The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar Page B

thing she had not done before, and looked at the pages as he read them. The book contained short snippets of text and pictures of long muskets, reproductions of old paintings of battles, studio shots of museum artifacts like rusting buttons and uniforms. There was something sad about a young boy sitting in a park reading about men in white wigs who were dead. She wanted to tell him that he should put down his book and play, but of course that wasn’t her business, to talk to him like his mother.
    “What happened to Guadalupe?” Brandon asked suddenly.
    “Yeah,” Keenan chimed in from the play structure. “Where’s Lupita?”
    Araceli was momentarily taken aback. Guadalupe had taken care of these boys for five years, she was like a big sister to them, and no one had explained her absence.
    “¿Tu mamá no te dijo nada?”
    “No. Nothing.”
    “I don’t know why, but she is gone,” Araceli said, hoping to forestall any further questions.
    “She’s gone? You mean she’s not coming back?”
    “Is she working somewhere else?” Brandon asked in a distracted voice that suggested he already had an inkling that Guadalupe had quit. “Is she mad at Mommy? Is she getting married?” Brandon was continuously peppering the adults around him, including Araceli, with questions,and these queries about Guadalupe seemed more like the casually curious questions he posed to Araceli from time to time: “Why can’t we have turkey dogs two days in a row? … Why do you say
‘buenos días’
in Spanish but not
‘buenos tardes?
…” In the Torres-Thompson family, doing your best to answer Brandon’s questions was a house rule.
La señora
Maureen was proud of her inquisitive oldest boy and liked to brag about the very first “brilliant” question he had asked when he was four years old: “Why do moths always fly around the lightbulbs?” Neither of his parents knew the answer and they scrambled to reference books and the Internet before giving their incipient genius the information his young brain demanded: moths use the moon to navigate at night, and the lights confuse them, so that “they think they’re circling the moon.”
    When a boy got answers as satisfying as that one, they only fed his desire to ask more questions. “An atomic bomb? Why? How does that work? How do bald eagles see fish in the water from way up in the sky? Who is Malcolm X, and why is his last name X?” The boy was destined to be either a brilliant scientist or an irritating attorney.
    “Did Lupita go back to Mexico?” Brandon asked his temporary caregiver. “What part of Mexico is she from? Is it the same time there as it is here? Can we call her?”
    “No sé,”
Araceli said, giving an annoyed looked to make it clear that this answer applied to all of Brandon’s questions.
“No sé nada.”
    Araceli felt a sudden warmness on her face: looking up, she saw a shimmering white disk of phosphorus eating through the clouds.
The sun will come out,
Araceli hoped, and then she said it out loud and Brandon looked up and nodded and returned to his book, lingering over a picture of two armies gathered at opposite sides of a bridge, engaged in a standoff of martial posturing. As he read the accompanying text, running his fingers over it, Araceli gave out a loud sigh.
    T he nursery manager paid a quick visit to Paseo Linda Bonita and left Maureen three pieces of paper. First there was a schematic drawing on a sheet from her sketchpad in which small symbols represented the various succulents the consult ant proposed planting in the Torres-Thompson backyard. Second, there was a form in which the price of creating this desert garden was laid out, with separate quotesfor “labor,” “flora,” and “base material,” and the alarmingly high figure of the sum total. The third and final piece of paper was a drawing that depicted the succulent garden as it would look from the perspective of the sliding glass doors of her home. The cylinders of a miniature