Chapter 93: Three Choices
He had been at the end of that street since eleven o’clock in the morning.
Three hours and twenty minutes in a rental car on a residential block, in a coat made for Chicago, and he never came to the door.
He came in at twenty past two with a hat in his hand, which I had not known he owned. Dolores Reyes did not shake it. She pointed at a chair and he sat in it.
She told me to stay. I stayed, and I want to be plain about why.
Not out of loyalty to either of them. I stayed so that somebody could say afterwards what was said in that kitchen.
She said it in Spanish first.
She was not translating for him. She was getting it out of herself in the language it happened in, and then turning it round into English, the way a woman carries something heavy through a doorway.
“She telephoned me on the thirtieth of November,” Dolores said.
Victor said, “When.”
“The thirtieth. Nine days before.”
“What time.”
She found it on her phone, because she has never deleted anything in her life. Twenty-eleven in the evening. Twenty-six minutes.
I wrote it on my knee. 30 November 2025, 20:11, duration 26 minutes.
“She asked me if she was going crazy,” Dolores said.
Victor did not move.
“She said she could not breathe in that house. Only in that house. She said it the way you say a stupid thing quickly, before somebody else can.”
“And you said.”
“I told her she was tired.” Dolores put both hands flat on the table. “I told her she had a baby and no help and a husband who was never home, and that of course she could not breathe.”
“I told her to go back to the doctor and stop frightening herself.”
The refrigerator started up and I have never hated a sound more.
“She had bought a ticket,” Dolores said. “The fourteenth of January. She asked me not to tell you.”
Victor turned the hat over once in his hands.
“Why not.”
“Because you would have said it was nothing.”
She said it without heat. That is the part I could not get out of my head for a year.
“Not to be cruel. You would have said it in that voice you have, and she would have believed you, because she always believed you.”
“She asked me to come up instead. In November. I could not get the days until Christmas. I had it booked, the twentieth of December.”
Victor said, “I would have paid for the flight.”
“I know,” Dolores said. “That is not why she did not ask you.”
There is one more thing from that kitchen and I put it in the left column that night, because I had promised Moreno I would always write the ones that hurt. Dolores said her daughter had bronchitis every winter until she was about eleven.
Victor said, “She never told me that.”
“She did not like being a person that things happened to,” Dolores said.
I gave it to Moreno on the second of February and he entered it in the chart, at the top, under the other inconvenient line.
Then there was the paper.
Doyle had emailed a one-page consent that morning and I had printed it at a copy shop on Fredericksburg Road for eleven cents. Dolores read it twice, then said what she wanted, in a list, which I respected.
“You will pay for all of it. You will put her back the way she was.”
“You will not tell me the day it happens. And you will send me every page they write. In English. I read English.”
Victor said, “All right.”
That is the whole of what he said in that kitchen in an hour and forty minutes, apart from four questions.
He did not apologise.
I have thought about it a great deal and come round to thinking he knew an apology in that kitchen would have been for him.
She signed it with a pen out of a mug on the windowsill. I witnessed it, printed my name and put the time.
Then she went to a drawer by the sink and came back with a photograph, four by six, printed at a pharmacy, curled at one corner.
She put it on the table facing him. A headstone in winter grass, a section marker behind it, somebody’s shadow across the bottom left.
“My cousin took that. In April. He drives a truck and he was in Illinois.”
“That is the only picture I have of it.”
Victor looked at it and did not touch it.
“You have never seen it,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“I have never been to Chicago,” Dolores said. “In fourteen months nobody asked me to come, and I was not going to ask.”
She tapped the photograph twice with one finger, not hard.
“Tell me what it says on the bottom. My cousin’s thumb is over it.”
Victor read it out.
Beloved wife and mother.
“Who chose that,” Dolores said.
There was a pause of about four seconds. I counted it, because I count things.
“The funeral director gave me three,” he said.