Household Gods

Her brain was as sticky as the Honda’s engine. It needed a couple of tries before it would turn over. “But what am I supposed to do? I work for a living, Josefina – I have to. Where am I supposed to take the children tomorrow?”

Josefina’s face set. Nicole damned herself for political incorrectness, for thinking that this woman whom she was so careful to think of as an equal and not as an ethnic curiosity, looked just now like every stereotype of the inscrutable and intractable aborigine. Her eyes were flat and black. Her features, the broad cheekbones, the Aztec profile, the bronze sheen of the skin, were completely and undeniably foreign. Years of daycare, daily meetings, little presents for the children on their birthdays and plates of delicious and exotic cookies at Christmas, reciprocated with boxes of chocolates – Russell Stover, not Godiva; Godiva was an acquired taste if you weren’t a yuppie – all added up to this: closed mind and closed face, and nothing to get a grip on, no handhold for sympathy, let alone understanding. This, Nicole knew with a kind of angry despair, was an alien. She’d never been a friend, and she’d never been a compatriot, either. Her whole world just barely touched on anything that Nicole knew. And now even that narrow tangent had disappeared.

“I’m sorry,” Josefina said in her foreign accent, with her soft Spanish vowels. “I know you are upset with me. Lots of parents upset with me, but I can’t do nothing about it. My mother got nobody else but me.”

Nicole made her mind work, made herself think and talk some kind of sense. “Do you know anyone who might take Kimberley and Justin on such short notice?”

God, even if Josefina said yes, the kids would pitch a fit. She was… like a mother to them. That had always worried Nicole a little – not, she’d been careful to assure herself, that her impeccably Anglo children should be so attached to a Mexican woman; no, of course not, how wonderfully free of prejudice that would make them, and they’d picked up Spanish, too. No, she worried she herself wasn’t mother enough, so they’d had to focus on Josefina for all the things Nicole couldn’t, but should, be offering them. And now, when they were fixated like that, to go from her house to some stranger’s -

Even as Nicole fussed over what was, after all, a minor worry, Josefina was shaking her head. “Don’t know nobody,” she said. She didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Of course she didn’t. She couldn’t mean, It’s no skin off my nose, lady. Josefina loved the kids. Didn’t she?

What did Nicole know of what Josefina felt or didn’t feel? Josefina was foreign.

Nicole stood on the front porch, breathing hard. If that was the way Josefina wanted to play it, then that was how Nicole would play it. There had to be some way out. She would have bet money that Josefina was an undocumented immigrant. She could threaten to call the INS, get her checked out, have her deported…

Anger felt good. Anger felt cleansing. But it didn’t change a thing. There wasn’t anything she could do. Deport Josefina? She almost laughed. Josefina was leaving the USA on her own tonight. She’d probably welcome the help.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina repeated. As if she meant it. As if she even cared.

Nicole didn’t even remember going from the house to the car. One moment she was staring at Josefina, hunting for words that wouldn’t come. The next, she was in the Honda, slamming the driver’s-side door hard enough to rattle the glass in the window frame. She jammed the key in the ignition, shoved the pedal to the metal, and roared out into the street.

Part of her wanted to feel cold and sick and a little guilty. The rest of her was too ferociously angry to care how she drove.

She might not care, but with the luck she was running, she’d pick up a ticket on top of being drastically late. She made an effort of will and slowed down to something near a reasonable speed. Her brain flicked back into commuter mode, cruising on autopilot. The main part of her mind fretted away at this latest blow.

I can’t worry about it now, she told herself over and over. I’ll worry about it after I get to the office. I’ll worry about it tonight.

First she had to get to the office. When she came out onto Victory, she shook her head violently. She knew too well how long tooling back across the western half of the Valley would take. Instead, she swung south onto the San Diego Freeway: only a mile or two there to the interchange with the 101. Yes, the eastbound 101 would be a zoo, but so what? Westbound, going against rush-hour traffic, she’d make good time. She didn’t usually try it, but she wasn’t usually so far behind, either.

Thinking about that, plotting out the rest of her battle plan, helped her focus; got her away from the gnawing of worry about Josefina’s desertion. It was good for that much, at least.