hot glue gun. My not-very-funny doctor had asked me, after some successful minor surgery, whether I'd be wanting a stud or a dangle for the hole.
"Don't worry," my mother said. "This will cheer you up."
Out of a little lap table she brought a ceramic plate and soup bowl, a spoon and napkin, a vase filled with baby's breath and dried roses and incense - the whole Bohemian breakfast-in-bed kit. Then with a flourish she extracted a foam cup the size of a Bill Miller extra-large iced tea (which is to say, awfully big).
The white top was scotch-taped in place, dripping with steam.
"Caldo res from El Mirador," she announced proudly.
I stared at her blankly. "But it's not Saturday."
One of the many absurd rules Texans learn to live with - El Mirador's famous soup cannot be had for love or money except on Saturday.
"I had a premonition," Mother told me. "I just knew I had to get an order to go this week. It reheated beautifully."
"Thank you."
Mother smiled, gratified. She spooned the concoction into my bowl, and watched, pleased, as I slurped it mouthful by greedy mouthful, spilling a good deal of it on my napkin.
Afterward I sat back, enjoying the warmth, even enjoying my mother's quiet company.
It seemed like hours before she said, "Jess isn't coming back."
Her jaw was set, her lips were pressed together in resolution. Her eyes were ever so slightly rimmed with red - from sleeplessness or anger or maybe crying - but she sounded confident, even upbeat.
"Apparently he came by and got the last of his things while I was doing my installation at the Crocker Gallery," she continued. "It's amazing - three years together, and amazing just how little he really made a mark on that house."
"That house," I assured her, "could never be anything but yours."
She nodded tentatively.
"And nobody makes a mark on my mama," I added.
She cracked a smile.
She gathered her things, replaced the items in her purse, and sat up in a glittery readjustment of denim and black hair and beads.
"I don't suppose I need to tell you," she said, "you scared me to death again."
"No, you don't."
We agreed on dinner next Monday.
Then Mother left me alone with the afternoon light growing long on the walls of the hospital room. I lay there for a long time, listening to George Berton contentedly mumbling his dead wife's name.
Chapter 50
To my knowledge, Ralph Arguello had never lived in any one location for longer than six months. He began life moving from shack to shack in the slums of Cementville, a factory-run shanty town where his father worked. After his father's death and his mother's success as a maid, they moved into a small cottage off Basse, behind the Alamo Gun Club, but Ralph, as much as he loved his mother, was constantly shifting from friend's house to cousin's house to God knows where, lying low when the cops were around, making money any way he could.
The habit proved hard to break once Ralph became a successful pawnshop king. Today, he would still move into the offices of acquired shops for a few weeks, to get a feel for the land, he claimed, and then move to another apartment or rental house. He had several homes in his name, several more in other names, but none of them were his home. He traded in and out of living quarters with the same kind of rootlessness the items in his pawnshops experienced.
Ralph's inseparable possessions were few.
This week he was living in the old Broadway Apartments in Alamo Heights. The units were dingy blocks, with narrow, perpetually shaded courtyards smelling of chinaberries and Freon and damp earth. The metal window frames had not been replaced since the Johnson administration. It was a place you could drive past a thousand times and never notice, which is exactly what appealed to Ralph, I was sure.
I paid off the taxi driver and walked through the courtyard of the nearest building. On the sidewalk, a couple of Anglo boys in striped shirts and corduroy shorts and paper Burger King hats were fighting over a Mr. Potato Head. There were fiesta leftovers scattered across the ground - colored eggshells and confetti from busted cascarones. A Night in Old San Antonio T-shirt was hanging over somebody's wall AC unit.
Ralph answered the buzzer at number five. He looked relaxed, his braid over his shoulder, his green Guayabera pulled sideways so his buttons