don’t have kids, I’m not married.”
“Really? No kidding.”
An uncertain smile crawls across Jack’s features. Was that sarcasm? He’s off the map of his flat world. Over the edge, into unknown territories where medieval cartographers wrote: Here be dragons. “What?” he says defensively. “You don’t think I could be married, or have kids?”
“Oh, you could definitely have kids, given the, well, enthusiasm and determination you apply to the task. And I bet there’s a landfill of broken hearts who hoped or mistakenly believed you might want to marry them.”
“That’s harsh.”
“Harsh nothing. Statement of fact. Want to dance?”
“What?”
“Dance.”
“I can’t.”
“Bullshit.”
“You think I’m an asshole, but you still want to dance with me?”
“I know. However, (a): I didn’t say you were an asshole, you did, and (b): I just hooked up with you, Jack, and I don’t fuck assholes—but, since you brought it up, okay, well, it has been my experience that assholes can be great dancers.”
“I don’t—”
“C’mon.”
Jack says stubbornly, “I can’t dance. I’m sorry.” He adds, somewhat more artificially: “I can’t dance, I doubt there’s a God, and I don’t make decisions without knowing what all the options are.”
Mona rolls her eyes. She’s already off the bed, and pulling Jack’s shirt over her head and throwing his jeans at him, offering only, “That is so weak.”
The Roundup Room is dark. Chairs on the tables, stools up on the bar. Mona unlocks the door and pulls Jack inside. He has no shirt, because Mona’s wearing it, no shoes because she wouldn’t let him take the time to put on his boots. Mona’s small body barely curves the cotton of Jack’s shirt as she goes behind the bar to light a couple of votive candles and turn on the stereo. Samba music. The snap of the surdo, the pandeiro shivers its reply.
“My granddad built this place in 1951 for a woman who was not his wife.”
“Dorotea?”
Mona pours reposado into shot glasses. “Dorotea Elana Maria Bustos Pacheco, a Peruvian nightclub singer my granddad met in Denver. He was already married then—I think my mom was about two or three—but he was an accountant for a resort chain and they used to send him out to do the country club audits. Señorita Pacheco was playing the Blue Spruce Room at Cherry Hills Country Club. She was one of those big-boned women with the little tiny waists. There’s some pictures of her over the motel office—dark hair, dark eyes, big wide mackerel mouth smeared with dark, wicked-witch lipstick.
“Well, Granddad had never experienced oral sex of any kind, and she, by all accounts, could suck-start a Harley, and so before you could say adios, he and ’Tea were headed west to California in his berry-red Buick ragtop. It broke down in Victorville, crawled here and died. They built this motel so she’d have someplace to sing. Between blow jobs. Built it with money he’d neatly disappeared from his employer’s development fund.”
“They come after him?”
“Never went after him. Or after my grandmother, who, for no apparent reason, subsequently became a Mormon. I think Granddad Malloy knew how hard the resort chain’s books were cooked, since he’d done a lot of the culinary heavy lifting, so they just wrote down the loss and left him alone.
“My mom ran away from home when she was fifteen and hitchhiked out here to Two-nine Palms to be with her dad.
“Then ’Tea got pregnant by Granddad’s best friend Norbert Willams, and then she died in childbirth—she was so small through the middle and the baby got itself hung up in there—subsequently Granddad wigged out. He started smoking reefer and hanging with would-be gold prospectors and land speculators and professional lowlifes in Yucca Valley.”
Mona comes out from behind the bar. Hands Jack a shot glass. “He either got killed in a head-on collision outside of Blythe or ran off to San Francisco, my mom is kind of unclear about it. But, hey, she’s been running this place by herself since she was twenty”—Mona raises her shot glass—“survived me and the desert and has no regrets.”
They drink. Then Mona takes his glass, and puts it with hers, side-by-side, on the bar.
“I think the trouble with choices, Jack, is there’s too many of them. You can’t ever know them all.”
“That’s why I never make decisions,” Jack says.
“You do. You will.” Mona moves close to him, kisses him hard. “Mad about the boy.”
“Yes.” Jack starts to put his arms around her, but she catches them, pulls him into position and starts to move her hips. “Wait—”
“Dancing is about trust.”
“Yeah, well, and maybe rhythm, which I don’t have.”
“Come on.”
“I’m serious, Mona. I can’t dance.”
“You have to, Jack. Sooner or later.” She stares into his eyes. He knows she can see the difference. The grey one, with its overcast cornea and fixed pupil, looks but doesn’t see. Jack can feel her question even if she doesn’t ask it, and for a moment they are only movement. “Nice guys dance,” Mona says finally.
Jack is awful, no matter how hard he concentrates. His feet never find the rhythm. Mona, however, doesn’t appear to care.
Later, Jack sits cross-legged on the bed back in his motel room, quartering a lime with a carving knife borrowed from the Roundup Room bar. The half-empty bottle of tequila waits on the bed stand, with more whole limes in a bowl, and a salt-shaker alongside Jack’s signature cigarette, smoldering, vertical, end up.
Mona flicks Jack’s lighter, and the flame licks out. Extinguishes it with the cap. Flicks it on again. Extinguishes it.
“You’ve lived out here how long?”
“All my life, except for a few intermissions. Scout camp in Ensenada. Disney World. And this other thing that happened.” Mona sits up. Flick, flick, flick.
Jack wonders: other thing?
“I understand the desert,” she says finally. “All the emptiness.”
Jack puts the knife on the bed stand, gives Mona a wedge of lime and the bottle. “Where’s your dad?”
“Mom claims he’s a Hollywood movie star who came out here and broke her heart. She swears she only slept with him twice.” Mona stares at him, swigs tequila, sucks on the lime, salts her tongue. “And she made it a cautionary tale, you know, about sex and pregnancy. Was that the right order?”
“Yes. Sex, then pregnancy.”
“No, with the limes and—”
“To be truthful, I don’t think there is a right order.” Jack tosses tequila, jams his lime wedge against his teeth and eschews the salt. The liquor kicks, doesn’t go down right, burns hot in his chest.
“I personally think Dad was a fall-down drunken gyrene grunt Mom used as a sperm donor because she was thirty-six and figured she’d never get the chance again.”
Jack swallows hard a second time, his eyes watering as Mona crawls back on top of him. She’s got the lighter. “Somebody give you this?”
“Yeah.”
“Wife?”
“Old girlfriend.”
“How old?”
He