Sanctuary Line Read Online Free PDF Page B

fill her bird feeders and watch the sparrows come and go. The window on the opposite side looks out to the kind of semi-urban sprawl common now to country locations, and sometimes, as she talks, I gaze out at pizza parlours and laundromats rather than shrubbery and birds. An odd combination: these memories of her life at the farm, thosebirds in winter sunlight, this place named for an acre of farmland in deference to the agricultural “seniors” it was built to house. And then a convenience store, a car wash, office supplies.
    About six months ago I asked her outright if she remembered Teo. She had been speaking about Mandy, whose death had greatly disturbed her. “Such a lovely girl,” she was saying, “and so clever, so competent. Her father would have been proud.”
    Proud of what? I wondered. Her ability to survive him, at least temporarily? “Do you remember the Mexican boy?” I asked.
    To my amazement my mother shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said and turned to watch a couple of birds at the feeder. “I think that may be a thrush of some kind or another.” She reached for the binoculars she always kept on the windowsill, but by the time she had them in her hand, whatever it was had vanished.
    “Of course you remember,” I said, almost angrily, though the words came out sounding more patronizing than angry. “He came with the Mexican workers.”
    “So many Mexicans,” she said, “every summer. Sometimes the same ones, but often they were different. Didn’t your Uncle Stanley use school portables for their sleeping quarters? Yes, I think he did — at least at first, when he hadn’t yet decided whether to keep them.”
    I myself had not known this. The first Mexicans hadarrived at the farm two years before I was born so I recalled only permanent bunkhouses and one or two trailers.
    “Teo,” I said. “His name was Teo.”
    “Stanley had a dog named Tim,” my mother said. “Smartest animal ever born. He could play soccer and did so, I remember, with you and your cousins.” She laughed. “He could bounce the ball right off the top of his head, that dog. Mandy was very cut up when he had to be put down. The boys too. Even your Aunt Sadie admitted that –”
    “I remember Tim,” I interrupted, “but Teo is who I am referring to. Teo played with the dog, he played with us. He came with his mother, every summer.” There was no response. “His mother’s name was Dolores,” I said. “She was a foreman, remember?”
    “Apples,” my mother said. “I often wondered what the world did with all those apples. Your grandmother still hung them on strings to dry them, to preserve them. I don’t suppose anyone does that anymore.” A faint visual memory of the wooden sills of my grandmother’s bedroom windows came into my mind. And an audio memory of cluster flies buzzing there, the summer after she had died and the room was no longer in use. I had known her only in my early childhood.
    “Please remember Teo,” I said quietly. “Please say that you remember Teo.”
    My mother got up slowly from her chair and walked into her tiny kitchen, returning with a damp cloth in herhand. The sun had revealed a tea stain on one of her end tables, and she began to work away at that now, her back toward me, her thin arm moving rapidly back and forth.
    “Please,” I repeated, aware of a child in me, whining. “Just say it.”
    She turned toward me then, her look cheerful, kind, her hair backlit by the winter sun. “What was that, dear?” she said.
    “God, Mom.” I looked at her hand on the cloth. The veins under the skin were like mauve sinews. “Think about it. Think about Teo.” I was aware that my voice was rising.
    “Oh that.” She folded the cloth twice. “No, dear, I don’t think so.”
    The whining child in me was turning into a teenager, and I could feel myself wanting to storm out the door, car keys in my fist, the desire to burn rubber in the parking lot hot in my blood. I