We Never Asked for Wings by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
All at once, he stopped running. Hands on his knees, chest heaving, he remembered the envelope beneath his mother’s bed.
Wes Riley, 536 Elm Street, Mission Hills, California.
This was it. All his life he’d been waiting for the chance to see his father’s house, and now, with his grandparents gone and his mother and sister at work—this was the time. It seemed impossible his father could still live there—every photo on the Internet showed him with a different country as backdrop—but maybe Wes’s parents did. And maybe they would help.
He meant to keep running, but he was tired and, all of a sudden, nervous. As he got closer, his steps slowed, until he stood unmoving at the corner of the five hundred block. It was dark already; he tried to make out the addresses, but the numbers were too far away. It could be any one of the oversize houses on the block, all immaculate, all with neat rows of flowers and bushes trimmed square under wide windows.
Crossing to the even-numbered side of the street, he walked from house to house, pausing in front of every quiet face: 512. 520. 524. Then, on a giant white house, in the place where all the other numbers had been, a sign: WELCOME TO THE RILEYS’.
The sign itself was almost too much for Alex. With one swift blow it destroyed every late-night fantasy he’d ever had about his father. They were poor, he’d decided, living in the only rotten house in Mission Hills, without even a crust of bread to share, or else his grandparents were evil, and had threatened Wes if he so much as wrote a letter to his son. These were his favorite fantasies, when he imagined his father didn’t want to leave but was forced to by circumstances beyond his control. But a bright white house with a WELCOME sign—they were neither poor nor evil; they couldn’t be.
Alex took in other details: a blue door, an iron balcony, wooden beams supporting a tile roof. The front window was arched, the high walls stucco. In a pot under the WELCOME sign a bright red bundle of flowers had been overwatered; dirt spilled in a line down the side of the pot and onto the cement porch.
He could tell by the dark windows and the empty driveway that no one was home, so he walked up onto the front porch to peek inside. It was dangerous—they could be back any minute—but he’d waited all his life for this moment, and he wanted to see everything. Behind the glass he took in a polished wood table surrounded by glossy black chairs, and through an arch he made out the outlines of a kitchen, white floor and white tile and white appliances, everything as stark and bright as the exterior except for a round, bright green table. The table was stacked with what looked like dirty breakfast dishes, an open box of cereal beside them. Alex had an urge to close it—It’s your stale cereal to eat, he heard his grandmother say, as she’d said for months and years, until he’d remembered to close the box on his own and she didn’t have to say it anymore.
At the far end of the porch, a wooden swing hung from the eaves. He walked over and reached out, setting it gently in motion. His mother had sat here. He was sure of it. He imagined her walking to Wes’s house after school, her backpack heavy with books, and sitting here hand in hand with his father, watching the world go by. A New York Times sat open on the swing now, and he picked it up before setting it down quickly, exactly as he’d found it. No one could know he’d been here.
Just then he heard a noise behind him. A car on the road, slowing down, and before he could even worry about whether or not it could be his grandparents, he felt a pair of headlights slice his midsection, a car turning in to the driveway.
They were home.
He raced across the porch and was halfway down the front path when a door opened and slammed shut. Alex stopped in his tracks and turned to look.
But it wasn’t his grandparents.
It was his father.
He recognized him immediately, the light from the streetlamp reflecting off his dark blond hair. He wore a loose set of pale blue scrubs, a highlighter tucked into the front pocket. He waited for Alex to speak, and when he didn’t, he walked around the car and paused.
“Can I help you?”
Yes! A voice in Alex’s head screamed. Please. Help us. But instead he shoved his hands in his pockets and backed away. He was looking at the man who’d left his mother, the man who’d spent fifteen years no more than a mile away but had never once come to visit, the man who’d held babies all over the world and had never held his own son. He could ask him to help, but it wouldn’t do any good. He’d made his decision a long time ago.
“No,” Alex said. “Sorry. Wrong house.”
Wes stood still, looking at him, and before he could say another word, Alex turned and ran.
There was a honeymoon. After the abandonment, after the popcorn and chocolate and chase down Mile Road, after Letty begged her job back with Luna bleeding on a barstool beside her, they behaved, all of them. Letty switched to the lunch shift when school let out for the summer, and Luna went to work with her every day, sitting obediently in an oversize chair in the terminal with an empty suitcase beside her and a purse in her lap, props intended to make it look like her mother had left her there for just a moment to use the restroom. Letty worked with her eyes glued to the chair, her attention divided between her customers and her daughter.
At home, Alex took over the microwaving of Maria Elena’s food, setting the table each evening the way his grandmother had taught him and reporting out long days in strained sentences: he’d patrolled the cracked wetlands, throwing stranded minnows back into the bay; he’d refilled his grandfather’s bird feeders; he’d met some girl named Yesenia on the rock that they’d determined to be exactly halfway between their apartments. After dinner, they sat in a line on the couch watching television, speaking in soft, careful tones and asking questions instead of making demands (Letty: Do you want to put on your pajamas? Luna: Do you want to help me?). They were afraid to be together, but they were afraid to be apart too. Even with an empty bedroom they still slept three to a room: Alex in the twin bed pushed up against the window and Luna in the full bed on the opposite wall, her sweaty cheek sealed to her mother’s, arms tight around her neck.
It lasted exactly a month. On the day after they’d eaten the very last of Maria Elena’s meals, when there was nothing left in the freezer but a bag of ice, Letty looked up from making change at the register to find Luna crouched behind the bar, her long hair stuck to a bottle of simple syrup.
“What are you doing?” she hissed, swiping her daughter’s hair away from the row of bottles and glancing around to make sure her manager wasn’t on the floor. “You can’t be back here.”
“But I’m bored.”
“So keep coloring.”
“I already finished the book. I want a new one.”
Switching to the lunch shift had cut Letty’s earnings in half, and over the past four weeks she’d spent the majority of what she made at the airport gift shop. She bought coloring books and puzzles and stuffed animals, anything to keep Luna in her chair. But now the food in the freezer was gone. She needed to start buying more than milk and cereal and chips and Kool-Aid, plus there was the letter she’d received from her mother just the day before, pages and pages of everything she forgot to tell her (Luna breaks out in hives when she eats blueberries! The dollar store on Rollins sells produce on Wednesdays!), followed by a postscript: The address is on the envelope, just in case you can. Send money, she meant, though she didn’t even have the decency to ask outright. Letty wanted to ignore her letter out of spite, but she couldn’t bear the thought of her parents walking through that big, empty house hungry, and so she’d already started dividing her tips in her apron pocket. “I can’t buy you another one,” she said to Luna, turning her daughter toward the end of the bar. “Color the backgrounds?”
“I already did.”
“Add patterns? Hearts? Stars? Tear out all the pages and make paper airplanes?” Luna shook her head: no, no, no, no. “Well, figure it out, then. You have two more hours.”
She led Luna across the rubber mat toward the door, but before they were h
“Hey, there,” Letty said casually, one hand on top of Luna’s wriggling head, the other reaching for bar napkins. “Have a seat anywhere you’d like.”
Go, she mouthed to her daughter as the women hung long overcoats over the backs of two stools, but Luna stuck out her lip and wouldn’t budge. There was nothing to do but drag her out. Better her customers saw than her manager, who had promised he’d fire her the first time he saw Luna getting in her way. Letty grabbed her daughter underneath the armpits and carried her protesting into the hall. The chair where she’d spent most of the past month was smeared in dried glitter glue and marker. Letty dropped her into it.
“You can’t tell me this entire thing is full,” she said, picking up the book. She’d bought it only that morning. Flipping through, she found two pages Luna had missed in the middle. “See? Here. Color.”
Spinning around, she jogged back to her place.
“Can I get you ladies something to drink?”
The women were in their sixties, well groomed, one with a short gray bob and no makeup, the other with dyed blond hair and an oversize orange purse, which she placed on the bar beside her. They asked for two Cokes without taking their eyes off Luna. She had flipped over onto her back, twig legs sticking straight up the back of the chair, her hair flowing off the cushion and all the way down to the floor. With one hand she held the book in the air, and with the other she scribbled pink marker onto the page.
“She’s beautiful,” said the blonde.
“Thanks.” Filling two glasses, Letty set them on the napkins. “Eating lunch today?”
They nodded. She turned to get the menus, and when she spun back around Luna stood in the doorway, holding up the colored pages.
“Sit down, please,” Letty said, in her best imitation of a patient mother. “I’ll be right there.” And then, to the women: “Sorry about that. Babysitter canceled. Anything look good to you?”
The woman with the gray bob had taken a sip of her drink and puckered her lips, forcing herself to swallow. “I don’t think this is Coke.”
“No?” Letty picked up the glass and smelled it. She was right; it wasn’t Coke. For ten years nothing had changed at Flannigan’s, and then the week she was gone, management had decided to put iced tea in the soda gun. She still hadn’t gotten used to it. “You’re right. Sorry about that.”
Taking a step closer, Luna shook the coloring book. The noise flapped through the empty restaurant.
“One minute,” she said to her daughter, her voice significantly less patient this time. “I’m sorry. Let me swap those out for you.”
Flinging the dishwasher open, she pulled out two tumblers and shoveled them through the ice bin in the way that was expressly forbidden. The glasses could break, rendering the ice unusable, but they didn’t, and her manager didn’t see. Double-checking the gun to make sure her finger was on the Coke, she filled both glasses and pushed them across the bar before dragging Luna back out into the hall.
“You have to stop doing that,” she whispered, her anger barely contained. “Sit down.” She picked up the book again, praying for more blank pages, something, anything, to keep her daughter occupied at least until the restaurant was empty again, and found what she was looking for: a section of the book had been glued together by some kind of butterscotch dribble from the candy the TSA officers were always handing Luna—eight or ten pages at least.
Merciful God, she thought and almost laughed aloud, she sounded so much like her mother. She unstuck the pages and slammed the book down, victorious.
“Now stay.”
Luna didn’t look enthusiastic but didn’t protest; Letty ran back to the bar. The ladies hadn’t touched their drinks.
“Coke?”
“Maybe.”
The blond woman pointed to lipstick marks on the glass. With sudden horror, Letty remembered: she hadn’t yet run the dishwasher. She’d served them in dirty glasses. Biting back tears, she whisked the glasses away and dumped them into the sink.
“Maybe the Cokes just weren’t meant to be,” she said, trying to smile. “What do you think? Something stronger? It’s already midnight in London.”
They looked at each other, surprised. “How did you know we were going to London?”
She’d seen a pocket-size travel guide in the orange purse when the blond woman had reached inside to check her phone. But Letty didn’t like to give away her secrets. She’d spent ten years trying to figure out where people were going or where they’d come from based on accents and dress and baggage and any other clues she could scavenge.
She gestured to their long coats. “It was either that, or you are the first tourists in history to believe the hype about summers in San Francisco.”
They laughed. “Sure. Give us something stronger. You choose.”
Letty made them Bloody Marys, counting slowly as she poured vodka into a shaker and then adding the rest of the ingredients, topping off the glasses with celery and green olives and umbrellas. The drinks were so full and the towers of celery and umbrellas so extravagant it took all her skill to carry them to the bar without spilling.
“Wow,” the gray bob said when Letty placed one in front of her. “Now, that’s a drink.”
“On the house,” Letty said.
The women raised their glasses. The Bloody Marys were a little too brown—too much Worcestershire, probably—and just as she handed them over, Letty remembered she’d forgotten the salt.
But they were free.
Clinking their glasses, the women sipped, and then grimaced, but they did not complain.
—
Forty-five minutes later the women had finished lunch and sped off to their gate, tipping generously enough to almost cover the cost of the drinks Letty had bought them. She loaded the glasses into the dishwasher and turned it on, glancing up just in time to see Luna dart from her chair and disappear. Letty abandoned the wet rag on the counter and ran into the hall. Luna stood with her back pressed against the doorway, peeking around the corner as if preparing another surprise appearance behind the bar.
“Uh-uh. Not happening. Back in your chair.”
“But there’s nothing to do,” Luna complained. “Why won’t you buy me a new coloring book?”
Letty reached deep into her apron pocket and pulled out a pathetic collection of wrinkled dollar bills. “Because you can’t eat a coloring book.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You aren’t hungry now, because you just had lunch.”
“I won’t be hungry later,” she said, drawing an X across her heart with one finger. “I promise.”
“Oh, Luna.” Letty knew it was a lot to ask a six-year-old to sit in a chair for a six-hour shift, but what else could she do? Luna refused to stay home with Alex. Sara was teaching, and all Letty’s restaurant friends were probably still asleep, not that she trusted any of them to watch Luna anyway. There was barely enough money to buy food; she could never afford to hire a babysitter. “Listen. We’ll go to the dollar store this weekend and buy you more things to do. But right now you have to sit here. If you can’t you’re going to have to stay with Alex tomorrow, no matter how much you fight me.”
“No,” Luna said, crossing her arms and pushing herself into Letty’s stomach. “No, no, no, no, no. You can’t leave me.”
I’ll never leave you, Letty wanted to say, but she’d given up her right to ever say that again when she left them sleeping in their beds and drove to Mexico.
“Then sit down.”
“I won’t.”
Luna started to cry. Letty held her tight, her grasp half comfort, half muffle, but Luna would not be quieted. She pulled her face away and took big, gasping breaths. Tears streamed down her face. Businessmen talking on cell phones crossed the hall to get as far away from them as possible, while heavily burdened mothers stopped their own complaining childre
“She’s fine,” Letty muttered, embarrassed by the scene they were making.
Hearing this, Luna pulled herself away and stomped over to her chair, climbing up onto the seat and then onto the back, balancing taller than the potted palm beside her.
“I am not fine!” she screamed, a spectacle that caused the entire hallway to stop and stare.
An eerie quiet fell over the terminal.
“You’re the worst mom ever,” she whispered into the sudden silence. “My nana would buy me a coloring book. I want my nana.”
“So do I,” Letty spit, to which Luna began to cry again, and the crowd turned in on itself, chatting loudly about nothing, trying not to watch. Blood rushed pink to Letty’s cheeks, and she felt like ripping off her apron right there and giving up. She couldn’t do it. She knew she couldn’t do it and she’d told her mother she couldn’t do it. Maria Elena’s blank stare and empty encouragement popped into her mind, replaced almost immediately by the expression on the London-bound ladies’ faces at the dirty-brown Bloody Mary bribes she’d thrust at them. She couldn’t do anything right.
As she stood there, trying to figure out how she could walk away from it all, Letty felt it—someone was watching her. A shadow moved from the back of the restaurant, drawing closer, and all at once the fantasy of fleeing faded. She couldn’t leave, and she couldn’t lose her job. In the time it took to turn around, she saw exactly how her life would be if she lost this job: hungry kids, no apartment, no hope. Her manager had already warned her more than once. Luna couldn’t come into the bar, couldn’t get in her way, couldn’t distract her. And now he’d found them both in the hall, Luna wailing, while a band of passersby watched it all.
But when she turned around, she was relieved to find that it wasn’t her manager after all. It was Rick Moya, the bartender hired to fill her evening shifts. He was early. As she exhaled, her panic turned to mortification. Of all the people to be witnessing this spectacle, she wished it didn’t have to be Rick. There was something about him she just didn’t like. He had the kind of groomed good looks she assumed to be untrustworthy: dark hair kept short, square jaw cleanly shaven, black-rimmed glasses, and expensive-looking dark jeans. But even more than his appearance, there was the fact that he’d been brought on to work her shifts. Every night he closed up and drove home with what she still thought of as her tips.