The Last Communion David Larsen

by David Larsen

The trickle from the crusted spigot of the faucet in the bathroom sink was more than mildly disturbing to Carol Brownfield, a woman who prided herself on her expertise on water (she was, after all, a hydrologist of some renown with the Geological Survey, a dedicated public servant who had spent her professional life studying and stewing over the dwindling supply of ground water in the southwestern sector of the United States). The slow gurgle from the spout might just be an inauspicious portent to what lie ahead in her visit to a time when she was more certain of who she was and to a place she once thought she knew and understood.

She feared that this latest undertaking might be seen by her few friends and her estranged daughter as nothing more than a last-ditch effort to search for something she had lost somewhere along the way—herself.

The disappointing drizzle of the offensive-smelling sulfurous water that hopelessly sputtered from the faucet was of the same copper tinge as the weak green tea she brewed every morning in

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the kitchen of her apartment, six hundred miles behind her, in Tucson, though, she suspected, it wasn’t nearly as pleasing to the palette.

The hot water faucet didn’t work at all. When she turned its handle, unseen skeletal pipes clanked and complained bitterly behind wallpapered walls, like a grumpy old man who’d been woken from a deep slumber, a cantankerous old coot who bristled at being disturbed. A cobra’s hiss escaped from the rusted spout. It seemed the entire circulatory system of the room was in worse shape than Carol’s own recently-stented tenuous veins and arteries within a body that was rapidly failing her. If she had one superstitious bone in her body, she might have seen it as an omen. But she was a realist, not a woman guided by impulse. Thomas Wolfe might have been right, she thought worrisomely, you really can’t go home again.

At first glance, the faded pastel towels on the ornate wrought-iron rack appeared clean, most likely laundered with a heavy-duty detergent that could blister the skin right off of an oil-field roughneck’s hairy chest, but upon closer inspection, the towels and washcloths were suspiciously stained, tampered evidence of God knows what sorts of offenses. Not only did the linen smell a little funky, but each bath towel, hand towel and washcloth was thin and intolerably threadbare.

Carol dreaded thinking about tomorrow morning’s shower. But what was she to do? There was no Holiday Inn Express or Comfort Inn for more than seventy miles. Perhaps if she allowed the water to run long enough, the rust from the pipes might play itself out—that was if the town of Dos Pesos had a reliable supply of clean water.

The tub, scratched, cracked and discolored, as if moonshiners or heavily-tattooed meth dealers or perhaps enterprising cannabis botanists, self-educated and criminally savvy, had

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occupied the room before her—for months, if not for years—was a distasteful basin she might be able to force herself to shower in, but certainly she could never convince herself to bathe in the grimy fixture. The plastic shower curtain had a healthy culture of something black and slimy inching upward from its bottom hem.

Carol pressed both hands on the surface of the bed. The springs creaked, as if they had tales to tell, which, of course, after seventy years, they did. She shuddered when she thought about what might have taken place in the valley of the sunken mattress. She cautiously pulled back the acrylic, floral-printed comforter to inspect the patched and stitched grayish—once white—sheets for any signs of bedbugs, and to look for what her roommates at the University of Arizona used to call pecker tracks.

“College,” she thought, and laughed. “How does anyone survive it? But, somehow, most of us do.” The boys’ beds that she and her friends too often found themselves waking up in on weekend mornings weren’t always pristine—far from it. She laughed when she remembered the debates in her dormitory over whether or not you could contract a venereal disease, not just from the boy himself, but also from his open-range bed. That was before safe sex. Before HIV. Before the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Carol wondered what college girls puzzle over today. Probably nothing. Today, they know so much more than she and her friends knew at eighteen. Their biggest concern seems to be what model of cellphone is most advantageous. But the clock had begun to tick backwards, old worries might become new concerns.

She could ask her daughter, two years out of Arizona State, what young women of today considered troublesome, but the girl seldom called, never came to visit either of her parents.

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Divorce takes its toll. Carol’s own family’s dissolution had been tough enough, and she was eighteen when that occurred. Her daughter had every reason to distance herself from the aftermath of decade-long fray.

It was more than the faucets, the tub, the bed, the dusty linoleum floor, the silly bedside lamp with a horseshoe painted on its plastic shade. This whole trip, everything about it, seemed out of kilter. The entire room, like everything in Carol’s life, seemed to sag, like the smile on her daughter’s face when the circus ended. Explaining to a ten-year-old that it was time to throw away the cotton candy and go home was an experience Carol was happy to have far behind her. Now, here she was herself, looking for the cotton candy she had tossed aside.

Something, something even heavier than the doctors’ soft-spoken reassurances, was dragging her into a fathomless despair, and this silly journey back into time, was in no way alleviating her funk. If anything, it was aggravating her already-severe misgivings about her life. Perhaps, looking for happier times was an enterprise doomed from the start. This sad town had nothing to offer a woman tumbling down a mountainside, with nothing to break her fall.

But, in the end, where else could she go, and where else could she stay? Dos Pesos was the best she could come up with, her hometown, or the closest thing to a hometown she had. The Sagebrush Inn, a motor-court built sometime in the late forties, about the year her late father and mother were born, was the only place for a weary traveler to stay. Dos Pesos, Texas, the town Carol had escaped so many years ago, less than a month after her graduation from high school, was all she had left to be nostalgic about.

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At least the clerk in the office, a bald, mildly portly man in his mid-sixties looked nothing like Anthony Perkins, nor was he dressed in his mother’s clothing. But, then again, Carol, at forty- seven and bone-thin, was no Janet Leigh. The attendant looked more like Alfred Hitchcock, andthat wasn’t in the least reassuring, but she was dog-tired after the eleven-hour drive from Arizona. All she needed was a night’s sleep, no matter her surroundings.

Luckily, Carol had grabbed a bite to eat at a Sonic in Ft. Stockton, a deep-fried chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke. With COVID still a concern, she avoided going inside restaurants or fast-food franchises whenever she could. Besides, in her present state, people weren’t all that eager to have to look at her.

With enough food in her stomach and a bottle of vodka in her bag there was no reason to venture around Dos Pesos tonight; tomorrow morning would be soon enough. As she’d driven through the town at dusk, even smaller and more destitute than she remembered, the silhouetted buildings, dark and deserted, seemed skeptical about Carol’s return to the place she had grown up. How would the residents of Dos Pesos feel about her return? Would anyone even remember her? Or her family? It had been nearly thirty years. One marriage, one child, one divorce ago.

Before she left her room, after her morning shower, a dismally cold affair in a foul-smelling, low-pressure flow of tainted water, Carol had to decide what to do with the seven plastic bottles of pills she had packed in her overnight bag. Medicines, all prescribed and legal—but whoever cleaned the room might think they were uppers or downers, or, for heaven’s sake, hallucinogens, and be tempted to sneak one or two pills from each container, if not for the maid herself, then for a boyfriend or husband who liked to get high...or low. Carrying them in her purse would be

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cumbersome. Leaving them in the room could be catastrophic for the thief, and, even more so, for Carol herself: she needed the pills to keep herself alive...for a little longer—her life, or what was left of it depended on the damned pills. After careful consideration, she decided to lock them in the trunk of the rental car that was parked in front of her room. It was March. The West Texas heat shouldn’t be terribly intense, not quite hot enough to damage her supply of maintenance pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Patel had told her she could travel, as long as she took all of her medication and didn’t overtax her waning body. Get plenty of rest, he advised. Don’t push it. Of course, he’d let her go. What did she have to lose? A few months? At best, a half a year. Each of her four physicians, each more somber than Pilate, was well aware of what lay ahead. As was Carol.

She half considered not taking the medications. To die on the road, like the romantics of old. But the untidiness of calling it quits in a squalid motel room in Dos Pesos, Texas didn’t really appeal to her. In a sterile hospital back in Tucson didn’t sound any better...just cleaner.

Downtown Dos Pesos was even smaller and surprisingly more depressing than Carol remembered. The brick building on the corner of State Highway 1129 and Guadalupe Street, Wilson’s Drug Store, where Carol and her friends used to drink Coca Colas and thumb through fashion and movie magazines while they giggled about the few boys in town, was now boarded up, possibly haunted. As was the Contreras Bakery in the middle of the block. Her mother had bought the cake for Carol’s seventeenth birthday there. A white cake with white-lace icing, the best cake she ever had. A pang of regret shot through her chest; she never thanked her mother.

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The Green Tree Bar was, of course, not yet open for business. Soon, a score of washed-up, most likely unemployed men in scuffed cowboy boots and faded Wranglers would show up for their first of several beers. Carol remembered how much her father detested the ne’er-do-wells that hung out in the bar. The gruff man had his faults—and issues—but lazy, he was not, a dedicated, hard-working company man to the end. That just might have been his greatest fault, the fly in the ointment that finally brought him down.

The few pickup trucks, with bristly men or pony-tailed Mexican women at the wheel, passed hurriedly through town, on their way to work in feedlots or oil fields, ranches or desperate farms. Some of them, the women, were quite possibly heading out to clean the houses of the wealthy landowners and ranchers. One of the young women might possibly be on her way to clean Carol’s room at the Sagebrush. Not much had changed, other than a shriveling up of what wasn’t much of a town to begin worth.

Carol wondered whatever happened to Letty, the girl, not that much older than Carol, who used to clean house for her family. Would she still be around? The dark-eyed, moon-faced girl would be in her mid-fifties by now. Happy, Carol hoped. She wished she’d been nicer to the housekeeper, but she was merely following her father’s lead. “Don’t get chummy with the help,” he used to tell her.

The only enterprise that looked open for business was the Good Luck Grocery, a small store Carol’s mother had shopped in, with a nagging, bratty Carol at her side. She remembered being a whiny child, what her father used to call a “pain in the ass”, up until the age of eleven. Her poor mother—her daughter and husband put the quiet, loyal woman through so much. That the store

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was still in business surprised Carol, but no supermarket chain was going to invest in Dos Pesos. The Good Luck Grocery was safe—for now at least.

Inside the store her stomach churned at the smell of coffee; she hadn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon and her stomach’s associating coffee with food was as primal as the first clenched fist. The welcoming aroma wafted through her like a late-night trance, that surreal moment between wake and sleep. A man of about her age stood behind the counter and studied the newspaper he had laid out where customers would soon set their groceries for checkout. But there were no customers. What paper? Carol wondered. There was no local paper, not that she could remember. If there was one, a story about the daughter of Thomas Crandall being back in town would be quite a scoop for someone.

An attractive young woman, long-haired and narrow-hipped, shelved cans of what looked to be peas, green beans, maybe corn, onto the wooden shelves at the back of the store. The mustached man behind the counter, a Mexican man in an apron, a clean, white butcher’s apron, looked familiar, but it couldn’t possibly be the same kind man who used to give her a free piece of candy when her frugal mother wasn’t looking. That man would be in his eighties by now.

“That coffee sure smells good,” said Carol.

“Would you like a cup?” asked the grocer. He’d looked up from his reading and grinned, an example of the small-town cordiality she’d grown up in the midst of, but failed to appreciate at the time. A touching reminder of what she was in search of, of why she was on her quest.

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“I was hoping to find someplace where I could eat breakfast.” She smiled. All of her life, she had been prideful of her winning smile—people had told her that she had one—but now, with her skin desperately hanging onto her skull, but losing its grip, and with her teeth browned and turning inward from countless radiation treatments, she knew she looked haggard, a crone at forty-six. Or was she forty-seven? She couldn’t remember.

The man shook his head. “The La Sombra Café won’t open until eleven. There aren’t enough customers for them to open for breakfast. But we’ve got coffee, and Angie, back there, brings in empanadas.” He tilted his large head toward the young girl in the back. “They’re really good. And, for you, they’ll be on the house.”

Instantly, Carol loved the man. “I’ll gladly take you up on your offer. I’m famished.” As of late, any act of kindness or generosity, any words of compassion, made her heart quiver, brought tears to her eyes, made her sniffle. Old black and white movies on TCM left her blubbering for hours.

As the grocer poured from the pot into the ceramic mug, he asked with more than a tint of an accent, “Apricot or pumpkin? The empanada? Or both? Angie’s really good at making them. They’re really good.”

Hearing the West Texas Spanish accent, with just a hint of Texas twang in the vowels, was like hearing her favorite song on the radio after years of not hearing it. She was home, back where she once felt she belonged.

“I’ll try the pumpkin,” Carol chirped. With her loose skin and the turkey wattle that had prematurely developed beneath her chin, she might as well sound like a bird; she certainly

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looked like one. “This is very nice of you, both of you.” She looked back at Angie. The girl smiled shyly. Carol paused. “I used to live in Dos Pesos, almost thirty years ago. I went to school here.”

The coffee was good. Carol sat at a small round table in the corner by the window, it reminded her of the out-of-the-way places in Europe where she and Rod, her then husband, used to enjoy sitting and sipping expressos. Back in better times. Or were they? At the time they seemed good, but within a few years everything went sour. She and Rod split. Amie, their preteen daughter, began to hate both of them. Then, eventually, Carol began to weaken and lose weight rapidly. And now, here she was, sipping coffee in Dos Pesos, rather than Paris or Barcelona.

Carol ran her fingers through her embarrassingly short hair. Reluctantly, it had begun to grow back two months ago, after the oncologist advised her that the chemo treatments weren’t getting the results that she, the doctor, had hoped for. Oddly, the new hair came in lighter, almost blond. Her old hair had been a dull shade of auburn. Yet, she knew she’d never really get to test the adage blonds have more fun. She was definitely not having much fun—or maybe she was. Good God, she thought, this coffee and this empanada are delicious, a godsend, to a drowning woman. What could possibly be better than this? The wonder of it: a friendly grocer, delicious empanadas, a quaint store with warm coffee and hardwood floors, a step back into happier times: she was having more fun as a blond—in Dos Pasos, the town she found so dreary years ago, the town that knew her secrets, but, she hoped, looked the other way. And drowning? Was she? She’d once read that the strongest swimmers are the ones who drown. She was barely treading water, but steadily going under.

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And, anyway, just what did Dr. Frazier mean when she said “We’re just not getting the results we had hoped for”? Who is this we? The doctor, a striking woman, thin, with perfect teeth and blond hair, went home at the end of the day and had a glass of moderately-priced wine with dinner, probably with a tennis-obsessed husband, and a pet of some sort, most likely a schnauzer or a poodle, while Carol went home to her empty apartment and cried through the night. Alone. What could the doctor possibly know about “we”? What could anyone know? Anyone other than a very sick woman, a generous grocery store owner and a young woman who skillfully balanced cans of peas in her hands, a gifted empanada maker.

“You said that you used to live here,” said the grocer. He startled Carol. He stood beside the table. She hadn’t noticed his approach.

“I did,” she said, wiping an unexpected tear from her cavernous cheek. “I moved here when I was seven and stayed until I went off to college in Arizona. I went to high school in Terrace Creek. They took us in a bus.”

“We have our own high school now,” said the kind man. “They don’t send the high-schoolers to Terrace Creek anymore. All of the students in Contreras County come into town for school. Do you know where Milam Park used to be? That’s where the new high school is. It’s a nice school.”

Carol shook her head; the wattle wobbled fiercely, a pendulum out of whack. “I used to swing on the swings in that park. And they had a slide, and, if I remember correctly, a merry-go-round. Not like in an amusement park. One we had to push, then jump onto and hope that we’d make it.”

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“And a teeter-totter,” added the grocer, handsomer by the moment

“I’m Carol Brownfield, formerly Carol Crandall,” she said. She offered her hand. The man hadn’t blanched at her maiden name. It had been so many years. Perhaps, Irene Clark, her therapist was right. People forget. One hundred and fifty dollars an hour for that?

“I’m Hector Gonzalez.” He took her hand, but released it quickly.

Carol glimpsed a wince of terror flash across his face. She tended to forget how frail and bony her hands had become; for the grocer it must have felt like shaking hands with the angel of death. At least he had the decency not to say anything about being able to feel every single bone in her hand.

“I was Carol Crandall when my family lived here,” she told him. “My married name is Brownfield. My father was Thomas Crandall. He worked for Mr. Dawes. He was an accountant for Dawe’s Drilling and Oil. You might have heard of the company.”

“Everyone in town knew Mr. Dawes. And I think I remember a Carol Crandall from school. I graduated in eighty-six. My wife, Irma, in eighty-eight. My father used to own this grocery store. Now it is mine.” He leaned back to get a good look at her. “Yes, I do think that I remember you. There weren’t that many kids in town.” He chuckled. “The town’s even smaller now. Are you visiting someone?”

“No, Hector, I’m staying at the Sagebrush.” Carol stopped to allow this to sink in.

“Hijole,” he said. Then gasped. “And you’re still alive? That’s no place for a woman to stay. Is your husband with you?”

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“No. He couldn’t make the trip. We live in Tucson. I just wanted to see the town I grew up in.” There was no reason, Carol decided, to tell the poor man her whole, pathetic tale of woe. He was already a witness to the obvious.

“Sheriff Reed spends half of his time arresting people at the Sagebrush.” Hector laughed. “Usually for drugs. Sometimes for being too loud. It really is no place for someone like you.”

Carol shook her head and laughed with the grocer. No, she thought, it’s no place for a woman like me. But is there a place for a woman like me? She said, “Sheriff Reed? That wouldn’t be Kyle Reed by any chance?”

“It certainly is,” exclaimed the mustached man. His face, lined by a smile that could break any woman’s heart, tore at her insides. Not that he was great looking. He wasn’t. He was just so real. A quality that had been in short supply in the men Carol had known.

“That pudgy kid is the sheriff?” She laughed so hard she snorted.

“I’ve known him all my life,” said Hector. “He’s a good man. He comes in here almost every day. Sometimes he sits right here at this table and watches out the window. I don’t know what he’s looking for. Nothing much happens in Dos Pesos.”

“I remember Kyle,” she said. “He really was a likeable boy. It’s just hard to imagine him as sheriff.”

“And Doyle Gaither is the mayor. Though I didn’t vote for him.” He shrugged. “The town is more divided between white and brown.” Again, his face pinched. He wasn’t a man who was

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comfortable stating opinions to strangers. “But Sheriff Reed is different. Nearly everybody likes him.”

Carol blushed. The first boy who ever kissed her was now the mayor. Not so unlikely when she thought about it. He was persistent. She smiled and chuckled at the scene, so many years ago, in the front seat of Doyle’s father’s Chrysler.

“I thought that I’d drive out on the highway south of town. That’s where we lived. About a mile or so out of town.”

Hector cocked his head and frowned. “I know those houses. Or, I did. The highway department decided to straighten that curve out of the old road. Ten years ago. Maybe more. They bulldozed those houses to make way for the new section of highway. They even destroyed the home of Mr. Dawes, but he had passed on by then. Nobody lived there. Those were the nicest houses in the county. They say that the Dawes’ house even had a swimming pool.”

Carol didn’t offer that her house also had a pool. “That’s too bad. We had a nice house.”

“What do you do, Mrs. Brownfield? Is it rude of me to ask?”

“No, it’s not rude. Not in the least.” She paused. “I’m a hydrologist.” Again, she stopped. “I study water and its effects on the environment. My field is mostly ground water. How water moves and disperses beneath the Earth’s surface. There’s an undercurrent few people know about.”

Carol could tell by his charmingly puzzled expression that the grocer hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. Most people didn’t. It was a dumb choice for a profession. But a vital field of

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study in the deserts of Arizona. And New Mexico. And Texas. From what she’d seen dribbling out of the pipes at the Sagebrush, her services might be needed in Dos Pesos.

Finally, she asked, “Where could I find the mayor’s office? I might stop in to see Doyle Gaither. Just for old time’s sake.”

The grocer picked up Carol’s cup and the empty plate. She’d eaten both empanadas without realizing it. “His office is next to the courthouse. He might be there. He also sells Allstate Insurance out of his business office near the Jiffy Stop south of town.”

The kindness of Hector Gonzalez released a backlog of tears from Carol’s eyes as she walked the two blocks to the office next to the courthouse. People she used to look down on, the Mexicans, the peons, as her father used to call them, had probably been the most authentic people. Her ilk: a bunch of self-congratulating snobs. She wanted to kick herself for allowing her father’s narrow opinions to influence her as much as they did. Lazy Mexicans. Superstitious Catholics. Can’t get a day’s work out of any of them. Then, as things turned out, it was her father who disgraced not only himself and his family, but the entire town.

The few people Carol passed on the streets of Dos Pesos glanced at her, stared, then quickly looked away. A leper amongst them. Good people, she suspected, but like her, they averted their eyes from what was unpleasant. Carol pressed on into the westerly winds that had begun to kick up; by late afternoon there would be a dust storm, just as there had been on spring afternoons when she was a child.

The square-jawed, sturdy man at the desk, his legs propped against the wall, looked up when Carol came through the door of the mayor’s office. No secretary. No clerks. Just the chiseled

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mayor in a Banlon shirt and Dockers. After all the years, Carol recognized something unmistakable in his smile, the same self-assuredness he had in high school. His blue eyes still glistened, even in the poorly-lit office, nothing more than a room with a desk and a telephone. If she were to see him on the street in Tucson, she would recognize him. An athlete in high school, football, baseball, track, he’d somehow managed to stay fit in his late forties. It wasn’t fair. In some ways she’d hoped that he would be a dumpy, middle-aged man, bald, with bags under beady eyes. But, for mercy’s sake, Doyle was absolutely beautiful.

Carol smiled, as best she could. “You might not remember me, but you gave me my first French kiss.”

The mayor swiveled in his chair and dropped his feet to the floor, then stood like an infantryman called to attention. His bewildered expression said it all: he didn’t recognize her. But how could he? She was her own grandmother. The Carol Crandall he knew was a bright- eyed cheerleader, a seventeen-year-old, gum-chewing girl, who unashamedly flirted with him in study hall.

“Carol Crandall,” she said pertly, “now Carol Brownfield. We dated thirty years ago.”

“It’s nice to see you,” he said hesitantly. The poor man couldn’t find his bearings. After a long moment he uttered, “Carol, from high school?”

“One and the same,” she said cheerfully. Although cheer was far from what she felt inside. For so many reasons, she felt shame. Her makeup was smeared from her tearful walk, her skin sallow from medication and inhumane medical procedures. She was a mess, and she knew it.

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Doyle remained behind his desk. She had so hoped for a hug, a handshake, any physical contact. But she couldn’t blame him for his reticence. If ever he fantasized about the old days, this was not the image he conjured. But perversely, Doyle looked even better than the young boy who often starred in her own fantasies.

“Carol, what a surprise.” He paused. “I’d heard that you were living in Arizona. That’s where you went off to go to college, wasn’t it?”

“I was living in Arizona. Now, I’m dying in Arizona. But enough about me. Tell me about yourself.” Flippancy was the tactic she’d decided on as she’d walked the two blocks through town, a few hundred yards that felt like the condemned man’s walk from the guardhouse to the gallows. She’d tried to walk them with a devil-may-care aloofness. Yet now, her carefree words sounded pathetic, almost hollow, in his nearly empty office. Each syllable ricocheted off of the bare walls like bullets in a John Wayne movie.

“You’re not well?” It was more of a statement than an inquiry.

“Doyle, do I look well?” She grinned, though wanly. “The doctors tell me I’m not long for this world.”

The handsome man looked down at his shoes, black wingtips. “Surely, they’ll find the right method of treatment. Pills? Whatever? Surgery?”

“Been there, done that,” she quipped. “Now I’ve returned to haunt you. Like the ghost of Christmas past.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll fill you in on my life, then I want to hear about yours, Mr. Mayor. For me it’s been college, then marriage, one child, a daughter, then a divorce,

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then a malignancy, then another malignancy, then another. And that’s about it. Oh, and a career with the U. S. Geological Survey. In water reclamation.”

“Geez, Carol.” He put his hands to his face. She almost laughed. Edvard Munch could have used him as a handsome model for a painting.

“Now tell me about being mayor. About your family. Are you married?”

Doyle sighed. “Married? Yes. I married Maria Ochoa. It’s been twenty-six years now. Remember how I was going to go to Texas Tech? I came back to Dos Pesos after two years and went into the insurance business. Done fairly well at it. Maria and I have two children. I got elected mayor six years ago. Up for reelection for the second time next year.” He took a deep breath. “But, Carol, how are you? Really?”

Carol laughed. “How do I look? I’ve got six months. Tops. I drink. I cry. I curse, I kick, I scream and I wallow in pity. And now I’m back in town to see what I’ve been missing out on all these years.”

Silence.

Finally, Doyle said, “I was really sorry about that business with your father. Deep down, I think he was a good man.”

Carol shook her head, hoping to control her wattle. “Doyle, the man embezzled a shitload of money from the company. He ruined the biggest business in town, then went to prison and died there. Deep down? Deep down he was a crook, and I didn’t see it. I should have. He was always

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such a bigshot. Strutting around town like he owned the place. He ruined Mr. Dawes. He was a phony.”

Doyle blinked several times, then crossed his arms across his chest. “Well,” he said, “it was a shame. And then when I heard about your mother...I felt terrible.”

“An accidental overdose. Or, so they said. I take Diazepam...it’s not that easy to overdo it.” Carol wiped away the tears on her cheek with the back of her hand. “I didn’t buy it.” She shuddered. “But I didn’t come here to feel sorry for them. I came here to feel sorry for myself. I’ve told you my wretched story. Now I want to hear more about you. Two kids?”

“A boy and a girl. Richard and Emma.” Doyle grinned, painfully. “Carol, when we dated, I always thought we’d both go off to school then come back here and get married. But you never came back. So, I married Maria. You probably don’t remember her. She was three years behind us.”

“If we would have married, you would have gotten a raw deal. I’m afraid this body came without a warranty. Spare parts are in short supply. And, you would have married into a family in disgrace.”

“You’re a geologist? What do you do? Study rocks?”

Bless his heart, thought Carol, he’s feigning interest, just for my sake. “Not at all,” she said. “My expertise, if I have one, is water. Mostly water beneath the surface of the ground. Ground water. There’s a lot going on down there. A gradual undercurrent that, in geological time, is cutting away at everything, like a buzzsaw, grinding into everything, rocks, mountains,

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continents. Taking everything to the sea so there’ll be room for whatever pops up next, more mountains, new continents. It’s all a big cycle, you know.”

“And what is that you do about it?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing to do about it.” She laughed at the concern on his still-handsome face. She shrugged. “We just keep an eye on it.”

Carol looked at him, he looked at her. There was nothing more to say. But more was said, though nothing of any consequence. She told him about Amie, how much the girl detested her parents, how the young woman relished the role of disaffected daughter of unrepentant misfits. Doyle talked more about Maria, Richard and Emma. He bored Carol when he boasted about his insurance business, but she pretended interest. They said their goodbyes, without a hug, and she strolled, her mind filled with memories, through town then back to the leper colony, the Sagebrush.

Carol had paid for two nights at the motel, but she just couldn’t do it, another night of drinking alone with nothing to look forward to but another miserable shower in the tub of doom. She packed her bags and drove north, toward I-10 and what she had always thought of as civilization, but now she wasn’t sure. It was the grocery store that had been everything she’d hoped for, Hector and Angie. Then, of course, Doyle was Doyle, better than his father—he couldn’t possibly have been worse—but still rather smug in his mediocrity. Mr. Mayor. Of Dos Pesos, Texas. And that was that. The only positive change she’d seen in town was that her old beau, the son of the biggest redneck in town, Rayford Gaither, a bigger hater than her own father,

21.

was now happily married to a woman named Maria Ochoa, someone Carol had pretended to remember. That was the only hint of any semblance of absolution that she witnessed in her twenty-four hours in Dos Pesos. And she hadn’t seen that one coming. The only memory she’d carry home with her other than her cleansing and healing in the grocery store was how proud Doyle seemed to be with his life.

On the interstate Carol drove west into a bruised sunset, purple with orange clouds scattered in the darkening sky. She intended to drive straight through, into the darkness of the desert night. She thought she might stop at the Sonic in Ft. Stockton. All she’d eaten were two empanadas, delicious pastries; it would the last time she would get the opportunity to take communion. And the eucharistic minister, a grocer in white, had actually held her hand, though briefly.

Her favorite professor in graduate school, Dr. Simpson, a downright peculiar man who wore the same tan suit, day after day, used to quote Heraclitus with a sly smile on his ragged face, “No man ever steps in the same river twice”. The bearded old man knew what he was talking about. What it had to do with hydrology, she was never quite sure.

The End

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David Larsen is a musician and writer who lives in El Paso, Texas. His stories have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines.