1. The Summer at Pop's

The plane landed in El Paso a little after noon and Marisol pressed her forehead to the window to look at the mountains, which were not green like mountains were supposed to be but the color of an old paper bag, and she thought, with the small private satisfaction of a person who had not yet been disappointed in a place, this is where Pop lives. It was the first summer her parents had let her come alone, and the first time she had been to Pop’s house at all — he had always come to them, in Phoenix, two or three times a year, with his Lotaburger cap and his stories and a small bag for himself because he did not like to be a guest for long. Her mother had cried in the security line and then stopped crying and said be good four times, each time quieter, and Marisol had said I will, I will, I will, I will, matching her. The only thing in her backpack that mattered was a Ziploc bag with three braided friendship bracelets she had made on the plane for Pop in case he wanted one, which he probably wouldn’t, but she had made them anyway.

He was waiting just past the rope where you weren’t supposed to wait, because he had told a TSA woman something that made the TSA woman laugh, leaning against a column in a denim shirt with the cuffs turned twice and a baseball cap that said BLAKE’S LOTABURGER in faded red. When he saw her he didn’t wave; he just lifted his chin the way men in Westerns lifted their chins, and Marisol ran the last twenty feet and hit him at stomach height and he made the oof noise grandfathers are obligated to make.

“Mija,” he said, into the top of her head. “Mija, mija, mija.”

He smelled like coffee and a little bit like the spearmint gum he kept in the truck and underneath those a third smell she didn’t have a word for, which was just the smell of him.

The drive to Alamogordo was an hour and a half on a road that went straight through nothing, which is what people from places that are not the desert always say about the desert, that it is nothing, but Marisol watched out the window and counted: four hawks, one roadrunner (Pop slowed down so she could see it cross), six abandoned gas stations, one billboard for a place called the Pistachio Land that had a pistachio on it the size of a school bus, and two military jets going somewhere fast and low and not telling anyone where. Pop drove with one wrist on the wheel and his other elbow out the window. He asked her, in the order grandfathers ask things: about school, about her friends, about whether she still played the clarinet (she did not; she had quit in March), about her mother (carefully), about what she wanted for dinner. She said spaghetti. He said good, because that is what he had bought.

The house was at the end of a road that turned to dirt for the last quarter mile, low and tan with a porch on the front and a porch on the back and a satellite dish on the roof that looked like it had been there since before Marisol was born. There was a cottonwood in the side yard that was the only tall thing for half a mile in any direction, and under the cottonwood there was a dog, and the dog stood up when the truck pulled in and walked over with a great old-dog dignity and did not bark.

“That’s Lucha,” Pop said. “She is the boss of everything.”

Lucha was the color of a paper bag too, like the mountains, with one black ear and one tan ear and a tail that had a kink in it from where, Pop said, she’d been hit by a truck before he got her, eleven years ago, the year Marisol was born. Lucha smelled Marisol’s hand and then her shoe and then her hand again and then made a decision and pressed her whole head against Marisol’s thigh and stood there leaning, the way a dog leans when it has decided that you are not, in fact, going to leave.

“She likes you,” Pop said, mildly, as if this were a meteorological observation.

Inside, the house smelled like coffee and old books and, faintly, like the green soap Pop used, the kind that comes in a bar wrapped in paper. The living room had a couch with a Mexican blanket folded over the back and an armchair with a dent in the seat the exact shape of Pop and a low shelf of books that was mostly westerns and a few thick blue ones about birds and one whole row of small black notebooks lined up like soldiers, which Marisol noticed but did not ask about, because she had been raised to know which questions were her business. On the wall above the armchair was a photograph in a wooden frame of a woman in a red skirt laughing at something off camera, and Marisol stood in front of it for a second and Pop came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder and they looked at the photograph together without saying anything, which was how they had agreed, a long time ago, to look at photographs of Grandma Elena.

Her room had been her mother’s, repainted, with a quilt on the bed that had every state on it and a window that looked out at the cottonwood and Lucha sleeping under it. Pop put her suitcase on the bed and said bathroom is across the hall, don’t drink from the tap because the well has minerals you don’t want, there’s a Brita in the fridge, and dinner is at six because that is when dinner is, and then he kissed the top of her head and went out. Marisol stood in the middle of the room with her backpack still on and listened to the house: the hum of the refrigerator, a clock ticking somewhere, Pop in the kitchen turning on the faucet, and underneath all of it the enormous silence of the desert, which was not nothing, it turned out. It was something. It was just a kind of something you had to learn how to hear.

—

She woke at six the first morning because Lucha had figured out how to open her door with her nose, and Pop was already up in the kitchen in a different denim shirt drinking coffee from a mug that said HOLLOMAN GOLF CLASSIC 1998. There was a glass of orange juice on the table and a plate with two pieces of toast and a small dish of apricot jam and one fried egg with the yolk centered exactly. The radio was on, low, tuned to a station that played mariachi in the morning and a man talking about the weather in Spanish in between songs. Pop turned the radio down when she came in and said, “Mija. You sleep okay?” and she said yes, and he said, “Good. Today we go to town.”

Pop drank Big Red. This was the most surprising thing she learned in the first three days. Big Red was a soda the color and approximate flavor of bubble gum, and Pop kept a six-pack of it in the bottom of the fridge and drank one with lunch every day, and when she tried a sip her whole face contracted and he laughed so hard he had to put the bottle down. “Acquired taste,” he said. “Don’t acquire it.”

The first week was a rhythm, and Marisol, who was eleven and therefore allergic to rhythm in general, found that she did not mind this one. Pop got up at five-thirty. He read the Alamogordo Daily News on the porch with Lucha at his feet until the sun came over the Sacramentos. He made her breakfast. He did the dishes by hand because the dishwasher made a noise he didn’t like. Around nine they did one thing — drove to town for groceries, or fixed a piece of the fence, or walked the dirt road to an old cattle tank Pop had stocked once with goldfish that had grown enormous and ghostly and pale. Around eleven it got too hot. They came in. They read, Pop in his chair, Marisol on the couch with her feet up against Lucha. Around four it stopped being too hot. They made dinner together. As the day grew dark, they sat on the back porch and Pop pointed at things in the sky.

This was the part she had not known about him. Pop knew the stars — not just the Big Dipper, but the actual stars, with names, Aldebaran and Altair and Antares, and which planet was which when more than one was up. He pointed at a steady white light low in the west and said, “Venus.” He pointed at a redder one and said, “Mars. Not very bright this year. He’s far.” He talked about the planets like they were uncles he hadn’t seen in a while. Marisol lay on the porch with her head on a couch cushion and Lucha against her side, and Pop sat in his chair, relieved of his daily duties, and he named things, and she listened, and she did not, that week, learn any of the names. She just listened. She would, much later, in a college astronomy class she took because she missed him, recognize Antares when the professor put it up on the screen, and she would put her hand on her chest in the dark of the lecture hall, because of Pop, on the porch, in July.

—

In town, everyone knew him.

This was not a surprise — it was a small town, and Pop had lived in it for forty years — but the specific texture of the surprise was. At the diner on Tenth Street the waitress, whose name was Dee and who had a faded tattoo on her wrist that had once been a hummingbird, said, “Hey, Ray, the usual?” before he had sat down, and brought him coffee without asking, and brought Marisol a chocolate milkshake without asking, which turned out to be the correct order. At the post office a tall man in a Stetson hat nodded to Pop in a way that involved exactly one motion of the chin, and Pop nodded back the same way, and they did not speak. At the hardware store on White Sands Boulevard a younger man in a denim apron came out from behind the counter and shook Pop’s hand with both of his hands and said, “Mr. Marquez. Good to see you, sir,” and Pop introduced Marisol as my granddaughter, up from Phoenix for two weeks, and the young man crouched down to shake her hand too, very seriously, and said, “It’s a pleasure, miss,” and she felt, for a moment, like the niece of a small king.

On the radio coming back from town it was “Caballo Viejo,” which Pop sang along to under his breath, and Lucha was in the bed of the truck with her head into the wind, and the sun was setting and turning the Organ Mountains the color of a struck match, and Marisol was eleven and completely taken with her grandfather, and that, she thought later, was the day.

—

There were small things she noticed and did not ask about. The phone was a beige landline mounted on the kitchen wall, and most of the calls were old men arguing about a football game from 1987 or the woman from the church about a potluck, and Pop took those at the counter, leaning, free hand on his hip. But two or three times that first week the phone rang and Pop said yes and then one moment, and he carried the phone out onto the back porch on its long curly cord and shut the screen door, and she could see him through the screen with his back to her, talking quietly, and when he came back in he hung up with a little extra care and washed his hands at the sink, and then he was Pop again. The drawer next to the stove was locked with a small brass keyhole, and the key was on Pop’s ring, the small one with the green dot of nail polish on its head. She did not try the drawer. It was not, she understood, a drawer that was locked against her specifically. It was just a drawer that was locked.

She had been raised to know which questions were her business.

—

The thing happened on the Thursday of the second week.

She had gone to bed at ten — Pop’s rule, which she had bent twice, but on this night she had been tired and had gone willingly — and she woke up at, she checked the clock on the bedside table, 11:47, because Lucha was no longer at the foot of her bed and the front of the house was making a sound. Not a loud sound. A sound like a car running. An engine, idling, low.

She got out of bed and went to the window of her bedroom, which faced the side yard and not the driveway, and she could not see anything, so she went, in her bare feet, down the hall and into the living room, and from the living room she could see through the front window, through the screen of the porch, down the driveway to the road.

There was a pickup truck at the end of the driveway. It was dark — black, maybe, or a very dark blue — and its headlights were off but its parking lights were on, two small amber points, and its engine was running, very quietly. The cab of the truck was darker than the night outside it, which she was too young, then, to recognize as the kind of dark that takes work to maintain. Pop was standing next to the driver’s side window. He was in his denim shirt and his jeans and he was holding a flashlight pointed down at the ground, off, and he was talking to whoever was in the truck, calmly, with his free hand sometimes coming up to make a small flat gesture, palm down, the gesture he made when he was explaining something. Lucha was sitting next to him. Lucha was not growling. Lucha was just sitting, the way she sat when she was waiting for him to finish a phone call.

Marisol watched from the dark of the living room. The clock on the mantel ticked. She counted, because she had read somewhere that counting helped, and she counted to five hundred and forty before Pop took one step back from the truck and lifted his hand in the way he lifted his hand at the post office, and the truck’s parking lights went out, and then its headlights came on, and it pulled away down the dirt road, slowly, without any hurry, and the red of its taillights got smaller and then was gone around the bend by the Padillas’.

Pop stood at the end of the driveway for another moment with Lucha at his side. Then he turned and walked back to the house. Marisol got back into the hallway before he came in. She was in the doorway of her bedroom when he came down the hall. He saw her. He did not look surprised. He looked at her for a second the way he had looked at her at the airport, like he was making sure she was still herself, and then he came over and put his hand on the top of her head and he said, “Go to bed, mija.”

He smelled like nothing. Not like the desert, not like the truck, not like coffee. Just like the soap, faintly, and underneath the soap, him.

She went to bed. Lucha came in a minute later and jumped up and put her chin on Marisol’s ankle. Marisol lay awake for a long time and did not think about it, or rather she thought about it the way you think about a dream you are having while you are still in it, which is to say not at all, and at some point she stopped being awake and was asleep.

—

The next day was the same as every other day. Pop was up at five-thirty. He read the paper on the porch. He made her breakfast. The egg yolk was centered. He did the dishes by hand. The radio played mariachi at a low volume. He took her into town and they had milkshakes at the diner and Dee asked Marisol if she was being good to her grandfather and Marisol said yes and Dee said that’s what I want to hear and gave her a free maraschino cherry.

The only thing that was different — and Marisol noticed it without naming it — was that Pop was a little quieter, that day, the way a person is quiet after they have done a hard thing and not had a chance yet to sit with having done it. He held her hand crossing the parking lot, which he had not done before. He let her pick the station on the radio coming back, which he had not done before. When they got home he sat on the porch for a long time with a Big Red sweating in his hand and Lucha at his feet, and Marisol sat next to him with her own can of root beer, and they did not talk, and the cottonwood made the small dry rattle that cottonwoods make in any wind at all, and a hawk went over very high, going north, and Pop said, after a while, “Mija.”

She said, “Yeah, Pop.”

He said, “I want to show you something.”

—

What he showed her was how to dance one figure of the cumbia.

He put a record on the record player in the living room, which she had not known was a record player; she had thought it was a small cabinet. He showed her where the needle went. The record was orange in the middle and the song was called “La Pollera Colorá,” he said, which meant the red skirt, and the song started and it was all horns and a drum that went bum-pa, bum-pa, bum-pa, and Pop held out his hand to her in a way that was both formal and a little funny, like he was a man at a wedding asking a duchess to dance, and Marisol took it, because how could you not.

He showed her the step. It was very simple — one foot back, one foot forward, the hips doing a small thing that was its own whole rule — and her feet got tangled the first three times and Pop laughed and said no, mija, the foot is just visiting, the foot is not moving in, and she laughed and tried again and on the fifth try she got it, the small rocking motion, and Pop spun her under his arm and she came out the other side dizzy and laughing and he said, “That is how your grandmother and I met. At a dance in Las Cruces. She was wearing a red skirt. I am not making this up.”

They danced through the whole song. Lucha watched from the rug with an expression of mild concern. Marisol’s hair came out of its ponytail. By the end of the song she was sweating and laughing and her feet hurt and Pop was breathing hard and grinning, and when the song ended he bowed to her, formally, and she curtsied, and he said, “Now you know one thing nobody can take from you.”

She did not understand, then, that he was giving her something. She thought he was just teaching her to dance. It would be much later — past the airport, past her mother’s second marriage and her own first heartbreak and her grandfather’s funeral, in a sanctuary in Las Cruces with Lucha long buried under the cottonwood and the house sold and the small black notebooks gone, somewhere, she didn’t know where — that she would understand that what he had given her, that night, was a thing he had been carrying for a long time and wanted to put down, partly, into her hands. The cumbia was the surface of it. There were other things, underneath the cumbia, that he had also put down, that night, that she did not have words for and would not, for a long time, look for words for.

There was a name, for one. Pop had said it, very quietly, as he set the needle on the record — not to her, but to the room, the way a man says a name in a room he has known longer than the people who live in it now. She would not, that night, register that he had said it. She would, twenty-seven years later, at an estate sale at a stranger’s house in Albuquerque, with the same orange-labeled record in her hand and the same needle pinched between her thumb and forefinger, remember the shape of the syllables. She would never find anyone who could tell her whose name it had been.

But that was later. That night, she just danced.

—

Two weeks went very fast.

Pop drove her back to El Paso on a Sunday, in the truck, with Lucha in the back, because Lucha had insisted, the way Lucha insisted on things, by standing next to the open tailgate and refusing to be unstood-next-to. The radio played a station that did Tejano in the morning and Pop sang along to two songs and hummed along to a third and they did not, mostly, talk, because there was a thing in the truck that was not exactly sadness but was sadness’s older, calmer cousin, the feeling of a good thing ending on time.

At the airport he walked her to the security line, which the same TSA woman from before was working, and the TSA woman said, “Back again, Ray?” and Pop said, “Sending her home, Marcie. Take it easy on her, she’s tired.” And then he knelt down — he had to kneel, because she was eleven and he was tall — and he held her by both shoulders and he looked at her for a moment the way he had looked at her in the hallway that night, like he was making sure she was still herself, and he said, “Mija. You come back next summer. You come back every summer.”

She said, “I will.”

He said, “You promise.”

She said, “I promise.”

He kissed the top of her head and stood up and his knees popped and he said ay, dios, and he hugged her one more time and then he turned and walked toward the doors in his denim shirt and his Lotaburger cap. Marisol got in the security line and took off her shoes and put her backpack on the belt and walked through the machine that beeps if you have anything in your pockets, and she did not have anything in her pockets, and then she was on the other side, and she walked in her socks to the big window that looked out at the parking garage. She watched the silver truck pull out of the short-term lot with Lucha’s tan-and-black head visible in the bed, and she watched it go up the ramp and around and out onto the road that led back to the desert. She did not cry. Pop did not cry, and she had decided on the plane out that this was a thing she and Pop did not do.

She watched until the truck was gone. Then she sat down on the floor by the window and put her shoes back on, and she thought, with the small private fierceness of a person who has been loved correctly, next summer, next summer, next summer, next summer, four times, matching her mother in the security line two weeks before, and she meant it, and she would keep it, and she would not, for a very long time, understand all of what she had been given.