Out of the Box(25)

I press Enter, and wait as the slow library computer chugs its way to the Google listings. I know it’s silly to imagine finding this guy. Facundo García and Facundo Moreno sound like unusual names to me, but for all I know, they could be the John Smiths of the Spanish-speaking world.

Sure enough, up pops a whole page of hits, most of them personal web pages and Facebook stuff, but this time, there’s something else too, something so incredible that it makes me laugh out loud: a page from the University of Victoria’s Department of Hispanic Studies. It seems like an unbelievable coincidence, but I know Alison would say It Was Meant to Be.

I click on the UVic site and hold my breath.

The page takes forever to load, but when it does, all the details fit. Facundo Moreno studied in Buenos Aires and Victoria, and his publications are all in the past few years, which would make sense if he was born in 1976. It takes awhile to become a professor, I guess. And wouldn’t it make sense that both he and his parents’ bandoneón are in the same city, even if it doesn’t make sense that they got separated? Then again, Jeanette said Alison got the instrument at a yard sale from someone who didn’t even know what a bandoneón was. Maybe it was stolen.

I go over the web page again. On the right is a list of links—Facundo’s favorite books, a few poetry journals and, weirdly, a tea shop whose name sounds familiar. I click on it and slowly, very slowly, the computer reveals the events page of a tea shop in downtown Victoria, one that I’ve passed lots of times on my walks with Jeanette.

Tea Talk. Discover yerba maté, the ancient drink of health and friendship still popular in South America today. Join us for the fourth of our Tea Around the World lecture series, as Dr. Facundo Moreno, Professor of Hispanic Studies, takes us through this tea’s exciting history. Samples and refreshments will follow.

The date is this Thursday. Three days from now. I imagine Alison looking over my shoulder at the computer screen and laughing. Don’t question it, Ellie. Just enjoy!

I stare at the page and swallow hard. I could meet him. Without telling him I have his parents’ bandoneón. I could just see what he’s like and decide later whether I really need to tell him or not. He’ll want it back, of course. But I don’t know whether I want to give it back. I scribble down the details of the tea talk, shut the computer down, and walk out of the library in a daze.

“You all right?”

I blink and turn to see Ned, or a rough and exhausted version of Ned, anyway. In the two weeks since I gave him the sandwich in front of the gelato shop, it looks like he hasn’t slept at all. I dig in my bag for the granola bar I’ve taken to carrying instead of the sandwich and hand it to him. “I’m fine,” I say. “How are you? Haven’t seen you around lately.”

“Went up island,” he says. “Visited a cousin. I’m back now though.”

I want to ask if he’s still living above the soup kitchen, but I suspect from the haggard look on his face what the answer will be.

“Welcome back” is all I can think of to say.

He thanks me for the granola bar, tips his ballcap to me and wanders off down the street, leaving me torn between his story and questions of how a bandoneón and its owner’s long-lost son both wound up in a small Canadian city, thousands of miles from home.

For lunch, Jeanette buys a bunch of salads and packs them into a picnic basket, along with wineglasses, a bottle of fizzy water and a blue tablecloth. She suggests I invite Sarah, but I say I think she’s probably busy. On the way to the park, I ask my aunt about her appointment with the financial advisor.

“Good,” she says. “Nothing unexpected.” She asks me about the soup kitchen.

I tell her about a woman who said God had told her I was a saint. “I wish she’d tell that to my mother,” I say.

“Nah,” says Jeanette, “she’d be disappointed in you for going all religious.”

“That’s true. Oh, and there was this guy who found half a pack of cigarettes on the street and was sharing them with everyone in the courtyard, all excited.” We cross the street into the park and take the path around the pond. “I wonder why some people can have terrible lives and still find things to be happy about, and other people can have everything and still be miserable.”

She casts me a sidelong glance, and I wish I hadn’t spoken. We keep walking, and in the end all she says is “It’s all a question of perspective, I guess.”

Maybe so, but for the first time, I wish my parents would make more of an effort to be happy, at least some of the time.