Apology by Jon Pineda (good novels to read .TXT) 📗

her, that promised another dimension to the faith in life her parents had provided her. The family settling in for the night, she and her brother listening to their father’s voice while the rest of Winthrop prepared for sleep as well. And in her memory, she could still see the reddish fused fingers of her father’s left hand peeking out from a sleeve. That hand gliding down and whipping about, like a leaf in a storm. Tailspun and drifting. Then gently, always gently, and punctuated with such patience, the idea of bringing back to life one’s former self.

When the Chevelle pulled into the driveway, its tires displaced the gravel easily, even though there were sizable chunks, flotsam of larger rock pulverized for domestic use. The car slid to a quiet stop, but just barely, and Elle thought for a moment of the way the bottom of a canoe can smooth water underneath with the flatness of its hull.

Exequiel spotted in the cast glow up ahead a woman lying on a couch in the front room, the long window like a television screen broadcasting another fictitious life. When Exequiel turned back to Elle, the woman he had just met in the bar, he found she had been the one, in fact, watching him. She was studying his expression to glean how he might be taking in the scene of the one sprawled, passed out.

“Can you tell if she’s sleeping?” Elle whispered to Exequiel.

He shrugged.

Elle leaned over to kiss his neck, just as he happened to turn his face. Their lips brushed each other. It was awkward. Elle smiled, trying to hold back from laughing altogether. He did the same.

She sensed something about this man. That he was kind. Or kinder than others she had known, especially since she had been a single mother. There was not any one thing she could point to that would justify her feeling this way, especially so quickly, but just this conscious thought in her head, that he was a kind man, made her want to laugh out loud.

How had she become so pathetic?

She needed to be more mysterious. Bringing him back to her house seemed dangerous. Or worse, desperate. It wasn’t the kind of thing she needed to be doing anyway. She shuddered hearing the tone of her mother’s voice as she said it in just that way, telling Elle that she’d had more opportunities than she, her mother, ever had. Just look at what you’ve made of yourself.

.  .  .  .

“Who is she?” Exequiel said.

Elle hesitated.

She gazed at the window. In the haze of the room, the older woman sprawled on the couch. Her nightgown open some. Nothing was showing. Elle wished there could have been something, at least.

Elle knew there was a knife. It was hidden, used as a bookmark. The Bible, with its tattered leather cover and gilded onionskin pages, rested on the floor next to the couch.

“One time I scared my mom so good,” Elle said, biting her lip.

“Scared her?”

“Yeah, I tiptoed up to the window and then banged on the glass as hard as I could. She said I almost gave her a heart attack.”

Elle laughed and shook her head.

“Isn’t that funny?” she said, wiping her eyes.

“Why would you do that to your mother?” he said.

Her laughter trailed off. She smiled.

The man beside her was becoming someone else. It was almost too easy, the way it could occur. How he could stop being the kind man she had met in the bar, whom she had driven here in her car. The man she had allowed herself to be foolish in front of and not care how she appeared to him.

Maybe he wasn’t so different from the others.

It could be Joshua, her son’s father, sitting beside her now. If that were the case, Elle knew she would already have slipped the house key into the front door. She would have gone inside, stepping along quietly so as not to surprise her mother, and she would have reached down for the Bible and opened the book and found the knife hidden there and seen, before standing back up in the artificial glow, a line from Psalms. The one about the valley of the shadow of death. Her mother’s favorite. Elle would have used that knife to cut away every memory Joshua still had of her and their son.

Seeing again the stranger beside her, she leaned into him and said, “I’m sorry.” He did not respond with words. He nodded at the quiet surrounding the car. At the image of the woman’s mother asleep on the couch. The television continued to wash her body in bluish neon.

“You’re welcome to stay the night,” Elle said. “Or should I take you home?”

“I don’t care,” he said to her.

She put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway. A streetlight had smoothed out its small, yellow dress over the distant intersection, where other cars were parked crooked near the curb. She let the car idle.

She was staring ahead.

“Where are you from anyway?” she said.

“Nowhere.”

“Really,” she said. “Where are you from?”

“A bunch of places.”

“Name one.”

“I don’t remember their names.”

“You make them sound like women.”

He laughed.

“What?” she said.

“I wish,” he said.

When he woke, Exequiel could smell coconut. That and oranges. The blended scent had stirred him from his slumber. He rubbed his eyes to see a boy sitting on the bed and observing him. The boy had an angry cowlick curling above the back of his head. It looked like the top of a question mark.

“Who are you?” the boy said.

“Exequiel,” he said, trying to sound American.

“What does that mean? Your name means something, doesn’t it?”

“You must be Wendell.”

“No,” the boy said and shook his head. The scent of coconut fell on Exequiel again, and he realized it was the boy’s hair, the tropical fragrance of the shampoo.

As his eyes adjusted, Exequiel could see that the sides of the boy’s hair