The World in Half (10 page)

A minute later we were at the counter to pay. My mother slapped down her book and started unzipping her purse for her wallet. I watched as the cashier flipped through the book’s pages—a routine inspection—and stopped at the puzzle my mother had half filled. I swallowed. The cashier—she was young, maybe in high school—slid the open book to the lip of the counter. Her fingernails were short and bitten.

“Did you know this one’s damaged?” she asked.

Still dealing with her purse, my mother said, without looking up, “It’s not damaged. I did that.”

“You wrote in it?”

She cocked her head at the cashier. “I did. But now I’m buying it.”

“I don’t think it works like that. I think you’re supposed to buy it first.”

My mother said nothing.

“Seriously. Because what if you had decided not to buy it?”

“Well, then you would have a book with one half-filled puzzle in it on your shelf.”

The cashier narrowed her eyes.

“We were always planning on buying it,” I said.

The bearded man behind us craned his neck to see what the commotion was about. I turned my body to block his view.

“I think I should call a manager,” the girl said, and took a step back, casting her eyes down the long galley behind the counter.

“You’re not going to let me buy it?” my mother said. “I thought that’s what you wanted. And now here I am, ready to do just that.” She pinched her lips and stared squint-eyed and unblinking at the girl.

I bit the inside of my lip and waited to see how things would play out. Finally, the cashier sighed and rang us up, although she didn’t say another word to us for the remainder of the transaction.

Sure, it was a bit ridiculous, but this was my mother: audacious and gruff and stubborn as steel, doing what was needed to get by in life and dispensing with anything she deemed frivolous. But she was capricious, too, so it was never patently obvious what qualified as necessity and what qualified as frivolity. She was not what anyone would describe as a warm person. She was not only short with cashiers, but with telemarketers, hovering salespeople, bad drivers, and slow pedestrians. Basically, anyone who got in her way. Over the years she had worked as a delivery driver for a pizza restaurant (until she could find something better), a waitress at The Cheesecake Factory (a second job for a brief stint), a receptionist for the Economics Department at Northwestern, a receptionist at a dental practice, and most recently a receptionist at a small law firm in Wilmette. She almost never made more money than she spent. She’d paid rent on the same house for almost two decades. She had $1,236.51 in the bank. She’d once said that if she could have done anything with her life, she would have been an actress. But as she saw it, she couldn’t do anything with her life but muddle through it, one day after another, attaching the end of one to the start of the next so that the chain kept extending, until from a distance it was one seamless and winding line that looked like a life. My mother had brown eyes with flecks of gold in them and fine brown hair that she tried her best to plump up with a hair dryer every morning. She wore tastefully brown-hued makeup, except for a phase in the early nineties when she experimented with amethyst. She had freckles that marched across her slender shoulders and over the bridge of her nose. She talked in her sleep. She sang in the shower. She watched public television and prime-time game shows. She liked dressing up and didn’t understand the philosophy behind dressing as though you didn’t care to impress, dressing with nonchalance—in other words, my philosophy. But she didn’t let that inclination interfere with the fact that she was extremely budget-conscious. She trolled for overlooked gems at consignment stores, and once a year she flipped through the whisper-thin pages of the giant JCPenney catalogue for something to splurge on. She cooked meals for us at home, convinced that, as a mother, cooking was one of the obligatory tasks within her purview. Seldom did it seem as though she enjoyed it. She relied on frozen waffles and casseroles and BLTs, which were her favorite. She was stern with rules and discipline. She didn’t believe in treating children like children, so she always spoke to me like an adult. She expected me to entertain myself. She had her soft moments, those times when she was tender and bruised—they’re inescapable in this life—but mostly she was a plank of wood, braced and erect, weathering anything and everything. She puffed her chest out to the world and walked through it without taking a breath.

 

 

 

I ride a bus
back to the hotel.

As soon as I step off, Hernán advances toward me, waving his arms. “What happened to the taxi?” He looks concerned.

“The bus was fine,” I say. Danilo had made taking the bus sound like a challenge, and I thought that if I could do it, I would have accomplished at least something today. I really needed to feel like I accomplished something.

Danilo’s painter’s bucket is on the sidewalk by the wall.

When Hernán sees me looking at it, he says, “I don’t know where he is. I didn’t even see him until this afternoon. He was probably sleeping until then. He is not so good with responsibility.” He eyes me pointedly.

“It’s okay,” I say.

“I cannot believe you took the bus!” Hernán tuts. “You aren’t worried about getting lost?”

I’m wearing my new straw hat. The brim ripples gently in the breeze. In my life, I tend to worry a lot about getting lost. I like maps because they make it seem possible for every pathway to be laid out, every direction to be marked. But as I stand on a street in the middle of a place I don’t know, it occurs to me that this whole trip was about wanting to get lost, about wanting to lose myself.

Loose pouches hang under Hernán’s eyes, and sweat glistens where his hat meets his forehead, as he stares at me, waiting for an answer.

“No,” I say. “I’m not worried.”

 

 

 

I can’t sleep that night.
Shortly after midnight, I prop up the spongy hotel pillow and crawl to the foot of the bed, leaning out across the chasm between it and the dresser to turn on the television. The only thing on any channel is what appears to be a Panamanian version of
America’s Funniest Home Videos.
A woman trips and falls facefirst into her wedding cake. A parakeet plucks the toupee off a man’s head. A toddler buries his face in half a coconut, then stumbles around with it suctioned to him before he runs into a wall.

I grab my phone. When Beth answers, she’s shouting. “Hello? Who is this?”

“It’s Mira. Where are you?”

“Mira! Hi! It’s Beth.”

“I know.
I
called
you.
”

“We’re at Jimmy’s.” Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap is a local Hyde Park dive, filled with smoke and beer advertisements on the wall and a live jazz band on Sunday nights. It’s depressing to think of her there without me. “How are you?”

“I’m okay. Actually, I’m having kind of a crappy day.”

“What’s that?” she yells.

“Can you hear me?”

“Is the connection bad again?”

“I don’t know. You’re shouting and I can hear the music in the background. Do you want to just call me later?”

“What? Hold on.” Outside my window, the sky is a deep plum color. “Are you still there? I want to talk to you but I can’t hear anything. Actually, do you want me to go outside?”

“It’s okay. Just call me later.”

As soon as I fold the phone and put it on the nightstand, the room feels quieter than before I called her. I wait for it to pass, for the air to recalibrate, but the silence only deepens until I feel as if I’m drowning in it.

 

 

 

I see Danilo right away,
in one corner of the hotel bar. Two wiry men sit in the opposite corner smoking cigars and laughing, the air around them a fog. Danilo is playing cards with someone.

“Hey,” I say, walking toward him with all the nerve I can muster.

He smiles and scoots back one of the empty chairs at the table with his foot.

“Have a seat,” he says. “This is Nardo.”

Nardo, wearing a crisp blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, doesn’t take his eyes off his cards, which he guards in a tight fan held close to his face, the tops of them nearly brushing his nose.

Danilo kicks him under the table. “
Oye,
be polite, man. You could look at the girl at least.”

Nardo casts his eyes sidelong, stealing one quick look at me, before focusing again on his cards.

“It’s late. What are you doing down here?” Danilo asks. There’s a glint in his eyes, as if he wants me to admit that I came down to find him.

“I just wanted to get out of my room. I couldn’t sleep.”

“You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

“What do you want?”

“What are you drinking?”

In front of him is some sort of mixed drink, the glass nearly full, the ice melted into thin wafers that float on the surface like lily pads.

“
Seco
and Fresca.”

“What’s
seco
?”

“What’s
seco
? Nardo! Did you hear that? What’s
seco
?” Nardo huffs, but keeps his eyes on his cards. “It’s authentic Panamanian shit, Miraflores,” Danilo goes on. “Best liquor available anywhere on earth. For sure better than anything you can get in your country.”

“But what is it?”

“Sugarcane alcohol.” He raises the drink to his mouth and takes a sip, the lily pads swarming in toward his lips as he tilts the glass. When he puts it down, he has a goofy look on his face like he’s a little drunk. He yells across the room to the bartender. “Give me two more of these!” Then he picks up his cards, sliding them into view one by one with his thumb. “Nardo, are you going to put something down or what?”

Nardo squints at his cards and after several seconds lays one on the table, letting it snap past his fingertips.

Danilo cackles. “That’s the best you can do? Jesus Christ. I don’t know why I keep playing with you. I need someone who’s a real challenge, you know.” He shakes his head and lays down two cards. “Sorry, my man.”

Nardo throws his hand down in disgust, the slick cards sliding on the tabletop like brittle leaves skating across a plate of ice. “Fuck.” He stands, knocking over his chair as he does, and walks to the bar without bothering to right it. Danilo collects the cards with a smug expression on his face.

“What were you playing?” I ask.

“Rummy. You know how to play it?”

“I know pinochle. And Go Fish. And War.”

“Someday I’ll teach you this.”

The bartender delivers my drink and I sip it, feeling the cool liquid run and burn down my throat.

“You like it?” Danilo asks, shuffling the cards.

If I drink at home, it’s usually something more like a hard lemonade, even though Juliette always makes fun of me for drinking something so wimpy. “It’s good,” I say.

He nods, and for a second it seems we’ve run out of things to talk about. I take some more sips in silence and then, sensing that it might be best to retreat to my room, ask him how much I owe for the drink.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Why? You’re buying?”

“One time only. Enjoy it while you can.”

“Thanks.” I scratch my neck and scoot back from the table.

“Where are you going?”

“To my room.”

“Where you don’t want to be anymore?”

“I just needed a break from it for a few minutes.”

“You missed a nice day today. I mean the weather. If you had gone out, you might have thought it was too hot, but for me, it was very nice. The kind of weather that makes people want to buy flowers. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea why.”

“What makes you think I didn’t go out today?”

“Did you?” He smiles teasingly.

“Yes.” I drag the chair and myself back up to the table. Nardo is smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer at the bar. He’s standing sideways against it, his elbow on the counter, two fingers circling the neck of the beer bottle. I can smell the smoke mingling with the scent of cigars from the men in the corner.

“And where did you go?”

“I went to Avenida Central and to the address I had.”

“The address?” Danilo lets his head go wobbly for a moment, as if it’s too heavy for his neck, before regaining his composure. “Your father’s house?”

“Yes.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“And?”

“It isn’t his house. There was only an old woman who didn’t know him.”

“He doesn’t live there anymore?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But you went there?”

“I did.”

“To Santa Ana?”

“Yep.”

“I hope you didn’t wander into Chorrillo, though.”

“I don’t think I did.”

“You would know.”

He looks impressed. There’s a strange satisfaction in knowing that I’ve surprised him just now and, even more, that I have the ability to.

“So why are you here so late?” I ask.

“Nardo, come on,” Danilo yells toward the bar. “Another game. I didn’t mean it, man. I love beating your ass.”

Nardo holds his hand over his shoulder and gives Danilo the finger.

“What did you say?” Danilo asks, turning back to me before shuffling the deck, the cards spraying like a fountain.

“Why are you here so late?”

“Eh, waiting for Hernán to get off his shift. He doesn’t like to walk home alone, so I usually wait for him even on his late nights. He thinks someone is going to rob him. For what, I don’t know. He doesn’t have anything worth taking. But that’s what he thinks. What time is it, anyway?”

I check my watch. “Almost one.”

Danilo takes a gulp of his drink before pushing it to the center of the table. He shoves the deck of cards into his back pants pocket. “Old man should be done by now,” he says, standing. Then he extends his hand. “I’m glad you went out today,” he says. “You can’t be scared of your own life, you know. That might be the worst thing.”