HUGGING ROBERT REDFORD

A short story by Paula Coomer

With apologies to my Mexican and Mexican American brothers and sisters. When I wrote this story in the late 1990s, having lived a life of white privilege, I knew nothing about the concept of racial appropriation. I now know that writing a story about Mexican people when that is not my lived experience is the wrong thing to do. I spent two summers in my early twenties working the fruit as a migrant laborer, elbow to elbow with workers who’d travelled from Mexico. Even with the language gap, we raced to see who could pick the most fruit, laughed at each other’s foibles, shared food, Band-Aids for blistered fingers, even gasoline and propane if we had it to spare.

Those two summers picking fruit were the most eye-opening of my life. In some camps, we had no facilities. In others the quarters were severely cramped and unkempt, facilities shared with dozens of others with no regard for gender, no hot water, or no water at all. The color of skin didn’t matter in these cases. The status of all of us was less than in the eyes of those who owned the orchards. Because of my admiration for my co-workers, I was later instrumental in developing a public health outreach program for migrant workers and their families, in which we took our clinic out to the fields, including a table spread with food we nurses had prepared ourselves, taking along interpreters, medicines, vaccines, listening to hearts and lungs, checking blood pressures and blood sugars, passing out condoms and pregnancy tests and Spanish-language materials about HIV/AIDS.

I hope none of this is offensive. I share this story here to pay homage to those people I worked with and to actor and director Robert Redford, who was a champion for elevating marginalized voices in filmmaking and storytelling, and whose handling of the film version of the novel The Milagro Beanfield War had an enormous impact on my understanding of the man. I understood that he cared about things and people the same way I do. I admit to suffering a certain level of grief over his death. But who among is us not grieving his passing, not only for the loss of his talent and great contributions to film, to diversity, and to the environment, but also because he was that most precious of things: A decent human being. I used to fantasize that he would somehow someday get his hands on my story, and that it might become a beloved film, too. Alas, that never happened. Perhaps from someplace in the ether, he can read my story even now.

I met the real Roma Valdez one night when I was driving back to Moscow, Idaho, where I was working on a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, from having spent time with my sons, who were taking a turn living with their father in Oregon. The trip was eight hours one way, I was too exhausted to drive further, and I was pretty broke. I pulled into a tattered motel that was called something obvious like The Rest Inn. “Roma” was the desk clerk and maid, and the man on whom César is based was scooping cigarette butts from a milk can full of sand. The person who became Belva really was a security guard. She worked shifts at the Rest Inn and at the more expensive Motel 6 down the way. When I drove up, she stood sentry outside and flirted with me as she held the front door open for me. I had that feeling I always get when life lands a story in my lap. Like champagne bubbles in the region of my solar plexus. I knew immediately I was going to write about this group of people.

Roma recommended the bar next door for the best burger and pie around. She was getting her dinner break and “César” was taking over the helm. She and I walked over together and, as happens to me so often, she began unfurling her story and her dilemma about a marriage proposal and about not being sure about giving up her freedom and her string of truck driver boyfriends. She had a funny way of talking, interspersing Spanish language words smoothly and seamlessly with English. She was beautiful, articulate, and self-aware, but she was feeling stuck in her life and had just made the decision to finish her GED so that she could start taking classes at a nearby community college, only to have one of her regular boyfriends show up with a marriage proposal.

Just prior to this, I had made another trip to spend a weekend with friends. They threw a party and served a huge feast for a house full of friends and family, topping it off with a mound of desserts, the most scrumptious of which was a sweet concoction made of layered cookies and pudding, both of which were homemade, then drizzled with chocolate. The dessert was called, “The Next Best Thing to Hugging Robert Redford.” Somewhere I still have the recipe.

It’s probably easy to see what happened. Roma went back on her shift. I sat there with a beer, watching the comings and goings of the patrons while the short story “Hugging Robert Redford” took shape in my notebook. While many details are changed to protect identity, the story is at least tangentially based on some of what Roma told me that night. I tried to reach her afterward, but never received a response. I really liked her and would have liked to have stayed in touch. I’ve always wondered if she married the guy or if she indeed pursued her own dreams. After several years and many drafts, and further attempts to get in touch with her, I finally decided I had embellished her story sufficiently that she and her fellow employees could not be recognized, and sent the story off to a few journals. Soon enough someone decided to publish it. It was later included in both editions of my short story collection Summer of Government Cheese. I hope wherever the real Roma is, that she found her best life, and I hope you enjoy the tale that came from that memorable evening.

________________

HUGGING ROBERT REDFORD

by Paula Coomer

Roma Valdez is never going to marry Robert Redford. This she must tell herself over and over, must read it on the notes she’s taped to the bathroom mirror, the kitchen cupboard, her insulated lunch bag. Which is a little like dying, un poco, since Roma Valdez generally softens her days with such imaginings and possibilities. The two casually meeting and smiling brightly to seal their fates, then the angelic conjoining, followed by hazy days engaged in local good deeds, building stick houses for Habitat for Humanity, boiling vegetables for soup at the Salvation Army, collecting coats in the autumn at St. Alphonsus for children who need them and who always bring smaller, more tattered coats in exchange: coats of beach ball-colored nylon, spitting polyester from between tiny, frayed lips; little children who stare lost and brittle as raked leaves, but to whom Robert Redford shows love in his kindly, pale-eyed manner, kneeling in fading blue jeans and cowboy boots, taking their old coats and talking to them like fellow movie stars.

For some reason, looking out over the heat of a June day in the Columbia River Basin, after maybe fifteen years of pretending her thinking held magic enough to make this picture reality, Roma squares her shoulders and tells Robert Redford to get himself the hell out of her brain. Because Roma Valdez is only a sometimes-clerk/sometimes-maid at the Rest Away Inn in Hermiston, Oregon. “Heavy” the gossips call her behind her back and “big-boned” to her face, while truckers jabbering the CB network around Walla Walla, Washington, and Highway 12, where it grafts onto I-84 and the main east-west to Portland, Oregon, code-name her “Double D.”

Although it isn’t just her flamboyant breasts or vagrant tendrils, mysterious and dark as coal dust. Roma strolls with an essence no single word can impart. “Like dew on roses—indescribable and who would want to,” Belva, the night security guard, is fond of saying. One amber-haired drifter named Kip—who fancies himself a bit above because of a high school French class trip to Paris and the Louvre, who talks about book authors with names like Hemingway and Steinbeck—calls her “Rubenesque.” The night he scooped her into his freckled, hairy arms sticks in her memory, the two naked in the dusty Eastern Oregon landscape out behind the blue Dumpster. Counting in French the stars in the Big Dipper and the Pleides, un, deux, trois, on the gardenia-printed bedspread from Room 16. Him saying how velvet was her skin. How raven was her hair. She expected to be in love forever that night.

But dawn is always the same. She rises hot-mouthed from worn-off liquor, spots the missing teeth, the snuff-colored spittle staining mustachioed lips, and feels the pilot light go out. They open crusted eyes, scruff an inadequate two-day growth of beard and see her dissolving make-up. Paunchy arms and middle. Words launched like a pat on the back land like a wad of paraffin. “Good god, honey, look what you did to me!” followed by, “Baby, a man could take you for a sport.” Then the boots, two hands on the straps, one at a time over stale socks. Under leftover Levi’s. Boot-cut Wranglers. Lee Riders. Rub back hair gooey with road dust and insensible hamburger grease, secure it with a baseball cap, sometimes a Stetson. Toss her a twenty, maybe a fifty, and say, “Catchya on the flip-flop, darlin’.” Even though money never has been mentioned. Even though part of her still feels flattered to have slept with them.

Each night, at the end of her shift, just before César comes on, Roma feels the ache for newness. It sits green and lost in the bottom of her belly. “Wind the clock with a different hand,” she chants. Tells her heart to slow its blood when a familiar face signs the registry. Tells herself to go home and wash dishes, switch the sheets, dust her dead mother’s statue of the Virgin. Paint the ceramic angels she bought last Easter to make presents for a Christmas already gone. To “Dance to the Oldies” with Richard Simmons. Anything to keep her nights from turning into gravy. Anything to save some sauce for her days. One night she pulls out the dictionary to look up a word César used: copacetic. “Don’t worry, amiga,” he said, when she told of her encounter with Kip, wondering whether to pack a bag and climb into the cab of his Freightliner, to double-clutch far away from Hermiston and sagebrush and dead-end jobs. “Everything will turn out copacetic. You’ll see.”

Next to “copacetic,” Roma notices other words: cook, cool, coordinate, cope, copulate, coquette. Cook, cool, coordinate, cope, all have more than one definition. “Copulate” and “coquette” have only one each. Roma bites her lower lip at these two words. Maybe it is a sign. Maybe it is time for new definitions. Take loneliness. Maybe her parents didn’t speak very good English. And so she mistakenly learned to call an absent feeling loneliness. Maybe it is actually the urge to hoist to a sail or drag a fire hose, but she doesn’t have that definition because she’s never hoisted more than a shot glass, never dragged more than a cigarette. But then, on the other hand, maybe the urge for a drink is as real as real gets. Maybe that is her only destiny. On the other other hand, as César also says, maybe a new life starts with the realignment of only one thing. Like having the drink but not going back to the Rest Away with the vaquero pulling dollars from his wallet.

But then César shows up. César Garza who is five feet tall and skinny and brown as a root. Combed but slightly greasy hair, the brown a mix of Mexican father, Anglo mother. A harvest of open pores on his nose and cheeks. Tattoos across his hands, a letter on each knuckle. The left hand spelling, “Trust.” The right, “Jesus.” Lunch for himself that was meant for two, every night the same: two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; two types of fruit, depending on what is in season, but always an apple, always strawberries, even if they come from California; two granola bars; two cans of Coke; two packages of chocolate cupcakes. Then two packs of Winstons, of which he rarely smokes more than five or six a shift, but keeps on hand, Roma has noticed, for guests who arrive after midnight, after the convenience store is closed tight. He has been known to get as much as ten dollars a pack. His shirts are always silky and open to the chest. A narrow stripe of suede around his neck holding a small stone with a petroglyphic etching of a bear. His “power stone.” A chain with a cross sharing space with it, the sound of the two clinking together faintly, like a far-off toast, whenever César moves.

Roma isn’t sure what it is about César, but she’s always had the suspicion that he sold out in life. Just looking at him makes her feel like an empty soda can. And every night seeing him solidifies her decision to head to the bar. Head to the rite of neon, the smoke and haze and double-rum Cokes that makes two-stepping to the juke box feel like being called velvet under the stars. Because courting over-the-road truck drivers might not diminish her soul-searching, but it didn’t make as big a hole as César must have had on the inside of him.

Crazy as it seems, César’s is the first voice to suggest Roma’s current life path might result in “psychological electrocution,” referring to the pending doom of all who waltz to the demands of the midnight rider. That it is a waste of her “ancestral talents,” that she is “failing in her obligation to the divine Goddess.”

“Everybody’s got that thing they do better than nobody else,” César says to her one night, out of the blue, after Roma finishes her shift, after putting new tips to her eyeliner and refreshing her lipstick. Popping open his first packet of chocolate cream-filled cupcakes for the evening, he adds, “If you’re in the wrong place, your right place is empty, Roma.”

“César,” Roma tells him, “your gringo brain is swollen from too many cupcakes.” Then she strides from the Rest Away lobby to the striped parking lot, which lays like armadillo skin between her and the Cactus Room next door, littered beneath the lampposts with flattened cigarette butts and the carcasses of reckless moths. Breathing the exhaust from diesel engines in their holding patterns and lifeless freeway air snatches whatever confidence she has spent the evening building up. And Kip, the book reader, is there waiting, this particular night, she knows, his second drink or third already lubricating his eloquence, and her first, diluted from the ice melting, sitting near his right elbow on the bar.

*

Roma awakens the next morning with a suitcase handle sticking her in the ribs. The back of her throat feels prickly and crowded from swallowing what—she doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t even want to think about it. Nervousness disables Kip’s thermostat at times. But already this morning he is talking, pushing words at her like he expects her to want them. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute, vaquero. Let me wake up.”

“I said, ‘Roma, here’s a brand new suitcase. Take it to your place and throw some personables in it’.” The French scholar’s face hovers between her and the hanging lamp ballooning from a cellophane-covered chain-and-cord. The light casting an aura around him, a heavenly glow, diminishing his faintly lumbering jowls, embellishing his mutton-chop sideburns. Kip might be missing a nerve cell or two in the lower places, but he does own a full complement of hair.

Roma scoots up against the headboard. Snatches the pink cotton thermal blanket from under the bedspread and holds it tucked to her chin. “What the hell, Kip? You’re talking in puzzles.”

“Ah, shit,” the trucker says, picking up the suitcase and tossing it against the door. Roma watches the safety-chain rock like an earthquake, sees the deadbolt handle is rotated, too. The suitcase thunks, leaving a ragged divot in the wallboard. “I knew it. I knew never to make plans with you when you was plowed.”

She breast-strokes through her hangover, the dry heaves in close pursuit. “Plowed?” she says. “Of course I was plowed, vaquero. Wasn’t that the goal?”

Kip hooks his denim jacket over his shoulder and leans toward her from the waist. “The Hitchin’ Post up in Coeur d’Alene? I-dee-ho and you-dee-pimp? Remember? Roma, we decided you’d go on the road with me. We decided we’d drive to Coeur d’Alene and get married today?”

“Vaquero. You really think we’re that lucky? Goddammit, I was drunk, Kip.” This man, the former French student who unmistakably charmed her that faraway night, now seems himself like a deadbolt and chain.

He stares at Roma for an instant longer. His anger and disappointment merge as red splotches on his neck and the portion of his upper chest visible between the V of his unbuttoned shirt. “I’ll give it you have no way of knowing this, Roma. But I keep your picture sitting right up on my dash. I’ve been putting back money toward this day for a long time. That picture has kept me going for many a mile.”

“And you have no way of knowing this, Kip,” Roma says, having no idea where her sudden disgust and dismay is coming from. She only knows she feels pissed. “But I ain’t even in the market.”

Kip cinches back his mouth from decent false teeth and grinds his cigarette into the bowl of an ashtray. Roma pictures herself later cleaning ashes off the words, “Motel property. Do not remove.”

“Ought not to toy with a man like that,” he says. Then caves in the suitcase with his boot heel, and takes his leave.

*

Roma spends the first hours after Kip vanishes focused on spackling the hole in the wall of Room 16. Which, of course, requires a trip through downtown Hermiston, past the IGA, the fruit trucks, and the mobile-home sales lots where Roma loves to sit and fantasize, to the K-mart at the edge of town. There are three places to buy mobile homes in Hermiston alone and a half-dozen more up the road in Tri-Cities. Everyone she knows pines for one of these pretty and practical houses. The dream of her mother was to own such a home. Her mother who raised her and her four brothers in the cement-floored dorms and tent-camps of the cherry fields and strawberry farms, standing firm against Papa in the autumns and winters so that they rented drafty old cottages and run-down ramblers in town in order for her and her brothers to attend public school. Desire teeters in her belly as she passes each hoard of gravel on which is parked perhaps two dozen samples of the latest in fine manufactured homes. At the last driveway—A-1 Mobile Sales—Roma veers in her pummeled maroon Toyota and turns off the key.

It is early, the salesmen still home shaving in their underwear or nudging their wives for a wake-me-up. The thought exits as a shudder. Roma knows what kind of men end up in jobs like these. The same knobby-jointed, fast talkers who otherwise might have been truckers. Figuring she’d have no defense if the police stopped through, a Latina in a beat-up old car, Roma guesses she shouldn’t linger. But one little square blue house draws her. A double-wide. Twenty-four by twenty-four. A perfect box with a pointed roof and white-framed cupola standing off the peak. A sweet little white-painted attachable porch. Five hundred and seventy-six square feet of her own private Hermiston. She can feel herself longing for it. Feel her body one with every board and nail and puddle of glue. Knows if she had that house, her life would de-liquify, become solid, stable.

It is only quarter to nine, but K-mart’s front door is already open, and although she sees no clerks, Roma helps herself to a cart and heads for the home improvement aisles. Velvet white interior latex—the same color she herself chose to repaint the entire motel six years ago—spackling compound, a scraper, a brush. Then she glances at home furnishings—the veneer bookshelves and paint-it-yourself dining sets. Wicker nightstands and over-the-toilet storage units. Standing in the checkout aisle fifteen minutes later, behind an apple-wasted figure she recognizes as a barmaid from the Cactus Lounge, Roma listens to the clerk chastising the woman for coming in before the store officially opened. Leaning into her cart to pull items onto the conveyor belt, Roma accidentally launches her paintbrush into the other woman’s cart.

“Well, I’m glad it’s you that needs this and not me,” the woman says.

Roma catches gazes with the woman, feeling a bit creepy, retrieves the brush then blinks at what she sees. The wire bottom of the cart is filled with the same cupcakes César eats. There are dozens of them, little white plastic wrappings zigzagged on the end, a picture-perfect cake, cross-sectioned to reveal cream inside the middle, photographed in living color on the front. The woman, smiling, simply says, “I’m addicted.”

During the slow hours of her shift that night, Roma makes a list. Flour. Butter. Walnuts. Cream cheese. Chocolate. Good chocolate, like—what was that? Ghirardio’s or something. Or Ibarra. Mexican chocolate. She paces. She checks in customers. Ignores the filmy grins of the familiar ones. Their come-on-over winks. Makes Belva, the security guard, take a call from Kip. And a second. And a third. Goes through the motions with César at eleven when he comes on. The cabby’s hat on the coat hook. The Coca-cola in the half-pint fridge behind the break room door. Sandwiches in. Cupcakes out.

“What is it, César? she asks him. “What is it about those cupcakes that keeps you eating them?”

Belva, jointly hired by the Rest Away and the Motel 6 to augment the police, who flattens all her feminine assets under a bullet-proof vest she bought herself, and moonlights as a bouncer at the Tapidera, pipes in. “Why, Romacita,” she says, pinching Roma on the cheek, “them’s the next best thing to hugging Robert Redford, ain’t it, César?”

Roma stares at Belva. “What makes you say that, Belva?” she asks.

Belva merely shrugs it off, walks over to peer at herself in the night behind the glass doors, then moves to the opposite windows.

César puts a hand on his size twenty-six waist and offers the back of the other one as if gloved for a kiss. “Magnifico,” he says, drawing out the Italian syllables in exaggerated Spanish. Then he smooshes an entire cupcake into his mouth.

Roma stands spellbound listening to an angel choir. Music in brilliant orchestral accord. Dramatic violins. Diminutive oboes. Harp strings cloistered and blooming. She watches an avalanche of crumbs stumble over César’s pigeon-chest. Some of them land on the desk blotter. On the Lions Club mints. Roma’s eyeballs shake like the chain-lock on the door to Room 16.

“Going to Safeway?”

Roma Valdez stares at César’s chocolated teeth, wonders who his dentist is and how many cavities he has. “What?” Roma says. “What did you say about Safeway?”

César and Belva look at each other and giggle, high-pitched, little girl giggles.

“Hearing aids, Roma. What you need is to find yourself a purpose in life and a set of hearing aids. Maybe some of them clear, nigh-to-invisible ones,” César says.

“Neither of us said nothin’, ain’t it?” Belva says. “Cesar and me are just standin’ here sayin’ nothin.”

César leans back for an overhand toss of a naked cupcake toward Belva.

Roma pulls from the parking lot feeling like one of the old sock puppets she played with as a girl. As if powering somebody else’s hands shifting the car at the stoplights. Turning her north toward town. Pulling her into the Safeway parking lot. Like her brain is registering somebody else’s chemicals, another human’s eye squinting to watch a loner breeze toy with an empty paper coffee cup. An owl explodes into flight above the store.

Inside, beyond a row of empty checkout stands, she hears the words, “freight night,” rising from the mumbles. A youngish man with red hair, eyes blue even from a distance, sticks his head around the corner of an end display and says, “Let us know when you’re ready.”

She unsticks a cart from its nesting place inside the other carts and ticks off her list. Toblerone chocolate. Toblerone, not Ghiardelli, as it was pronounced, a fact she discovered in a women’s magazine some customer left rolled up in the bed sheets that morning. But Ibarra if they have it. Raw cane sugar. Real butter. Then to the produce aisle for strawberries. Nothing less will do than fresh, homemade strawberry jelly. This is going to be unheard of and new. Original and previously unimagined. Roma’s life is not built around certainties, but this is an absolute.

Roma Valdez is going to be rich. She is going to get herself a home.

When she ends at the checkout counter, the red-headed young checker is waiting for her, the black conveyor belt soon jostling powdery sacks of flour and plump, local berries. Roma stares at the passing strawberries. She hasn’t eaten a fresh strawberry since she quit the fields, and has never purchased one. While the clerk passes other items across the scanner, Roma carries the little green crates back to the produce department. On the condiments aisle she finds a brand called Pure Fruit Strawberry Jelly and loads three quart-sized jars into each arm. “The same thing,” she whispers to herself, “only different.”

Back at the register, she feels her anger as dampness on her lower lashes.

“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” the clerk asks.

“What’s a shame?” Roma wonders what this red-haired Anglo could possibly have to say to her at this instant.

“That some of us have it so easy. And some of us don’t.”

*

It takes almost exactly twenty-four hours for Roma to be satisfied. First she tries changing on old cake recipe, altering it to accommodate the chocolate—Ibarra. They had it after all, a tribute to her familia. She mixes whipped cream with jelly, then jelly with cream cheese, then the three with marshmallow crème. This last is like nectar on the lips of the Virgin. The cake works best when she substitutes vinegar and baking soda for the eggs—an old camp cake recipe of her mother’s. The chocolate dips better mixed it with Crisco, isn’t too bad with lard, but makes the thinnest, tastiest coating when she melts it with a little of each and a dollop of butter. The final struggle comes when she tries to get the dimensions just right. Too much cake and not enough filling leaves her taste buds wavering. Too much filling and it won’t hold together for dipping. She finally settles on small, square, half-inch thick layers of cake sandwiching a not-too-hefty layer of filling. The dipping chocolate is a drape of perfection.

Roma sets a half-dozen finished works of art on a cookie sheet, examines them at eye-level. Just before midnight, the phone rings. It is César.

“Jesus, Roma, you know what trouble you’re in? El Toreador is grumblin’ in his sweet potatoes, not to mention me, who he called in to cover your shift because, hello, you didn’t show your little sparkly whites when you were supposed to. What gives, Romacita? One of those nobodies treacherize you last night?”

“Couldn’t be helped, César. Listen. I gotta talk to you, vaquero. ¿Comprende?”

“Oooh, Romacita! Well, jeez Louise, Roma. Rooms are full and Belva’s down at the 6. Come on dowwwn, come on dowwwn,” César says, this last bit a lazy version of his Hollywood imitation of an imitation Mexican accent.

César sits on his perch behind the registration counter at the Rest Away, appearing tired and grim. His theatrics gone to bed for the night. The perpetually-chocolated corners of his mouth clean, a Coca-cola in front of him, unopened. It occurs to Roma that no one knows the true César Garza.

“This better be good, Roma. This better be good.” César engages his accent, soft and brief, drawing “this” out to “theez.” He is wearing drugstore eyeglasses, resting the weight of his head on his chin.

“Try this, vaquero, and tell me what you think,” Roma says.

César looks at the folded wax paper.

“Roma, have you been into Belva’s bootleg?”

“Just eat the damn thing, César. This is as serious as I ever get.”

“Must be pretty damn serious, then,” César says, “considering all the seriousness you got in your life.”

“Damn it, César. Shut up and eat it!” Roma tacks a note to her memory: End all cussing.

César’s short, boyish fingers assume a prissy pose as he lifts the folded edges of the packaging, sniffs the insides, then admires the chocolate-covered confection on an open palm. “Never have a camera when we need one, now do we?”

Roma’s cake in César’s palm gleams. Air molecules sparkle and hiss. Even before he tastes it, Roma knows she has gotten it right.

César slowly moves the cake to his mouth, chews it, then slumps to the floor.

“Jesus. Vaquero!” Roma says. “Are you allergic? Hell, are you allergic to strawberries, César?” Roma slaps the back of her co-worker’s hand. Pats him about the temples and forehead. Yells for Belva, which is pointless, she realizes. César has already said Belva is over at the 6.

César begins to hum, and then to sing, right there on the floor. “Fairy tales can come true/they can happen to you/if you’re young at heeeeaaarrrt . . .” Then he grabs Roma’s face, kisses her mouth, shows his chocolate gums. “We are going to be rich,” he says. “We are going to be rich!”

Roma stands, kicking César in the hip. “What’s this ‘we,’ gringo?”

César jumps to his feet. “Roma, who’s been bustin’ chops to get your hacienda ass together all this time? Who’s been tellin’ you night and day you was made of genius? You’re going to need help, Baby. You are going to need me!” All one hundred and twenty pounds of César Garza does a little dance.

*

Kip shows the next morning. Roma is in her kitchen by 7:00 a.m., cleaning up from the day before. She washes the strawberry jelly from every bowl, spoon, and pan. She rinses the kitchen floor, sink, and counters with bleach water. She changes her bed sheets. Scrubs the toilet and shower. Makes another list: Diane’s Tortillas in nearby Milton-Freewater to find out about packaging; the state offices in Pendleton for permits; see if the local restaurants accept daily deliveries.

Then she starts thinking about ratios. How many times does a batch double before the ratios fall apart? Maybe the community college has a formula. But the biggest thing is money. She can’t sell the old Corolla. Pounded as it is, between everybody she knows it is the only reliable vehicle. What can she hock? The TV? Her old sewing machine? Roma’s throbbing brain reminds her of how long she has avoided pointed thinking.

Around eleven-thirty, the doorbell rings.

Roma can’t decide if Kip looks the best he’s ever looked or the silliest. His thick, wavy red hair is freshly cut and barber-shop slick, chin straight-razor smooth. A gray, western-cut suit, probably purchased for the occasion, shelters his over-run belly, which, even sucked in, tightens the royal blue silk shirt to the point that smiles manifest between its buttons. The lizard skin boots look unbroken and painful. Kip carries, of course, a dozen of the biggest roses Roma ever has seen, the red so deep as to blacken the edges of the petals, the ribbon tied and bowed and stiff with hot glue and gold glitter. And a long, white envelope with a hand-scrawled star on the front, the star also traced with gold glitter.

“Before you say anything, Roma, listen at me.” Kip looks her in the eye like he means to hold her to the spot by the sheer power of wanting it. “Now I know you already told me no, but there is some things you ain’t aware of about me, and I think you ought to be.” Kip hands Roma the card, pulling a white gift box from his piping-trimmed breast pocket. “Now open it and I don’t want to hear about it.”

Inside the box is a set of keys. The envelope holds finance papers for a twenty-four by twenty-four double-wide mobile home. Eggshell blue with white trim and a cupola. And detachable porch. Roma looks at Kip, feeling her question but not speaking it.

“Cuppa Java,” he says. “Across from A-1. Have my morning coffee there every day I’m in town.” Cocking his head, he adds, “Only way to keep from going crazy driving truck is to pay attention.”

Roma’s mind fishtails from the unlikelihood of what is happening. She feels like she did as a girl when her cousins asked her to choose from two kinds of candy and then snatched them both before she got a wrapper off.

“Buying a mobile is easy,” Kip says. “They don’t want cash. They make their money off the interest. Hell, they’ll finance anybody. Even an old gas-guzzler like me.” Kip gets down in front of Roma on one knee. “You can see it, can’t you, Roma? The two of us in that little place? A bunch of strawberry and chocolate-headed littl’uns runnin’ around?”

Roma’s head jerks from the shock of his wording. She feels every single one of her thirty-two years in the joints of her fingers just then. She feels how the insides have begun to wear down a bit from bending around drink glasses and toilet scrubbers and vacuum-cleaner handles and steering wheels. She feels how the lubricating fluid that keeps them floating inexplicably in place has started to dry out and how when she gets older, they will grow inflamed, making it hard to turn a door handle. She feels them angry and complaining, begging her not to fold the finance papers back into their envelope. She feels them wincing as she drops the bottomless weight of the keys into their dime-store gift box.

“Kip,” she says, after an instant, “let me show you the way out.”

Roma walks Kip to his rig, bobtailed and waiting for the load he’ll soon be hooked to. The parking space in front of her building holds only a smattering of gravel. Little green weeds push through the part of it that crowds the curb. As he hoists himself onto the driver’s seat, she hands up the envelope and the key. “I’ll keep the roses, if you don’t mind,” she says. Thinking for a minute she adds, “I’ve heard there’s a law in Oregon that gives seventy-two hours to change your mind when you buy something big. You probably ought to go get your money, back, Kip.”

Kip sits still, looking toward the east, where the sun is already heating the day, then salutes and reaches to pull the door closed while Roma backs off, hands atop her hips. She can feel the lump in his throat as if it were in her own. The steel plate around her heart shivers, like silverware in the kitchen drawer. If she is telling herself to call him back and take up his offer, she isn’t doing it loud enough. And her new rule today is not to act on instincts anyway, since instinct doesn’t seem to differ much from impulse and habit. She doesn’t know what she wants. “Goddamn you, Kip,” she says, in response to whichever is at work. “Why did you have to pick today?.”

Back inside her apartment, the one in which she’s lived these past twelve years, ever since her mother died, prematurely grayed and whispering from throat cancer, and ever since Papa left, taking her siblings east to Ontario, Oregon, in pursuit of steady work with the Basque and the sheep and the onions, Roma relinquishes whispery epithets at Kip from her sleeping room at the end of the hallway, where green, matted carpet meets pocked hardwood floors that grow fur balls under her bed. The lived-in tobacco smell competes with the chlorine from her earlier clean-up, neither enough to blockade the diesel residue from Kip’s rig idling. He has nerve showing up like this, she thinks, imagines him quizzing whomever changed the sheets at the Rest Away this morning to find out where she lives. The stupid vaquero never stopped to think she hadn’t given the least clue about herself, much less intimate details. What did he base his wanting on? A progression of nights in some stinky motel room?

It is a forgotten habit, but Roma knows if she digs long enough, she’ll find the K-mart shoebox, which still holds its original pair of white patent leather shoes, scuffed and mashed now, with a grosgrain bow at the toe, from the year she turned eight, when she was junior bridesmaid at her aunt Consuelo’s wedding. The wedding that was Catholic in the biggest way, with candles and dialogue and crossed blessings from the priest at St. Al’s. Within the box, cordoned by the shoes, is the one dependable thing she owns, and after fidgeting through the contents of her closet bottom, she finally finds the box, and in it, alongside the little girl shoes: a stuffed cotton cheetah with its pink tongue halfway out, which had been sent up by her abuelita in Oaxaca, even more years ago than Consuelo bought the low-heeled pumps.

Lying back with the cheetah as a pillow beneath her head, Roma thinks about Kip and her new dessert, “The Next Best Thing to Hugging Robert Redford,” considering them as her options. She knows she can continue to work her evening shift, spending mornings baking, so long as she avoids the Cactus Room at night. Maybe she will get rich from snack cakes, and maybe she won’t. Either way, if what Kip says is true, buying the mobile home might not be such a far-fetched idea after all.

She also knows, in the quiet of her belly, that she isn’t serious about not marrying Kip, even though he isn’t the same as Robert Redford. And she knows she probably doesn’t have business savvy enough to pull any of this off alone, and probably isn’t necessarily serious about making him return the house to A-1. But, shifting the cheetah to the crook of her elbow, Roma savors the power building up inside herself, imagining for the moment that she is.

__________

“Hugging Robert Redford,” originally appeared in Talking River Review, Lewiston, Idaho, Spring 2002, and subsequently in the collection Summer of Government Cheese by Paula Coomer, Sandhills/Lewis-Clark, 2007; second edition by Booktrope, 2011.

Photo credit: Ramon Martinez