The Bean Trees

"I don't think she'd mind. Her eyes are her hands. And Virgie. She has her own special ways of keeping an eye on things," I told Lou Ann, and this seemed to make her feel better.

On Monday afternoon I asked if it would be okay if I went up to see Esperanza. I had never been upstairs at Mattie's and for some reason I felt it was off limits, but she said fine, to go on up. I went through the cramped study, which of course was still piled high with Mattie's dead husband's magazines (I knew by now that he had been dead many years, so it seemed unlikely that his mess would clear up any time soon) and on up the staircase into Mattie's living room.

It had the same crowded, higgledy-piggledy look as the office downstairs, though the stuff here had more to do with everyday living: junk mail, bills, pencils, magazines with color pictures of people like Tom Selleck and the President (not Jesus), a folded newspaper with a half-worked crossword puzzle, the occasional pliers or screwdriver. It was the type of flotsam and jetsam (a pair of words I had just learned from the dictionary) that washes up on your coffee table, lies around for a week or so, and then makes way for whatever comes in on the next tide.

Every surface was covered: tables, chairs, walls. Over the fireplace there was a big cross made up of hundreds of small, brightly glazed pieces of tile, each one shaped like something: a boy, a dog, a house, a palm tree, a bright blue fish. Together they all added up to a cross. I had never seen anything like it.

The wall across from the fireplace was covered with pictures of every imaginable size and shape. There were snapshots of people squinting into the sun, a few studio portraits of children, pictures of Mattie flanked by other people, all of them dark and shorter than herself. There were a number of children's drawings. I remembered Mattie telling me when we'd first met that she had "something like" grandchildren around, how that had struck me as such a peculiar thing to say.

I noticed that practically all the kids' drawings had guns in them somewhere, and huge bullets suspended in the air, hanging on the dotted lines that flowed like waterfalls out of the gun barrels. There were many men in turtle-shaped army helmets. One picture showed a helicopter streaming blood.

The living room had no windows, just doors opening off in four directions. An older woman came in with a cardboard box and looked at me with surprise, asking something in Spanish. I had never before seen anyone whose entire body looked sad. Her skin just seemed to hang from her, especially from her arms above the elbows, and her jaw.

"Esperanza," I said, and she nodded toward a door at the back.

That room seemed to belong in another house-it was empty. The walls were an antique-looking shade of light pink, completely bare except for a cross with two palm fronds stuck behind it, over one of the beds. The two beds were neatly made up with rough-looking blue blankets that surely no one would sleep under in this weather. Esperanza was not in either bed, but sitting up in a straight-backed chair by the window. She looked up when I knocked on the door casement.

"Hi, I came to see how you were doing."

She got up from the chair and offered it to me. She sat on the bed. I don't believe she had been doing anything at all, just sitting with her hands in her lap.

We looked at each other for a second, then looked at other things in the room, of which there were painfully few. I didn't know why I'd thought I'd have the nerve to do this.

"How are you feeling now? Are you feeling better? Your stomach's okay?" I put my hand on my stomach. Esperanza nodded, then looked at her hands.

I had lost my directions somewhere when I came into the house. I looked out the window expecting to see Roosevelt Park, but this was not that window. We were at the back of the house. From here you got a terrific bird's-eye view of Lee Sing's back garden. I wondered if you might catch a peek at Lee Sing's old mother from up here, if you stayed at your post long enough.

"I've been meaning to tell you," I said, "I think Esperanza's a beautiful name. Estevan told me it means to wait, and also to hope. That in Spanish the same word means both things. But I thought it was pretty even before I knew it meant anything. It reminded me of, I don't know, a waterfall or something."

She nodded.

"Taylor doesn't mean anything that interesting. A tailor hems up people's pants and stuff like that."

Her mouth stretched a little bit in the direction of a smile. But her eyes looked blank. Dark, black holes.

'You understand basically everything I'm saying, right?"

She nodded again.

"I think that's how Turtle is, too, but people always forget. They think she doesn't take in any more than she puts out, but I know better, I can tell she understands stuff. It's something about the way she looks at you."