The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,156

this week in Kenosha.” She too complained about the Fourth of July noise and smoke, but also about the disability bureaucrats and her glaucoma, and the neighbors who stole her newspaper, and how she heard her dead husband speaking in the hallways on certain warm summer nights, until Janet finally said, “I’m so, so sorry. But I really have to go.” It pained Janet Bryson that she could not listen more. She picked up the last letter at 3:45 p.m. on Citrus Avenue in Yorba Linda, four blocks from the Richard Nixon Library and Museum, and made her away southward on the State Highway 57 freeway to Santa Ana. By 4:55 p.m., she had managed to deliver one copy of each letter by hand to the five offices of the members of the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

At 5:30 p.m. she was back on Interstate 5, heading north toward South Whittier in heavy traffic, but feeling light and free of the congestion of red lights braking and cars inching forward. She touched the passenger seat, where the letters had lain, and gave a sigh of satisfaction, thinking how she would type Mission Accomplished in the subject line of the email she would send to the One California office when she got home. And then she remembered the woman with the dog, and the woman who heard ghosts, and thought she had helped them that day simply by listening. Owe no man anything, but to love one another, for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. She felt attached to something larger than herself. Not just the story of the wronged American family, but also to other homes and automobiles where women looked out their windows and into the city and tried to make sense of what they saw. She turned on the radio and found it tuned, by her son, to some Spanish hip-hop monstrosity: so she changed the station, finding some rock-and-roll songs from her father’s era. Those joyous anthems with their ascendant guitars and big soul choruses matched the way she felt. Her reverie lasted through forty more minutes of bumper-to-bumper, until she reached her exit at Carmenita Road and she turned northward home.

John Torres was well inside the house on Paseo Linda Bonita before Maureen became aware of his presence. He had talked his way past the useless guards at the front gate easily enough: they were quickly persuaded that a seventy-year-old man was harmless, and Maureen was sweeping in the kitchen when he opened and stepped through the unlocked front door. He quickly found his grandsons in their bedroom—“You guys are reading? In the middle of a summer day?”—and was hugging them and bribing them with twenty-dollar bills by the time Maureen could rush into their room. She glared at the old man with a how dare you! affixed to her lips that died, undelivered, when she saw Brandon and Keenan waving greenbacks ecstatically before her.

“Look! Grandpa gave us money!”

“Hello, daughter,” John Torres said with a stiff cheerfulness, and Maureen wondered if he knew how much she hated hearing him call her that. He was dressed like an angry workingman forced to play a round of golf against his will, copper jowls resting over the collar of his polo shirt, khaki pants affixed to his bony frame by a belt that was about six inches too long. Now he grabbed at its flapping leather tongue as he waited for her to reply, because he sensed that she was studying it and judging him and his simplicity. She was, in fact, looking at his fingers and hands, and thought that the contrast of the wounded digits at the end of arms stuffed into a teal shirt summed up all his contradictions, and for that reason she resisted the temptation to say, Hello, Juan, which was his birth name, after all. Scott had discovered this a few years back, when helping the old man with some Social Security paperwork, and Maureen had rather spitefully called him that on that last time he had come to this home, two years ago. It was during Keenan’s sixth birthday, in a moment of high dudgeon following his outrageous, bigoted, and incorrect observation that Keenan was “the white boy” and Brandon was “the Mexican.” It was the sort of thing he said when he had too much alcohol, which was nearly every time he arrived for a family gathering, and she had resolved at that moment to banish him from Paseo