17. Marisol at Sixty-Five

She drove down from Salida on a Tuesday because Tuesdays, Diane had said, were the days she liked Marisol least, and Marisol had laughed at this the way she always laughed at it, which was the laugh of a woman who has been loved long enough to be told the truth in jokes. The drive was eleven hours if you took it without stopping and she did not take it without stopping. She stopped in Walsenburg for coffee, and in Raton for gas, and in Las Vegas — the New Mexico one, the small one — for a green chile cheeseburger at a place that had been there in 2001 and had not, apparently, been there long enough before that to make it into any guidebook she had ever owned. She ate the cheeseburger sitting in the truck with the window down. The air was the air she had not breathed in fifty-one years and it was, immediately, the air.

She had not known, until she crossed into New Mexico, how much of her body remembered it.

The motel in Alamogordo was new — built in the late thirties, she guessed, after the second water emergency — and it had the small bland competence of a place built by a chain that had taken seriously the lesson that the desert wants its air conditioning quiet. The room was clean. The bedspread was the gray of a river stone. There was a small framed print over the bed of a roadrunner that was the only roadrunner she had seen all day, though she had watched. She put her overnight bag on the luggage rack and sat down on the edge of the bed and took her knees in her hands for a moment and pressed, gently, the way the physical therapist had shown her, and then she stood up, and her knees did the thing they did now, which was to inform her of themselves before they consented, and she went out to the truck and drove to Pop’s house.

She had looked at it on the satellite once, ten years ago, and closed the tab and not looked again. She had known the road would be paved now. She had not let herself know what else.

The road was paved now. The Padillas’ place at the bend was gone — not torn down, only emptied; she could see the shape of the foundation under the creosote — and where Pop’s quarter mile of dirt had been there was a quarter mile of chip seal that was already, in places, going back to dirt. She drove it slowly. She passed the cottonwood first, which is to say she passed where the cottonwood had been, because the cottonwood was no longer there, and she did not, in the moment, register this. Her eye went to the house.

The house had been painted. The tan was a softer tan, more pink in it, the pink the desert pulls into anything left outside long enough; somebody had retouched it, maybe ten years ago, and the retouching had since aged into the original. The porch was the porch. The satellite dish was gone. There were solar panels on the south side of the roof, four of them, set in a careful row, and a small white box at the eave that she recognized as the kind of node the county had been installing on rural houses since the brownouts. The screen door was a new screen door. The front door was the front door. She knew the front door at a distance of forty feet the way she would have known her own mother’s hand.

She parked in the road and not in the driveway. She sat in the truck for a minute and then she got out.

There was a woman on the porch. Marisol had not seen her at first because the woman was sitting in the shade behind the screen, and what Marisol had taken for a folded blanket on the chair was the woman, small, white-haired, in a denim shirt and what looked like, from forty feet, the kind of canvas pants a person wears to garden in. The woman watched Marisol cross the yard the way you watch a hawk you have decided is not coming for the hens. When Marisol got to the foot of the porch steps the woman said, mildly, “You looking for somebody?”

Marisol said, “I’m sorry to bother you. My grandfather lived in this house. A long time ago.”

The woman looked at her for a moment and then she stood up, with the same small theater of consultation with her own knees that Marisol had performed in the motel room twenty minutes earlier, and she came to the screen door and pushed it open, and she said, “Marquez.”

Marisol said, “Yes.”

The woman said, “We bought it in 2007. From a real estate woman who didn’t know anything. We found your grandfather’s name on the abstract.”

Marisol said, “Ray. He went into memory care that year. He passed in 2012.”

The woman said, “I’m sorry.”

Marisol said, “Thank you. It was a long time ago.”

They stood with the screen door between them. The woman said, “You want to walk the yard?”

Marisol said, “If it’s not a bother.”

The woman said, “It is not a bother. Walk wherever you want. Stay off the back patio because my husband just sealed it. Otherwise.”

She let the screen door close. She sat back down in her chair and picked up the book she had been reading, which Marisol could not see the title of, and she did not watch Marisol go around the side of the house. This, Marisol thought later, in the motel, was the great kindness of the encounter — the woman had understood, in the half second she took to look at Marisol’s face, that what Marisol needed was to not be watched.

She went around the side of the house.

The porch step she had to step down off of, at the side door, was the new one. She knew it was new because the old one had had a long crack along its right edge from a time Pop had dropped a cinder block on it in 1999, he had told her once, and the new one was a clean piece of pressure-treated wood already silvering at its corners. Somebody — the woman, the woman’s husband — had replaced it. The hinge of the screen door had been replaced too. The screen itself had been replaced. The smell at the side door — she stopped, here, two steps off the porch, and breathed in — was almost the smell. Creosote and dust and the iron mineral note of the well. The green soap was gone. Of course the green soap was gone.

She walked into the side yard.

The cottonwood had been taken out some years ago. She could see the stump now, ground level, almost level with the dirt; somebody had ground it down, and the dirt had taken it back, and a small Russian thistle was growing out of the center of where the heartwood had been. She stood for a long time looking at the stump. She did not, at the stump, think about the dog. She had thought about the dog already, on the drive down, somewhere around Raton, and she had let herself think about her then, the kinked tail and the one black ear and the way she had leaned, and she had said the dog’s name out loud in the truck — Lucha — and the dog had been fifty years dead and the saying of the name had cost her one tear which she had wiped off with the back of her wrist, driving, and that had been enough. She did not need to do it again at the stump. The stump was the stump.

She looked up from the stump and across the yard, and she saw the weather vane.

Where the flagpole had been — Pop’s flagpole, the white aluminum one with the small dent at the base from the lawnmower, the one he had raised the flag on every morning at six-thirty and lowered every evening at sundown without ever once, in two weeks, making a thing of it — there was now a weather vane. It was a copper rooster, tarnished green at the comb and the tail, mounted on a black iron pole sunk in concrete in what was almost certainly the same hole. The new owners had pulled the flagpole and put in the weather vane and used Pop’s hole. The pole was a little taller. The rooster swung, slow, in a wind Marisol could not feel on her face but which the rooster, from its height, could.

She walked to the weather vane. She put her hand on the iron pole, low, where it came out of the concrete. The concrete was warm.

A radio, somewhere, was playing a cumbia.

It was very faint — the neighbor across the dirt road, the one whose house had used to be the Garcias’, she thought, but who knew now — and it was not “La Pollera Colorá,” it was some other one, a newer one, a man singing about a woman in a green dress, but the bum-pa, bum-pa, bum-pa was the same, and the horns were the same, and Marisol stood with her hand on the iron pole where Pop’s flagpole had been and she listened to the cumbia drift across the dirt road and she remembered the night of the truck.

She remembered it the way you remember a thing you had been told was a dream and discover, in the middle of the afternoon, in your sixty-sixth year, was not.

She remembered going to the window. She remembered the parking lights, two small amber points. She remembered Pop standing at the driver’s side window with the flashlight off in his hand and his other hand making the small flat gesture, palm down, the gesture he made when he was explaining something. She remembered the dog sitting next to him. She had remembered all of this before — these were the surface beads, the ones that had stayed on the string when the rest of the necklace dissolved — and the remembering of them, now, was only the brushing aside of the curtain.

Behind the curtain was the conversation.

She had not heard it that night. She had been inside the house. The window had been closed. She had watched through the screen and the glass and she had counted to five hundred and forty. But she had, it turned out, heard it anyway — not through her ears, she understood now, in the side yard, with the cumbia coming across the road; through the other thing, the thing they had put in her at four, the thing they had left in her until the cycle went quiet in 2040 and she had been, she had come to understand, retired — and what her ears had not heard her substrate had recorded, and what her substrate had recorded the overlay had bound, and what the overlay had bound was now, twelve years into the decomposition of it, available to her, in the side yard, in the late-summer light.

The man in the truck had said, Ray, we are bringing her in this fall. Standard intake. She’ll be in the September window for the next sixty years.

Pop had said, No.

The man had said, That isn’t on the menu.

Pop had said — and this Marisol now had verbatim, the way you have verbatim a line from a play you were once in — I am not asking you to take her off. I know I can’t ask that. I am asking you to put her in the late cohort. Put her in with the ones that get serviced in the autumns of the off-years. Put her in with the slow rotation. You know the one I mean. The one where they’re done by sixty.

The man had said something Marisol did not get; her substrate had not recorded the man clearly, only Pop, because Pop was the one she had been built to listen for.

Pop had said, I know what it costs. I have done the math. She gets twelve fewer years of the surface and she gets out at the back end with thirty years of clear air. I want her to have the back end.

The man had said something.

Pop had said, Yes. From mine. Take it from mine.

The man had said something.

Pop had said, I know.

The man had said something.

Pop had said, I know what I am doing. Put it in the book. Sign it tonight. I want it done before she goes home Sunday.

There was a silence, in the side yard, that was almost the silence of the cumbia ending, except the cumbia had not ended; the cumbia was still going, a little quieter now, the way a radio gets quieter when somebody inside a house walks from one room to another. Marisol stood with her hand on the iron pole and she did not weep. She was sixty-five and she had wept, in her life, over smaller things, and she would weep again, probably, over smaller things, but she did not weep at the weather vane. She had not been built, by Pop, to weep at the weather vane. She had been built, by Pop, to stand at the weather vane and know.

She thought: he gave me the back end. He took twelve years off himself and gave them to me at the back. He knew, that summer, that he would not get the back end. He knew, that summer, that he would go the way he went — into memory care at seventy-six, into the long erosion, into the place where the overlay and the man and his own name all went into the same drawer and were not, any of them, retrievable. He knew that. He went into the truck and he negotiated me into the slow cohort and he came back into the house and he looked at me in the hallway and he made sure I was still myself and he sent me to bed.

She thought: he taught me the cumbia the next night because he had just paid for me with the rest of his life and he wanted to give me, on top of that, one thing of his own.

She thought: now you know one thing nobody can take from you.

She stood for a while at the weather vane. The cumbia ended and another song began, a slower one, a bolero. The copper rooster swung. The light, which had been the late-afternoon white of high desert, began the slow tip toward the gold it would be at six, and Marisol, who had spent her adult life noticing the exact qualities of New Mexico light because they had been a thing Pop had given her without telling her he was giving it, watched the light tip.

She walked back around the front of the house. The woman was still on the porch. The book she was reading, Marisol could see now through the screen, was a paperback of The Spectator Bird, the cover faded. Marisol came to the foot of the steps and stopped.

She said, “Thank you for letting me walk the yard.”

The woman said, “Was it like you remembered?”

Marisol thought about this. She said, “It was better. You’ve taken good care of it.”

The woman said, “We’ve tried.”

Marisol said, “The man who lived here — my grandfather — he would be glad.”

The woman said, “I expect he would.”

They looked at each other through the screen. The woman said, “You drive safe back to your motel. It gets dark fast out here.”

Marisol said, “I know.”

She walked across the yard to her truck. She did not, at the truck, turn around and look at the house again. She had had her look. She got into the truck and she put both hands on the wheel for a moment and then she started the engine and she drove, slowly, back down the chip-sealed quarter mile to the paved road, and she turned onto the paved road, and she drove back to town.

The motel room was the cold the desk clerk had set it to, which was a degree or two colder than she would have set it herself, and the air conditioning made the small steady sound of a well-maintained machine in its second decade, a sound she knew from the hospital, the sound of a thing built to be unobtrusive and succeeding. She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment. She took her shoes off. She put them under the bed parallel to each other the way she had been doing since she was eleven, which was a thing she had not, until this minute, known she had been doing since she was eleven. Pop had lined his boots up parallel to each other under the kitchen chair every night.

She picked up the phone.

Diane answered on the second ring. She said, “How was it?”

Marisol said, “It was good. They’ve taken care of it. The cottonwood is gone.”

Diane said, “Oh, honey.”

Marisol said, “It was time. It was a long time. They put a weather vane where his flagpole was.”

Diane said, “A weather vane.”

Marisol said, “A copper rooster. It looked all right. He would have hated it for about a day and then he would have decided he liked it.”

Diane laughed. Diane said, “Did you find what you went down there to find?”

Marisol thought about this. She thought about the conversation at the truck — put her in with the slow rotation — and she thought about Pop in the hallway with his hand on the top of her head, and she thought about the cumbia drifting across the road from a neighbor she would never see, and she thought about the woman on the porch with her paperback Stegner, and she thought about the back end she had been given and was now, gradually, inhabiting.

She said, “Yes. I did.”

Diane said, “Good. I’m glad. Come home tomorrow.”

Marisol said, “Tomorrow.”

She put the phone down. She lay back on the bedspread the gray of a river stone, in her clothes, with her shoes parallel under the bed, and she listened to the air conditioning, and beyond the air conditioning to the small late-summer sounds of the parking lot, a car door, a man saying something in Spanish to a child, the distant brake hiss of a truck up on the highway, and beyond those sounds to the silence of the desert, which was not nothing, it turned out. It was something. It was just a kind of something you had to learn how to hear.

She closed her eyes. She slept.