Chapter 2

After church we drove to the Taco Bell at Montgomery and Eubank. We've been eating out after church since before we were a family, and it's a custom we've maintained for 13 years or more – one of the few genuine Carpenter traditions. On any given Sunday we may eat at the fanciest place I can stand, where some of the menu items are in French and they sell wine that a friend of ours who knows says is good stuff, or at a fast food joint, or anything in between. We're not picky – if it tastes good, we'll eat it – by the truckload, too.

After we ate, I drove us slowly home, enjoying the fall weather, which wasn't the cold of winter yet but wasn't as blisteringly humid as summer is in Albuquerque. I parked in front of the house, where I've been parking since the fall of 1994 – Cecelia parks her arrest-me-red Mazda sports car in the driveway. She used to park in the garage, but a while back she surprised me by converting it to a study, since the bedroom where I'd had my books for years had just gotten too cramped.

We live across from Inez Park on Wisconsin Street in the neighborhood they call Hoffmantown. Cecelia bought the house when she was single and had no thought of marriage or children, yet it's got three bedrooms and is in walking distance of a barbershop, library, three parks, two malls, an elementary school to which we've never sent Darlia, and a church that we've only visited a few times. It's as though someone were guiding her so that when marriage and a daughter came along, she'd be ready.

Looking both ways – there's hardly any traffic in Hoffmantown, but the one time you don't look is the time about 37 cars will run over you – we crossed the street to the park. Cecelia and I wandered slowly, without any plan but always keeping an eye on Darlia as she ran and played. It's a nice neighborhood, one of the few where you seldom if ever see gang graffiti or gangbangers, but these days allowing a child to go out of the house unsupervised is just too dangerous.

"You know," I told Cecelia, "when I was a kid I could literally go out in the morning, spend all day outside, and come back in the evening, and as long as I was in time for supper Tony and Anna didn't say a word."

"You lived in Lanfair Valley, with miles between you and the nearest neighbor."

"True, true. Still, things were different when we were kids – you know that."

"I do. It was safer. I could walk to a neighbor's by myself, and no one molested me nor did my parents worry. Of course, there were other concerns in that part of the world, for those of my ancestry."

I knew what she meant. She'd told me of the two occasions when idiots in bed sheets had burned a cross in her yard, of chopping cotton in the summer sun on a sharecrop farm, of having to take it when an unreconstructed bigot called her a nigger, of watching her father step humbly out of the way of someone who addressed him as "boy." She was born in the same year I was, 1965, and she only remembers the last fading remnants of Jim Crow, but she remembers as though someone had branded the memories into her brain with an iron.

After I'd been silent for a moment, Cecelia said, "Tell me about Miss Moreno."

I grinned. "That child is something else, ain't she? She says someone led her to Christ last week, an' told her he goes to MJT. She didn't give me a name, said she didn't have it, and I believe her. Maybe someone will recognize her, if she keeps coming, and give himself away. Anyway, whoever it was told her she could come to the elders for info about the church, an' so she come. I hadn't expected her this morning."

"I remember you told her so. Was she so irrepressible yesterday?"

I chuckled. "After talkin' with her yesterday, I don't think you could shut her up with a screw-on cap over her mouth. She does go on. But she ain't irritating – she's too much of a nice person for her chattering to annoy you."

"Perhaps if I were pastorally inclined I might agree with you. But this morning I found her a little more than I care for."

"You are the best pastor I've ever had, you know," I told her.

"So you have said. I still reject the appellation of pastor – when I wish to violate the Scriptures, I shall find some other avenue for my rebellion."

"Yeah, there is that." I squeezed her hand – as always, her right hand was in my left. "I suppose your temperament would find her a little less pleasant. I like her, myself."

"I must admit that she is quite attractive – nearly as skinny as I am, but with softer limbs and a more cushioned figure."

"You're the most beautiful woman on earth, Cecelia, an' that's that," I said, knowing that she wouldn't believe it even though I've been telling her for years. "But yeah, she is pretty. I do love that 'fro. I wish you'd do your hair thataway."

"So you have mentioned on a plenitude of occasions. But I prefer my hair as it is."

I looked at her hair – drawn back as always into a short ponytail at the base of her skull. This morning she'd used a piece of gold ribbon to secure it with, ribbon that matched the accents on the cuffs and collar of the white blouse she wore. The blouse was about three sizes too big for her, as nearly all her tops are, and it made her seem fragile, though in fact she's the toughest person I've ever known. Beneath the blouse was a skirt in a shade between cream and beige – I was sure there was a name for the color, but I didn't have a clue what it might be. And on her feet she was wearing a pair of sandals, a rare thing for her, sandals that showed the sinews and veins that decades of determined exercise had made prominent.

"Your hair as it is," I said, "ain't my favorite part of you, but you sure ain't a-gonna change it for me, so I guess I'll live with it."

"And another thing," she said, as though she'd been speaking all along, "is your grotesque laceration of the English language. Must you continually treat nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, particles – well, let us simply specify the entire catalog of the parts of speech and the forms with which we use them – must you continually treat these components of the language as a butcher bird treats its prey?"