashes and strange eyes of Ricky Nelson. She thought of her father, whom she had never met, and wondered how handsome he was to lure her mother all the way to Texas.
Cars rumbled by more frequently now, so Teresa made her way to the shoe store, waiting outside the doors. Mr. Carson had not yet arrived, nor had Candy, her co-worker. Sunlight warmed the sidewalk. She could feel the heat in her shoes. Mr. Carson was always early, so by the time his Oldsmobile approached the store, she knew it was probably eight thirty.
He parked fastidiously, poking his fat head from the car window to peer down at the painted lines on the asphalt. He locked the car with his key and approached, a paper cup of coffee in one hand, a small white bag in the other.