rang out again.
“Hey, how you like it?”
Russell turned to see the man holding a steak above the grill.
“Rare,” he answered. Dad started laughing.
“Rare. Rare. That’s him all right,” he called out to Manny and Luis. “He’s a rare one all right!”
It took a while for the crowd to be seated when dinner was called. Russell had gotten separated from Manny and Carmela, and was surrounded by strangers. They all held hands as a white-haired man said a prayer. Although Russell’s Spanish was limited, he followed the gist of the blessing, heavy on the gratitude for family, making him even more self-conscious of being a stranger among them. After the meal began, he felt a slap on his back, and Nestor appeared at his side.
“I decided I’m hungry after all,” he said with a broad smile.
A plentiful meal was set before them. Platters were heaped with grilled meat and shrimp. Bowls overflowed with salads of every stripe—bean salad, lettuce salad, potato salad, egg salad, macaroni salad, fruit salad. There were plates of corn, beets, biscuits and bread. Carmela made sure Russell tried a dish she’d concocted with melon and walnuts. Dishes clattered. Children shouted, giggled, and carried on. Everyone talked at once, a babble largely unintelligible to Russell, who concentrated on his plate. The food looked especially good to him, and he dug in. Nestor nudged him.
“See the redhead?” He tilted his chin and drew Russell’s attention down the table to a woman whose flaming mane was hard not to notice. “Luis’s girlfriend, Cheryl,” Nestor continued. “Check her out.”
Her complexion was pale and freckled. There was almost no food on her plate, and she wasn’t eating any of it. Her watery eyes bulged from their sockets and stared beyond the table. Russell followed her far-off gaze and saw that she was watching a duck waddling on the lawn. Suddenly she grabbed a soda can and raised it to her lips, then closed her eyes and jerked her head back as she took a quick swallow.
“She’s one weird girl,” said Nestor in a confidential tone. “And you know, if I’m calling someone weird, well, keep your eye on her. She’s nuts. Takes one to know one, you know.”
Russell looked at her again. This time she noticed him. They looked at each other for a moment. Then she rolled her eyes back in her head, picked up her soda and took another bird-like gulp. Russell returned to his meal and devoured a pile of shrimp.
A cooler of ice cream was presented for dessert. Russell ignored the sweets and began to help clean up. He was dismissed by a woman who told him not to bother, so he started to walk off to the gazebo to which Nestor had already retired. On his way he remembered with a start that he hadn’t called Helen. He sought out Carmela for permission to use the phone. She led him into the kitchen and left him there. He picked up the receiver and searched his pockets for her number, then realized he’d left it behind. He really didn’t want to blow her off again, but he slouched and hung up.
Out in the gazebo, Nestor was writing. He glanced up as Russell came in.
“Hey, grab a seat. I’m just taking a few notes here. Something on my mind.”
Nestor sat at a desk, surrounded by a futon and a chest of drawers. Crates full of books were piled everywhere. Russell sat in a folding chair.
“What, do you live out here now?” he asked.
Nestor answered while he continued to write. “Yeah. My dad kept telling me I should move out of the house, so I did.” He looked up with a smirk on his face. “Moved out here. For the summer at least.” He capped his pen and moved over to the futon, where he stretched out.
“Dad mostly just ignores me now. Whenever he does notice me he calls me a kook. But Mom’s cool. She knows I’ll probably just disappear one of these days. ‘Crazy Nestor’ getting lost in the crowd in New York City.”
The horizon turned yellow and the air thickened. A charge built in the atmosphere, like a storm might be coming. The air was still, without the slightest breeze. Slanting light cast the scene in a greenish tinge.
“I’ve been concentrating on my music,” Nestor said. “Let me play you something I’ve been working on.” He reached behind the futon and pulled out an electronic keyboard, then looked through a crate for a long orange extension cord. Russell followed him to the house.
“My dad hates it when I do this. Let’s go round the back and avoid a freak out.” He led him to the rear door and located an outlet. Russell turned to head back out, but Nestor stopped him and waved him up a set of stairs.
“Come up here for a second and check out my mom’s latest craze.”
They stood in a little alcove of shelves filled with shuttlecocks.
“See this one?” Nestor handed him a bundle of cork and feathers. “Passenger pigeon feathers,” he said. “They used to blacken the sky. Now this is all that’s left.”
Russell handed it back. “Pretty wild.”
“Yeah.” Nestor started down the steps. “You want to know something wild—you know about Isabel?”
“Carmela said she was living in Mexico.”
“Right, with Aunt Rosa.” They left the house and headed across the lawn. “Did she tell you about the unsuitable suitor?”
Russell shook his head.
They entered the gazebo and sat together on the futon. “Maybe she doesn’t know,” he began. “But my mom got a weird-ass call last week about this guy Isabel was dating. I guess he creeped Rosa out, she said she got this bad vibe off him. So Isabel’s going out with this guy, and then Rosa finds out he’s married. She tells Isabel and she puts the guy out. Then he comes back the next day with a big bouquet of flowers, only Isabel wasn’t home. Rosa grabbed the flowers and threw them on the ground and—this is what my aunt told my mom—then the flowers turned into hissing green worms.”
“What?” Russell exclaimed.
Nestor laughed and continued. “I know. That’s what she said, big hissing green worms. The guy ran off and she stepped on them and squished them and she said they were full of black blood that smelled like sulfur.”
“OK,” Russell slowly intoned, trying to determine by Nestor’s expression if this was some sort of joke.
Nestor laughed again, then stood and shrugged his shoulders. He set up his keyboard and began cranking out swirling chord progressions. He closed his eyes and swayed rhythmically, leaned across the keyboard and chanted in a slow drawl, “All skate! Everybody skate!”
“No way!” Russell shouted.
Nestor continued playing, then trailed off and said, “What, no way?”
“I was just talking about that this morning,” Russell excitedly explained. “I walked by the roller rink and thought about that guy and his ‘all skate, everybody skate’ thing.”
“Well,” Nestor chuckled, “I’ve been working for a while on a concept, sort of a take-off on The Phantom of the Opera, maybe something like, Phantom of the Roller Rink.’”
Russell
