Chapter 8

'Berto

Roberto folded clothes while Toni got her belated shower. It seemed so perfectly natural to him to fold her clothes, and to find his among hers. The night before, when she'd taken his clothes to wash, it had been odd – pleasant, but odd. This morning, having officially moved in, it was normal.

Not, he thought, that anything about this was really normal. It wasn't normal for bartenders to introduce promiscuous drunks to nice girls. It wasn't normal for nice girls to then invite said promiscuous drunks to spend the night, much less to spend ... however long he spent. Right now he didn't know how long it would last. If it was forever it would please him – he who had never spent more than a single night with any woman. But he couldn't count on that; men moved in with women, and women moved in with men, and they all moved out again, with dizzying speed. He'd seen it more than once among those with whom he worked, and he'd seen more than one man, more than one woman, come into the Corner Bar weeping about the breakup of just such a relationship.

So while it felt normal, it wasn't. If Toni had been more like him, it would have been normal. But, he realized, if she'd been more like him, he wouldn't have wanted to hang around – and probably she wouldn't have wanted him to hang around. He'd never wanted to be around the women he picked up for more than a night at most. And another thought came to him: Would 'Vangeline have introduced us if Toni was more like me? Probably not. With his new insight into 'Vageline's character, the insight he'd gained by comparing her with Toni, he thought that perhaps the introduction had been a way for the bartender to maintain some sort of tenuous connection with a world that didn't involved spilled drinks, and drunken men and women stumbling out of the bar and into the night. I wonder how she used to be, he thought.

He wasn't sure that he was doing the folding properly – by Toni's standards of properly. He knew how he folded his own clothes, and t-shirts and pants were easy enough – they might be hers, but he could follow the pattern he knew. But how do you fold this stuff? Do you even fold it? It struck him that as experienced with women as he liked to think he was, it was a very narrow experience. And it began to penetrate his mind that this was not exactly the right way to be with women. It was such a new thought that he could barely grasp it, and it had to settle for now at the very edge of his mind. But it was there, now, where it hadn't been before.

He folded everything except his own clothes, and left the basket on the sofa for Toni to do with as she wished. He heard that the shower was still running, so he went into the bedroom and closed the door, and changed into his own clothes. He didn't know what to do with the borrowed clothes he'd taken off, so he laid them carefully on the foot of the bed – a new thing, but he didn't want to displease Toni, the one who kept such a neat house. In his own clothes again, and with his socks in hand, he went out into the living room. He retrieved his shoes, and put his socks on and the shoes too. He looked out the living room window and saw the branches moving, their pale green tips showing that their were beginning to leaf out. It was windy, which was standard for an Albuquerque spring, but not as bad as it might have been. He'd seen days when the wind picked up the dust from the river and spread it through the city in a gritty brown fog.

He sat back down on the sofa, and just then he heard the bathroom door open, and Toni's voice came from behind him. "You're done with the clothes, 'Berto?"

He decided he liked what she was doing with his name. "Yeah." He turned to look at her over the back of the sofa. She was in a white terrycloth robe that hid her figure and made her look more like a child than ever. Her hair was wet, and hung straight and smooth down her back where she'd clearly brushed it. Her face was so clean, and fresh, and open, that he could almost swear she was younger than her teens.

"What are you looking at?" she asked, laughing.

"Just the most beautiful girl in the world."

"Thank you, 'Berto." She smiled then, a gentle movement of her lips. "I'll take care of the clothes when we get back. Let me go get dressed now."

He nodded, his eyes still on her face, finding himself unable to speak.

She turned and for a brief moment he saw her hair – black with wetness – swaying between her shoulder blades as she walked. Then she was out of sight, and he heard the bedroom door closing.

It wasn't as long as he'd expected before she was back. On a few occasions he'd been getting ready while the woman he'd been with got ready for her day, and he was used to endless pondering over clothes, and long sessions before the mirror with mascara and lipstick and foundation and he knew not what all. Toni was in another baggy t-shirt, yellow this time, and a pair of white jeans. She'd put her hair into a ponytail again, and it seemed to Roberto that she'd done something to her face, though exactly what he couldn't say. Perhaps it was a slight thickening of her lashes, perhaps a slight pinkness to her cheeks – he wasn't sure. But while he had said truly enough that she was beautiful fresh from the shower, with nothing on her face but a little bit of water running out of her hair, she was exquisite now. For the first time he appreciated how makeup could be an enhancement of a woman's natural beauty rather than a mask behind which she could hide the marks of age and rough usage.

He saw that she had a pair of socks in her hand, but no shoes. So he got off the sofa and, while she sat down, brought her running shoes from the corner beside the door. And, feeling very bold and very young and very much ready to blush, he sat on the floor beside her and took a foot in his hands. He kissed it, and then without looking up slipped a sock onto the foot. He didn't dare look up, for he knew his face was a furious red. He put the shoe on, and tied it, and then did likewise for the other foot – kiss, sock, shoe. Toni didn't say anything till he was done, and then: "'Berto, you're so sweet."

Still looking down, he said, "I ... I really like you, Toni."

Her voice was a mere whisper. "I like you too, 'Berto – a lot."

Toni

They took Toni's car. 'Berto actually didn't live very far away – he was in an apartment complex on San Mateo Lane, behind Goodwill and north of Del Norte High School. "There's no need to move everything yet," he told her as they got in the car. "I just signed a new lease, and I don't want to break it this soon."

She reached over and patted his leg. "That's all right, 'Berto. We have plenty of time." All the time in the world, her mind said ... or was it her heart? She wasn't sure, and she wasn't certain that they did have that much time – but it was a comforting idea.

She started the car and backed out of the driveway. There was no garage, just a carport, and as she pulled out from under its shelter the sun came in the passenger window. As she looked right before pulling into the street she saw the light in 'Berto's hair, like a halo, and she thought of the pictures she'd seen of saints, stained glass and paint, plaster and bronze. But he's no saint. However much I like him, he's no better than I am – and I'm certainly no saint. That was the one speck of bitter in her newly sweetened life. Whatever we have, whatever we become, I'll never be a good woman. Goodness was, for her, in the past – irretrievable. She'd betrayed God, and betrayed her family, and betrayed morality, and all that remained was living with the consequences. If 'Berto could ease her days for a time, that was great, and she would greedily take every day with him she could get. But her life was a ruin, and a flower in the midst of ruins doesn't resurrect the fallen pillars.

She knew where to go – up Washington to Montgomery, east to San Mateo, north to San Mateo Lane. That side road first went east, then north, to dead end at McLeod across from yet another apartment complex. Albuquerque wasn't nearly as big as other cities – it was considerably smaller than Los Angeles or New York City, or Mexico City where she'd been born – but it certainly had plenty of apartments. No doubt any city sprouts apartments when it gets large enough. For everyone to have a house would take up a lot more land.