Ana had thought about going back to that restaurant more than she’d ever admit. Regina’s was an Italian spot in the Theater District that served mostly European tourists and sleep-deprived lawyers who worked in the building across the street from it. Ana had spent her first New York winter, when she lived with Carla and Ernesto, working the coat check room. Her goal, however, was to make her way into Regina’s kitchen. It was run by men, men who spoke their own language—a mixture of English, Italian, and Spanish—and who spit out orders too fast for her to follow. But she couldn’t afford to be their apprentice. The hours were too long, the pay was next to nothing, and she was uncomfortable being the only woman in a kitchen filled with men. But she took a weekend job doing coat check, hoping to slowly gain the confidence and trust she needed to make her way in regardless. Lucho initially fought the idea of her taking the job. He worked nights at a meat-packing plant, and although Carla had offered to watch the children, he didn’t want Ana working at night, especially not in that part of Manhattan. She convinced him, however, that it was the first step to something bigger, something they could potentially leave one day to their children: a restaurant, a business. He went with her one evening to see the clientele, to speak to the manager, and when he saw that the train station was at the corner, and that it was only a two-block walk from the train station to Carla’s apartment, he agreed.
But then winter was over, and as diners lost their coats to the warmer nights, Ana didn’t feel quite comfortable asking to be let into the kitchen. By then, Carla had also started to tell this friend or that, and always within earshot, that she had to miss a birthday party or bingo night because she was playing the part of a nanny, again, that evening. Lucho refused to say no to weekend work, and so Ana never made it beyond the coat check room.
That she might one day cook at a place like Regina’s, speak those men’s language, inject it with her own words and commands, seemed so remote now. What felt even farther away was the possibility of watching her own recipes come alive on porcelain plates and make their way to a table of well-dressed patrons, eager to devour her Escabeche or her Tallarín Verde. They’d keep coming back, keen to try something new on La Inmaculada’s menu. La Inmaculada, that’s what she’d call it. “Immaculate” because the place would be spotless; the food, perfection. Immaculate as the Virgin herself.
“Yes, Ana, go back so you can learn,” said Betty. “Then maybe you can hire us and we can say goodbye to this place.”
“That might never happen,” said Ana.
“Don’t be so negative,” said Carla. “You never know. You might actually have that restaurant one day, and then Betty can be your waitress, and the two of you can serve me and Ernesto when we celebrate our anniversary there. First thing you have to do, though, is get yourself out of Valeria’s. It’s the only way you’re going to get ahead.” She pulled a pen from her pocket, grabbed a paper towel, and began scribbling. “His name’s Bob,” she said, “but everyone calls him Sully.” She tore the piece of paper and slid it over. Ana eyed the name and phone number. A seven-one-eight area code, a name she would’ve pronounced “su-yi” had Carla not said it aloud. “Just call him and see the apartment, Ana. What’ve you got to lose?”
* * *
THAT AFTERNOON, SHE HEADED TO MAMA’S. SHE’D GROWN NUMB AT THE thought of what might happen once she ended up in the back house behind the main building. In the weeks leading up to the livery cab money, she’d gone to the place twice to see Don Beto.
The first time, he acted as she expected. He was gracious and gallant. He wore cologne and offered her sweet wine. He talked about Cuba. He sat close to her, then closer, near enough that she could smell his sweat and count the small chicken pox scars on his face. He told her he liked her, put his hand on the inside of her thigh, and kissed her. Her body stiffened, and she kept drinking. He kept kissing her, then touched her breasts, and even though she could feel it happening, it didn’t seem like it was happening to her. She was outside of herself, watching it from across the room. She had only allowed him to touch her.
The next time they met, he wore even more cologne. The bottle of wine was uncorked, and her glass was already filled to the brim. By then, Mama had said no to the money she and Lucho needed to lease Gil’s car. Ana was behind on payments, and Mama didn’t want to lose any more money. Ana had to drink enough to let whatever was going to happen happen, but not so much that she’d miss out on the best time to make her request. He’d undone the buttons on her shirt, and was kissing her neck, when she said she needed money.
“For the livery cab?” he asked, and she realized he’d spoken to Mama.
“Yes,” she said.
“I can give it to you. Four weeks so you can pay for the month upfront.”
Her eyes had widened. “I can start paying you back in two weeks,” she promised.
“No, I’ll give it to you.”
He said the words as he slid his hands around her waist and hoisted her back up on the couch. He undid his belt buckle. She hesitated, then reached over, but he placed his hand on the back of her head and guided her face forward instead.
At the end of that visit, Ana had the money she needed to lease the cab.
There had always been a line she was unwilling to cross with Don Beto. If he’d been satisfied with their encounters to that point, she might be able to bear them a little longer. But she knew he expected more than the petting and the kissing, and all the precursors to sex that she could barely stomach. She was willing to see him again, but she didn’t want to cross that imaginary line. She didn’t want to know if she could bear it.
Now, as she walked toward Mama’s house on a dim afternoon, she relied on one possible out: she could pay Don Beto back. She had enough money stuffed inside her coat pocket to show him she was serious. She could get on some sort of schedule. Maybe not as frequently as she paid Mama, but a couple of times a month. She could figure out a way to pay him back, little by little, but she’d give him back his money.
The truth was that she wanted nothing more than to run back to the train station with the cash still tucked in her pocket. She deserved something for what had happened between them. If she had to live with the disgust of the moment, she should get something for it. But it wasn’t an encounter she wanted to repeat, and she couldn’t think of a way to keep the money without also having him in the picture. She urged her Virgencita to please ask El Señor to call the man. She didn’t even want a tragedy, but a heart attack or a stroke. She asked for a merciful death even though he didn’t deserve one. The Lord, however, didn’t seem to listen.
She threw on her hood as she approached, but there was no one at Mama’s apartment window when she arrived. She hurried onto the cobbled path that led to the back house. A burgundy car, at least two decades old, watched her with its rectangular eyes as she hurried toward the structure. She tapped its cobalt door, and he answered in a cream guayabera and pleated cinnamon slacks.
“Entra, niña,” he said, “before the heat escapes.” She hurried inside, but kept her hood over her head. The space had been a garage once, but it was now a small studio that Ana found oddly soothing. The walls were cream and mostly bare, with the exception of one wall that had a single large window that faced out into the yard and the back of the main house. Its blinds were pulled shut. Another wall held the black-and-white image of a woman on her back with her palm on her forehead and a leg kicking up. Don Beto had installed a small bar in one corner of the room. A number of tools hung in another and, below them, a table with three wooden orbs that needed to be sanded. A brown futon sat in the middle of the room with a vanilla-colored throw draped across it. Beside it was a recliner decorated with twists of tamed flowers and leaves, the only item in the room that Ana suspected had once belonged to Mama. A coffee table was at the very center. Its ruby wood gleamed beneath the overhead recessed lights. It offered up a bottle of wine, plump red grapes, and perfectly punctured crackers.
“Let me get your coat,” he
offered, but she didn’t budge. She had no intention of staying, let alone taking off her coat. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Your patrona is not here.”
Her head jerked. Mama never left the sanctuary of her first-floor apartment, not even to collect the rent from her upstairs tenants. She depended on her clients to do everything from picking up groceries and refilling prescriptions to dropping off items at the post office. Leaving its warmth to head into the frigid late December air seemed odd. “Where is she?” she asked.
“Go ahead,” he urged her. “Get comfortable and I’ll tell you.” He noticed her hesitation. “You’re going to cook in here if you keep that coat on.”
She didn’t know whether it was the comfort of the room, the fullness of the grapes, or the knowledge that Mama was away, but she acquiesced. Her gloves came off, and then her scarf. She slid off her coat, and then her boots. Her feet were cold inside her socks. She crossed her arms, adding another layer.
“So where is she?” she asked again.
“Mateo’s in town,” he said. “Here to see doctors with his ‘novio.’”
Mateo was Mama’s only child, a man in his mid-thirties. She’d mentioned him only once in passing. Mama liked to watch the five o’clock newscast because one of the reporters reminded her of him. “They have similar eyes,” she’d said once, when Ana had come by to make a payment. That was all she ever said of him. There were no pictures on the wall, no drawing or ceramic or other childhood remnant to remind Mama or the world that a child had once lived there. That’s because he’s gay, Carla had whispered when Ana asked her about him. He lives in Miami, she’d said, so he could live his life however he wanted.
“You’re surprised too?” said Don Beto, setting her clothes down on a stool by the bar. “So am I. But the prodigal son is back! After all this time, I thought he’d left for good.”
“How long has he been gone?” she asked, curious to hear more of Mama’s lost son.
“Long time,” he said, picking up a bottle of rum and two glasses. “All because she tried to fix him. I told her, there’s nothing that needs to be fixing. It is what it is. But she was stubborn. She had him in soccer, baseball, all kinds of sports. He was good at them too. Then she spent all this money on those baths they sell you at the botánicas. Those brujas are just thieves if you ask me. Her brother even took him to some brothels in Woodside. Nothing.” He set the bottle and glasses on the coffee table, then walked back to her. He touched her back, urging her to sit. “Then he went to college in Florida,” he said as he followed her to the couch, “and that was it. Completely forgot about his mother. Not a letter or a phone call. Not even for her birthday or Mother’s Day.” He filled a glass with rum then threw it back before muttering, “Ingrato.”
Don Beto might have been more forgiving of Mateo’s ungratefulness if he’d been his biological father or even his adopted one. But Don Beto had come into Mama’s life when Mateo was still in high school, playing on that soccer team that Mama had hoped might set him straight. By then, a string of men had followed the death of Mama’s first husband, Mateo’s father. None, however, had managed to pull off what Don Beto had done. He married Mama only months after Mateo left.
“He’s here to see doctors?” she asked. “Is he okay?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? I didn’t ask. It’s none of my business.” He poured wine into the second glass and handed it to her. “I honestly don’t care. He’s been a thorn in her side for as long as I can remember. He should just stay away.” She held the glass under her nose, its sweet scent crawling up her nostrils as she drew the rim to her mouth. “How did that apartment turn out?” he asked.
“It’s not for us,” she said, taking a large gulp. “I have your money.”
He held up his palm. “I told you it wasn’t a loan, Ana.”
“I don’t just take people’s money. I said I’d pay you back when I have the money and I have it.” She looked at her coat bundled on the stool and was about to stand when he grabbed her arm.
“Your husband just started a new job, Ana. You still don’t have a place to live. I’m sure you spent a lot to make Christmas real special for your little ones. Consider it a gift.”
She sat back, relenting. She needed that money. Besides, she had already repaid her debt in other ways. She muttered a thank-you, but she didn’t think he heard her.
Her hands, once cold, now sweated. He stared at her. A layer of gel coated his eyes. His smirk made her uneasy, and she did not know what to do with her hands. She rubbed them against her pants to avoid looking at his face.
“How are things at your cousin’s?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Everything’s fine.” She grabbed a grape and quickly stuffed it in her mouth. She looked around the room, tucking her fingers into the insides of her sleeves. He moved closer. She smelled the rum on his breath. She could almost find it enticing, if it had come from another man.
“Tranquila,” he whispered. “You’ve gained some weight.” She tensed as his hand moved up her inner thigh. He reached higher.
She knew what he expected, but she asked anyway. “What is it you want?”
He leaned in, his breath pressing on her face. “Come on. You know. You’re not a child, Ana.”
She bristled, and she slowed her breath to keep the anger from turning into tears. His inept attempts to woo her with wine and grapes, his pungent cologne, all turned her stomach. Why not keep it all business? At least then they could get straight to it. It’d be done and over with, and she could go home.
He grabbed her face and wiped his thumb across her lower lip. “I like helping you, Ana.” He squeezed her face tighter and brushed his lips against her puckered mouth. “I don’t care what you do with the money. It’s yours.” He loosened his grip, placing a loose strand of hair behind her ear, caressing the curve in her neck. Her body instinctively retracted, but she tried to stay still. His breath swarmed her skin, then his dry lips descended, his hands invaded. They moved from her face, sliding underneath her shirt and up to her breasts. He rummaged through her body, going from one spot to the next, searching like a pickpocket. As her body fell back onto the couch, Ana only looked longer and deeper into the track lights that ran across the middle of his ceiling. He lifted and pulled, and she counted the lights above her. She heard the seam in her shirt split against her skin. Breathe, she told herself. He paused as he fumbled with his pants. She noticed the light that had dimmed near the end of the track. It didn’t hurt as much to look at it. She clung to it, and when he pressed against her, she buried her eyes in that last light until its gaze blinded her.
7
A DREAM JOLTED HER FROM BED THAT NIGHT, THE SAME ONE SHE’D been having for weeks. In it, wings had sprung alongside her spine, and she struggled to fly as she hovered above a river on a moonlit night. Shrieking monkeys slung from one tree branch to the next; dolphins raced behind her along the river. They chased her toward a wall, a wall made up of something that was moving, though she couldn’t quite make out what it was. She woke as she crashed into it.
Her heart pounded against her ribcage. The back of her T-shirt and the undersides of her breasts were drenched in sweat. Her socks had slid off, and her bare feet were numb from the cold. The room was still as an indigo night crept through the blinds, its fingertips touching the top of her rose-covered blanket. She was in her bed, not in that dream, she realized, yet the river’s scent lingered beneath her nostrils.
Beneath the blanket, a bump rose and fell to the rhythm of a wheezing breath. She pulled back the sheet, and there was Pedro, his cheek on a pillow, his thighs tucked into his chest. She brushed a swath of wet hair from his forehead and blew air across his face and neck. She wanted to wake him; his eyes always forced her to be stronger than she was. Instead, she turned him onto his side, wiping the saliva that escaped his mouth before pulling the sheet over his chest.
She found her socks near the foot of the bed, but the cold nevertheless crawled through the floor, up the so
les of her chancletas, and through her legs. It was the first truly cold night of the winter. She didn’t mind the sogginess of summers in New York. Its glue didn’t bother her as it did Lucho or Valeria. But she had resented the mild autumn that lingered through December. She had kept the oversized coats, the long johns, and tank tops that she and Lucho had worn the previous winter. But she had to spend money on new clothes for the children. Winter, however, had taken its time, and there was so much more she could’ve done with that money instead.
She patted the top of the bunk bed where Victoria had turned her blanket into a cocoon. Ana pulled it back just far enough to see her daughter curled into a fetal position—how she always slept—with the two braids Ana had woven together still intact and with her doll, Liliana, beside her. Unlike her brother, Victoria had an almost soundless breath, something that always unnerved Ana. She held her finger beneath Victoria’s nose, waiting for a breath to cycle through her body, just to be sure it was there.
The room was otherwise empty. She squinted at the clock on the dresser. Its green light was steady: 2:23 A.M.
She was up again.
She grabbed her maroon sweater hanging on the vanity chair, plucked her address book and pen from her handbag, then stepped into the hallway. All the doors inside unit 4D were shut. Hers closed without a sound. In the darkness, she made her way through the hallway. Her feet skittered over the floor. The ornaments on the Christmas tree glinted in the darkened living room. Her heart continued to echo through her mouth. She reached the kitchen still shivering, hoping that a cup of tea might lull her back to sleep.
The Affairs of the Falcóns Page 8
