At midnight I walked alone through the memorial rose garden in Balboa Park. It was a new moon; the only illumination came from distant streetlights. The fragrance of roses calmed me. In such darkness, every rose is black.
Betty’s not in Hillcrest anymore, of course, but something of her remains. In the queen ordering sprinkles for his Ben and Jerry’s cone, in the corny joke told in a Fourth Avenue cafe, in the ubiquitous rainbow stickers, I sense both her absence and her presence. She’s the Angel’s Share.
HOMES
BY KEN KUHLKEN
Greg Mairs took a Restoril, his third tranquilizer of the afternoon. He washed his face and sat down to organize bills. Sort out which they could afford to pay. Decide which creditors might allow them to coast another month.
Visa, $150 minimum. No grace on that one. Business loan for the truck-mounted dry cleaner that would’ve doubled his commercial accounts, except he’d only had it two months before he turned into a wimp who could barely work an hour without collapsing. And even though he’d needed to sell it for half of what he owed, no grace.
Doctor Ramos. Doctor Schuetz. Sharp Cabrillo Hospital. Xray Medical. These days, more often than he prayed for miraculous healing, he prayed for a windfall that would allow him to at least pay off his medical and funeral bills. So he wouldn’t die as the louse who’d left Barb this stack of horrors, so she wouldn’t have to sell their home. He couldn’t blame his girls if they boycotted his funeral.
Latin American Childcare. He wasn’t about to shirk his pledge to orphans in El Salvador. Gas and electric, down now that summer had arrived, thank God, and the phone bill too. Barb hadn’t gabbed as long as usual with her sister in Minnesota. Her sister wanted to talk about Greg, his death, and the future. Not Barb’s favorite topics.
He slammed the lid on the rolltop desk and went to the kitchen. While he drank carrot juice, he thought maybe tomorrow, if James could abide his company, he’d join his amigo in a big glass of bourbon. “What good does carrot juice do a dead guy?” he muttered.
He sat on the porch staring down Newport Avenue, at the very place where the Silva brothers would’ve stomped him to death for knocking up Angie, their little sister. Except James saved his life by mashing Junior Silva’s head with a Little League bat.
Then James runs from a murder charge, and only returns after twenty years. He risks it all, comes back home in hopes of rescuing Olivia. And Greg does what, after James gave him the chance to live, know love, meet Barb and Jesus, become a father. “Nothing. Zip,” Greg mumbled.
He looked up and watched the fog muster out to sea and begin its advance toward the shore, and tried to imagine some grand gesture, something James would remember whenever he thought of Greg Mairs. But grand gestures usually required money.
He returned to the desk, raised the lid, and sat down. He forced himself to list the bills, almost a full page, add the total, and take the ledger out to the dining nook table where he would remember to go over it with Barb. This time they would talk about his death. Always before, she stopped him and insisted they expect a miracle. He supposed that was her excuse for not giving Chez the truth.
Chez only knew her daddy was sick and couldn’t go on the long hikes they used to take in the Cuyamaca forests, across the desert dunes, or along the beaches of Silver Strand and into the Tijuana sloughs. She knew he couldn’t work anymore, so they’d had to sell the kayaks and Mom’s car, and they watched the blurry TV, no more cable, and they couldn’t go to a cabin in snowy mountains or to Arizona for Padres spring baseball.
Tonight, he decided, he’d tell her the whole crappy truth. He tried to imagine her face when she learned he was as good as gone. Pale, he thought, with her cheeks caved in, tears big as goldfish. Shivering.
His horror at the image got interrupted when the old Toyota pickup made the turn off Guizot Street and pulled to the curb in front of their house. Chez waved. Such a beauty, he thought, with her raven hair and Kobe Bryant grace.
He waved back and hustled to meet her. He picked her up, kissed her cheek, and would’ve held her on his hip while he carried the cleaning gear in, but she squirmed and jumped down. Barb, exhausted from cleaning three houses, came around the front of the car, blew him a kiss, and trudged up the steps to the porch holding Chez’s hand.
While he delivered the vacuum cleaner, broom, mops, and buckets into the garage, Chez zoomed past. She was already in her play overalls that matched her dad’s outfit. Over her shoulder, she shouted, “Mom’s mad cause you didn’t make the spaghetti like you were s’posed to.”
She leaped over the low rock wall between their yard and her friend Maria’s.
Inside, Greg found Barb stepping into the shower. He leaned against the sink. “Babe, tonight, we’re going to tell Chez about you-know-what.”
Over the splashing, she hollered, “Since you didn’t make the spaghetti sauce, how about microwave chicken and that summer squash with cheese that you and Chez like. Okay?”
“Yeah, sure.” He stayed a minute peering through the beveled glass, admiring her curves that had trimmed and defined over the past few months since she began jogging. He gazed at her breasts, which he still loved to fondle after thirteen years, more than ever since the hepatitis caught hold. For at least a minute he admired the henna- auburn hair she wrapped like a scarf around her neck while she rinsed her backside.
Greg sighed, then winced from a pain like a high-voltage whack to his liver. He groaned, and staggered toward the bedroom, panting and blowing the way he’d learned at Lamaze classes while Barb was carrying Chez. He lay down and kept panting. As the pain dulled to a bearable ache, he sat up and heaved his feet over the side of the bed. He took the pillbox from the breast pocket of his overalls, opened it, and fingered through the pills. No OxyContin, his most trusty painkiller.
He returned to the bathroom, where Barb was out of the shower and wrapping her hair in the Snoopy towel. She said, “You asked what was for dinner, didn’t you?”
