Nestor

By James W. Morris

He was rifling through cabinets in the pantry when a woman unlocked the front door of the house, entered, then crossed the modest living room and faced him in the kitchen.

They stared at each other in surprise for a second.

“Oh, hello,” the woman said. “You must be the nephew I’ve heard so much about. Nestor, is it? I was told you’d be stopping by.”

Nestor? All he knew was that he was ravenously hungry. Looking for food.

“Uh,” he said. He considered quickly pushing past the smiling lady, heading for the nearest exit, then running like crazy up the street, but for some reason he didn’t. He was frozen. Didn’t want any trouble. She might call the cops.

The woman put out her hand. “I’m Phoebe,” she said. “Pheebs. I look after your Aunt during the day. There’s a night shift too, mostly fill-ins. It’s really hard to keep people these days.”

Aunt?

Anyway, seeing no other choice, he grasped the woman’s extended hand. It was bony and warm.

“Whoa,” she said. “Cold hands. Well, like my mother always said, ‘Cold hands, warm heart,’ am I right? Val said you promised you’d drop by to see her on your way home from spring break. It’s nice that you did. And how was your break, anyhow? Hey, come to think of it, I didn’t see another car parked in the yard. Did you leave it up the street? Well, anyway, I suppose you haven’t actually been up to see Val yet, she’s probably still asleep since it’s so early, am I right? How did you get in? Oh, I guess your Mom lent you her key…”

Phoebe had been moving around the modest kitchen the entire time she was talking, stepping around him once or twice. She took off her maroon leather jacket and hung it carefully on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. She picked up and closely read an official-looking piece of paper that had been left in the center of the teetery kitchen table. She moved across to one of the countertops and looked to see if there were used grounds left in the coffeemaker, which there were. She shook her head. After dumping them, she put in a new filter and scooped in some fresh grounds; she filled the pot with water and poured the water into the machine. The ON switch, when flipped, emitted a mild buzz and glowed orange.  

During this time her monologue continued unabated; the woman didn’t seem to notice he was not responding.

He thought: Once this crazy lady leaves the room, I’ll grab whatever food I can and take off. 

As soon as the coffee machine began its phlegmatic gurgle, Phoebe moved past him again, heading for the staircase in the living room that led to the second floor, but still speaking over her shoulder.

“…go and tell Val you’re here, get her set up for the day. She’s been pretty downbeat lately. It’s hard recovering from a stroke. She said you promised to read to her. That’s great. Audiobooks edit out too much, she says. She really prefers guests to read to her directly from the original, physical, book. She’s got a stack of old dusty ones up there, next to the bed. It’s a shame she can’t read them herself anymore. I heard she was quite a reader before the stroke took her vision away. Anyhow, after she’s set up—twenty minutes or so—I’ll go food shopping. I hope you’re able to stay for dinner. Something special? Maybe a nice steak?”

He stopped a yard from the back door, a half-empty box of stale Nilla Wafers in his hand.

Steak?

***

The sound of murmured female voices could be heard coming from upstairs for quite a while, punctuated by sounds of running water and room-to-room footsteps. He sat at the kitchen table, got up, circled the table a few times, then sat back down. He was trying to talk himself into escaping the house, pronto. There was no way he could manage to pass for this Nestor guy.

Or could he? That steak was calling to him.

Before he knew it, Phoebe was back in the kitchen. “You can go up and see her now,” she said. “Maybe read from her current book. I have some errands to run and on the way back I’ll buy some food.” She grabbed her jacket and was gone.

Now was the best time to escape, to rapidly depart the premises. He got so far as to stand with his hand on the knob for the front door. But he did not leave. A part of him—perhaps a perverse part—needed to know if he could be Nestor.

He climbed the narrow, carpeted staircase and found the door to the front bedroom open a crack. He rapped on it and a lilting voice said, “Come in, Nestor.”

He had expected the lady in the room would be a wrinkled, white-haired and frail old woman, but she wasn’t. When he pushed the door wide he saw she was in fact a strikingly beautiful, middle-aged Latina lady, with raven hair and large watery black eyes. The manner in which she reached out a hand from the bed to greet him when he said hello told him those eyes couldn’t see him, however.

He felt a surge of pity for the woman, as well as a mortifying feeling of relief for himself. His chances of passing for Nestor had—very slightly—improved.

Val appeared exquisitely well-groomed, and sat propped up in her large bed in a magisterially erect, dignified manner. She might have been the Queen of Spain—except for the SpongeBob pajamas. He grasped her hand.

“Kiss me, Mijo,” she said, and without hesitation he dutifully bent down and gave her a peck on her warm cheek.

After a few pro forma questions about school and his mother—to which he gave vague, non-committal, mostly one-syllable answers—a comfortable silence prevailed between them.

Finally, Val said, “Okay. Read me a story.”

***

There was a hard-cover book of collected fiction—authored by some guy he’d never heard of—atop the stack near her on the bedside table. A bookmark indicated the beginning of the next story to be read. He opened the book, which was old and featured faded, rose-colored, cloth covers, removing the marker. Turning the brittle ivory pages, he read out the text slowly, whisperingly, to her at first, keeping an eye on his rapt listener, almost sure he was betraying himself somehow. But after a while his anxiety subsided; he was drawn into and distracted by the story and decided he liked the prose, which had an old-fashioned rhythm he found appealing.

The story was written from the point of view of a middle-aged man trying to recall his earliest memory, which centered around the unexpected death of his father shortly before Thanksgiving, when the narrator was quite young. The story concluded this way:

“And the smells come first, of fire and food, and the smell of his mother and her flowery perfume and the way the world clung to her, and she is sitting at his side and they are at a large wooden table with many others. The room has a haze. And there is the heat of proximate bodies, hot food and steaming plates—and the smell of just-cooked meat; a feast. And he is young, too young to follow the conversations being held above his head, and there are many words, words he does not necessarily know, and they come at him from all sides but he will not try to understand as he usually would—he doesn’t mind, it is the sound they make all together that he likes, the ebbing and resurgence, and the way he is surrounded and accepted without being seen. And he belongs there, with them, and a place has been set at the table just for him, he is big enough now. And he thinks: where is my father? And he remembers right away that his father is gone, has gone away to heaven they say—no place has been set at the table for him, he is not at the feast, and will never be seen again except in photographs, and he tries to think of his father’s face and cannot but remembers the lap, and the white shirt and the belly to lean on, and can almost remember a smell too, one that is missing now from the smells around him. And he despairs in his childish way and worries about what food his father is eating. He wants to ask, and looks up to do so, but says nothing. And he regards his mother, deep in conversation, her bright lipstick and the way she poses her cigarette. And without pausing or looking she puts her arm around him, all the way around; her bracelet is silver and it clinks and dangles before his eyes, and she has leaned her soft body a little his way, and she casts a shadow over his plate. And now he feels loved, and safe, and hungry.”

Hungry. The word hit him like a slap.

He raised his gaze from the text to his listener’s face. There were tears forming in her unseeing eyes. Again, he was struck by Val’s heedful stillness, the queenly dignity of her attention. It was an unusual experience, this opportunity to study someone’s face closeup without them being aware of it.

But shame followed.

“Excuse me, Aunt Val,” he said. He rose, replaced the book atop the stack, and abandoned the room. In the hallway, he loitered uncertainly for a time. Where was he meant to go?

***

A car door was slammed nearby outside. The front door of the house then opened and was slammed as well. There were heavy, rapid footsteps after that from everywhere downstairs in the house, as if it were being searched. Phoebe then appeared at the top of the stairs, nearly breathless, and entered Val’s bedroom.

“Val,” Phoebe said. “Are you all right?”

“Of course,” Val said.

“Where’s that boy?”

“He’s gone.”

Phoebe backed out of the room and searched the entire second floor. Then she returned to Val, sitting on the edge of the bed to relate what happened, pausing to gasp for breath between sentences. While shopping, she had received a phone call from Val’s sister—she had tried to call Val first, but her phone was apparently turned off or uncharged. The sister said that last night, her son Nestor had had a car accident while attempting to pull into the parking lot of some fast-food place in Georgia. The Georgia State Patrol had contacted the family and they had rushed to his bedside. Nestor was now in the ICU of the hospital, “wholly unresponsive.” 

Val did not say anything in reply to this news at first. Then she simply said, “Oh,” and carefully nodded her head.

“Don’t you see,” Phoebe said. “That boy that was here in your house this morning was, I guess, an impostor of some kind. Maybe a burglar caught in the act. I suppose I scared him off. We’ll have to check and see if anything’s missing. You know, I had never met Nestor, but I knew he was on his way to visit, so I guess I just assumed he was your nephew when I saw him standing in the kitchen. And the little creep played along…”

“Don’t think so,” Val said. There was a quaver in her voice.

Phoebe took Val’s hand. “Val, honey. Your nephew is six hundred miles away from here. In the hospital. In the town where he had his accident.”

“Nestor kept his promise to visit,” Val said. “To read to me. Phoebe, don’t you think I know my own nephew’s voice?”

James W. Morris is a graduate of LaSalle University in Philadelphia, where he was awarded a scholarship for creative writing. He is the author of dozens of short stories, humor pieces, essays, and poems which have appeared in various literary magazines, and his first novel, RUDE BABY, was published last year. More info at www.jameswmorris.com.