Silver Basilisk - Zoe Chant Page 0,12

but me and Eddie to eat it. Rigo didn’t show up, didn’t show up. Late the next day I heard that half the rodeo had vanished, leaving the remainder with all the owner’s unpaid bills. Rigo was one of those who’d hightailed off. That morning I took a long walk and faced facts. I’d been stupid. I’d never be stupid again. Or waste a tear on him.”

“What. A. Jerk,” gentle Bird said fiercely.

“Oh, you think that was bad? Just wait. It only gets worse. Which is pretty much why I’ve never yapped about it. What good does it do? But I said I’d get it out, so I will get it out. You know what things were like back then for girls who turned up pregnant with no ring. Especially brown girls with no money and no family.”

Doris winced. “Let me guess. The town turned on you as a harlot and a she-devil, while the guy gets off free and easy.”

“Got it in one. I confided in the head waitress, who I’d thought was a friend. I’d certainly taken enough extra shifts for her, and covered for her in other ways. But I’d missed the signals that she was hot for Rigo, and he’d just been polite to her. He was to all the women, except me. She must have burned a trail to the owner, because by the end of the week everyone in town knew. The diner fired my harlot ass.”

Bird scowled.

“But I was not about to put up with being treated like the town Jezebel, so I took my skimpy savings and got a bus ticket as far north as I could. There’s no use going into the deets. It was easy enough to get waitress work in those days, so I did, and when I started showing, I lied and said my husband was in the Korean War but I hadn’t heard from him in months.”

“Those were the days when hardly anyone had a phone,” Doris said, shaking her head. “I remember once my great-grandmother remarking tartly that a gal who needed to get lost could get lost. Though I never found out the story behind that.”

“Too bad. I would have liked to hear it. As for me, I certainly did. And so, my boy was born.”

Bird and Doris exclaimed almost in unison, “You have a son?”

“I do. Still do—I believe, though I’ve got no proof. That part is coming. When Alejandro was small he and I were mostly in boarding houses, with one phone in the hallway, everyone listening to whoever was talking. We moved a lot. There were some nosy types who seemed to think it was their duty to question Alejo about where his dad was. If he had a dad. Or I’d get the stink eye from holier-than-thous who didn’t believe in the husband in Korea.”

“I remember those days,” Doris sighed.

Bird nodded as Godiva went on, “Not that I cared what anybody thought, but I was not going to put up with Alejandro getting crap for having a single mom. So we’d move again, and I’d change my name. After three of those in a row, I rented a post box, and told him if we ever got separated, we’d write to that post box, and then find each other.”

“Now that was smart,” Eve said.

“But. Maybe it was the Nosy Parkers, or maybe peer stuff. Or maybe something boys just do, when they hit a certain age, because Alejandro kept asking about his dad. When he was little he believed me when I said his dad was a soldier overseas, but when he reached sixteen or so, suddenly he was all over me about who his dad was, where he was, and the rest of it.”

Doris the teacher and Bird the mother both nodded.

“I always told Alejandro the truth—that we’d been abandoned, that his dad was a worthless skunk, and anyway I had no idea where he was now. I didn’t even know his last name! I’d known him as Rigo El Cabarello, which was the name he rode under. I thought telling Alejo he was a skunk would disgust him into dropping it. But the day after he finished his junior year in high school, I came back from working a late shift one night to find him gone, with a note on his pillow: he’d taken off to find his dad, and promised to write to me as soon as he found him.”

“Oh, no,” Bird whispered.

“I reported him to the