Short lived pleasures.

Kim as Willy’s mother for a minute.

One setback in my personal life, just before the Caguas mall, was that Victor told me I had to return the Vitara. It was finally repo’d. It was one of his raffle cars before our partnership began. He’d given it to me as an inducement to work with him but after three years, as our business relationship was melting down, he quit payments on it. I never saw the paperwork or details. I just drove it. The title was in the glove compartment.

I gave it up angrily in Rincon to some repo man who showed up above my lot one Saturday morning. A few days later I bought a Datsun 240 Z from my new friend Tom for a thousand dollars. It ran fine but the problem was he had no ownership papers and the sticker on the license plate was one year expired, almost two. I had no way of renewing it but figured that in P.R. this would never be a problem. I was wrong.

It was in that car that Irving, Jean and I drove to work everyday for a month and finished the store. On one of the very last days, I went there alone and on the way home was spotted and stopped by an officer. He noticed the sticker was two years expired, an offence for which any car could be impounded immediately for a fine, and it was. Sanita had to come and pick me up in Aguadilla at the police station, an embarrassing scene, as she brought Willy along.

I bought an even worse wreck of a car a week later. It squealed but ran. My life and bank account were going downhill fast. Then the St. Croix job came up and Tom joined me. A month later we met Kim.

After the store in Moca was complete, where Tom worked with Kim and me for the last two weeks, he decided to go home. We were great pals the whole time, driving to work together each day then straight to the Calypso after work. But he must have figured his chances with Kim were shot. R.S. had returned after his month in Florida and let Kim sleep on the couch a few days. But she had money now and he found her another house just two doors up, smaller but vacant, all her own, two-fifty a month. She moved in delighted. It was furnished for surfers with bunk beds. But it was still August and they weren’t here yet, so she had the whole place to herself.

Victor then gave me the store in Isla Verde where Kim had her shock. We drove there in my beat up vehicle but we had good weekly paychecks, a free place to stay in his modest, worker’s apartment and fun in Isla Verde, the strip, a mile away, every night after work. That was my playground from the years before, the bars, the casino, the restaurants, and for Kim, my treat.

It was during these weeks that a strange scene occurred that affected Kim deeply. This was after the electrical shock, but perhaps, to her heart an equal shock. We drove to Rincon on a Friday night and picked up Willy on Saturday. She loved playing with him, even at Sanita’s house where the computer was. That morning she spent hours with him on a new program I’d just brought over that created stories. You picked out pictures and then filled in the narrative. Kim was like me in that she could talk and play with Willy on his level and laugh with him with mutual enjoyment, as if she were herself a seven year old, or at least comfortable with such a mentality.

I still have six pages of their collaboration. I’d bought him a color printer too. I was spendthrift at that time. Sanita pretended to be half amused at Kim playing with him so rapt in what they were doing. Those two were delightfully engrossed with the screen. Sanita paced the floor of her living room while I sat back on the couch, enjoying the scene. I wondered if she was envious, but I doubted it. Who knows what was going through her head. Whatever it was, I knew it was convoluted.

One of Kim’s and Will’s collaborations. Homer was our dog.

That afternoon we decided to return to San Juan, taking Will with us. We went to dinner at a restaurant at the rocky end of Isla Verde where once again, (like the ‘Black Eagle’ in Rincon) the deck was built over the water. The middle-aged waitress was polite and we enjoyed steak dinners, Kim even partaking in a few glasses of wine to match mine. We were all in a fine glow.

As the waitress came up to offer us desserts, she broke out, unable to contain herself at the sight of our happiness: “you three are the loveliest family I’ve seen in a long time”. Then she turned to Kim and said: “you have the most darling child. You must be so proud”. Will had been an angel throughout the meal and now he smiled at Kim the biggest smile, playing along with the mistake, and asked for a piece of chocolate cake. Kim was so overwhelmed she couldn’t speak. She blushed and looked at Will, teary-eyed. I ordered us coffee while she sat speechless. She hardly took a sip of her’s. I paid the bill and drove us back to the apartment nearby.

It might have been the only time in her whole life she was called ‘mother’. It was certainly the first and it affected her deeply. Her shock reaction showed it, delightfully so. So I guess I jolted her twice that summer. We went back to the cheap apartment in San Juan. No one else was there on the weekend. I should have bedded her right there that night, she was so flush with emotions, so deluged, unable to absorb them and sex probably would have been a relief. But I put Will in the other bed next to mine, while she went to her own room and turned out the light. Once again, love lost.

The next day, driving back to Rincon, she sat in the back seat with him, often holding his hand. It was a three hour long ‘thank you’ in small talk all the way home, which he understood perfectly. There are gestures in life far more intimate than sex. Sitting in that back seat together for those three hours made me feel closer to her then any three hours we might have spent in each other’s arms. But I dropped her off and spent one of my last Sunday evenings with Sanita, though I thought they might go on forever, with Will sitting between us.

What this inaction ended in was lost opportunities, with both Kim and Rachel. They considered that a man who didn’t make a pass at them didn’t love them. Then again, in each case we might have turned out to be a disastrous couple after a year or two. On the other hand either one might have bloomed into a wonderful partner lasting decades, as both women were more intelligent and far different in personality than Sanita, with far fewer demons, if any.

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