Garcia's Heart (17 page)

When the Garcías found out, they weren't so much appalled as incredulous that a sixteen-year-old could be left alone for three weeks. Their concern struck Patrick as charming and old-fashioned, and probably best explained as a Latin American close-knit family thing, a new-immigrant-family-paranoia reaction. Hernan and Marta voiced their worry for Patrick's health and safety. “How will you eat?” Marta had asked as he mopped the floor near the cash register. She was even more shocked when Patrick shrugged in response. Roberto regarded him with newfound respect. Patrick had absolute freedom–even if it was temporary, even if it was likely to be wasted–something that would elude him until he was out of his parents' house. Celia was steadfast in her indifference, but Patrick hoped that she secretly shared her parents' alarm and pity. He did play it up, too, doing little to dispel their notion of his abandonment,
happily accepting their invitation to dinner. He was sure they would think less of him had he told them how relieved he was not to spend three weeks pickling in the boredom of a cabin in St. Donat.

Dinner, Hernan explained, as he gave Patrick a piece of paper with their home address on it, was the most important time of the Garcías' day, the only time when all of them would be together outside Le Dépanneur Mondial. It was a rare ninety minutes, a gap in the day when they trusted the operation of the store to Madame Lefebvre.

The night of the dinner, he took a shower so long it ended only when the first lashings of cold water signalled an empty hot water tank. While picking through a pile of clothes on his bedroom floor for the cleanest he could find, he had inaugural thoughts about cologne but finding that his choice was limited to an ancient, unopened bottle of Brut in Roger's medicine cabinet, he thought better of it. On his way over to the Garcías', a typical red-brick duplex near the south end of Harvard Avenue, a couple of blocks from the store and not really all that far from his house, Patrick stopped and bought a cake to present to Marta, which he thought would be the sophisticated thing to do.

Patrick expected crossing the threshold of the Garcías' house would be memorable. He imagined foreign-sounding music greeting him as he entered, a melody rising, a prelude to what awaited. The Garcías lived here. It would be special. The house would be fragrant with flowers that had been gathered and arranged as a centrepiece on the table, the varieties a mystery to him, a sunburst of petals and thick stems bound with string to steady them into a huge earthen vase. He knew it, he'd been able to see it so clearly as he climbed the steps to
their front door. He'd be dizzy from the colour, heady with expectation of the meal and eating with the Garcías. He rang the bell.

Marta greeted him at the door. She looked pleased and puzzled as he handed her the box. And then she disappeared, leaving him standing at the doorway to stumble over the pairs of shoes scattered about. He waited, and after no one appeared, he took a couple of steps into the house to find it remarkable in its resemblance to his own. No music, not even the Mozart that accompanied every working minute at the store. The walls of the entryway were bare and there were still cardboard boxes visible at the end of the hallway. He took another step and leaned around a corner to look into the living room, still suspecting that something exotic must lie just beyond. Again, another room. White walls and furniture similar to what he'd just left at home. Nothing special, really. Nothing even different. No colourful decorations, nothing that distinguished the Garcías from any other family on the block. It was a home like his own. He thought he would find something typically Honduran, but was uncertain what that meant, not knowing anything Honduran except for the Garcías themselves. He thought he could hear someone down the hallway, but there was still no one in sight. It was hot in the house, and the air was still, and, like in his house on hot days, you could smell the faint scent of wet towels. When he looked down, Nina was at his feet.

Marta returned after putting the cake away to find that Nina had taken Patrick by the hand and was leading him on a tour of the front room. A small group of dolls was assembled on the couch and Nina introduced each one in that way
specific to five-year-olds, citing their elaborate names followed by their accompanying emotional frailties, a roll call of dolly psychopathology. Nina then left the support group on the couch to show Patrick the “whale stuff.” Patrick assumed he was on his way to more stuffed animals with bulging eyes and hopefully less dramatic psychological problems and was surprised to be brought before a bookcase. He didn't recognize the objects on a single shelf in front of him, except that they were obviously on display, arranged in that particular way that suggested someone valued them. Propped against the back of the shelf were two black-and-white photographs, the edges ragged with age, each showing a clutch of houses running the length of a dock. “Nantucket 1853.” “Gloucester 1855.” There was no clue to what time of year the photos were taken, but the blue-tinged seas looked frigid. Five sharp-ended spears lay at one end of the shelf, gathered together like arrows ready for use. Fragmented pieces of what appeared to be yellowed bone crowded the shelf in front of the photos. Patrick wondered why Hernan had collected these things. As he peered closer, he saw the bone was covered in intricate carvings of ships and whales. He reached in and picked up one of the carvings, examining the tiny grooves darkened with grime.

“Scrimshaw,” Marta said over his shoulder.

“Is this yours?” he asked, and Marta nodded. “What's all this stuff for?” Patrick said as he looked more closely at the pieces. On the bone in front of him a spear lanced the flank of a breeching whale. Even though it was rendered in miniature, it effectively conveyed the theme of a battle to the death.

“For? For nothing, for me,” Marta replied, picking up what he had recognized was part of a harpoon. She gripped the
spear as though she were acknowledging its heft and considering how far she could throw it if she had to. “It is history, Michael Patrick, history, a way of life that is gone.

“I studied Melville,” Marta added, as if in explanation, and he tried not to look blank-faced. “You know,
Moby-Dick
.
Billy Budd
.” She smiled and put the harpoon tip down. Nina played with another piece of whalebone until Marta asked her to stop.

“Come to the kitchen,” Marta said, and Patrick followed with Nina like a little satellite, a moon of a moon.

The smells in the Garcías' kitchen–a pungent cloud rising from a pan of chopped peppers and onions–were the first sign of anything different from his parents' house. He sat on a stool beside the stove and watched Marta coax the meal into existence.

“You are how old, Michael Patrick?”

“Sixteen.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“Two sisters. Older. Way older.”

“Sisters,” Marta said, scraping rice off the inside of a pot with a wooden spoon. She rapped the spoon firmly against the pot's edge. “So what is it that you like to do?”

“Pardon me?”

“What do you do when you're not at the store?” Marta's gaze bounced from the pots and saucepans to Patrick. He tried to speak to her when she was facing him but she always turned away too quickly. He wasn't sure he was being heard.

“I don't know. I just sort of hang out.”

“You have friends.”

“Yes.”

“What do you like in school?”

He shrugged involuntarily, and he felt Marta watching him, watching the shrug. He shifted on the stool and then he said something that surprised him for its honesty and, later, for its accuracy: “I like science. I like, you know, how things work.”

Marta nodded as she stirred a large pot that bubbled on one of the stove's back elements. Patrick felt no better.
Science.
He heard noises from the back of the house and Celia appeared from behind a door. Her hands were buried in an old cloth and the jagged odour of turpentine cut through the other smells in the kitchen. Marta turned to her.

“
Vaya afuera y lávese las manos. Nina está aquí.
”

Celia turned and left without a word. Marta didn't explain what she'd said, and with the silence Patrick felt increasingly self-conscious. Marta moved a lid from one saucepan to another. For a moment he considered bolting, leaving the stool upturned and the pots on the boil and cake behind for them all to laugh at. He'd brought a
cake
, for christsake. It was a step away from a bouquet of dandelions or a sitcom quality compliment:
My, you look lovely in that apron, Mrs. García.

He felt more comfortable when Hernan and Roberto arrived from the store. Roberto pinned him with a stare as hostile as it was familiar, a reassuring source of gravity in the house, holding him down. Nina ferried between the counter and the table, depositing a fistful of cutlery on each placemat that Marta arranged into a table setting. Nina then sat down in her chair, looking over at Patrick in what he thought was an invitation to sit beside her. Marta and Hernan were occupied with carrying dishes of food to the table, Hernan pausing several times to call for Celia.

Patrick took the seat beside Nina, who smiled and promptly got up, wandering away from the table. Hernan chased after
her, trying to shepherd the girl back, cajoling her. With Marta still at the stove and Roberto and Celia nowhere to be seen, Patrick was now the only one seated at the table. He felt someone tap him on the shoulder.

“That's not your place, Mopito,” Roberto said. “Up.”

As Patrick prepared to get up, a hand came to rest on his other shoulder, preventing him from rising.

“Roberto,” Hernan said curtly, “Patrick is our guest, he can sit where he wants.”

“That's
your
place.”

“It doesn't matter.”

Facing away from them, Patrick listened, unable to tell how the exchange ended. Marta seemed not to notice and brought the last dish to the table. One by one the Garcías sat down around him, Celia the last to come to the table, without a word or a glance.

Marta said grace and then Spanish phrases volleyed across the table as the steaming dishes were passed around. Patrick couldn't understand a word but after a while, listening to the percussion and rhythms of the García family conversation, he convinced himself that he could follow what was being said: the excitable, teasing inflection in Roberto's voice, Celia calmly rebutting him, Hernan and Maria reining them both in. Nina smiled and surveyed Patrick for the alien that he was.

On the other side of Patrick sat Hernan, who would lean over to translate a particular phrase or explain a dish. A plate of
carne asada
appeared and along with it Patrick was given a short history of Honduran cattle farming. He bit into a tortilla, anticipating a taste he thought he knew but instead experienced the earthier tang of what Hernan explained was the taste of flour made from corn instead of wheat. But the tastes and the
sounds and the smells came too quickly and without ceasing; the exotic soon became unintelligible and Patrick found himself feeling increasingly apart. He was a stranger here. He watched and ate.

Hernan must have sensed this, as he made every effort to steer the conversation toward topics that would include their guest. He asked Patrick about his parents' vacation, reacting as if the potbellied hills of the lower Laurentians were the Andes themselves, expressing an admiration for anyone fit and adventurous enough to attempt a mountain holiday. Hernan spoke of a trip he and Marta had taken with the children when Roberto and Celia were small, a journey by station wagon across the eastern states that ended up on the beaches of the Jersey shore. And while the beaches weren't much compared to what they had in Honduras, it had been a trip they'd always remembered.

“We did it for the ocean. I needed to see the ocean,” Marta said.

“You lived in the States?” Patrick asked, turning to Hernan.

Hernan paused as he wiped his mouth with a napkin. He nodded. “Detroit,” Hernan said. “For a few years. I was working. Celia was born there.”

Hernan changed the topic to an update on Gerry Delaney: hip stable after an operation; legal prognosis less optimistic. Discussion of the robbery, and Patrick's involvement in foiling it, drew Roberto forward, smirking: “You didn't tell us, Mopito, that you knew this guy Delaney.”

“He's from the neighbourhood, everyone knows him.”

“But you knew he was a criminal.”

Patrick fumbled for words, but before anything could emerge, Hernan interceded. “
Roberto
–”

“It's just that I was surprised a guy like that would know when Celia would be alone in the store.”

“She wasn't alone in the store. Michael Patrick was there,” Marta answered.

“Where were
you
that night?” Hernan asked Roberto, and Marta placed her hand on her husband's forearm.

“Yeah, yeah. We were lucky he was there,” Roberto said, pretending to back off, “lucky he had his
mop
.”

It was near the end of dinner when the phone rang and Hernan excused himself to answer it. Celia was, as usual, in a world all her own, and Marta was occupied with cleaning up Nina. Roberto, in what Patrick thought at the time was an unexpected but welcomed gesture of reconciliation, offered him the last green vegetable on the platter. In the spirit of camaraderie, Patrick popped it in his mouth and bit down hard. The sensation was immediate, foreign, and incendiary. By the time Hernan returned, Patrick's mouth was ablaze, his eyes leaking as though a canister of tear gas had been lobbed into his lap. Coughing and choking as he downed a tumbler of water, Patrick pushed back from the table and ran to the hallway, desperate for a bathroom. Finding it, he kicked the door shut and spun open the cold water tap, trying not to retch as he gulped and spat. Even with his head in the sink and the water a torrent in his ears, he could still hear Hernan shouting.