What Can't Wait

by Ashley Hope Pérez

  I want my hard work to get me somewhere. I want to worry about which engineering firm to work for, not how I’m going to pay the light bill.

  So why do I make my life so hard? Because I want to make something of myself. Because I want my mom to look at me in ten years and finally understand why a high school diploma wasn’t enough for me.

  ————

  “You got it,” Ms. Ford says. “Just clean this baby up, type it, and send the application in.”

  I don’t want Ms. Ford to get the idea that I’m excited about UT, but I can’t stop myself from grinning. I start to imagine myself at UT. It’s easy because I’ve practically got all the “student life” photos from the website memorized. There I am, sitting in the front of a big lecture hall with my pen out and notebook ready. Or waving from a desk on the top floor of the gigantic main library. I could be standing around a dorm microwave with three other girls, all of us eating ramen noodles . . .

  There’s a bunch of shouting in the hall, and I look up to see two freshman guys scrambling to hold Ms. Ford’s door open for Brenda. She walks in with her arms full of stuffed animals. One of them falls as she dumps the heap onto a desk.

  “What are those?” I’m laughing before I even get the words out.

  “What do they look like? Christmas Gobblers. It’s our next fund-raiser for nursing club.” Brenda picks up one of the plush turkeys and shakes it. “Isn’t he cute?”

  “Definitely original,” Ms. Ford says.

  “I think of turkeys as going more with Thanksgiving,” I say.

  “Uh, no! See? He’s got a green-and-red sweater and everything.”

  “I can see it.” Ms. Ford squints and turns to lower the blinds behind her. She’s trying to hide a smile. “Like Frosty the Snow Turkey.”

  Brenda rolls her eyes. “Very funny, miss.”

  It looks to me like the retailer didn’t quite unload all of their autumn merchandise. “Did you get them on sale?” I ask.

  “Maybe,” Brenda says, which means yes. “Let’s just hope the freshmen buy thousands of them. You want a ride to work or what?”

  I gobble at her. “That’s ‘please’ in turkey.”

  “See, you like them so much I’ll tell Alan he should buy you one.”

  That shuts me up.

  “Grab some of these for me, will you?” she says. “Just don’t bend the tags.”

  I say good-bye to Ms. Ford and scoop up a dozen of the turkeys. We’re halfway down the hall when Ms. Ford walks out and calls, “I want to see your essay before you send it all in.”

  “Yeah, OK,” I mumble. My cheeks start to burn.

  Brenda looks at me hard. “I thought U of H didn’t have an essay.”

  “Ms. Ford’s been ragging me about applying to UT– Austin. I mean, it just got easier to actually do the application than to listen to her. No biggie, just an idea.”

  “I know about your ideas, Marisa. When were you going to tell me?” Brenda grips her armful of turkeys tighter, bending up some of the tags.

  “There’s nothing to tell, I just . . .”

  “Well, shit, forget it!” Brenda spins around and starts walking fast. I try to help her when she stumbles in her high heels, but she just pushes through the doors to the student parking lot. A few steps later, a turkey tumbles from her arms and lands in the gutter. She still doesn’t stop. I pick up the turkey and brush it off.

  Brenda crushes a few more tags trying to get her keys out. Finally she lets me help, but she still won’t look at me.

  We dump the gobblers into the backseat. “Look,” she says finally, “you’re too smart for community college, eso ya sé, and that’s OK. But what’s wrong with U of H? I thought we were going to stick together here in Houston. Like always.”

  “We will stick together. I just . . .”

  “No importa.” She yanks her car door closed. “Really. I’m just surprised, that’s all.” She stares straight ahead, fumbles with the keys, and starts the car.

  “Don’t be mad,” I say.

  “I’m not mad.”

  Brenda backs up without looking. The driver behind her honks, and she shoots him the finger.

  “I just thought I’d be at junior college and you’d be at U of H and we’d do our homework at Burger King or the taquería. We’d hang out, and you’d finally really start going out and everything. I thought you wanted that too.” Brenda’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel.

  “I do want it,” I say, but I know she’s not buying it.

  This is how stubborn Brenda is. We both know that the plans we made in middle school don’t have anything to do with the way the world really is. We said crazy stuff like how we’d start college together and hit up the parties, but also get good grades. Go on double dates and meet handsome guys who are best friends. Finish college and get good jobs. Get married and buy big houses next door to each other, and then two years later have babies at the same time and be comadres. Watch our kids grow up best friends.

  When we were younger, I imagined that finishing high school would be like waving a magic wand, and then my dad would like me and Ma would understand me and Ceci wouldn’t dump on me and Gustavo would do the dishes for once and I’d have my own life.

  But here I am, seventeen years old and still tiptoeing around my dad, trying to please my mom, getting bulldozed by Cecilia and ignored by Gustavo. In Brenda’s house, she’s the princess, so it’s different for her. But what I want doesn’t matter.

  “Nothing makes sense anymore,” I say.

  Brenda turns up the radio.

  chapter 6

  Lucky for me, Brenda doesn’t stay mad that long. After two days of bumming rides from other people, I see her waiting for me in the hall when school lets out. I glance down to make sure the sealed UT application envelope is still sandwiched out of sight between my calculus book and my binder.

  “Want to get a burger and hang out before work?” she asks.

  This is Brenda’s way of saying sorry, so I agree. Since I don’t start work until a little later today, we drive through Jack in the Box and then go to Brenda’s.

  Brenda is decking out her burger with jalapeños and I’m spooning salsa onto mine when the back door opens and her mom comes in with her arms full of construction paper and that weird gray-brown, recycled paper with dashed lines that they always made us use in elementary school. “Hey girls,” she says. She swoops in for a kiss from Brenda and then comes over to the counter where I’m screwing the lid onto the salsa jar.

  “Life, how is it?” she asks me.

  “Good, Ms. Zepeda, thanks,” I say.

  “You two can help me grade if you want. All you got to do is check that they wrote three sentences and that the picture’s got something to do with what they put down.”

  “Ugh, Mom, no way!” Brenda says, rolling her eyes. “We were just about to go do homework, you know.” She grabs the salsa and swings open the fridge door. I get a good look at Brenda’s grades—four B’s, one A, and a C— there’s a sticky note with a smiley face and the words, “Hard worker!” in bubbly letters stuck to the front. That’s the kind of reception you get when your mom’s a thirdgrade teacher, I guess.

  By the time we get to the mom-free zone of Brenda’s room, I can tell she’s dying to dish about Greg. That’s fine by me, just so long as she isn’t pissed anymore.

  “So he invited me to ride around with him later. His dad has a Tahoe, how cool is that?”

  “Mmmm-ummm,” I say through a mouthful of fries. I wash them down with a swig of Brenda’s Coke.

  She gets back at me by snatching a huge handful of my fries.

  “Hey!” I swat her hand away, but I’m too late. “So what’s his story? Where’s he live?”

  “Used to live with his dad downtown, but he got fed up with Lamar. It’s all preppy like people say it is, you know, all academic and shit. Too stressful. So he moved in with his mom. She has one of those nice apartments on Meadowbrook.”

  “You alrea
dy saw his apartment?”

  “Oh yeah,” she says. She carriers her burger over to the bed, closes her eyes, and stretches. Her face says GUILTY x 40.

  I wad up one of her shirts from the floor and throw it at her. “You’re so bad, girl,” I say, because that’s what I always say. But I don’t worry too much, because I dragged her sexy self to Planned Parenthood sophomore year.

  Brenda stares at her fingernails and picks at her cuticle a little, no doubt reliving some delicious moment with Greg. “Maybe, but being bad feels so good. You know what I mean.”

  The thing is, I don’t. Although lately I have been imagining in some detail what it’d be like to snuggle up to a certain baseball player in my economics class.

  “You can’t fool me, Marisa Moreno,” Brenda says, pointing a fry at me. “No lo niegues because I know you like I know my bra size. You and Alan Peralta are getting nice and close.”

  “Yeah, right. I wish.”

  “He’s totally in love with you. From what I can tell, he has been since freshman year. You just need to . . .”

  “Alan? We’re friends and everything, but he’s way out of my league.”

  “Then why hasn’t he been dating other girls?”

  “He’s got baseball and his drawing. Plus that job at his brother’s restaurant.”

  Brenda throws up her hands. “Don’t be tonta. You heard it here first. When have I ever been wrong? I have a sense about these things.”

  I’m about to remind her about LeRoy—and all the other guys she’s “loved” before Greg—when my phone rings.

  “That’s probably Alan,” Brenda says, looking proud of herself.

  But it’s Cecilia.

  “Marisa?” she says, voice shaking. “You got to help me.”

  I roll my eyes at Brenda and mouth “Cecilia.” She probably wants me to babysit Anita so she can go get her nails done.

  But I’m way off.

  “Somebody just called from the Ben Taub E.R. It’s Jose. They wouldn’t tell me what; they wouldn’t tell me anything. They just said not to come alone.”

  “What? Was he working?”

  “Some construction job on the west side, he just started last week. I don’t know where . . . I don’t know . . .” Her voice cracks.

  “Calm down, Ceci. You don’t want to scare Anita.”

  “I just took her next door to Mrs. Salinas. Shit, Mari. I’m so scared.”

  “Just hang in there. I’m coming.” Brenda hears the weirdness in my voice and is already off the bed and throwing stuff in her purse. “I’m going to get Brenda to bring me over, then I can drive with you to the hospital, OK?”

  “Hurry,” Cecilia whispers.

  All that the nurses in the emergency room will tell us is that there was an accident, Jose is being cared for, and the doctor is on his way to explain the details. It must have been a long walk, because I have time to call at least a dozen people before he finally shows up.

  The doctor is a small man in crumpled blue scrubs and white sneakers. He has a funny name full of consonants. I forget it as soon as he says it.

  “Who is the wife of Mr. Jose Almaguer?”

  Cecilia lifts her hand.

  “I see,” he says and turns toward her. “Your husband has been in a serious accident. He is fortunate to be alive.”

  Cecilia slips down a little in her chair.

  “Your husband was on a work site, he was using a forklift, and ...”

  Dr. Unpronounceable presses his lips together like he’s trying to decide if Cecilia can handle this. I grip her hand. He still doesn’t say anything, and I’m ready to scream.

  “And?” I ask, trying to sound calm.

  “It seems that somehow Jose was separated from the machine he was operating.” He consults his clipboard and glances up at Cecilia. “He fell down in front of the forklift, it continued to move forward at a high speed, and the result was that he was crushed against a wall. Both legs are fractured in many places, and his right hipbone was completely shattered.”

  Cecilia dissolves into tears. I rub her back and watch the doctor angle his fingers into a bridge in the air. He’s brown like us, but probably Indian. His voice sounds so crisp and proper, the kind of British English that belongs with fancy teacups and rose gardens, not here with antiseptic cleaner and broken bones and blood.

  He picks up his clipboard again, glances over the notes scribbled on the front page. “Your husband will be in surgery for several more hours as we pin the broken leg bones together. We will also need to remove bone shards from the hip area and check for internal bleeding in the nearby organs.”

  “What happens after that?” I ask.

  “We won’t know until later how much permanent damage has been done to his body. His face may need some minor reconstruction, but the wounds there are mostly superficial. But if, for example, a bone was forced into the spinal cord, there is a chance of paralysis. Or . . .”

  “Thank you,” I cut in before he can scare Cecilia even more. “We’ll wait to hear more after the surgery.”

  The doctor nods, shakes our hands, and says he’ll notify us of any developments. Then he’s gone.

  Cecilia doesn’t move. Her eyes are glassy, and her chin wobbles. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispers.

  “We just have to wait,” I say. “Mami will be here as soon as someone can pick her up. I can go get her now if you want.”

  “No,” she says. “I mean, you tried to tell me. I should have gotten out while I could. Pero esto cambia todo. What if Jose can’t work again, what if he’s hurt for good and . . .” She trails off.

  “Try not to worry. It’ll be OK.” But all I’m thinking is, oh shit.

  chapter 7

  Hours drip by. I stop looking at my watch and measure the time by how tired the doctor looks. He keeps coming in with updates that blur together. They pinned his right leg together.... They started the left.... Pieces of his shattered hip were extracted.... Some internal bleeding in his lower abdomen, another surgery for that....

  I know it’s been a long time because when he comes in to tell us that last bit, the doctor’s mustache is drooping and there’s a shadow of stubble on his cheeks that wasn’t there earlier.

  The waiting room fills up with people, but nearly everybody is related to Jose. I recognize his parents and older sisters from the wedding and Anita’s birthday parties, and I can see enough resemblance in the half dozen other people around them to know that they’re part of the same gene pool. I recognize Pedro Jimenez, one of Jose’s cousins who also happens to be in my graduating class. I give him a little wave, but he doesn’t see me. Maybe he doesn’t even know who I am. He doesn’t spend that much time at school, anyway.

  Across the room there’s a girl about my age with her family. They stick out because they’re white in the sea of brown. Whatever their emergency is, I can just tell by how the girl slides her phone open, grins, and starts texting that it’s not exactly hitting her in the gut. Who knows, maybe her brother-in-law just got himself smashed up on the job, too. But her parents are there, the dad in a business suit, the mom in a pretty gray dress, all hushed voices and serious looks. Now the girl is up out of her seat, and her mom gives her a hug and hands her a wad of bills. She slips the money into her jeans pocket, pulls her T-shirt down over her flat tummy, and strolls out of the waiting room. Just like that, so easy.

  Me, I haven’t left the room except to pee since we got here, because right now I’m all Cecilia’s got. My mom is still waiting for someone to pick her up from the bakery. When I tried to leave to go get her, Ceci started to cry all over again. I mention it again now, but she doesn’t want to be left alone. So I call Gustavo’s cell and Papi’s work like every five minutes. I still can’t get them.

  I’m just about to text Brenda to take her up on her offer to get Mami when my mom walks in. I squeeze Cecilia’s hand, and then I see that Alan is right behind her. He’s in a damp T-shirt and Nike shorts, like he just came from the gym, and f
or just a moment I forget all about Jose.

  Within seconds Cecilia is hanging on my mom’s neck and crying into her hair. Mami hustles her off to the bathroom so they can be in private. That leaves me to come up with something to say to Alan.

  “Thanks, I . . . how’d you know? I mean . . .”

  “Brenda called me. Your mom’s bakery’s really close to the gym where me and Jimmy work out. It was no problem.”

  An intercom from the nurse’s station blares a doctor’s name, and we both sort of jump.

  “Gustavo should have picked her up, it’s just he won’t answer his phone. My dad ought to be coming, too, but . . .” I look around, like maybe the irresponsible men in my family are here, just hiding behind the table stacked with boxes of Crystal Flake doughnuts and everything else people brought. Because whatever our other failings, Mexicans don’t let people in a crisis go hungry.

  “No problem, really.” Alan just smiles at me.

  “Well, thanks again,” I say. I can feel myself blushing, and I fight the urge to put my hand over my birthmark. I figure he can’t wait to get out of here, probably just brought Ma as a favor to Brenda.

  “You want some company?”

  I manage to smile, and a minute later we’re sitting together on the hard plastic chairs.

  “It’s packed in here,” I say. Queen of the obvious, that’s me.

  “Looks like La Raza is having its meeting at Ben Taub tonight,” Alan says, all calm and serious-looking.

  When I explode into giggles, two ladies praying the rosary in the corner stare daggers at me. I want to hide.

  “So what happened, exactly?” he says, leaning forward so that no one can hear us.

  “My sister’s husband is not the smartest,” I whisper, shooting a glance at his family along the other wall. “Take any situation, right, and he’ll do the one stupidest, most dangerous thing a person can do. And he works construction—really bad idea. Somehow he fell off a running forklift and ended up in between it and a wall.”