Sunland: A Novel

9

• • 70 • • “It’s not like that,” I said. Mona was in frayed mauve sandals. A small buckle connected across the top. One of her toenails was chipped. She glanced at her watch. “Well, I have a work appointment,” she said. “Some people have real jobs. If you’ll excuse me.” She brushed past me, heading for a breach, close enough that I could smell her hair—lemons. “Wait,” I said. Mona stopped. She balanced the bag on her other hip. “I’m not what you might think. I’m not a bad person.” She looked at me strangely, kindly. “I never said you were,” she said. I spent Sunday morning working on the casita, isolating future repairs and fixing what was broken. A real estate agent had stopped by for a preliminary walk-through. She’d made lists of improvements for me. The most pressing issue was the pronghorn wallpaper . “Absolutely one hundred percent undoubtedly has to go,” she’d said. Several silver-dollar-sized holes decorated the wall in Nana’s room. Time had deepened what were once picture mountings. For each, I cut out gypsum board, taped it up, troweled down joint compound, and sanded out the high edges. I touched them up with slaps of paint. My grandparents had kept the spare bedroom in stasis for the past three decades. Long ago it had been my father’s room, later my room. Over time the items in the room began to vanish or were carted off to Goodwill: bed, night table, basketball trophies. Now it was empty, except for several holes in the door, a chip in the window, and newly primed walls. I taped the moldings and laid down a plastic drop cloth. By the time I finished painting it, the room began to put me at ease. An idea occurred to me. I grabbed my baseball bat and some spare balls from the car and arranged everything in the corner. Still, it wasn’t enough. The room looked too barren. So I rooted around the closet in the other bedroom for Bubba’s Red Sox cap. I hooked it around the bat. I peeled the drop cloth off the floor, and in a mason jar went old house keys: a makeshift rattle. I rummaged around the backyard shed and found several warped old children’s books. I rolled the foldable cot into the room, accidentally scratching the hardwood. Soon the room filled in the right way, as it had once been, with the right items, and it resembled, when I finished, a kid’s room. 9 • • 71 • • I spent too much time wondering if it was in my nature to raise a child. I would like to believe there was a man in me, if the time came, who would push forward and assume the brave responsibility of fatherhood. When I was with Juliet, I’d wanted that. As a final touch, I lugged Bubba’s handcrafted rocking horse from the shed. I carried it between my knees. I wiped off the dust with my forearm and set it in the corner. Baseball bat, baseballs, rocking horse. The scene threw out hope, and for a moment I imagined setting my boy down on the horse’s flat back. I pictured the horse creaking as my boy rocked back and forth, back and forth, on the hardwood floor. speaking to my mother had become a special event. My mother had a demanding schedule, always hard to reach—didn’t like to take personal calls in public, thought it was rude—and she often forgot to call me back. But every other Sunday, like clockwork, she called. I waited in the living room, leaning against the wall, staring at a picture frame that resembled a painter’s easel. I liked this photo of her best. It helped me visualize her whenever we talked. The photo showed my mom and dad when they were younger—before I entered the world— weekending in some park, happily married, a pair. Their shadows melded into a single block behind them. Late twenties and wearing a green T-shirt, my mother was young then, with squinty eyes under desert sun and a biggum smile and carefree brown hair blowing over her head from a wind. And then there was my dad, standing odd as a Joshua tree, one arm awkwardly perched on his hip, but handsome in his way, in a sleeveless shirt with a garish tie that looked like a purple...