What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [41]
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,