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When Castillo nodded, she added, "He's a friend of my father's."
"I am not surprised," Castillo said. "Anyway, Naylor was shortly able to tell her the reason that my father had not come back as promised was because he was interred in the National Cemetery in San Antonio." He paused, then-his voice breaking-added: "So at least she had that. It wasn't much, but she had that."
Beth saw tears forming. Her own watered.
He turned his face from hers and coughed to get his voice under control.
He then asked, "If I take a beer from the cooler, are you going to snatch it away from me and gulp it down?"
"No," she said softly, almost in a whisper.
He took a bottle of Schlitz from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap. As he went to take a swig, raising it to his mouth, he lost enough of his balance so that he had to quickly back up against the counter.
Without missing a beat, he went on, "So…so one day Major Allan Naylor shows up in San Antonio, nobly determined to protect as well as he can the considerable assets the German kid is about to inherit from the natural avarice of the wetback family into which the German bastard is about to be dumped."
"Oh, Charley!"
"My grandfather was in New York on business, so Naylor had to deliver the news to Dona Alicia that WOJG Jorge Castillo had left a love child behind in Germany."
"What happened?"
"She called my grandfather in New York, told him, and his reaction to the news was that she was to do nothing until he could get back to Texas. He didn't want to be cruel, but, on the other hand, he didn't want to open the family safe to some German woman just because she claimed her bastard was his son's."
"Oh, Charley!"
"You keep saying that," Castillo said. He took another swig and went on: "Couldn't blame him. I'd have done the same thing. Asked for proof."
"So how long did that take? Proving who you were?"
"Not long. Thirty minutes after she hung up on Grandpa, the Lear went wheels-up out of San Antonio with Abuela and Naylor on it. They caught the five-fifteen Pan American flight out of New York to Frankfurt that afternoon. Abuela was at the Haus im Wald at eleven o'clock the next morning."
"Haus in Wald? What's that?"
"Means house in the woods. It's not really a castle. Really ugly building."
"Oh. And she went there?"
"And I didn't want to let her in," Castillo said, now speaking very carefully. "My mother was pretty heavily into the sauce. What she had was very painful. I was twelve, had never seen this woman before, and I was Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger. I was not about to display my drunken mother to some Mexican from America.
"So Abuela grabbed my arm and marched me into the house, and into mother's bedroom, and my mother, somewhat belligerently, said, 'Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my bedroom?' Abuela said she didn't speak German, so my mother switched to English and asked exactly the same question. And Abuela said"-Castillo's voice broke, and he started to sob-"and Abuela said, 'I'm Jorge's mother, my dear, and I'm here to take care of you and the boy.'"
He turned his back to Beth and she saw him shaking with sobs.
And she saw him raise the bottle of Schlitz.
And she ran to him to take it away from him.
And he didn't want to give it up.
They wrestled for it, then he fell backward onto the floor, pulling the bottle and Beth on top of him as he went down.
Neither remembered much of what happened after that, or the exact sequence in which it happened.
Just that it had.
The next thing they both knew was Beth asking, "Charley, are you awake?"
"I'm afraid so. I was hoping it was a dream."
