Chapter 54
I stood watching him pass through the sliding glass doors, waiting for him to turn back, but he never did.
Numbly I drove home. In the back seat, Henry and Ida argued.
Because it was Sunday, the gallery in Mexico City where I’d bought the lithograph was closed, as was La Conexión, our mail service.
I checked my email, hoping for news that the purchase hadn’t been completed, the piece had been returned unopened.
But there were only several unread messages from Louise, beginning on Friday, presumably in anticipation of our return, each typed in her customary exhorting capital letters:
COME SEE ME AS SOON AS YOU’RE BACK.
MISSED YOU TERRIBLY, XOXO.
SURELY YOU MUST BE HOME BY NOW? YOU TRAMP, WHAT ARE YOU PLAYING AT?
I’LL WRING THAT PRETTY NECK FOR MAKING ME LOVE YOU AND WORRY.
The most recent, written that morning, struck a note of intrigue:
COME WHENEVER YOU GET THIS. HAVE HAD A RATHER STUNNING REALIZATION.
I didn’t respond to any of them. I spent several hours instead drafting emails to the gallery.
Some had a vaguely confessional tone: long pleas, slow prostrations professing ignorance, foreignness, a failure to secure my husband’s agreement.
Others were terse, entitled: To whom it may concern, I purchased a lithograph from your gallery in error.
Kindly refund the full amount to my credit card upon its return.
I agonized over these drafts for hours, shifting commas and periods, making the sentences more and then less emphatic, only to put them in the trash.
At five o’clock, for dinner, I drove the kids to Pollo Feliz, a chain with a big indoor playground, and sat slowly sipping a beer while they ran through the elaborate maze of tunnels and slides and jumped in the ball pit, and with the coins I gave them bought handfuls of candy at the machines.
The next morning, Monday, I woke the children early. I had barely slept. A sense of anxiety had been building in me that left my throat dry, my stomach queasy. It was both a relief and a burden to see María again.
“Los extrané, senora.” She kissed my cheeks.
Lowering my eyes, I muttered shyly that we’d missed her, too, it was good to be back, all the while thinking about what I’d done, how I’d been an unworthy wife; I was not the loyal and good woman she took me for.
“Everything was tidy on your return?” she asked.
I nodded, thinking of her cleaning when we were gone, oblivious to Bill’s death, wondering—did she know even now?
Worrying next that Tom would lose his job and Bill’s children would sell the house, and then what would become of María and Rocío and Antonio?
How would they survive without the income, the weekly tips, the money we gave at baptisms and holidays?
We had become a part of their family, if only in the sense of a family as a hierarchical structure, their lives more secure since our arrival.
But we also felt a deep love for her, as I believed she did us.
I had told her we wanted to remain in Mexico, perhaps buy our own house, and she had held both my hands when she told me she wanted to stay with us, she would come to whatever house we bought.
“Please,” she had said as insistently as I’d ever heard her, “please allow us to stay with you.”
Yes, I had answered, of course we would stay together as long as we were here!
Perhaps for that reason, I found myself agreeing now to her suggestion of a comida that was a favorite of Tom’s, not saying that Tom was away, as though the preparations and our eating of it could cement our inseparability.
After dropping the children at school, I went to the market.
This took longer than usual, both José Luis and Enrique asking how the beach had been, were we pleased to be back home in San Miguel, had we missed it?
At last, home again, having deposited the bags into the kitchen to be washed and sorted and cooked, I pulled up the website of the gallery and found the telephone number.
I paced around the living room, working myself up, rehearsing phrases in my mind.
Any telephone conversation was in itself stressful, my Spanish always worse when I could not read the cues of the person to whom I was speaking.
At last, I called. It rang several times before a woman answered.
I gave my name; she asked several questions to which I listened with razor focus, answering with deliberate care.
At length, the gallery owner came onto the line, speaking in English, introducing himself as Senor Menendez. I’d recently made a purchase, I began.
“Yes, yes,” he said eagerly, “we were so pleased to ship this particular piece to you. If I may compliment you, senora, you’ve chosen a very powerful work. Muy bien lograda.”
“You’ve sent it?” My heart had begun to pound.
“But of course,” he said with an air of assurance.
I couldn’t speak. My mouth seemed filled with ash. Finally, barely above a whisper, I managed to say, “The purchase was made in error.”
“Pardon me?” he said, all suave solicitousness, as though he hadn’t heard.
Maybe he hadn’t. Suddenly I couldn’t bear to disappoint him, this fatherly man I’d never met, whom I had imagined seated at a dark wood desk in an elegant suit, holding the telephone urbanely to his ear.
In a fog, I plucked up the envelope upon which, the night before, I had written a few phrases: Would it be possible to return the piece?
What is the protocol for that? Am I able to get a full refund if I return the artwork unopened?
They were written in Spanish; I hadn’t counted on being able to speak English.
As I stared now at the words, they seemed to no longer be relevant, as if I’d neglected crucial interim steps required to be able to speak them.
Frantically my eyes scanned down the list.
“Senora?” the man prompted. “How may I be of assistance?”
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry,” I finally managed, “please excuse me, I’ll have to call you back. I need to pick my children up from school.”