Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 1. Whole No. 785, January 2007

With the Rich, a Little Patience by John Van Kirk

John Van Kirk teaches writing and literature at Marshall University in West Virginia. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Hudson Review, The New York Times Magazine, West Branch, and Paragraph, as well as in several anthologies. “Newark Job,” his first published story, won an O. Henry Award in 1993. He makes his EQMM debut here with a Christmas story with an O. Henry-like twist at the end.

Have you ever even lied to anybody? Did you ever just take something... you know, just because you wanted it? Christ, Little Ms. Perfect, did you ever do anything bad in your life?”

Nobody had ever spoken to Emily like that before, or nobody but her father, and he never would have asked those questions, but now, finally, secure in her seat on the train, her Christmas boxes tucked around her, she had time to think about what her boss was trying to tell her when he had called her into his office an hour before. “I’m not saying you have to have larceny in your heart,” Wade had gone on, “but, my God, you have to want something, you have to have hunger. If you go on like this, you’re going to give away everything we have.”

The train gave its first soft lurch and Emily looked up to see a hugely pregnant woman in a threadbare red coat teetering toward the open seat next to her. She had that glow people say some pregnant women have, and Emily said to herself, This is a beautiful woman, this is a beautiful pregnant woman steering her way toward me, and she started clearing her parcels from the empty seat to make room, another act of generosity that Wade wouldn’t approve of. Although she only saw Wade at work, she could easily imagine him on the train: He wouldn’t invite this girl, for as she drew closer she was revealed to be quite young, younger by ten years than Emily herself... Wade would never invite this girl to sit beside him; he would guard his space until he had no choice but to surrender it, and then he would manage to give it to a thin person who wouldn’t encroach on his breathing room.

“Permiso. Gracias. Thank you,” the young woman said as she settled herself and several shopping bags next to Emily.

“You’re welcome,” Emily said. “De nada.”

“You speak Spanish? ¿Usted habla Español?” the woman said.

“Yes. Sí, sí, algo.”

Suddenly a torrent of rapid-fire Spanish poured from the young woman. Emily could just keep up. “Could you watch my things a moment?” the young woman asked. “I must find a bathroom,” and she indicated her belly. “I can’t go ten minutes these days.”

Ill at ease with the responsibility of guarding the young woman’s possessions, but unable to say no, Emily stretched her arm across the seat next to her, and tried to extend her sense of property over all that it contained. The train had pulled out of the station, and was lumbering through the dark underground passageways that led out of the city. Emily could remember riding through these tunnels as a little girl, at once frightened and fascinated by the lights that would surge out of the shadows, wheel around, and vanish, roaring. Red taillights glinted from silvery tracks. The murmur of her parents’ voices comforted her from the distant past.

“Ai, gracias de nuevo.”

The young woman was back, shifting packages and maneuvering herself into the seat.

“Esta bien,” Emily said.

“Soy Emilia,” the woman said, extending her hand and smiling not just with her mouth, but with her eyes as well. She smelled like cornmeal.

“Emilia? Yo soy Emily. Tenemos el mismo nombre.” We have the same name.

And somehow, faster and more easily than she could have expected, she found herself in a conversation... in Spanish. As she listened to the young woman, and found herself responding, she marveled at how readily the language, which she hadn’t practiced in years other than in the occasional brief interchange with a Hispanic waiter or salesperson, came back to her. They spoke of the weather — as they burst from the tunnels the usually barren gravel railbeds of the old switching yards were beginning to be dusted with big flakes of snow. They spoke of the crowds and the rush to get home for Christmas. They began to speak of their families.

Emilia was from Guatemala. She had been in the U.S. for only a few months. Her husband had brought her and her mother up with the money he saved by working as a truckdriver, going back and forth across the country. They were renting a little house in the suburbs. It was pretty, but she still wasn’t used to the cold, and her mother was feeling lonely for Guatemala. And she was cleaning everything in sight and cooking all this food as if a multitude would be coming for Christmas. Emilia had had to get out of the house or she would go crazy. So she took the train to the city. It was her first time alone, and she practically had to sneak out of the house. But when the baby came, she told Emily, then her mother would be all right, she was sure of that; once she had a little baby to help out with, to keep her occupied, she would be fine. And Emilia had found a beautiful present for her, too. She reached into one of her bags and pulled out a white cardboard gift box about the size of a pencil case, and opened it to show Emily. There, on a snowy bed of cotton, lay a bright necklace of shiny green and red stones set in a delicate silver filigree. Emily knew it couldn’t have cost more than forty or fifty dollars, perhaps less, but it was tasteful and Christmassy, really quite beautiful. “Your mother will love it,” she told Emilia.

And then, caught up in Emilia’s enthusiasm, Emily blurted out that she, too, had bought her mother a necklace for Christmas. She felt embarrassed as soon as Emilia demanded to see it. But there was no denying this young woman, so exuberant with her two lives tucked into one body. Emily took the black case out of her purse, held it low in her lap, and snapped it open for Emilia’s eyes only. Diamonds like stars and white gold like dripping icicles picked up the blue-gray light of the late afternoon sky, the yellowish light from the ceiling of the train car, and a bit of the red of Emilia’s coat.

“Ai, Dios mío,” Emilia said. What a marvel. “Oh, if I could give... if my mother... ah, your mother will love it.”

“Oh yes,” Emily heard herself reply, “I saw her admire it in a shop window just last year, and I have been making little payments on it every week,” which was partly true. She had put it on layaway, and she had made fifty weekly payments of two hundred dollars each. She closed the box carefully and returned it to her purse.

“Your mother is very lucky,” Emilia said, “to have such a generous daughter.”

“Four daughters,” Emily heard herself say, “and we all try to outdo one another, ever since we were girls together.” There was something about saying all this in another language that made it possible for Emily to paint for Emilia the picture of an idyllic childhood with two older sisters and one cherished baby sister. She told her of the Christmases and birthdays, and how her mother would cook all day and make gifts by hand, but how happy it made all of them just to be together in those days. She told her how her father had struggled to send them all to college and how they didn’t always have all the things their neighbors and friends had, but their house was always filled with laughter and love, especially the lively wit of her mother, a great joker, a tiny round woman who was always setting a place for other children at the table, as all of the girls would invite school friends to dinner, and later, during their college years, would even bring friends home to spend the holidays, not poor friends, or not always, but sometimes rich friends whose parents were off to Aspen or Switzerland or someplace remote and exotic where they went without their kids. “Oh, those rich people,” Emily said.

“Sí,” Emilia said, “pues, dicen, ‘Con los ricos, paciencia.’ ” They say, “With the rich, a little patience.” They have their troubles.

Emily looked at Emilia. She meant what she said. This lovely glowing pregnant woman from Guatemala, living with her mother far from the rest of their family, waiting to hear whether her hard-working husband would be able to make it home for Christmas, this woman was recommending sympathy for the rich. She thought again of Wade telling her she lacked the hunger to succeed in the business world, suggesting that she wasn’t worth the wages, the first real money of her own, he paid her.

“I don’t know,” Emily told her. “I had one friend who stayed with us almost all the time; she couldn’t stand her rich parents in those days. Now she works in New York trying to become just like them.”

“Ai,” Emilia said, arching her back and wincing. “I think he’s standing on my bladder. Would you watch my things again?”

Emily took charge again of the bags. It was becoming dark, and she could see her own reflection in the window. She looked tired and sad. She watched the snow falling through the streetlights of the little towns along the route. A melancholy sense of futility took hold of her. So much was irrecoverable. Again she heard Wade’s words in her ears: “Did you ever just take something just because you wanted it?” No. She hadn’t. But she would, she resolved, she would.

She looked up to see Emilia wobbling back toward her seat, her face beaded with sweat from the exertion, her black hair sticking to her temples in curly little tendrils. And still she looked beautiful, radiant.

“It is the first time I have seen snow,” Emilia told her as she lowered herself heavily into the seat. “I have seen it in pictures and in the movies, but I never really knew it would be so beautiful.” For a moment, Emily actually saw the scene through the train window, the white blanket of snow on the ground, the Christmas lights on the houses, the falling snow under the night sky... she saw all this reflected in Emilia’s eyes.

“I have to get off at the next stop,” Emily said.

Emilia wished her a merry Christmas “...and blessings on your mother and all your sisters.”

“Hello, Daddy,” Emily said as she entered the warm foyer.

“Hello, precious,” her father said. “Did you have a good trip? Give me those bags, your coat — ah, here’s Consuela.”

A little round woman was coming down the stairs. “Ai, bienvenida, mi amor,” she sang out musically.

“Oh, Consuela,” Emily said. “Feliz Navidad. Como te he extrañado.” How I’ve missed you.

She set her bags on the floor and wrapped her arms around Consuela before shrugging out of her coat. “How is she?” she asked, looking from Consuela to her father and back again and seeing the look that passed between them before either would answer.

“She’s about the same, dear,” her father said, but the weariness in his voice told her that she was worse.

“She has good days and bad days,” Consuela said. “Today is not so bad. I was just with her. She’s awake. You go up and tell her Merry Christmas.”

“Does she know you?” Emily asked, again of both her father and Consuela. “The last time I was here she didn’t know me.”

Her father didn’t say anything.

“She will like to have a visitor,” Consuela said. “You go up and see her.”

A short while later Emily sat by the side of the hospital bed brought into the house for her mother. She held the older woman’s dry right hand in hers. The table next to the bed was crowded with photographs in tasteful frames and stands — her slim, stylish mother and her handsome father in ski outfits at Vail and Bern, in formal wear at a fancy dress ball, in conical hats drinking champagne. Emily herself was only in one of the photos — a birthday shot taken in a restaurant when she was ten or eleven.

“It’s Emily, Mother, your daughter,” she said.

Her mother didn’t speak, but looked at her with expressionless eyes.

“I know you don’t remember me.”

Emily reached out to dab her mother’s mouth with a napkin.

“I learned something today,” Emily said. “Wade — you don’t remember him either, Daddy’s old friend who’s supposed to be teaching me how to cut throats — Wade thinks I need to learn how to lie, how to steal... he thinks I don’t have the hunger it takes in his world, the world Daddy did so well in. But today I lied. And I stole. And I saw what I want.”

Emily brought out her present. “It’s Christmas Eve,” she said. “I’ve brought you something.”

She held the box up before her mother and opened it carefully, watching the unknowing eyes as they took in the black velvet lining and the box’s contents. And suddenly her mother’s left hand that had lain limp on the coverlet lifted and reached for the necklace, for the shiny green and red stones and the silver filigree.

Copyright ©2006 by John Van Kirk