The Guardianship Papers on My Table

A Plate of Beans

The deputy who brought me the papers was a boy I used to feed, and I would not take them from his hand until he had eaten.

It was a Tuesday, the twenty-ninth of September, a little after ten in the morning. The wind had been blowing out of the southwest since before daylight, the way it does in the Estancia Valley, and I had a pot of pintos on the back burner with a ham hock and a spoonful of red chile, same as nearly every day of my life.

I saw the county car turn in at the cattle guard and I said to the empty kitchen, “Well, who died?” Nobody had. Somebody had only decided that I was finished.

Ruben Trujillo stood on my step with his hat in both hands and a long envelope under his arm. He is thirty-five now and wears a gun and a radio and a belly his mother is proud of. He did not look at me. He looked at the boot scraper.

“Mrs. Hargis,” he said, “I’m real sorry. I have to put this in your hand myself.”

“Ruben, you are not putting anything in my hand on an empty stomach. Come in and sit down.”

“Ma’am, I’m on duty.”

“Then you will be on duty at my table.”

He was in the third grade the year his daddy went to Texas and did not come back. He had no lunch money and would not say so, and I ran the steam line at Willard school. When the line was slow I slid an extra roll under his tray, and neither of us ever mentioned it. I could see in his face that he remembered.

He sat. I warmed three flour tortillas on the burner and ladled him a bowl of beans, and then a second one when the first was gone. He ate with his head down, the way a boy eats when he is trying to be a deputy, and I let him finish before I put on my glasses.

The paper on top said Petition for Appointment of Guardian and Conservator. It was filed in the Seventh Judicial District Court, Torrance County, with a hearing set for Thursday, the twelfth of November, at nine in the morning. Under that, in a box, was my name. Luella Marie Hargis, an alleged incapacitated person.

Under that was the petitioner. Kurt Stidham, nephew.

I read every page slowly, with Ruben watching me as if I might topple off the chair. I did not topple. I did not skip a line.