Franco knew the horn. It had once been his. He crossed to the front of the second-story apartment and looked down from the bay window. He saw rust spots on the Chevy’s roof. They were no longer his concern. Giving it only the briefest of breaks, Connie still leaned on the horn.
He went to the door to take the stairs down to her.
Mary was at the door. It was not quite five. He was just home from work. Normally her mother would bring her at seven or eight, and he’d have had time to call her and discuss the weekend’s plans and what to wear and to bring. Now she wore pajama bottoms. Flannel balloons in red, blue, and yellow ascended her legs. In one arm she held Jacques, her turtle, its green plush growing patchy, its stuffing uneven; in the other, a knapsack covered in scrawls resembling those on the neighborhood’s fences.
“What does your mother want?” Franco asked.
“She wants to tell you I’m a problem,” said Mary.
“What kind of problem?” Franco asked.
“That’s between you,” Mary said and pushed past him, the short brush of her brown hair almost flicking his nose.
“I’ll be right back,” Franco said. “I’ll go talk to her.”
But the horn had stilled. He closed the door and returned to the window. Mr. Cataldo from across the street stood by the driver’s side window of the Chevy and waved arms. Cars and then a bus swerved around him. Franco heard Connie’s voice but not what she said, just that she shouted. Then the car sped off, leaving Mr. Cataldo alone mid-street. Franco heard tires squeal at the corner.
Moments later a text came as Franco entered the kitchen, where Mary filled a teakettle at the sink.
“Does your mother always text when she’s driving?” he said to Mary.
“Again, between you and her,” Mary said.
He read the text.
Ignoring the typos, he then read it aloud. “She’s all yours,” he read. “I’ve had enough.” Mary’s green eyes had not met his eyes since he had opened the door to them and did not now. “Does she mean it?” he asked.
As answer he received only a shrug from the fine-boned shoulders in the fading black V-necked T-shirt.
Franco restrained his questions. The weekend had time for them. Just now he wanted to let Mary finish making her tea and bring the knapsack and the mangy turtle to her room. He had rented – at real expense in San Francisco – a larger apartment than he needed for himself so that he would have a small room just for Mary on her weekends with him. Only a twin bed in plain metal frame, a small white dresser he’d found at a garage sale, and a short stool that served as nightstand furnished the room. She did homework at the kitchen table. She kept nothing in the dresser; rent left things tight for him to provide her a parallel wardrobe, and so he’d counted on her to bring what she needed from her mother’s. She left only a toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet.
“When you’re done with tea,” Franco said, “throw some pants on and let’s go get dinner.”
“These are the only pants I have with me,” said Mary, with dip of her head toward the flannel balloons trailing their serpentine cords.
Franco’s mouth hung open an instant.
“Seems there was some hurry,” the girl said, “and no time to let me pack. I grabbed and ran. Which is what was required.”
“Then let’s go back and get you some,” Franco said.
“How does this seem like a good idea?” said Mary.
Franco conceded her point to himself. “Pizza, then?” he said.
“You could cook,” Mary said.
“You know better. That’d make me guilty of child abuse,” said Franco.
“Then pizza,” said Mary.
She went with tea, turtle, and knapsack to the room and did not emerge while he called in the order and set the table with plates and paper napkins and a can of beer for himself and of Mug Old-Fashioned Root Beer, her favorite, for her. The doorbell rang and he went to the street and tipped the delivery man in cash and brought the box back up and set it mid-table. The pizza was ham and pineapple, to which he like anyone in his family of his generation or earlier objected. Mary preferred it, though, and it did not seem a moment to impose tradition.
He knocked on her door. She came out and went without a word to the table. Without a word, she opened the box and served herself.
He did the same.
Hoping eating would hold her to the table, he waited for her to take two bites and sip her soda before attempting his questions. He began, “Is it about a boy?”
Her mother’s eyes, Connie’s, Consuelo’s eyes, pale green tinged and flecked sometimes with gold, had something marine in them, like kelp pierced irregularly by sunlight. Mary had them. She turned them now, at last, to his. The eyes on him, he felt his loss of Connie’s brilliance and of the bells of her laughter, which he had once expected – had long after expectation had proven absurd so hoped – would sound for him until his breath no longer stirred air. The gaze froze him.
“Could you be more wrong?” said Mary. Her voice at least was not Connie’s. This drew him back, if painfully, to fatherhood.
“A girl, then?” he said.
Her laughter, too, thank God, was not Connie’s.
Unlike him, Connie had never smoked. He had heeded her protests and quit. In the end, this had done nothing for him in her green eyes. “Smoking?” he asked.
“No. Here, smell,” Mary said, and half stood to lean her brown hair across the table toward him.
“That’s okay, I get the point,” he said. She sat back down. He waited this time until she had demonstrated by taking a second slice an intent to stay at the table. He sipped the beer. “I have to ask, because I love you, and maybe it’s something we have to work through,” he said, and then, with no interrogative rise, “Drugs.”
She wiped her fingers on the napkin. Opening her eyes wide, she pulled down the lower lids with index fingers. Franco assumed she was demonstrating that her pupils were no wider than the weakness of light at the table demanded. As evidence, Franco thought, this was nothing; as statement, it sufficed. He nodded.
“School,” he said, again without the upturn of question.
“They think I’m something there,” Mary said. Franco had long wondered where the cherry lips had come from, not from Connie’s long and ample lips, not from his, narrower but broad in movement; from somewhere back generations, Italian side or Salvadoran side. Somehow now, first time he’d seen it, one corner of the lips found a way to curl up. She said, “What do you think I am?”
He knew that the movement of his own lips now, their opening, their irregular quiver, showed her that he was stymied. To say anything was to go wrong; to be silent, to go at least as wrong. “Well, what is it, then?” he said at last.
She seemed not upset but amused that he hadn’t answered her; the little curl now appeared at both ends of the cherry lips. “Again,” she said, “that’s between you.”
Franco said, “That can’t really be the case, since you’re the subject.”
Mary shrugged. She said, “Maybe it’s just that I’m part you.”
Franco was stymied again, this time painfully.
“Nothing I can do about that,” Mary said.
“Yes, I’m aware,” said Franco.
They ate in silence. At the end of his second slice Franco brought himself to say, “I was planning for us to take a hike tomorrow, Point Reyes, nothing long or hardcore, dinner maybe after in Point Reyes Station. But you’d need pants for this first thing in the morning. Do you have a friend who wears your size, who we could borrow them from?”
The green eyes were back on him. They narrowed a few moments. He felt those moments in his spine; it tugged his head back. He could not bring the head forward again until the cherry lips, not Connie’s, said, “Blanca, maybe.”
“Would you call her to see if we can come by?” Franco asked.
“Let me finish my dinner,” Mary said.
“Of course,” Franco said and was glad to let her turn the eyes from him and back tableward and to listen awhile to nothing but the faint scrape of crust across cornmeal and plate, and mastication and swallowing, and the hiss and growl of the city outside.
As he put leftover pizza in the refrigerator, she made the call.
“Blanca says come by,” she said.
It was a block and a half to the closest spot he’d found to park the car; rent for the apartment had left also not enough for a garage. Besides, Franco had a better use for any extra money. He bent conduit and stitched it into walls with the best of them, and the electrical contractor that employed him was happy to give him all the weekday overtime that was available. When there was enough, he took Mary someplace nice, if casual, for dinner on the weekends, when the settlement said she was his. That had been his plan for Point Reyes Station and Saturday.
Wind harried the summer fog along the street between the apartment and the car. Mary had excavated a pullover from deep in the knapsack and wore it now, but the pajama bottoms snapped back and forth in the hard eddies of the wind as she and Franco walked between buildings of different heights and shapes, and though she crossed her arms Franco knew she must feel the cold more in her legs. The tugging of the balloons on the pajama legs one way then another wanted, he thought, to remind him of something. To his dismay, he couldn’t recall what.
The car was an older Ford Bronco he’d bought used, in good mechanical shape but with rust spots in the Toreador Red bigger than his big hands, when he’d surrendered the family Chevy to Connie. The first day he’d driven it to work an apprentice had said, “Not a date car.” The apprentice had been right, the car signified a surrender of certain hopes; but Franco had said to him, “Apprentices are to be seen, not heard.”
Blanca’s was about fifteen minutes away, on one of the quiet streets tucked between Mission and Alemany toward the Daly City line. Franco parked blocking the driveway. The fog was darkening now above the streetlights, which illuminated its near swirls and rendered them ghostly. Mary stepped out into the cool and mounted the terrazzo stair to the front door of the house, its pastel stucco graying now like the others up and down the block. Her hips in their windy pandemonium of balloons, Franco saw, had started toward the curves of Connie’s. He felt in himself swirls like the spectral fog’s, pride in his daughter becoming a woman, fear for what awaited her in this, sorrow that he and Connie had made a wreck of what should have been her shelter and sustenance.
The door opened quickly to her, and she was inside.
The Bronco had only a radio. He found a station playing older rock-and-roll. He sang with the first song, bobbed his head and drummed on the steering wheel to the second, sang with the third.
By the end of the seventh the door at the top of the stairs had not reopened.
He took out his phone and texted Mary, just “?”.
A train whistle sounded from the passenger seat.
Switching on the dome light, he saw Mary’s phone.
He took the stairs two at a time, but paused at the top to still himself, to let the anger he knew was in his face drain from it, to become less frightening, and only then rang the doorbell.
A plump woman of maybe forty in gray sweatpants and sweatshirt, her hair dyed not quite to blond from the brown still in her questioning eyebrows, opened the door and stood in his path. Past her right shoulder and down a long hallway, family photos covered the wall, generations of them, of dark-skinned farmers and farm workers in sepia, of uniformed soldiers and sailors, of women in dresses through a history of style, of baptisms, First Communions, quinceañeras, graduations, weddings.
“So sorry to bother you,” Franco said, it seemed to himself too unctuously. “My daughter Mary is here. I’m here to get her.”
A small man, black-mustached, in white athletic undershirt, his dark and thinning hair tousled, appeared at a door to the woman’s left and back, behind him the flickering glow of a television. A boy of maybe ten, slender, his thicker dark hair also tousled, barefoot in T-shirt and jeans, came up beside him.
“Mateo, get your sister and her friend,” the woman said.
The boy went down the hall and turned through a door.
Franco waited for what seemed more than five minutes. He found nothing to offer in conversation. The woman said nothing. The man continued to stand in the door, the dim flicker still behind him. The woman began to shiver in the damp chill of the thickening night but did not ask Franco in so she could close the door.
Mary and another girl and the boy Mateo came into the hallway by the door through which he’d disappeared. They came toward Franco, the boy veering off and returning to stand by the man.
Mary still wore the pajama bottoms. Her hands held nothing.
“The pants?” Franco said.
“Pants?” said the other girl, shorter than Mary, a grin spreading her round brown cheeks, her dark eyebrows arched above dark eyes.
“I’ll tell you another time,” Mary said.
“Thank you very much, ma’am, sir, real sorry to have bothered you. Mary?” said Franco. He extended an arm toward the stairs. He waited for her to walk past him before he started down.
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
“Good night,” and the door closed on the house and its warmth and warm light.
Franco waited until they were driving to attempt to speak. “What were you…. I want to know…. Can you even….”
“It’s different there,” Mary said in a voice flat and simple. “I liked it.”
Franco abandoned his attempt.
*
In the morning he knocked on her door, and when she emerged made blueberry pancakes for her from the batter he’d already prepared and served them with maple syrup he’d been warming. She liked blueberry pancakes with maple syrup as much as pizza with ham and pineapple. It had come to him that making them for her this morning might seem to her a pathetic attempt … to keep? to regain? … to buy her affection. The one alternative that he had imagined – telling her to get her own breakfast, she knew where things were – had seemed to him worse.
As he returned to the stove to cook his own pancakes, he glanced at her and so at the pajama pants and their balloons. One in particular, red, seemed to tug at a cord caught beneath her thigh.
He remembered what had eluded him the night before. He turned to his daughter.
“When I was a boy,” he said, as much to himself as to her, “I saw a movie on television, short one, set in France, I think; yeah, in Paris. A boy frees a red balloon caught on a lamp pole. Balloon’s alive. They become friends. One day, bullies chase them, and they kill the balloon with sharp stones. Balloons from all over come to the boy and his dead balloon and they pick him up and carry him off over rooftops, into the sky.”
Mary stopped eating. Her head dropped.
“Mary,” he said to her.
“Nothing,” she said, “is going to carry us away from this.”
Franco found this inarguable.
He turned to the stove. He cooked a pancake, another. Pouring batter for a third, he heard, “Can you find that movie online?”
“I … I think I can,” he said.
“If you can, let’s watch it tonight,” said the voice, not quite yet a woman’s, no longer quite a girl’s.
He pictured, he felt a thousand strings tug at him. They might, he thought, they just might lift him up.