“He scared the shit out of me, trashed my car, and the whole time he was laughing about it. He couldn’t even let me have this one thing, this one little thing. Fucking asshole.”
I’d never heard her curse. She was one of those girls who said fudge and shoot and darnit, and whenever anyone around her cussed, she’d blush for them. Fierro had been so charmed by this, he’d proposed to her on the last day of his second R&R. Wait until you get back, Sergeant Fletcher told him when he heard about it, don’t make the same mistake I did. But Fierro wouldn’t listen, he was crazy about her. She was nineteen, enrolled in cosmetology school, dreaming of working on a Hollywood set someday. This is the girl I’m gonna marry, he said. And he did.
“I’m sorry, Mary.” I was trying to think of a graceful way to ask her to drop her complaint, see if she could accept some kind of payment for the car, but when I touched her arm, she pulled back from me with fear in her eyes. I was startled, and took a step back from the threshold myself. Something about the way she looked at me made me feel tainted, as if Fierro’s crime said something about me, too. But just because we’d been in the Marines together didn’t mean we were the same. Whatever troubled Fierro had started long before he’d gone to war. Surely she knew that. Still, the look in her eyes stopped me from bringing this up. “Listen,” I said after a minute. “Change the locks.”
“Yeah, I know. Locksmith left an hour ago.”
“And get a dog.”
“That’s it? That’s your advice? Why don’t you tell him to leave me the hell alone? If you really wanted to help, that’s what you’d do. Keep him away from me.”
“I already told him this, Mary. He wouldn’t listen.” Again, I felt the heat of her rage. I saw how badly I had miscalculated, coming here to try to fix things. I was only making them worse.
A gust of dry wind blew across the street and a piece of glass fell from a window of the Mustang and crashed on the driveway. Mary glanced at it, then fixed her green eyes on me again. “You know, if someone had told me five years ago that you’d be the one with a steady job and going to college, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
I wanted to tell her that I wouldn’t have believed it, either. Five years ago, Fierro had landed a job in security at the Indian casino in Morongo, while I had to get by on roofing work whenever I could find it. Five years ago, I’d gotten so drunk at their wedding that I’d thrown up in the water fountain where rose petals had been set to float. Five years ago, I couldn’t have put a name to the bridesmaid I woke up with the next day at the Travelodge, her blond hair a tangle of ornate pins and glitter against my chest. I lost a year, maybe a year and a half, like that, just drifting, trying to fill the hole in me that I thought the war had left, until I realized it was the same hole I had gone into the Marines to fill in the first place. I was living with my sister at the time, and she kept telling me to go to church and stop drinking so much. Promise me, she begged, promise me. I’d kept half of that promise. Some weeks later, I was driving back from a roofing job when I noticed a billboard advertisement for the police academy in San Bernardino.
Maybe that feeling of being out of place would eventually clear up for Fierro, just as it had for me. But he needed to work at it. “He can get better,” I said.
“Yeah, well. Good luck with that. I tried. I’m done trying.”
And with this, she pushed the door closed.
Nora
In my memory, the cafeteria at Yucca Mesa Elementary was immense, but that evening it seemed small and cramped. This was an illusion, of course, because the cafeteria hadn’t changed; I had. Folding chairs had been set up in a dozen neat rows, but