AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Such was the case with the Bonshaw family plot, where Flor and Senor Eduardo would be buried--together, as they'd requested, and with Beatrice's ashes, which Edward Bonshaw's mother had kept for him. (Senor Eduardo had saved his dear dog's ashes in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Iowa City.)
Mrs. Dodge, with her Coralville connections, had known exactly where the Bonshaw burial plot was--the cemetery wasn't in Coralville, but it was "somewhere else on the outskirts of Iowa City." (This was the way Edward Bonshaw himself had described it; Senor Eduardo wasn't a driver, either.)
If it hadn't been for Mrs. Dodge, Juan Diego wouldn't have discovered where his beloved adoptive parents wanted to be buried. And after Mrs. Dodge died, it was always Dr. Rosemary who drove Juan Diego to the mystery cemetery. As they'd wished, Edward Bonshaw and Flor had shared one headstone, inscribed with the last speech in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which Senor Eduardo had loved. Tragedies affecting young people were those that had moved the Iowan the most. (Flor would profess to having been less affected. Yet Flor had yielded to her dear Eduardo on the matter of their common-law name and the gravestone's inscription.)
FLOR & EDWARD
BONSHAW
"A GLOOMING PEACE THIS
MORNING WITH IT BRINGS."
ACT 5, SCENE 3
That was the way the headstone was marked. Juan Diego would question Senor Eduardo's request. "Don't you want, at least, to say 'Shakespeare,' if not which Shakespeare?" the dump reader had asked the Iowan.
"I don't think it's necessary. Those who know Shakespeare will know; those who don't--well, they won't," Edward Bonshaw mused, as the Hickman catheter rose and fell on his bare chest. "And no one has to know that Beatrice's ashes are buried with us, do they?"
Well, Juan Diego would know, wouldn't he? As would Dr. Rosemary, who also knew where her writer friend's standoffishness--concerning the commitment required in permanent relationships--came from. In Juan Diego's writing, which Rosemary also knew, where everything came from truly mattered.
It's true that Dr. Rosemary Stein didn't really know the boy from Guerrero--not the dump-kid part, not the dump-reader tenacity inside him. But she had seen Juan Diego be tenacious; the first time, it had surprised her--he was such a small man, so slightly built, and there was his identifying limp.
They were having dinner in that restaurant they went to all the time; it was near the corner of Clinton and Burlington. Just Rosemary and her husband, Pete--who was also a doctor--and Juan Diego was with one of his writer colleagues. Was it Roy? Rosemary couldn't remember. Maybe it was Ralph, not Roy. One of the visiting writers who drank a lot; he either said nothing or he never shut up. One of those passing-through writers-in-residence; Rosemary believed they were the most badly behaved.
It was 2000--no, it was 2001, because Rosemary had just said, "I can't believe it's been ten years, but they've been gone ten years. My God--that's how long they've been gone." (Dr. Rosemary had been talking about Flor and Edward Bonshaw.) Rosemary was a little drunk, Juan Diego thought, but that was okay--she wasn't on call, and Pete was always the driver when they went anywhere together.
That was when Juan Diego had heard a man say something at another table; it was not what the man said that was special--it was the way he said it. "That's what I know," the man had said. There was something memorable about the intonation. The man's voice was both familiar and confrontational--he was sounding a little defensive, too. He sounded like a last-word kind of guy.
He was a blond, red-faced man who was having dinner with his family; it seemed he'd been having an argument with his daughter, a girl about sixteen or seventeen, Juan Diego would have guessed. There was a son, too--he was only a little older than the daughter. The son looked to be about eighteen, tops; the boy was still in high school--Juan Diego would have bet on it.
"It's one of the O'Donnells," Pete said. "They're all a little loud."
"It's Hugh O'Donnell," Rosemary said. "He's on the zoning board. He always wants to know when we're building another hospital, so he can be opposed to it."
But Juan Diego was watching the daughter. He knew and understood the beleaguered look on the young girl's face. She'd been trying to defend the sweater she was wearing. Juan Diego had heard her say to her father: "It's not 'slutty-looking'--it's what kids wear today!"
This was what had prompted the dismissive "That's what I know" from her red-faced father. The blond man hadn't changed much since high school, when he'd said those hurtful things to Juan Diego. When was it--twenty-eight or twenty-nine, almost thirty, years ago?
"Hugh, please--" Mrs. O'Donnell was saying.
"It's not 'slutty-looking,' is it?" the girl asked her brother. She turned in her chair, trying to give the smirking boy a better look at her sweater. But the boy reminded Juan Diego of what Hugh O'Donnell used to look like--thinner, flaxen-blond with more pink in his face. (Hugh's face was much redder now.) The boy's smirk was the same as his dad's; the girl knew better than to continue modeling her sweater for him--she turned away. Anyone could see that the smirking brother lacked the courage to take his sister's side. The look he gave her was one Juan Diego had seen before--it was a no-sympathy look, as if the brother thought his sister would be slutty-looking in any sweater. In the boy's condescending gaze, his sister looked like a slut, no matter what the poor girl wore.
"Please, both of you--" the wife and mother started to say, but Juan Diego got up from the table. Naturally, Hugh O'Donnell recognized the limp, though he'd not seen it--or Juan Diego--for almost thirty years.
"Hi--I'm Juan Diego Guerrero. I'm a writer--I went to school with your dad," he said to the O'Donnell children.
"Hi--" the daughter started to say, but the son didn't say anything, and when the girl glanced at her father, she stopped speaking.
Mrs. O'Donnell blurted out something, but she didn't finish what she was going to say--she just stopped. "Oh, I know who you are. I've read--" was as far as she got. There must have been more than a little of that dump-reader tenacity in Juan Diego's expression, enough to alert Mrs. O'Donnell to the fact that Juan Diego wasn't interested in talking about his books--or to her. Not right now.
"I was your age," Juan Diego said to Hugh O'Donnell's son. "Maybe your dad and I were between your ages," he said to the daughter. "He wasn't very nice to me, either," Juan Diego added to the girl, who seemed to be increasingly self-conscious--not necessarily about her much-maligned sweater.
"Hey, look here--" Hugh O'Donnell started to say, but Juan Diego just pointed to Hugh, not bothering to look at him.
"I'm not talking to you--I've heard what you have to say," Juan Diego told him, looking only at the children. "I was adopted by two gay men," Juan Diego continued--after all, he did know how to tell a story. "They were partners--they couldn't be married, not here or in Mexico, where I came from. But they loved each other, and they loved me--they were my guardians, my adoptive parents. And I loved them, of course--the way kids are supposed to love their parents. You know how that is, don't you?" Juan Diego asked Hugh O'Donnell's kids, but the kids couldn't answer him, and only the girl nodded her head--just a little. The boy was absolutely frozen.
"Anyway," Juan Diego went on, "your dad was a bully. He said my mom shaved--he meant her face. He thought she did a poor job shaving her upper lip, but she didn't shave. She was a man, of course--she dressed as a woman, and she took hormones. The hormones helped her to look a little more like a woman. Her breasts were kind of small, but she had breasts, and her beard had stopped growing, though she still had the faintest, softest-looking trace of a mustache on her upper lip. I told your dad it was the best the hormones could do--I said it was all the estrogens could accomplish--but your dad just kept being a bully."
