# Chapter 2 – Rachel Moreno

Out in the parking lot Rachel pulled off her cardigan. She couldn't stand it on her one second longer, not with the asphalt throwing heat up at her like an open oven. Brent held the door open until she was in, and when it thumped shut the air in the cab was so hot it stung her nose. The seat burned through the fabric of her skirt. Rachel sat in the middle of the back seat between Caleb and Josh, knees against the center console, the cardigan folded in her lap over her left wrist. The pickup was Brent's, and so was the AC button, and he turned it on when he decided it was hot enough, which he rarely did in the first few minutes.

"That," Brent said, backing out with one hand on Mom's headrest, "was the best he's done in a long time."

Mom agreed. She had her sunglasses on and her face turned to the side window, and in the little pauses Brent left for her she said *yes*, and *really*, and *I thought so too*. He talked about the sound, how you could hear every word now all the way in the back. He didn't need to say that it was his money you were hearing. Caleb poked Josh in the ribs and Josh poked back, carefully, with his eyes on the rearview mirror.

A few rows over, the Petersens were standing by their car. Kayla was sitting on the hood, and Doug said something that made her throw her head back and laugh so loud Rachel could hear it through the window. Linda swatted him on the arm. Rachel watched them until the pickup turned onto Foothill Boulevard and a row of palm trees hid them.

She had made up her mind to ask the pastor during the sermon, when he lowered his voice and turned toward the fourth row. Not that she had ever thought he would help her. She wanted to see what he would do. If there was one single adult in that building who would stop and wonder why a seventeen-year-old was asking something like that, she wanted to know. At the door he had smelled of aftershave and sweat, and his collar had gone dark where the shirt had soaked through under the jacket. His hair was combed back and held with something that shone, and he smiled at her with the same smile he had given Margaret Olsen and Brent. He hadn't wondered. He had answered right away, as if he'd had the answer ready in his pocket: *Then he carries them.* Only then had she pulled up her sleeve, just an inch or two, enough that it showed from where he stood and from nowhere else. She had seen him look. His eyes had caught on it. Then he had let her go.

The words stayed with her while Brent took Sierra Avenue, and she kept turning them over. If God carried the ones who couldn't handle it, then there was only one way to get carried. The thought was calm and practical, and it scared her less than it should have.

At the red light Brent turned on the AC. The cold air blew straight into her face, and Caleb groaned out loud with relief before he could stop himself.

---

Ten minutes later Brent turned into the cul-de-sac in north Fontana. The house was a two-story in sand-colored stucco, too big for its lot, pressed up against the neighbors' fences on both sides. The lawn out front was the greenest on the street. Brent watered it in the evenings even though the city had banned it back in July, and the one time a neighbor had said something about it, Brent had laughed and offered him a beer. The neighbor hadn't brought it up again.

Mom had put the pot roast in before they left, and when they came inside the whole downstairs smelled of fried onions and broth. They ate Sunday dinner in the dining room, on the white plates with the thin blue rim that Mom had gotten from Grandma in Bakersfield. There had been twelve to begin with. Now there were eight left, and Rachel set out five of them without having to think.

Brent said grace. He thanked God for the food, for the sermon and Pastor Toomey, and for giving him a family to take care of and a house to take care of it in. Rachel peeked through her lashes and saw Josh doing the same across the table. They were waiting for the same thing. Most Sundays you could tell Brent's mood from how he said amen, whether he dragged it out or let it drop, and today he let it drop. Josh's shoulders came down.

Brent always cut his meat into small pieces before he started eating.

"What were you talking to the pastor about, anyway?"

He asked without looking up. Mom stopped cutting her potato.

"I asked about the sermon. The part about trials."

"Oh yeah?" Brent chewed. "He's busy on Sundays. You don't need to stand there holding him up."

"I know."

"Keep that in mind."

Josh reached for the bread basket, and his elbow caught the milk glass. It tipped over, and the milk ran in a white tongue across the tablecloth toward Brent's plate. The room rearranged itself in a second. Mom went completely still with her fork in the air, Caleb pulled his shoulders up to his ears, and Josh went so pale his freckles stood out like specks of sand.

Rachel beat Josh to it. "Sorry. That was me. I bumped him."

Brent looked at her. He had on the same face he wore in church during the sermon, a furrowed brow and a seriousness that could mean anything. The milk reached the edge of the tablecloth and started dripping onto the floor.

Finally he set down his knife and fork and wiped his mouth with his napkin.

"Clean it up."

That was all. Rachel got paper towels from the kitchen, and the rest of them finished the meal in silence while Brent told Mom about a client at work who wouldn't pay his invoices. When he went off to the TV afterward, the house breathed out, though only a little, because you never knew how long it would last.

Rachel dried while Mom washed. The kitchen faced the street, and the window over the sink was open a few inches. The AC was off again, because Brent thought the electric bill had gotten too high in August. Next to the stove, at the height of Rachel's shoulder, there was a spot on the wall the size of a hand where the drywall had been patched and painted over in a white that was a shade whiter than the rest. Rachel had stopped seeing it a long time ago, even though you could see it from anywhere in the kitchen.

Up close, the makeup around Mom's eye had cracked. A yellow edge showed through.

"Mom."

"Mm."

"We could go stay with Grandma for a while."

Mom rinsed a plate longer than she needed to. "Grandma doesn't have room."

"She's got the guest room."

"We don't need to go anywhere." She handed over the plate without looking at Rachel. "He's had a lot going on at work. It'll pass."

Rachel dried the plate and put it in the cupboard on top of the others. She wanted to say that it always passed and then came back. Mom had already started scrubbing the pot, and her back said the conversation was over.

After a while Mom spoke anyway, without turning around. "We'll be fine, Rachel. We don't need anybody."

At three-thirty Rachel got her backpack with her work clothes in it. Brent was in the recliner with his feet on the ottoman and a baseball game on TV.

"Take the bike," he said without turning his head. "I'm not driving today."

She could see him doing the math. It took twenty minutes to bike to Rialto, and he knew when the dining room closed. Every time she took the bike, he had to give up a couple of hours of her that he couldn't see.

"Nine," he said.

"The dining room closes at eight-thirty. I can't get home till nine-thirty."

He turned and looked at her. On TV the crowd cheered at something.

"Nine-thirty, then."

---

She rode east on Baseline Road with the sun at her back. The asphalt gave off heat from underneath, and after ten minutes her T-shirt was stuck to her back under the backpack. At a red light she smelled grilled meat and lime from a taqueria in a strip of low storefronts, next to a nail salon and a payday loan place. She had three dollars in her pocket and decided on two tacos on the way home, and then decided against it.

In her closet at home, in a tennis sock pushed all the way to the back behind the winter coat she never wore, was $1,140. It was enough to start with, if not enough for a car she could count on or a security deposit. She would turn eighteen on December eleventh. She hadn't told anyone how much she'd saved, or why, and nobody had asked.

In a driveway a family was grilling burgers. The dad stood with tongs in his hand and his cap on backward, and two kids splashed in an inflatable pool on the lawn while a woman yelled at them to watch out for Mom's flowers. Farther on, a girl Rachel's age drove by in an old Honda Civic with the window down and the music up, and her back window had stickers from UC Riverside and Cal State San Bernardino, as if she hadn't decided yet and didn't have to.

Rachel added them to the list. For as long as she could remember she had been collecting other people's ordinary lives, one after another, the way you count money you don't have: a dad at the grill, a girl who got to choose between two schools, Kayla on the hood of a car. She didn't know what the list was for. It kept growing.

---

Cedar Mesa Care Center sat on a side street behind a gas station, a low brick building from the seventies that the sun had bleached nearly pink. The staff entrance was around back by the dumpsters. Rachel locked her bike to the railing by the ramp and swiped her card, and the door buzzed open.

Inside it smelled of bleach and boiled potatoes. There was a TV on in every room along the hall, each on a different channel, so the sound ran together into a steady murmur of voices. In the break room she changed into the maroon polo shirt with the logo on the chest, a cedar that looked more like an arrow, and put on her hairnet. Here she was somebody else. She knew who got thickened liquids and who couldn't have salt, who would only eat if you sat with them and who threw the plate if you did.

Lourdes stood at the med cart outside Magnolia, the memory care unit at the far end of the hall, sorting pills into little plastic cups. She was Filipina and past sixty and had worked at Cedar Mesa longer than anyone.

"Anak." She pressed a Werther's into Rachel's hand without looking up. "You look tired."

"It's hot."

"It's always hot." Lourdes nodded down the hall. "Fourteen's empty now. So you know."

Rachel already knew. Mr. Bettencourt had been failing since the Sunday before. The door to his room stood open. The mattress had been wrapped in plastic and wiped down, the dresser was empty, and where his name card had been there were only two strips of old tape. She stood in the doorway for a while. Mr. Bettencourt had wanted his coffee in a glass instead of a cup, because that was how he'd drunk it in the Navy, and he had called her Sergeant even though she'd told him that was the wrong branch. She was the one who remembered things like that, what they ate and how they liked it, who had gotten visitors and who hadn't.

In the kitchen Marvin was spooning fish into baking pans. He was the cook and always looked tired, and every Sunday he made the same joke.

"Friday fish on a Sunday." He slid the pan into the oven. "So they think they missed a week."

She laughed anyway. They liked her here, him and Lourdes both. They liked that she showed up on time and didn't complain. When she thought about it, neither of them could have told you what grade she was in or where she lived, and she had never given them a reason to ask.

Dinner was served at five. She wheeled the cart down to Magnolia and handed out trays, cut up the fish for the ones who couldn't do it themselves, and stirred thickener into juice for Mrs. Delgado, who wanted three spoonfuls exactly and watched to make sure. Someone was crying in one of the rooms farther down. Someone else was singing the same line of a hymn over and over. Rachel worked her way through the dining room table by table, and for a while she didn't think about anything at all.

---

Shirley Albright had barely eaten, as usual. When the others had been wheeled back to their rooms, she sat alone by the window in the dayroom with her hands in her lap, looking out at the parking lot, where a bed of roses had died.

Rachel sat down next to her. She had a break between dinner and the evening dishes, and for almost three months now she had spent it with Shirley.

Shirley lit up. "Ruthie. There you are."

Today Rachel was Ruthie, the little sister in the black-and-white photo on Shirley's dresser. Other days she was a student from sometime in the sixties, or the girl from the store. Rachel had stopped correcting her. It felt kinder to be whoever Shirley needed.

"Hi, Shirley."

"You've grown." Shirley took her hand and patted it twice, the way you pat a child who has done well. She had taught elementary school for thirty-five years, and it was still in her voice and her hands. "Did you ride your bicycle all this way?"

"Yeah."

"In this heat. You should take the car. The Taurus is at home in the driveway, the blue one." Shirley leaned closer. "It pulls to the left, you have to hold it straight the whole time. But it always starts. The keys are on the hook by the door. And the apple's hanging from the mirror, so you'll know it's the right car."

Rachel had heard about the apple before. It was made of red felt, sewn by a student in 1979. Shirley remembered which student, though she didn't remember her own address.

"You take it, Ruthie. You can go anywhere you want."

Rachel thought about the sock in the closet and a blue Ford that pulled to the left. She thought about driving west on Baseline with the window down until the road ran out at the ocean. The clock on the wall said six-forty, and next to it hung the week's schedule in brightly colored letters: *Bingo Tuesday 2:00. Music with Pastor Rick Thursday 10:30. Ice Cream Social Friday.*

She hadn't planned to tell her. She started with the milk, because it was closest, and Shirley nodded and said *oh dear, oh dear, milk will stain*. After that came everything else, in the wrong order and in half sentences.

She told her about Brent, that he hit Mom and that was why the sunglasses went on in church, where everyone saw them, and that he hit her too, but mostly where it didn't show, and about the boys, who had learned to read him before they could read. She said that sometimes he came into her room at night, and that was where the words ran out, because she had never gotten further than that, not even in her head. Last came the wrist and the question for the pastor, what he had answered, and December eleventh.

Her voice didn't sound like hers. It was too small and too even and didn't belong in a room with a bingo schedule on the wall. She had never heard these words said out loud before. Now they had been said, and nothing had happened. Outside, the sun had started to go down.

Shirley held Rachel's hand in both of hers. She had listened the whole time with her head a little to one side, and when Rachel stopped she sat up straight and found the voice she must have used on a classroom full of seven-year-olds.

"Now you listen to me, Ruthie. If somebody hurts you, you tell a grown-up. I told all my children that. You tell a grown-up, and the grown-up takes care of it."

"I'm telling you."

"Good." Shirley patted her hand again. "Then that's good." She looked away, past Rachel. "December," she said after a while, with a smile that came from a long way off. "In December it snows in Dayton. Daddy used to shovel the driveway before we woke up."

Rachel stayed where she was and watched her. Tomorrow Shirley wouldn't remember a word of this. She would wake up with Brent and the milk and December eleventh gone. Rachel would have given everything in the sock to do the same: tell, and then be rid of it. She was ashamed of thinking it and couldn't stop.

---

Shirley's daughter showed up at seven-fifteen. She had a Target bag in one hand and her car keys in the other, and she seemed to be on her way out already as she came through the door. She was a small woman in khakis with a crease pressed down the front of each leg, and her white sneakers looked like they had never been farther than from a parking lot to a door. Her lipstick had worn off in the middle of her lower lip and stayed at the corners.

"Hi, Mom."

She said it the way you'd read back a receipt. Shirley looked up and smiled politely.

"Hello. Are you from the church?"

The daughter clenched her teeth for a second and said nothing. She set the bag on the table and started taking things out: two packs of wet wipes, a nightgown with the price tag still on, a six-pack of vanilla nutrition shakes. She looked over at Rachel next, or rather at the maroon shirt.

"You're from the kitchen, right? Thanks for sitting with her."

Shirley nodded at Rachel. "Ruthie's been telling me all kinds of things."

"Mm." The daughter folded the Target bag in quarters and tucked it into her purse. She sat on the edge of the chair across from them with the keys still in her hand and asked Shirley if she'd eaten. Shirley said she'd eaten a whole chicken. That was good, the daughter said. She looked at the clock on the wall twice in one minute.

Rachel got up. Her break was over anyway. Something old and familiar rose in her chest, meaner than usual. The woman across from her had had a mother who patted your hand and told you to tell a grown-up, a mother who remembered who had sewn a felt apple in 1979, and she couldn't even be bothered to take her purse off her shoulder. Rachel wanted to say it out loud. Instead she said goodbye. Shirley said *bye-bye, Ruthie, drive carefully*, and Rachel went.

At the door Rachel turned around. The daughter was reading the week's menu on the wall. Shirley was looking out the window. Neither of them noticed her standing there.

The rest of the evening she stood at the dishwasher in the kitchen next to Marvin, who had the radio on low and sang along to the choruses without knowing the words. She rinsed trays and racked them, and the steam from the machine made her hairnet damp. When she came back out into the hall, the dayroom was empty and the daughter was gone. At eight-thirty Marvin turned off the lights in the dining room.

---

It was dark by the time she rode home. The heat hadn't let up and was still coming off the asphalt. Along Baseline only the taqueria and the gas stations were open, and small white moths swarmed in their lights.

She felt lighter than she had in a long time, and it scared her. It was as if she'd left something behind on Magnolia, in the dayroom by the window, and was riding home without it. She let herself think about December, and about a blue Ford with a felt apple hanging from the mirror, parked in a driveway somewhere, waiting for someone to come and get it.

At nine-fifteen she turned into the cul-de-sac. She had fifteen minutes and took the last stretch slowly.

She stopped on the sidewalk in front of the house with one foot on the ground and looked it over, as she always did before going in. Brent's pickup was in the driveway, Mom's Corolla behind it. The sprinklers on the lawn ticked in the dark and threw water over the curb, and it smelled of wet grass. In the living room the TV light flickered blue against the curtain. The kitchen light was on, and the window over the sink was open.

She knew the sound of china hitting a wall right away. It came out through the kitchen window as a dry crack, followed by pieces bouncing off tile. Then came Brent's voice, loud enough to fill the whole kitchen and spill out over the lawn. Rachel didn't hear the words, or she heard them and didn't let herself keep them. She heard the tone, and the silence in the pauses where Mom should have answered and didn't.

The sprinklers kept ticking. A dog two houses down barked once and went quiet. The lightness from Magnolia had gone so fast she wondered if it had ever been there.

Upstairs, the window of the boys' room was dark. They were in there. Josh was probably lying awake with the covers over his head, as he did whenever it sounded like this, and Caleb was pretending to be asleep so Josh wouldn't get scared.

Rachel got off her bike and leaned it against the garage wall, carefully, so it wouldn't rattle. She walked up the driveway past Brent's pickup to the front door. Inside, the voice had stopped. That was worse.

She put her hand on the doorknob.