by Sylvie Fox
“Do you want to get breakfast?” Cam asked. She’d forgotten he was there. He must have been the cause of the door slam. But there he was, looking like a rock. She needed something strong, hard, and stable right now as the sandy California soil shifted under her feet.
She turned to him. “Roscoe’s?”
He nodded. “See you in five.”
Nearly every fight they’d ever had involved making up at L.A.’s iconic chicken and waffles stand. They’d order food then ask the waitress for a doggy bag not five seconds after she dropped the meal. After their blowouts, they hadn’t really been so much hungry for food as for each other. Greasy bags in hand, they’d drive to their little rented house on Formosa and devour each other. Thankfully, the mile drive from her mother’s house didn’t allow Yesenia to fall too deeply into memories of the past. The last time they’d been there, they’d had neither the food nor each other.
Emptying her mind, she focused on squeezing into the tight lot next to Cam’s car. At least she didn’t have to worry about marring the perfection of the pearl white paint. There would be no more lawyers. She wouldn’t have to choose between her family and herself. She slammed the door, leaning against it. She could keep the car. It was all done.
Pulling off her sunglasses, she walked into the squat single-story restaurant. The darkness enveloped her like a shroud. With its scarred wood booths, it wasn’t the kind of place that renovated every year, chasing the latest trends. Its caché was in being exactly what you remembered it to be.
Cam waved her over to a table. A half cup of lemonade accompanied a half glass of water on her side of the table. Was there nothing he forgot? She sat, and poured the water into the lemonade, taking some of the sting from the sugary sweet concoction.
“Got you a number thirteen, Carol B. Special,” he said. It was exactly what she wanted, a fried chicken breast and waffle. For once, she forgave his chauvinism. “You going to be okay?” he asked.
Yesenia promptly forgot about fights, sex, and waffles past. Dolores’ resolve and determination came rushing back at her. “So many years, we’ve been out of Mexico.”
“Your sister’s finally taking responsibility,” Cam said.
“She’s being stupid. Who makes a decision to move—to another country—in a week?” She saw a couple of patrons look their way. Slipping her sunglasses back down, she continued in a quieter voice. “You seem so accepting even though you’ve always been one of Dori’s harshest critics. If she was moving to Arizona or something, you’d say she was being stupid.”
“Arizona would be a bad idea.”
“She could get killed in Mexico.”
“I’m pretty sure your sister won’t get in the middle of a drug war,” Cam said, his voice all calm rationality.
She wanted to yell. Get him to see her side of things. But the arrival of breakfast curtailed discussion for a moment.
“If your sister got a green card and took a job in New York City would you be upset?” he asked.
“No, of course not.” She wanted Dori close. To keep an eye on her. But she would certainly understand her sister following a great job opportunity. Yesenia picked up her utensils and started in on the work of making bite sized pieces of breast.
“This isn’t much different,” he said. She drew in a sharp breath then sawed into her meat with renewed vigor. A major life decision and they hadn’t even consulted her, not really. Not in any meaningful way that counted.
“How long is the flight?” he asked.
“Too long.” She took a single bite. Not her mama’s food, but it was good. She took a second bite, of waffle this time. When she’d first spied this place as a teenager she couldn’t figure out this bizarre American combination. She knew what chicken was. But waffles were something you got in a yellow box from the supermarket. The two foods together, though, were great. It was one of the many things she’d misjudged about this country.
“Three, maybe four hours, Jessie,” Cam said, interrupting her trip down memory lane. “That’s less than New York.
In through her nose, out through her mouth the air traveled. Despite the deep breathing, her eyes smarted, and the trickle of tears rolled down her cheeks. She pushed her glasses up again, grabbed a stiff paper napkin and dabbed at the wetness leaking out. Great, now she could go on air looking like a bloated fish. She turned her head away from Cam and the other diners, toward the window.
He abandoned his food and came to sit beside her. One thick arm slipped behind her waist, pulling her to him. The other gripped the hand she’d filled with shredded, damp napkin.
For a long moment she was rigid, fighting against him. Fighting against it all. Suddenly, she relaxed, all the fight going out of her, letting her back curve into him. Slackening her muscles, she folded against her ex-husband. Letting the solid, loyal, no-nonsense man she’d avoided, hold her.
“I feel so horrible,” she whispered.
The world narrowed to no one but him and her. “Why?”
“Because part of me is relieved. That I don’t have to try to fix it all, the money problem, Raul and Dolores, their papers.” She held the sob down as long as she could. It burst out with a laugh and a hiccough.
“The other part.”
“Will miss them terribly. They’re not perfect. But they’ve been all I’ve had in America.”
“You have me.”
Yesenia’s heart raced. She wanted to believe that. Believe in a future that could involve Cam. Guilt crushed hope.
“Mama won’t call me in the mornings.”
“They have phones in Mexico.”
“Who’s going to make me sopes, tortillas, tamales?”
His hand left hers and stroked her hip. “You always complained about the food making you more curvy than KESP allows.”
“Who’s going to take me to Christmas Mass at St. Agatha’s?”
“I’ll go with you.”
“You? You hate church. You don’t believe in God.”
“But I love you,” Cam said without pause. Her heart sped up again. She gripped the napkin in her hand even harder. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard him say that. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever heard him say that. His thumb slowly stroked right below her rib cage. A tide of emotion overwhelmed her, a jumble of feelings. She couldn’t separate one from another. Tears leaked again.
“I’ll miss them.”
He reached over and got a napkin from another table. “It’s the right thing.”
“There’s nothing I can do, is there?”
Cameron’s eyes met and held hers. He shook his head slowly.
If he could be so calm, perhaps there wasn’t much to worry about. “Maybe she’ll get a better job after they get settled. She’s bilingual. She has a degree in psychology. Maybe she could get a Masters. I could help her research programs in Mexico City. I wonder—”
A single finger brushed her lips. “Shhh. Let her unpack.”
“I wonder if you arresting Dolores could be the single best thing that ever happened to her.”
Cam didn’t move, but he got closer. His body heat, warmer. His breath stirred the hair near her ear. “Do you want to get a doggy bag?”
A shiver whispered up her spine. He hadn’t forgotten either.
She was temped, very much so. Thoughts of work fought their way through yearning, and kept her on the straight and narrow. “The station calls.”
Cameron looked at his own watch, and reality came back into the focus. “Gotta go to the station myself.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Got ninety minutes.”
Yesenia had to laugh. Men were incorrigible. “I’ll call you.”
Something clicked into place. Something that had been out of sync for years. “I think I’d like that.”
For more than a week, Cam and Jessie talked like old friends. Nothing more. He didn’t push on her response to the words he’d worked long to push out, or on whether she was ready to give them a try, or what more he could do to win her
over. Instead he listened to her seesaw back and forth between hope and despair.
Jessie asked for help with the house. Without hesitation, he rearranged his schedule and borrowed a pickup from Rivera in case he needed to move furniture. His wife was sitting on the steps of the Alsace house, sunglasses firmly in place. Her hair, pulled through a hole in her baseball cap, bounced when she turned toward him.
Even with decades-old cutoffs that predated their marriage and ratty Converse high tops, the pull was still there. He’d first fell for her because she was so resilient. So many girls he’d dated after high school had been clingy, afraid of everything; the L.A. gang problem, and losing him to gun violence, no matter how unlikely the possibility. Jessie took so much of that in stride. Probably because she’d grown up around those same gangs and guns. Because deportation was a much bigger worry than losing a boyfriend.
She’d needed him, even if she hadn’t known it that first night in the station. Jessie had needed shelter from the storm of her family’s demands and some honest-to-God fun. He’d been happy to provide both. Thrilled to bring a smile to her serious face. A little levity to a life of obligation.
He’d even admired that her ambition was much like his own. Determination to make something more of their humble beginnings. Until her drive to succeed came between them. Cameron banished the thought from his mind. They were beyond that and more mature than they’d been.
“Been inside?” he asked.
Her sigh was long, drawn out. “No. Let’s go.”
Jessie rose as slowly as an eighty year old woman with debilitating arthritis. Keys in hand, she twisted a rusty lock. The iron door opened with some protest. She fitted keys into a second lock, then a third, forcing the steel-reinforced door inward.
The inside of the house was a mirror of the day they’d helped Dolores and Reina move in. Used and discarded furniture littered the front rooms. The dining room table remained, but the chairs were gone. Kitchen cabinets stood half-empty. He pushed past his wife and inspected the bedrooms. The light pink carpet lay nearly bare. Faded patches and deep divots showed where furniture had stood, unmoved, for nearly a decade.
Like the home’s previous owners, Jessie’s mother and sister hadn’t much cared about who was coming after them. With virtually no cleaning, they’d taken advantage of Jessie’s unfailing reliability again. If he had any control, it would be the last time. There’d been so much hope when he and Jessie had bought this house. Hope that Dolores would figure out what she wanted in life. Hope that Reina would feel settled despite her status. Location didn’t change people, he’d learned.
She joined him in the smaller of the two bedrooms. The one she’d shared with her sister between the separation and striking out on her own.
Turning to him, she said, “Should we keep it?”
“The house?”
“It’s yours as much as mine.”
“You want to rent it out? I figured you’d want to sell it.” Forget the old. Start something new, he thought.
“So…I was thinking of moving in.” She rushed on before he could say anything. “I’d buy you out, of course.”
“What about your place?”
“It’s been sold to someone else.” There was a melancholy look around her eyes. He could see how much that apartment had meant to her. How much she’d wanted to strike out on her own in a place not drowning in memories. But when she’d used the money for her sister’s lawyer, that dream had gone up in a wisp of smoke. “I wanted to buy a place this year. And since we already own this one and it has a sudden vacancy—”
“Do you want to live down here?”
“Here? In the barrio, you mean?”
Why did she deliberately misunderstand him? He’d always believed the best of her. Until he hadn’t. “Near the freeway, I meant. Years ago you did that report on asthma clusters and heavy particulates.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why do you always do that? Jump to the worst conclusion?”
She looked at the toes of her sneakers. Her foot rubbed the carpet one way, then another. “I don’t know. Defense mechanism, maybe.”
“I’m not the villain. I was probably stubborn, closed off—”
“Angry.”
“I think I had a right to be. But it was because of what you did, not because of who you were.”
She turned away, putting a period on discussion of the past. “I could get new windows. Maybe some kind of whole house filtration system.”
Cam made a slow three sixty. Could he expand the dream of their future to include this house? It wasn’t exactly a ranch in Toluca Lake.
“I’m single. It’s about the size of my place. Plus, it has a yard,” she continued.
“You could rent it while you think about it,” he countered. “Give it a year. See if your sister and mom can stick it out.”
Picking up a box of discarded clothes, she said, “Let’s put the junk out for garbage pickup. I’ll call the city for the big stuff.”
“Should I call Ryan?”
Jessie shook her head, screwing up her face. Even under the glasses and hat, he could tell she wasn’t itching for a reintroduction to his family. She’d always been uncomfortable with Ryan and his mom Bridget. Neither of them had been as welcoming as he would’ve liked.
She’d probably thought it was because she was Mexican or from South L.A. It wasn’t that. They were protective of Cam, thinking she didn’t really love him. But she did, in her own way. All the other stuff had gotten in the way of that. He tabled Ryan, and pulled leather work gloves from his back pocket.
“What’s first?” Most of Dolores’ furniture couldn’t be sold, saved, or even given away. It wasn’t the fact that her family had left the discarded stuff that irritated him. He understood how quickly they’d needed to act once they’d decided on voluntary departure. It was that Jessie hadn’t been left a note or a word of thanks for cleaning up her family’s mess even if it was the last time.
For a couple of hours, they worked in tandem to pull apart the particleboard dresser, taking it from the house and stacking it on the tree lawn. Dori’s old clothes joined the pile, tied up in dark black plastic. Boxes from the garage that had rotted through several winter rains went out as well.
With brisk efficiency of someone used to cleaning up others’ messes, Jessie got a vacuum from her car. She sucked up all the dust and dirt left behind. He took a rag and cleanser from under the kitchen sink and wiped the cabinets, fridge, and counters.
When she wandered in, rolling the vacuum back toward the front door, he said, “Let that be. Let’s see what’s in here.” He pulled open the refrigerator. Unlike the rest of the house, it was nearly empty. Cam lifted two Jarrito sodas from the shelf. Guava wasn’t his favorite flavor, but he chugged it down, needing the water and sugar.
“Should I order delivery?” he asked after the growl of his stomach filled the quiet air.
Jessie laughed, shaking her head. “There’s no delivery.”
“What about pizza? That Indian place on Pico,” he offered what was close by, offhand.
“There’s no delivery to this neighborhood, Cameron,” she said again.
“What are you talking about? I order in all the time.”
“I’m sure restaurants are happy to serve North Hollywood now that it’s full of hipsters and out priced families, right?”
She pulled another trash bag from the counter, and went out to the porch. Fine, he’d pick without her. Cameron pulled the phone from his pocket and called a pizza place in Larchmont, then the Indian place on Pico Boulevard. Frustrated, he called two different delivery services. By the end of the fourth call, he was pissed and hungry. Admittedly a bad combination.
Jessie came back in, pulling off gloves. “I put the dead plants in the green bin. The cracked flower pots are out too. Do you think I should—”
“They won’t deliver.”
“Mm, hm.”
“How can you be so calm?”
; “I told you this a half hour ago.”
“One doesn’t deliver south of Venice. The other won’t go south of Pico.”
“Why?”
“The second pizza manager hung up on me. Last time I eat there. I don’t care what Rivera wants.”
“The other excuses?”
“Not enough demand. Gang activity.”
“There you have it, Cameron. How many times have I told you that life isn’t fair, especially for the black and brown people down here?”
“This is Los Angeles. In the United States of America.” Cameron realized he was shouting. He rolled back his indignation a little.
“I may not have been born here. But even I know there’s no constitutional right to food delivery, Cameron.”
“This is the second largest city in the country. Four million people live here.”
“We have cars. We can go out.”
“Have you covered this in KESP?”
“Not exactly. It’s not the crime of the century, Cam. It’s a little bit of economic injustice. It’s cute that you’re riled up on my behalf.”
“Maybe if they put you behind a desk, you could cover real stories like this.”
“Funny,” she said, though her facial expression was exactly the opposite. “There are bigger issues, like the economic disparity of recent immigrants in Pacoima. Families have been exploited, living two or three to a thousand square foot bungalow. Lack of city services both there and here. Failing schools. Environmental pollution. Unsolved crimes. Police harassment. That’s what I’ve covered. Whether Angelenos south of Pico or north of Sherman Way can get pizza in a half hour or less is not news.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said.
“I know you believe the world should be as fair and honest as you, but it’s not. In order to stay here, I’ve come to accept it. I had to.”
He grabbed one of her hands in his, held it firm. “What does that mean for us? It’s not you versus me, Jessie. I want us to be a team, like we used to be.”
“Do you really think there can be a future for us, Cam?” she asked. Her voice was soft. She pulled off her glasses. Brown eyes, intense, sincere stared back at him.
