Give It To Me. Ana Castillo

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      9

      How Palma Piedras got to Albuquerque was via Rodrigo’s career. Her Colombian ex-husband was not in a cartel. He was a school administrator. They met in Chicago when he was looking for a new job. A few months later he landed one in Albuquerque. They married in Reno, and not long after settling down, they bought the house that was now her home sans Rodrigo. He was at his job about a year when his brother, who she had laid odds on then was in a cartel, contacted him. He said that their mother was ailing and that Rodrigo had to go back to Medellín, or actually, the outskirts of that mad city. The couple went, pretending it was their idea and not a brother’s who was suspected of disappearing people as casually as flushing his turds down the toilet. The house in Albuquerque went up for sale, didn’t sell, went up again, didn’t sell, while renters through a property manager came and went. In the end they hung on to it. “Hanging on,” an operative term that seemed to have hit Mulchdom like a sudden cloud of tear gas released for maximum crowd control and had otherwise been known worldwide as The Recession.

      In Colombia, their Mulch marriage broke down. She wasn’t able to prove it, but Palma Piedras, who’d kept her maiden name (having scarcely been a maiden at the wedding chapel), had the distinct feeling her husband’s Sundays, which he spent at his ex-wife’s home, had as much to do with re-kindling the flame with the ex as it did with their kid he left behind when he immigrated. That wasn’t what ended it. (It only helped.) Rodrigo told Palma that in Medllín it wasn’t proper or right for a wife to go anywhere without her husband. He meant an-y-where. And guess who got to care for the bedridden mother? (Why anyone would leave Palma in charge of his mother left even her to wonder.) Rodrigo deferred to the patrimony of the household. Rodrigo’s older brother didn’t exactly give anyone a choice when he told you what to do.

      You’ve changed, Palma told Rodrigo, who refused to do anything together and was out a lot. You have to change, he said. We’re not in your women’s lib country anymore. Besides, here you could be killed and nobody would care.

      Not long after that remark Palma did go somewhere. With one carry-on and her passport she made her way to the airport and never looked back. When the runaway wife returned to Albuquerque and filed for divorce, he did not contest. As long as she kept up with payments, he said Palma should keep the house. Now that was not like Rodrigo. The suggestion that he was not planning on returning to the States led her to think she might have escaped “the family business” but her marido had not. She had miraculously managed a clean break. Palma’s ex, formerly a middle school vice principal, was now likely toting a machine gun and supervising a private landing strip in the middle of a cocoa plant field.

      There was one thing that earned Rodrigo Reyes more than an honorable mention ribbon at the science fair. He was the only man who ever found Palma’s G-spot. She knew that some men thought the G-spot a myth, feminist propaganda. She’d had true faith that it existed but no man had found it. Rodrigo did so by accident. They had a high four-poster bed and one time when they were having sex, he pulled his lover toward the edge, her legs hung over and he, standing up, entered her; it turned out to be the perfect angle for anatomical starbursts. God was good. He and Palma were going at it when the fluid spurt out and ran down. Ha, he said. Golden showers, eh? He acted as if he was cool with the unannounced program but he had struck gold all right. Palma wasn’t sure at first what had happened. She just knew that she wanted it to happen again.