Free Rust by Julie Mars Page A

then, without even a word, she shifted her position, rolled onto her back, and just stared straight up at the ceiling.
    Rico left the room, weighted down by the broken Fernando-record he heard from Elena every week, and Rosalita’s whatever-it-was-that-was-eating-away-at-her, and a day ahead of him with nothing beyond yard work. But, he reminded himself as he pushed through the back door, there was always tomorrow.
    At eight-thirty.
    1974

    A ND HE has a little girl.
    A little girl, far away, and he might never see her again.
    It is unbearable to think of her, back at home in the big city, perhaps looking out the window from a fourth floor apartment. Waiting.
    His throat constricts, closes off, and he cannot say her name, not even whisper it into the thin mat he sleeps on, face down. When he thinks of her, sweat breaks out along his hairline. He cannot breathe.
    A wife, and a little girl.
    Gone.
    Nothing left but time.
    W HEN R ICO arrived at Garcia Automotive at five to eight in the morning and hoisted up the garage doors—making it official that he was open for business and glad of it—in his mind he had already laid out his lesson plan, if it could be called that, for his first student. He had an idea of what Margaret hoped to accomplish, at least in the beginning, based on the rusty parts she had so carefully situated on the concrete pad in her yard. The shapes she seemed so obsessed with made no sense to him, but he hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever to the whims of modern art, or any other art for that matter; and, besides, he didn’t need to know the why, just the how, and in that department, he was more than competent.
    He watered the spider plant that had been hanging in the office window for five years, emptied the garbage can—which as usual overflowed with the takeout coffee cups of his Saturday customers—and then went outside to collect the trash that had blown against the fence or into his small parking area, or perhaps been thrown there by passersby, over the weekend. He checked his appointment book, which looked healthy with jobs for the week, slipped into his work coveralls, which he left on a hook on the bathroom door, and settled down in his chair to watch for Margaret. He wanted to see her as she approached, take in, in a relaxed manner, the way she moved toward his door, experience the burst of energy that he imagined she would bring to him.
    He rocked back in his rolling office chair so his feet dangled a few inches above the floor. It was a crazy thing, he mused, how much a middle-aged man, a father and a grandfather for God’s sake, could look forward to seeing a skinny middle-aged woman, one who had already made it clear she had no interest in him, stroll around a corner. And it wasn’t because she was trying to attract his attention, either. Margaret wasn’t working much on her appearance, he had to admit. Chicanas tended to put more time into it, with their polished nails, gold earrings, high heels, and tight pants designed to show off their rounded hips and fleshy thighs, which they were proud of and rightly so; while Margaret looked, both days he’d seen her, as if she hadn’t changed her jeans in a week and had no plan to. She wore baggy T-shirts that hid whatever equipment she had, and her long hair looked like it might not object if she dragged a comb through it more often.
    Within ten minutes, she appeared on Barelas Road, coming at a fast clip, a walking speed that the new people from the East seemed to think was normal. To Rico, she looked as if she was in a big hurry, though she was actually five minutes early and there wasn’t really an official starting time anyway. She wore dark sunglasses like the Blues Brothers along with her usual outfit, and she carried a shoulder bag big enough for a weekend trip to Las Vegas, Nevada.
    “Yo, Rico,” she said as she came in, “here I am, reporting for duty.”
    “They really say that over there in New York? Yo?” he responded.