Playing With Fuego

by K. G. MacGregor

  “And I’ll have kissed any new job prospects goodbye. Nobody gets hired these days without a credit check.” The more Mari talked, the more she reminded me of yet another class of human beings that rubbed me the wrong way—people who did what they wanted and left the rest of us holding the bag. Except being a long-legged lesbian in a tight dress made her a lot more tolerable. “I just can’t bring myself to do that. Walking away from our obligations is exactly what tanked all of our property values in the first place.”

  “Yes and no. The collapse came when more and more people found they couldn’t make their payments once the adjustable rates kicked in, and they couldn’t sell because so many other buyers were in the same boat trying to unload their houses. But the lenders weren’t surprised by any of that. They knew a lot of these new homeowners were poor credit risks, but they’d already unloaded their loans onto other unsuspecting mortgage buyers without disclosing their lack of due diligence. That’s like selling Ferraris at Ferrari prices when you know they have Chevrolet engines under the hood.”

  “Sounds like a pretty good racket if you’re a banker.”

  “Exactly. And trust me, they didn’t give a second thought to what they might be doing to your property value when they rubber stamped all those bad loans for your neighbors. So screw the banks. Do what’s best for you.”

  “Is this the kind of advice you give your clients?”

  “Always,” she answered unflinchingly, “unless it’s criminal. I’m a little more judicious about that.”

  “Good to know.” We sat there smirking at one another until I kind of sort of smiled a little. “I’m sorry if we got off on the wrong foot at the worksite.”

  “If?”

  “I have an issue with tardiness, okay?” She didn’t need to know about my issues with Spanish speakers in America, flashy cars, prissy women on a construction site…or just Miami in general.

  My phone went off again, a text message from Gisela telling me the Dolphins were interested in doing a media day on one of our upcoming projects.

  “Duty calls.”

  She picked up her purse and eyed the exit. “Yeah, I should get out of here before somebody asks to see my invitation.”

  “You crashed the cocktail party?”

  “Why don’t you just announce it to everybody?” she whispered through clenched teeth. At least she hadn’t shushed me this time. “I had an earlier meeting with someone in the bar and he asked me to join him.”

  “You mean Carlos Moya?”

  “No, Marco Padilla. He’s my uncle.”

  Chapter Five

  I always like the days we put down the tile floor. Most of our big volunteer jobs—putting up block walls, painting, drywall—show off progress by the end of the day, but seeing the floor take shape gives the house an even more finished look, and the workers a sense of pride and accomplishment.

  Not that we were wrapping up. We still had another week’s work ahead, things like tiling the shower, attaching the baseboards, installing the appliances and working through the final punch list. We’d finish next Saturday by laying sod. That was backbreaking work, so I’d lined up a dozen teenagers from Jesuit Prep.

  Saraphine Delacourt, the Haitian mother of three who owned the house, smiled and clasped her hands with the kind of excitement I usually reserve for getting out of jury duty. “It is so beautiful, so wonderful! God blesses me a thousand times with so many gracious hands.”

  Today’s group was from the Doral Resort, and while none of them struck me as overtly religious, they all seemed fine with giving God credit for their work. It was hard not to be happy at bringing Saraphine such joy.

  My overall experience with Miami’s Haitian community was favorable, minus the creepy episode with Guillame Pierre. Like many of the city’s immigrants, Haitians arrived on our shores in rickety boats and makeshift rafts, but they had a much tougher time with US Immigration officials than Cubans, who were automatically granted political asylum if they reached land. There were no such “wet feet-dry feet” provisions for Haitians, even those who claimed they were persecuted by their government.

  Mordy and Edith, in a rare show of agreement, believed the unequal treatment was due to the fact Haitians were black, while the moneyed Cubans who came in the early exile waves were white. I find Haitians to be hardworking, community-minded people who want to get ahead in life as much as the next person. It makes me feel good to see someone like Saraphine get a hand up.

  As nice a day as it was, there was a gaping hole where a certain community service worker should have been. Mari Tirado had found yet another way to irritate me. What I’d thought was a productive burying of our respective hatchets at the cocktail party had obviously been just a forgettable blip on her business radar, a way of making sure I didn’t tell all her fancy clients she was a felon. I actually preferred that scenario to the notion that she’d assumed we were pals now and I would cut her some slack for not showing up.

  Bo looked down from a ladder in the center of the living room, where he was tinkering with the wiring for a ceiling fan. “This is a good crew. We should finish the floor today.”

  I thought so too, especially since someone had already done the bathroom. That was the toughest part because the tiles had to be cut to encircle the toilet. Tricky stuff, best not left to amateurs.

  “Maybe I’ll pull a couple of folks out after lunch to paint the baseboards,” he added.

  “I can help with that. I’ll go set everything up.” I’d much rather work outside than slide around on the floor, even with my heavy-duty kneepads.

  We were headed back to work after the morning break when Miss Slacker’s Porsche pulled in. She popped out smiling like she didn’t have a care in the world.

  Before I could even get in a proper browbeating, Saraphine was off the porch and hugging her like a long-lost sister.

  “What the Jenko?” I muttered under my breath, but not low enough to escape Bo’s notice.

  “Oh, that reminds me. Mari stopped by yesterday morning and said she had something she had to do today and that she’d be late. She wanted to get some hours in so she wouldn’t get behind.”

  “She worked yesterday?”

  “Yeah, she and Saraphine laid the bathroom floor. Took them about five hours. I’ve got her paperwork out in the truck.”

  All things considered, I was feeling pretty lucky I hadn’t gone off half-cocked about Mari being late. That didn’t mean I was happy about her thinking she could just show up whenever her busy schedule allowed. I’m the personnel coordinator and she should have come through me for permission to change her schedule. As a rule, we don’t usually allow volunteers at the worksite on a weekday when there isn’t anyone around to supervise them.

  But I had to hand it to her for coming in a day earlier to bank the time.

  And I was utterly annoyed that she and Saraphine were such lovey-dovey friends after just a few hours together. I’d spent five weeks working on this house and never gotten so much as a single hug. From Saraphine, I mean. Yes, I’m technically paid to be here, but it’s not as if Mari was showing up out of the kindness of her heart. It takes a court order to get privileged people like her to come out.

  “Hi, Daphne,” she said, smiling all innocent-like. She had on her carpenter jeans again, and a thin, stretchy polo shirt that I could see through enough to know her bra had two perfect arcs of lace, one over each of her breasts.

  “Hi, yourself.” I realized I was grinning like a jack-o-lantern. Lace did that.

  “Please tell me you’ve got something for me outside. I desperately need some fresh air.”

  “How about painting the baseboards?”

  Her face fell.

  “They’re out back. It’s easier to paint them first and nail them on afterward.”

  I’d laid several long strips of baseboard across two sawhorses, and she wiped them down with a rag while I stirred the paint.

  “Long, smooth strokes so they won’t look choppy,” I said.


  She caught on quickly and seemed to enjoy the work. Once I realized her uncle was one of the most important members of the Cuban exile community, it made perfect sense she’d want her criminal charges kept under the radar. There was no reason we couldn’t do that, especially since she was doing such good work for us.

  “By the way, you should have called me about coming in the other day. It was okay, but I’d feel pretty bad if there was a mix-up and you didn’t get credit for your hours.”

  “I did call, but you were out of the office or something. I didn’t see any point in leaving a message when it was just as easy to drive over here and ask Bo. He said it would be all right.”

  “Let me give you my card in case that happens again. It has my cell phone.” How clever of me, unless of course she used it to switch her hours around and not come at all next week. “You and Saraphine sure got to be friends.”

  “Spending a few hours together in a tiny bathroom does that. We brainstormed some ideas for how she could save money for retirement.”

  “Saraphine?” She was a cashier at Publix Supermarket.

  “I always tell my clients if they’re going to dream at all, they might as well dream big.”

  “How does somebody with three kids save for retirement on her salary?”

  “Anyone who makes money can save money. It just takes discipline and knowing the difference between what you need and what you can do without. She’s got a job with benefits—not a lot but her employer matches her contribution. If she takes advantage of a few tricks here and there, she’ll be able to get along just fine when she retires.”

  “Bet you didn’t know you’d be networking for new clients on this job, did you?”

  She gave me a little smile. Not a real one…more like one of those pained, indulgent looks that makes you feel bad without even knowing why. “Saraphine’s quite a woman. Lost her brother and sister-and-law to AIDS and now she’s raising their kids. I could send a few of my clients her way for lessons in character.”

  If she’d meant to shame me, it was a direct hit. I knew AIDS had devastated the Haitian community but knowing something in the abstract wasn’t the same as actually knowing a person who’d been affected by it.

  “It’s good what the Miami Home Foundation did for her,” she went on. “Getting this house fixed up gives her one less worry. You all should be proud of yourselves.”

  Maybe not all of us. I don’t have anything to do with that part of the foundation. The board of directors has a selection committee that reviews applications and decides who’s worthy of our help. I go out and sell the cause because that’s my job. At the end of the day, I get to bask in the feeling of doing good in the world, which is supposed to make up for the fact my corporate counterparts who do the same kind of work get paid five times as much as I do.

  At least I sleep well. I don’t go to bed every night feeling like a slave to the almighty dollar, or in today’s world, to the investors on Wall Street who don’t care how you do business as long as you make a buck. Ergo, Mariner Cruise Lines stock was falling not because they had destroyed a fragile reef, but because bookings were down and their investors doubted they could turn it around.

  I wondered if Mari caught the irony in what she said about the foundation relative to the sort of advice she gave her clients—that is, to do whatever was best for them, irrespective of how it affected others or even society at large. Or maybe she was implying that my intrinsic pride in doing good deeds is what’s best for me. Social recognition is, after all, worth more to some people than money. Not her, necessarily. I saw the things she valued—the expensive sports car, the designer clothes and the high life of Miami. What I didn’t see was how she could reconcile such an extravagant lifestyle with concern for people like Saraphine and gratitude for people like me. Probably because having Mari’s admiration wasn’t the same as having her respect.

  “How many coats are we supposed to do? That’s your fourth.”

  Jenko. I was barely aware I was holding a paintbrush, let alone how long I’d been working on the same strip of wood. “Usually just two but this one had a few rough spots.”

  “Thought you’d be interested in knowing I came clean with Pepe…that’s what we call my Uncle Marco. He saw us talking the other night and happened to mention he’s thinking about joining your board. I didn’t want him to be embarrassed if it came out later.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “He wanted to spank me but couldn’t figure out the best way to do that to a thirty-three-year-old. I told him not to worry, that just knowing he wanted to was punishment enough.”

  “You must be close to him.” Close enough to influence his decision to join our board, I realized. Gisela would want me to tread carefully.

  “He’s more like a father than an uncle.”

  I’d always heard Cuban families were very tight-knit. “What about your real father?”

  “Hardly knew him. He returned to Cuba not long after I was born.”

  “I thought the idea was to get out of Cuba and never go back…at least not as long as Castro was still there.” Mordy said the Cubans would never go back no matter what, that they had it too good in Miami.

  “My father didn’t have any political convictions. He was fourteen years old when his family left and he didn’t want to come to America, especially since my grandfather stayed behind to take care of their property. He was a successful construction engineer and they had a big house and several cars. That was the first wave and all the exiles thought the Castro regime would fall quickly and they’d be able to return.”

  “And fifty-some years later…”

  “Exactly.” Mari had no trouble talking and working at the same time, and even managed not to paint the same board over and over. “Mima—that’s my grandmother—she says my father never accepted being in America, especially after my grandfather decided he didn’t want to leave Cuba ever, even when Castro shut down his business and confiscated his property. Mima always thought it was because he had a mistress there. So when they opened the borders for the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, my father went back on his own. I was just a baby.”

  “He just left you and your mother all alone?”

  “We weren’t alone. Cubans have big families. We all lived with Mima, and there was Pepe—he took over as the man of the family—and the youngest brother, Felix.” She snickered. “Felix is gay but no one is allowed to tell Mima.”

  “Oh, that’s hilarious. So I take it they don’t know you’re gay either.”

  “They do, because I don’t keep secrets very well. But it’s not so bad if you’re a woman. A Cuban man, he has to be macho.”

  The Cockroach Truck sounded out front. I would have skipped lunch just to keep talking but Mari pulled out her phone.

  “I need to talk to Pepe’s wife, Lucia. They’re bringing Mima home from the hospital today. She’s been there for the past three weeks.”

  That explained all the serious phone calls, which I’d assumed had been her talking to her friends about me. That makes me a world-class jerk.

  When the break was over, Bo shuffled everyone around and I found myself indoors watching over a handful of Doral volunteers as they finished laying the floor. Mari was gone before I even had a chance to tell her goodbye. With the extra paperwork from Bo, she was at twenty-seven hours. Only five more to go.

  Hour-wise, she hadn’t really been on the site that long, but she was a long way from the crabby snoot that wheeled in late that first day.

  Or maybe I was a long way from that crabby snoot. One thing was for sure—I misjudged her.

  ***

  Mordy Osterhoff’s last visit to a temple had been his bar mitzvah nearly sixty-five years ago. He didn’t pray, nor read the Hebrew Bible. In fact, he’d pretty much renounced all belief in God and Abraham. But none of that stopped him from the traditions of the Sabbath, or his insistence on drinking only kosher wine.

  “Suh-dah Slish-it,” I said, knowing from t
he look on his face I had butchered it again.

  “Seudah Shlishit!” he barked.

  If I’d been the timid sort, I’d have been afraid of him despite the fact he was seventy-seven and slightly built. He was strong for his age, though, thanks to the fifty laps he swam each day in his obscenely bulging European swimsuit.

  Mordy’s main reason for going to the pool was to watch women in their bikinis.

  Edith went to watch Mordy.

  “Su-dah Schlischlit.”

  “Forget it. It’s the Third Meal,” Edith said. She was even less religious than Mordy but indulged him his Jewish customs by shutting down everything from sundown on Friday until Saturday night. No operating machinery or electronics of any kind. If they went to the pool, they walked down fifteen flights of stairs, and upon returning, waited for someone else to push the elevator button.

  Most traditional Jewish families ate the Third Meal in late afternoon around three thirty or four. Mordy and Edith held off until four thirty on the days I came over because it’s all I can do to get home from the jobsite and get showered in time. I have a standing invitation, but since I don’t reciprocate that often, I only take them up on it about once a month. The meal is always the same. Salad, lox, sliced melon and matzo. And Mordy’s beloved Manischewitz.

  Marvin, their longhaired black and white tuxedo cat, lounged in his favorite place on a carpeted pedestal by the sliding glass door. He loved Edith, tolerated me and ignored Mordy.

  “I had an interesting conversation today with one of our volunteers. Made me think of you, Mordy.” I referred to Mari as a volunteer because it didn’t seem right to single her out as a community service worker, especially since she’d soon have her record expunged. “A Cuban woman, a couple of years older than me, a first-generation American. Her parents came over as kids in the first wave. What was that…1960?”

  “The Cuban Revolution started the year before but I think you’re right. Most of the first wave came in ’sixty,” Edith said.