The place was packed. It took forever to get served and there were some mixed-up orders, and nobody cared. The music was so buoyant. One of the Althea sisters actually cracked a smile. After forty-five minutes the bass player plucked his lit cigarette from the bridge of his guitar and the Alvaros took a break.
Emelina told me she and J.T. had come here on their first date. They were fourteen. Viola had come too, but fortunately she spent the whole time in the kitchen advising Dona Althea on the menudo, Viola's specialty. J.T. was thus able to eat his whole meal with one hand on Emelina's knee, under the table.
"Just think," I said. "If you'd come on another night, the soup of the day would have been something else and you and J.T. might never have gotten married."
She smiled an odd little smile. "I don't think there's anybody else in this town I could have married but J.T. It was like we had each other's names printed on us when we were born."
"Seems like there's a lot of that in this town."
"Oh, yeah. And people do what their parents did. The father's a hoghead, the son's a hoghead."
I smiled. "What's a hoghead?"
"Locomotive engineer. I don't know why they call them that." She pecked her fingertips on the tabletop, watching the Papago women talking to the musicians.
For a while I'd believed that Emelina and J.T., with their congenial partnership and all those miles between them, were like Carlo and me, parallel lines that never quite touched. I was wrong. Two nights before when J.T. came home at 3 A.M. they made love in the moonlit courtyard, urgently, with some of their clothes on. My house was dark but I was awake, invisible in my kitchen. I felt abandoned. Emelina was nothing like me.
"It's dangerous," she said suddenly. "Shit, you can't think about it but it's hell, the railroad. Did you know Fenton Lee, in high school?"
"Sure."
"He was in a head-on wreck two years ago. Bringing his train out of the yard in El Paso, at night, and somebody else was coming in, lined for the same track. Nobody knows why. Maybe a signal failed. Southern Pacific says no. But J.T. says it happens."
"So Fenton was killed?" I remembered him plainly, in horn-rim glasses. He had blond bangs and a loud laugh.
"Yeah, it was real bad. They heard the crash all over the yard. The one engine climbed up the other one and sheared off the top. There wasn't a whole lot left."
I felt numb. A train wreck and Fenton dead in it were beyond what I was willing to imagine.
"You can jump off, when you see that coming," Emelina told me. "Fenton's brakeman and conductor jumped off, and the other crew did, but Fenton stayed on. I guess he didn't really believe it. I told J.T., 'If you ever see a headlight coming at you, don't you dare save the train. You get your butt out of there.'"
The band started up again and Emelina's mood quickly lifted. Our food arrived and Mason snapped back to the table. Emelina resettled the baby in the rickety high chair. "So you're going up to the rez with Loyd tomorrow," she said, her eyes twinkling. "This is getting serious. If I was your mother I'd tell you to wear garlic around your neck." She dipped the tip of her spoon into her refried beans and fed it to the baby. He took the spicy brown mush like manna from heaven. "But since I'm not your mother," she said soberly, "I'd advise you to wear nice-looking underwear."
She embarrassed me. "It's nothing serious," I said. "We're not exactly couple material, are we? Me and Loyd-with-one-L."
She looked up, surprised. "He can't help how his name's spelled." She paused a minute, studying me. "What, you think Loyd's dumb?"
Now I had embarrassed myself. "No, I don't think that. I just can't see myself with a guy that's into cockfighting."
I'm sure Emelina suspected this was nowhere near the whole truth. She was thinking I did hold Loyd's misspelled name against him, and a lot of other things. That I couldn't see myself with a roughneck Apache hoghead who was her husband's best friend. I felt myself blush. I was just like Doc Homer, raising himself and Hallie and me up to be untouched by Grace.
"I'll tell you something, honey," Emelina said, pausing her spoon midway enroute to the baby's open mouth. "Half the women in this town, and not just the single ones, would give up Sunday breakfast to go to Whiteriver in that little red truck."
"I know that," I said, paying attention to my enchiladas. I didn't know how to apologize to Emelina without owning up to something I wasn't sure I felt. Strictly speaking, I didn't think I was better than Loyd and half the women in Grace. I was amazed, in fact, by Loyd's interest in me. I also didn't think it would last very long.