Give It To Me. Ana Castillo

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      1

      Mucho traffic and a stampede of plebes down below. Above all, Mulch. Mulch was what Palma Piedras called the wide and astonishingly ordinary middle class at the start of the twenty-first century. Horns blasting, cops’ whistles blowing, and an ambulance stuck and siren ignored. She watched them hurry against changing traffic lights in their khaki shorts, flip-flops or sports shoes, and T-shirts or cheap polos. Big, fat men dressed like five-year-olds in baseball caps. Americans were the worst dressers in the world. She was in her hometown.

      A year in Colombia.

      A letter from Pepito brought her back to Chicago. He was out of prison by the time she got the letter that said he was getting out and could she meet him? A decade locked up. Ten years, nineteen days, he wrote. Before he did what he did to get himself locked up about five minutes after he did it—the gun was still warm—she hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. During all that time she had stayed in Buenos Aires, Madrid, El De Efe, and Medellín, Colombia briefly—her ex’s native tierra, her brief husband. The woman, who’d readily admit she did life better on her own, was attracted to places where Spanish was spoken because it was her other strong language. (In Italy she understood everyone but couldn’t put a sentence together.)

      Palma changed out of shorts she’d slipped into on that humid day and tried on a summer dress from the mall back in New Mexico. She was broke but didn’t want to look broke so she hooked on her best gold hoop earrings and a gold bangle. Accessorizing her mall dress made her look more broke. She changed twice before she was back in the plaid Bermudas purchased at the Sam’s Club where Palma was buying a twenty-pound bag of dog food for her forty-pound mutt back home. Home was now Albuquerque. She had returned to Chicago, among other reasons, to meet Pepito.

      Pepito was her lil cous’, raised by their grandmother. (Little was an expression.) She and him, together. Abuela told her way long ago that Palma’s mother, the grandmother’s daughter, had been born under a bad star. That bad star led her to follow a worse guy. Not Palma’s father, the old woman assured her, although she never said who he might have been. One day Palma came to the conclusion that her grandmother hadn’t withheld her father’s true identity out of spite for her mother who dumped the girl on her after she was born, but that her abuela truly had not known who he was.

      Abuela preferred her own one and only son and treated him like a baby, still cutting meat for him at the table, useless piece of shit that he was, and that never changed even after one day while in the seventh grade Palma came home from school and there was a toddler. A duffle bag the girl didn’t recognize was by the door. Pepito is going to stay with us a while, Palma, Abuela said. He’s taking your room. My room? The girl said. Where am I going to sleep? With me in my bed, Abuela said. Palma loved Abuela but she found the idea of sleeping with a woman who left her teeth in a glass by the side of the bed a very unattractive proposition.

      Then again, her lame uncle Jim-bo (or Jim-Boy or Jimmy or Yimmy, depending on who was talking about him or to him) had started making stops at the bedroom doorway with no door late at night when he’d come home smelling like a tavern urinal. The girl had sensed the soused СКАЧАТЬ