Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [127]
Mina attended Sally’s funeral, where she heard that the nephew had turned the ranch over to an agribusiness corporation that pledged to halve operating costs in the first two years. Immediately rumors flew that the resident workers would be evicted, although nobody believed such a thing was legal or enforceable. In a separate maneuver, the nephew soon discontinued David’s stipend and the stipends of all the other people Sally Morrot had supported. David, in no position to contest a will he’d never seen, took a job busing tables in a restaurant on Market Street.
Coming home from a double shift at midnight, he unlocked the apartment’s door and found Mina sitting on the bed and staring straight ahead. She was either in a trance or very stoned. The only light in the room came from a sand candle on the nightstand. His first thought was that somebody else had died. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “Four months pregnant.”
David oscillated between baths of masculine pride and clear, liquid terror. She’d been so certain of her elaborate rhythm method that he couldn’t understand how this had happened. He wanted to clean out one of Mina’s trust funds and move to Mexico or Thailand. “We’ll write our folks when we’re already married, when the baby is born.”
Mina surprised him with a naive conventionality. She wanted a wedding, a large and elaborate ceremony, and was confident her parents would concur. “Oh, they’ll bitch and moan and try to browbeat me, but after a while they’ll give in and accept you.”
“No,” David said. “They’ll send you to South Africa and kill me. I’ll be hit by a bus or I’ll simply disappear.”
“Dad’ll yell, Mom’ll cry, and that’ll be that. Then you’ll be one of the family.”
David did not want to be one of the Fitzgerald family, with its autocratic father, soused mother, and much-belittled son who had long since fled. David had his own family, and there was no talk of Mina becoming one of them. Once, after his first year at college, Mina had half-begged, half-dared him to bring her home for dinner. His mother served the meal, then refused to sit down at the table. His father never looked up from his food.
In their tiny Tenderloin apartment, they talked and wept and held each other, while all around them junkies and pimps moaned and beat their heads against walls.
Weeks passed without any decision; then David received news that his father had been fired, the villagers evicted, and that they had moved en masse into the Rito Town Park. David and Mina returned to Rito immediately. David, finding his family and former neighbors living in cars and tents, went straight to the park’s pay phone. Union leaders and lawyers arrived within hours to organize the villagers and fight a coalition of valley ranchers led by Mina’s father, who wanted the villagers evicted from the town’s park as well.
Mina, visibly pregnant, had gone home to the Fitzgerald adobe. Given El Cuarto’s current temper and David’s role in the opposing camp, she knew better than to name the baby’s father. “I’ll tell them some guy,” she assured David. “Some guy who got me drunk and took advantage after a football game.” She’d never been to a football game in her life.
She and David agreed to meet daily in a small, neglected tangelo grove way up by the lake.
THE TANGELOS were an abandoned strain, yellow and the size of large lemons or small grapefruits, with pale orange meat. Their sweetness was tempered by quinine, whose bitterness inflamed and then numbed the back of the throat. Though the fruit was popular as a novelty item in