The Realm of Hungry Spirits by Lorraine López

Author:Lorraine López [LóPEZ, LORRAINE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC044000
ISBN: 9781609418687
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2011-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The drive to Carlos’s place goes smoothly, a pleasant contrast to that crazy trip navigated by Connie, on account of his sensible directions. Of course, when Carlos comments on how well I drive, I immediately yank a sharp right and roll over the curb, spooking a nearby homeless man in a wheelchair, who drops his begging sign to give me the finger. After that, I focus strictly on keeping all tires flat on the street and shut my ears to anything but where to go. All the while, I’m fretting about the “seeing his sketches” euphemism, my nervous joke, and remembering the disaster that was my one interlude—not counting last Sunday’s transgression with Rudy himself, of course—in the whole five months since the Valentine’s breakup.

Apparently, when word got out at school that I was no longer “involved,” likely thanks to my loudmouth friend Pancha, the school counselor, I started getting visitations in my classroom by the woodshop teacher, Stuart Lindner. Stuart’s this tall, lanky white guy who is not merely Caucasian, but literally white, from his blindingly new-looking gym shoes to his faded khakis to his bleached polo shirt to his papery, nearly translucent skin and to the top of his dandelion puff of silvery hair. At the start of recess and lunch and right after the final bell, he’d just materialize at my threshold, all glowing and ghostly against the backdrop of my dusty and disarrayed classroom. I had to wonder how he managed this, since the woodshop was by no means close to my bungalow. He had to have been letting his kids out early because he never seemed out of breath; instead he was calm and relaxed, luminous as a ghost, when he drifted through the door with some contrived reason or another for having to see me.

Despite the silvery hair, Stuart is probably just in his forties, married, but separated from his wife, who—from what I could gather—is a real estate agent, a smoker with a bad shopping habit. It turned out he had lots of regrets about marrying her, and he filled journals with these. He showed me one once. That leather-bound thing was heavy, filled with this tight, cramped script practically gouged into the pages, he bore down so hard on the pen. I ran my fingertips over the engraved print, slapped the thing shut, and thrust it back to him, saying, “Wow! That sure is something.”

One thing led to another, and we both turned up at Pancha’s misbegotten “wedding shower,” which she held at the Wildlife Way Station up near Simi Valley. Instead of allowing guests, simply and conveniently, to trot over to Macy’s to buy crystal pickle dishes or silver serving spoons, Pancha commanded us to volunteer our time at the Way Station for the afternoon. I was—let’s face it—lonely and bored, having a pretty dull time “cleaning” the woods that comprised the Way Station’s grounds. I mean, apart from removing litter, of which there was none, how does one tidy nature? Those of us who showed up had little idea what Pancha expected.

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