SHE WALKED AHEAD of me into the kitchen and took a pitcher of lemonade from the icebox. The kitchen was glossy and clean, the walls painted yellow and white. She put ice in two glasses and filled them up and slipped a sprig of mint in each and set them on paper napkins. “That’s my father in the backyard,” she said. “He’s a pipeline contractor.”
A muscular man wearing strap overalls without a shirt was working on the truck parked under the pecan tree. His skin was dark with tan, the gold curlicues of hair on his shoulders shiny with sweat, his profile cut out of tin.
“He looks like Alexander the Great. I mean the image on the coin,” I said.
“That’s a funny thing to say.”
“History is my favorite subject. I read all of it I can. My father does, too. He’s a natural-gas engineer.”
I waited for her to say something. She didn’t. Then I realized I had just told her my father was educated and her father probably was not. “What I mean is he works in the oil business, too.”
“Are you always this nervous?”
We were sitting at the table now, an electric fan oscillating on the counter. “I have a way of making words come out the wrong way. I was going to tell you how my father ended up in the oil patch, but I get to running on.”
“Go ahead and tell me.”
“He was a sugar chemist in Cuba. He quit after an incident on a ferryboat that sailed from New Orleans to Havana. Then he went to work on the pipeline and got caught by the Depression and never got to do the thing he wanted, which was to be a writer.”
“Why would he quit his job as a chemist because of something that happened on a passenger boat?”
“He was in World War One. The German artillery was knocking their trench to pieces. The German commander came out under a white flag and asked my father’s captain to surrender. He said the wounded would be taken care of and the others would be treated well. The captain refused the offer. A German biplane wagged its wings over the lines to show it was on a peaceful mission, and threw leaflets all over the wire and the trench, but the captain still wouldn’t surrender. The Germans had moved some cannons up on tra
in cars. When they cut loose, they killed half my father’s unit in thirty minutes.
“Ten years later, he was on the ferry headed to Havana when he saw his ex–commanding officer on the deck. My father insisted they have a drink together, mostly because he wanted a chance to forgive and forget. That night his ex–commanding officer jumped off the rail. My father always blamed himself.”
“That’s a sad story.”
“Most true stories are.”
“You should be a writer yourself.”
“Why?”
“Because I think you’re a nice boy.”
“Somehow those statements don’t fit together,” I said.
“Maybe they’re not supposed to.” She smiled, then took a breath, the light in her eyes changing. “You need to be more careful.”
“Because I came up to the Heights?”
“I’m talking about Grady and his friends.”
“I think Grady Harrelson is a fraud.”
“Grady has a dark side. There’s nothing fraudulent about it. The same with his friends. Don’t underestimate them.”
“I’m not afraid of them.”
She jiggled her sprig of mint up and down in the ice. “Caution and fear aren’t the same thing.”
“Maybe I’ve got things wrong with me that nobody knows about. Those guys might get a surprise.”
“Number one, I don’t believe you. Number two, it’s not normal to brag about your character defects.”
“Sometimes I believe I have two or three people living inside me. One of them has a horn like Harpo Marx.”