We’re often tempted to be foolish, Bennie. Often tempted to do wrong.
Mami had never said anything about being tempted to do right! So, if she was tempted by this money, did that mean it had to be wrong? Heavens, even children and puppy dogs received rewards for doing right!
The cube was now squealing for attention, but it quieted and began to change color when she picked it up and patted it, as she had done with her babies. After a moment’s more confusion, she picked up the folder as well. Though her brain seemed to be having a fit, her feet started moving, carrying her body down the hill while her brain skipped here and there like a dud kernel of popcorn, badly overexcited but unable to explode. The best her legs could manage was a wavering stroll, but at least they kept going until she reached the car. The familiarity of it, the dents, the rust spots, the smell of the inside of it, fast food and dog, mostly, settled her a little.
She leaned on the open door, still trying to think. Lord. She couldn’t just get in the car and drive off with no plan, nothing decided. And she couldn’t just go home, either. Though it was remotely possible that Bert had crawled out of his boar’s wallow of a bed and found someone to give him a ride to work, it was far likelier he’d stayed in bed, watching baseball and making his way through the rest of the case of beer he’d talked Larry Cinch into bringing him last night. Larry was an open-hearted man whose kindness used up all the room in his head, leaving no space for either evil intentions or good sense. One would think that since Bert had been convicted of DUI five times, his friends would begin to catch on that he’d be better off without beer!
And one would think when he did it five times, the last time killing somebody, they’d put him in jail! Other places, maybe. Not in New Mexico, where at least a third of the male population considered getting drunk a recreation and driving drunk an exercise of manly skill, something like bull fighting. The judge had put Bert on house arrest, sentenced him to an electronic anklet that set off an alarm at the station house if he wasn’t within fifty feet of the monitor at home or at his so-called job in the Alvarez salvage yard. He was supposed to call the station before he went from one to the other and they gave him thirty minutes to arrive. Most of the time, Bert figured it wasn’t worth a phone call to get to work, especially on weekends when Benita was home and he could get some fun out of bedeviling her.
The rest of the week was bearable. Ten to nine, Monday through Friday, she was at The Written Word, doing more than a bit of everything. Marsh and Goose, the owners, were casual about their own work hours and pretty much left it to her. She’d been there part time for two years, starting when Carlos was three and Angelica was one, then full time for fourteen. The first two years were mostly learning the job, stocking shelves, unpacking, doing scut work. Gradually she progressed, and after they put her on full time she read reviews and ordered books and paid the bills and sent back the unsold paperback covers and did the accounts. She took adult education literature courses so she could talk to customers about books, and computer courses so she could use bookkeeping systems and inventory systems. When she ran out of anything else to do, she read books. Considering the correspondence courses, the books and the Internet, PBS, Bravo and the History channel, she’d soaked up a good bit of education, maybe even a hint of culture, occasionally comforting herself with the thought she was probably as well read as some people who came into the store, people who had obviously not hung their lives out on the line like an old, ragged dish towel.
Sometimes it was hard to remember how she’d felt more than twenty years before, a kid, a high school senior madly in love with an older man. Among her friends, there’d been a little cachet in that, his being older. She’d been too naive to wonder why an older man, a self-described artist, would be interested in someone just turned seventeen. She was pretty, everyone said so, and artists were romantic, everyone knew that, and the label wasn’t an actual lie. Bert had never claimed to make a living as an artist, and he had won a few third prize ribbons or honorable mentions at regional shows.