Where Mercy Waits

At two seventeen in the afternoon, the machine returned Carmen’s coin for the ninth time.

She caught it before it reached the ground. Beside her, a woman in a pale coat watched the little metal door swing shut.

“Perhaps it does not want your money,” the woman said.

“It wants something. It just isn’t going to tell me.”

Carmen put the coin in her pocket and took out the service key. The machine belonged to a company that employed her to keep a row of cold drinks and packaged food working at a small shopping plaza in El Paso. It was the first stop on a route that had already made her late. Inside the machine, a tiny plastic part had come loose. She found it, replaced it, and closed the door.

The woman waited until she was finished.

“May I have water?”

Carmen looked at her properly for the first time. The coat was too warm for the afternoon. Her shoes were clean despite the dust along the parking spaces. She carried a white vessel in one hand, shaped like a vase that someone had decided to take for a walk.

“The café sells it. Or there’s a fountain inside the grocery.”

“I have no money.”

Carmen pulled a bottle from the cooler in her van. It was one she had brought for herself, with her name written on the cap so her coworker would stop taking it.

“Here.”

“Will you have enough?”

“I can refill mine. You look like you’ve walked a while.”

The woman accepted the bottle. A drop of water appeared in the vase.

Carmen stared. The bottle was still full.

“That’s a good trick.”

“You offered it freely,” the woman said, as if that explained everything.

Carmen wiped her hand on a rag. “You can keep the bottle. Don’t drink from that vase unless you know where it’s been.”

The woman smiled. It was a tired smile, grateful without appearing to ask for more.

Across the parking lot, someone shouted. Carmen turned toward the sound. A man had dropped a bag of groceries, and two oranges were rolling beneath a parked car. He was scolding the bag, not calling for help.

The woman in the pale coat had already begun walking toward him.

“It’s fine,” he said when she bent to pick one up. “I’ve got it.”

She straightened. He thanked her for the orange in her hand and took it. The one beneath the car remained beyond his reach until Carmen fetched a broom from the café.

By the time they finished, the ice in her van’s cooler had begun to melt. Her phone showed three missed calls, all from her mother.

Rosa wanted to know whether the light over the stove could make a noise without being dangerous. Carmen said she would look when she came home and asked whether anything smelled burnt or had stopped working. Rosa said no. Then she asked what time Carmen would be there.

“After the last call.”

“Which is when?”

Carmen looked at the machine. She had six more after this one.

“I’ll call you at seven and tell you what I know.”

It was the first exact promise she had made all day. She repeated it so her mother would not mistake it for a promise to be home at seven.

The woman stood beside the van. “She wishes you to come back.”

“She usually does.”

“And the man wishes not to need help with his oranges.”

“He probably wishes he bought a better bag.”

A bus pulled up beyond the plaza entrance. Two passengers got off, and an older man waiting in the shade waved at someone still aboard. The woman looked toward them as if several people had called her name.

“What do I call you?” Carmen asked.

“Guanyin.”

Carmen repeated it slowly. “My mother had a neighbor who kept a picture. Lady with a vase?”

“Sometimes.”

“Okay. I’m Carmen. The machine’s awful. Don’t take it personally.”

She got into the van. The woman moved back to let her close the door. Carmen nearly drove away, then lowered the window.

“There’s a bench by the café. Andre starts at four. He’s security. He can tell you when the plaza closes.”

Guanyin thanked her. Carmen left with the familiar uncomfortable feeling that she had placed a person in the space between one task and another.

The bench held a strip of shade just wide enough for one person. Guanyin sat, put the bottle beside her, and listened.

There were cries she understood: a woman asking a child to come back from the edge of the pavement; a driver apologizing into his phone; someone inside the café saying please, just five minutes. There were others she could hear only as a pressure, like voices through a wall. She had come into this place because of a request. She no longer knew which one.

In other places, people had approached her through words prepared by generations before them. Here, a man asked her whether she was saving the bench for somebody. She said no and made room. He sat at the other end, pulled his cap over his eyes, and slept.

She could not remember the last time she had been allowed to be useful without being spoken to.

At four, Andre arrived carrying a radio and a half-eaten apple. He asked whether she needed to contact anyone. She said she was waiting to understand what she had heard.

“That can take a while,” he said. “Café’s open till nine. Gates close at ten. Don’t let them lock your car in.”

“I do not have a car.”

He looked at the coat. “Then don’t let them lock you in either.”

She wanted to tell him that she would not leave a place where somebody was still calling. It sounded less clear when placed beside a gate that a person would have to close at the end of his shift.

Instead she asked where the bus went. He showed her the posted route, then warned her that the last departure had changed recently and she should confirm it with the operator.

By five, three people had asked to share the bench. At six, a young woman arrived with a suitcase missing one wheel. Her name was Miriam. She was nineteen and going to stay with a cousin while she looked for work. Her ride had not come. Her phone was almost empty.

Andre asked whether she wanted him to call someone. She gave him a number. He took her to the café counter, where the owner let her use a charger while they checked the arrangement.

Guanyin remained with the suitcase. Miriam had asked her to watch it. It was a simple trust, lighter than the ones she usually carried.

A man approached carrying a small child asleep against his chest. He asked whether the vending machine took cards. Guanyin said she did not know. He tried, failed, and looked so tired that she lifted Carmen’s water bottle.

“Would you like this? It is unopened.”

He checked the seal and accepted it. Another drop appeared in the vase. There had been one before. Now there were enough to make a small sound when she moved it.

The child woke and began asking for a blue cup. The father explained that the blue cup was at home. Guanyin could not produce it. She had not been given a blue cup, and her vessel held only what had passed freely between people.

She could give water. She could not make a life familiar merely because a child was frightened by how far it had moved.

At seven, Carmen called Andre to ask whether the woman was still there. He handed Guanyin his phone.

“Did you eat?” Carmen asked.

Guanyin looked at the row of machines. “I have been listening.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

Carmen arrived twenty minutes later with food wrapped in paper. She had one more machine to visit nearby, she said, then she was taking her mother home from a neighbor’s apartment. Rosa had decided the light could wait but that Carmen could not be trusted to eat dinner alone.

“She’s in the van. She wants to meet you.”

Rosa came across the parking lot carrying a tote bag and walking as if she knew the ground had disappointed people before. She accepted the bench, asked Guanyin to move out of the narrow sun, and opened a container of food.

“You can sit,” she told Carmen.

“I need to finish the call.”

“You said seven.”

“I said I’d call at seven. I called.”

Rosa stopped arranging the forks. “You did.”

For a moment both women looked embarrassed by the smallness of the correction.

They ate. Andre came by and declined food until Rosa told him she had packed too much on purpose. Miriam emerged from the café to say her cousin was coming, and thanked Guanyin for the suitcase.

One call had been answered. The others continued.

Rosa looked at the white vase and said, “Can you make my daughter stop working for ten minutes?”

Guanyin looked at Carmen’s hands, still marked by the edge of a service panel.

“I can ask her,” she said.

Carmen stayed on the bench long enough to finish her food. When she finally stood, Rosa reached after her, then let her hand fall.

“Please don’t leave,” she said so quietly that only Guanyin heard it.

She did not know whether the request was for the woman going toward the van or for someone who had been leaving for years.

Rosa returned the next afternoon without Carmen.

She had taken a bus and was very proud of having arrived at the stop she intended. She carried a newspaper, a bag of cookies, and a photograph she said she had brought by accident.

In the photograph, two girls stood beside a motel swimming pool. One squinted at the camera. The other was trying to make the first laugh by holding a leaf against her nose.

“Carmen and Juliana,” Rosa said. “Carmen always wanted everybody to look presentable. Juliana thought that was a waste of an opportunity.”

Guanyin asked where Juliana was now.

“Away.”

It was a word people sometimes used for distance when the distance itself was not the trouble.

Rosa put the photograph back in her bag. She asked whether the vase could give water to anyone. Guanyin told her what had happened the previous day and offered to show her. Rosa accepted a cup from the café. The water was cool and tasted like ordinary water.

“Does it make you better?”

“It can help if you are thirsty.”

Rosa laughed, then looked relieved.

“Good. I’ve had enough people tell me a drink could put everything right.”

They sat in the shade. Guanyin heard a cry from the far side of the lot and began to rise. A grocery employee was already helping a customer lift a bag into a car. She sat again.

Rosa watched her. “Do you have to go every time?”

“I am accustomed to answering.”

“Does answering always mean going over there?”

Guanyin had no ready explanation. Some requests required a presence. Some required that she send someone better able to help. Some were prayers for an impossible thing spoken by a person who knew it was impossible. She could hear all of them. She could not always tell what part of herself they needed.

Rosa took a cookie from the bag. “When the girls were little, I worked at a motel. If one child called me, the other one would call louder. After a while I stopped listening to the words. Just went toward the loudest.”

“And now?”

“Now I call Carmen.”

She looked at the empty space on the bench as if it had accused her.

Carmen arrived at four to replace the broken payment part in the machine. She had not expected to find her mother there. Her first question was how Rosa had come. Her second was whether she had told anyone she was leaving home.

Rosa bristled. “I got here, didn’t I?”

“I know you did. I was worried because I didn’t know where you were.”

“You don’t always know where I am.”

“You called me eleven times this morning.”

The words struck the space between them. Carmen put down her tool bag and rubbed her forehead.

“I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

Rosa folded the top of the cookie bag. “I wanted to ask about the light.”

“I fixed the light last night.”

“Then it was something else.”

Carmen crouched beside the machine. Guanyin could hear her breathing, carefully controlled, beneath the parking lot’s other sounds.

Rosa said she would wait until Carmen could take her home. Carmen checked the route on her phone and said she had stops in the other direction. She could call a neighbor or arrange a ride with Rosa if she wanted one. Rosa said she could take the bus.

“All right,” Carmen said.

Neither sounded pleased to have found an answer.

After Rosa left, Carmen sat on the warm pavement beside her tools.

“She’s going to tell everyone I abandoned her at a shopping center.”

“Did she ask you to take her home before she came?”

“No. But that’s not how it feels.”

Guanyin could hear Rosa at the bus stop, speaking to a woman about the weather. Beneath the conversation lay the small request she had heard the night before. Stay where I know you can be reached.

It would have been easy to tell Carmen. It would also have turned a private fear into another demand on the person already being asked to carry it.

“What would make this afternoon easier?” Guanyin asked.

Carmen laughed once, sharply. Then she thought.

“If you could hand me the little case without asking why I need it, that would help.”

Guanyin passed it. Carmen replaced the part, checked the machine, and made the first successful purchase with her own coin. A bottle dropped into the tray with a satisfying thud.

“There,” she said. “A problem that tells you when it’s fixed.”

She gave Guanyin the bottle.

The vase filled a little more. Carmen saw it and looked away before the movement could become a request.

By evening, the story about the water had reached the café kitchen. Its owner, Marjorie, brought out a row of clean cups and asked Guanyin whether she could fill them for people waiting for the bus. Guanyin said she could try if the café was offering the cups and the people wanted the water.

Marjorie shrugged. “They’re cups. That’s what they’re for.”

Six people accepted. One declined and bought a drink from the machine. The vase remained cool in Guanyin’s hand. It did not become heavier with the number of people who expected it to work.

Then a man asked for water to take home to his wife. He said she was ill and he had heard that somebody was giving blessings in the parking lot.

Guanyin held the cup without passing it.

“This is water. I cannot promise what you are asking.”

His face fell. “You don’t want to help?”

“I do. I do not want you to take it home believing I made a promise I cannot keep.”

He sat down. She stayed beside him while he described the appointments, the long drives, the difficulty of telling his wife that he had nothing new to bring back. He accepted the cup at last, drank it himself, and asked whether he could sit a little longer.

Andre brought another chair.

At closing, Eckert came to see why people were gathering near the café after its doors had shut. He owned the plaza and had been receiving complaints about litter and cars left overnight. Andre explained who was waiting for a ride, who had permission to remain, and which cups belonged to Marjorie.

Eckert looked at Guanyin.

“You can’t set up a service out here without talking to somebody.”

“Who should I speak to?”

“Me, for a start.”

She asked whether he would sit. He said he was not there to sit.

They spoke standing beside the bench. He was willing to allow water while the café was open, provided its staff handled the cups and the area stayed clear. He was not willing to keep the gate open indefinitely because somebody might arrive later. Andre’s shift had an end. The businesses needed to know who was responsible for the property.

Guanyin heard the impatience in his voice and the fatigue behind it. She had no right to turn the second into an excuse for ignoring the first. People waiting outside still needed somewhere to wait.

“What happens to them after ten?” she asked.

“They need to make another arrangement.”

“Some have tried.”

“Then we need to know before ten. You can’t solve everything at five past.”

He left her with a deadline that sounded ordinary because it occurred every night.

Carmen returned just before the gates closed. Her route had finally ended. She had spoken to Rosa, who was home and angry enough to be safe from silence. She had also called Juliana.

“She’s coming on Monday,” Carmen said. “For several days. I nearly told her she didn’t need to.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to say we were managing. Because I wanted her to know we weren’t. Pick one.”

Guanyin looked at the white vase. The water inside was lower now, though she had given fewer cups than before. She understood that she had started to think of it as something she must produce on demand.

Carmen offered her a ride. Guanyin looked at the bus stop beyond the gate. There were two people beneath the light.

“I will remain a little longer.”

“Do they want company?”

“I have not asked.”

Carmen waited while she crossed the road to find out.