Four
At least in the car he could decompress, listen to a little music, try to forget about the day. He was going home and that was everything. He knew what was waiting for him there and the closer he got the more he relaxed and lightened up. There were plenty of cars on the road but they were moving steadily at least, first through the empty fields on every side, then past the first few lines of tree breaks hiding flower farms and ranches. Soon he went by the hamlet of Trés Piños, with its 7-11, diner and the Two Hoots biker bar, and then the massive power plant, and more and more roads branching off into the suburban foothills as the road widened to four and then six lanes and the valley narrowed on either side and in forty-two minutes exactly he came to his own exit, and another three minutes later he was pulling into his spot in the driveway of the little place he and his wife rented in the Buena Vista Village, a low-income development consisting of identical yellow houses with blue doors and plastic flowers in all the window boxes.
Janelle was already home, her old red beater parked alongside his blue one. Eugenio had barely closed the car door when Matilda, his six-year old treasure, came rushing out of the house and into his arms with a whoop of joy.
“Daddy!” she screamed as she leaped.
“Precious!” he grabbed her and lifted her high above his head and twirled her around a few times before bringing her face to his and planting a big kiss on her cheek.
“How's my girl?”
“Fantastic!” she beamed, then squirmed for him to let her down. She ran inside ahead of him shouting “Mommy, mommy, daddy's home!”
Janelle looked up from the kitchen table and flashed a weary smile. As usual she was sitting in front of a huge pile of papers and an open laptop, grading homework assignments. She was a middle-school language teacher at the same K-8 where Matilda was now in the first grade.
“How'd it go?” she asked as he bent over to kiss her on the top of her head.
“Better,” he lied. “It's a lot of jabbering.”
“You can do that,” she assured him.
“Look, daddy,” Matilda was clinging to his leg, “I got the spices out,” and pointed to the counter where she'd lined up the little jars. He always loved how she pronounced the word “spices” as if it rhymed with Pisces. She'd done that on purpose ever since she'd first learned both the word and her birth sign.
“Ah, excellente,” he said in his occasional Spanish and rubbing his hands in a show for his little girl. “And what else do we have? Do we have tomates?”
“Yes, daddy!”
“And do we have tortillas?”
“Right over here, daddy,” and she rushed over to the refrigerator and pulled out the package to show him.
“Okay, then all we need is ...”
Eugenio went through this routine every Tuesday taco night, a well-established ritual of preparing dinner with his daughter, how she'd bring out the saucer and turn on the stove, and he'd crumble the ground beef while she measured out paprika and chipotle and lemon pepper and salt and started mixing them in one by one, stirring the ground beef while standing on the wooden stool as he cut up tomatoes and tore up the lettuce and grated a little cheese and on lucky days chopped up a bit of avocado as well. Matilda was a thorough and patient chef and made sure her dad did everything just the way he'd taught her.
Meanwhile, Janelle continued to plow through her papers. She had a lot of students and they had a wide range of abilities. It was never easy. Some of them mainly spoke native tongues, some of which she'd never known even existed, while others were fluidly multi-lingual. It seemed impossible they were all in the same class at the same time. They should have been divided into several smaller groups, but instead it was she and teachers like her who were divided and sub-divided into multiple concurrent roles daily. She worked hard, and had been doing it full time for a long time.
Eugenio had stayed home to raise Matilda until she was old enough for school herself. He counted four years mostly out of the work force entirely, then another two of part-time occasional work while she was in pre-school and kindergarten. He had no real profession, had only completed his high school equivalency around the time Matilda embarked on her own formal studies. He missed those days, had never been happier, but Janelle could never have another child, and they could not really afford one anyway, and a man had to work so there he was, back in the world again doing that.
“I want to show you something, muffin,” he told Matilda later, after they'd made and had dinner and washed the dishes together and put them all away. She was sitting next to him on the couch in the living room with an old picture book on her lap. One by one he took out the little Richie toys from his sweatshirt pocket and lined them up on the low table in front of them. Matilda leaned forward and examined each one as it made its appearance. She said nothing about the spider, let out a little squeak about the snail, said “huh?” to the chicken leg, and “pretty” for the little paper hat. But when he brought out the little mermaids she gasped and reached out for them.
“Mermy girls!” she squealed as she grabbed them.
“You know what they are?” Eugenio asked her, leaning back.
“Doesn't everyone?” she shook her head in disbelief. He figured they must have been something she'd seen on TV.
“This is Trina, this is M'Bel, and this is Katie,” she informed him, holding them up one at a time. He didn't know how she distinguished between them. As far as he could tell, they were all identical. She's probably just making it up, he thought.
“How do you know which one is which?” he asked her.
“That's easy. Look! Trina has a diamond pattern here on her tail. M'Bel has a teeny hair clip in the back, and Katie doesn't have either of those things.”
“And what do they do?”
“They're mermy girls. They swim around and have adventures.”
“What do you think of these other things?”
Matilda shrugged.
“They're okay, I guess. Are they for me? I like the rose. Not the spider.”
“I found them at work,” he told her. “Somebody who used to work there left them.”
“Kids work there?”
“No, he was a man.”
“Was he a weirdo?”
“I don't know.”
“Nobody has a toy chicken leg,” she said, then she hopped off the couch and started playing with the mermy girls, making them swim around the carpet beneath the low table, while making different voices pretending to be them telling each other what to look out for in that underwater landscape.
“There might be spiders,” Trina warned Katie and M'Bel.
“I hope not,” Katie said. “Spiders are yucky.”