Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [57]
“Everything that had any chance of surviving seemed to pass right through Gallup. Movie stars, trains and cars, truck drivers. Only the dogs stuck around. And the pawnbrokers, forever and a day the pawnbrokers. Gallup’s heaven for pawns and for the broke. It’s not a place to live, it’s a place to leave. And that’s what I did.”
While he couldn’t follow many of her movie references, Kip heard things he understood.
“You know the joke about Gallup being well named?”
Yeah, gallop. He knew that one.
One of her father’s chronic taunts had been, —If you don’t like living under this roof, you can hit any road you want so long as it doesn’t bring you back. Do you hear me?
She did, and after years of cycling through the same pattern of mutiny, terror, anger, guilt, meekness, stoicism, and then back to mutiny, she’d eventually called his bluff. The golden lights of sprawling Albuquerque, as she crested the ridge that night after finally making her move, leaving behind family and the waitressing job at El Rancho and every bad memory she had of home, had seemed miraculous at the time. “Like my future was lying there in front of me, this glittering gold magic carpet, with Sandia backlit by a big fat full moon. It was some kind of fine vision.”
Mary smirked. She told Kip she’d ended up in Santa Fe because it offered her a brilliant opportunity to wait tables for better pay than in Albuquerque, which in turn paid better than Gallup. Her plan had been to save some money, take the bus down to the airport, and persevere west. But none of it happened. The hopeless dream was fading, as well it might or even should.
“Not so hopeless. You have a hell of a flair for invention. Aren’t you more or less writing, directing, and acting a role every waking minute?”
“I never thought of it that way.”
One confession deserved another, so Kip told Mary a few things about himself. That he considered himself no better than a living, unmoored Gallup. That he’d messed up more often than not. That somewhere out there another daughter had been left by an unworthy father to find her own way—nothing he was pleased about. Indeed, it was the greatest shame on his head, had shadowed him for a quarter century.
“Is that why you were such a globe-trotter, because you were running away from her?”
Kip shook his head. “Pitiful, isn’t it. Running from somebody who not only wasn’t chasing me but didn’t even know I existed.”
“I’m sure she’d love you if she met you.”
“She never will, though.”
“So long as you’re both still alive, there’s always hope.”
He turned the focus back to Mary, saying, “Look. You’re brave enough to share your problems with me. Why not trust Marcos to the same end? Promise me you’ll at least think about it.”
At breakfast the next morning he sat with the Montoyas. Spoons in cups, the spring of the toaster, the creaking of a cane chair as one or another shifted weight. Their familiar voices riffing over the purr of the refrigerator compressor in the kitchen. Kip thought of these as fundamentally the music of family. A place at the table was set for Franny, who often spent the night with Marcos when she didn’t have to work a late shift in Santa Fe or attend rehearsal. Kip sometimes wondered if he would be so tolerant about his child shacking up like this, not merely right before his eyes but coolly, calmly. Marcos and Franny sometimes came to breakfast dressed for their different days but bouqueted by the love they’d shared an hour before. This morning, however, she entered alone.
“What’s Marcos