Better than being a dealer. Anybody can do that.
And selling yarn? That’s only for the giants?
He put his hands on his lap. Stared at them. You live your life, Yunior. I’ll live mine.
My brother had never been the most rational of agents, but this one was the ill zinger. I chalked it up to boredom, to those eight months he had spent in the hospital. To the medicine he was taking. Maybe he just wanted to feel normal. In all honesty, he seemed pretty excited about the whole thing. Dressed up to go to the job, delicately combed that once great head of hair that had grown back sparse and pubic after the chemo. Gave himself plenty of time, too. Can’t be late. Every time he headed out, my mother would slam the door behind him, and if the Hallelujah Crew was available they’d all be at their rosaries. I might have been zooted out of my gourd most of the time or chasing that girl over in Cheesequake, but I still managed to drop in on him a few times just to be sure he wasn’t facedown in the mohair aisle. A surreal sight. The hardest dude in the nabe chasing price checks like a herb. I never stayed longer than it took to confirm that he was still alive. He pretended not to see me; I pretended not to have been seen.
When he brought home his first check, he threw the money on the table and laughed: I’m making bank, baby.
Oh yeah, I said, you’re killing it.
Still, later that night I asked him for twenty. He looked at me and then gave it over. I jumped in the car and drove out to where Laura was supposed to be hanging with some friends but by the time I arrived she was gone.
—
THAT JOB NONSENSE DIDN’T LAST. I mean, how could it? After about three weeks of making the fat white ladies nervous with his skeletal self, he started forgetting shit, getting disoriented, handing customers the wrong change, cursing people out. And finally he just sat down in the middle of an aisle and couldn’t get up. Too sick to drive himself home, so the job people called the apartment, got me right out of bed. I found him sitting in the office, his head hanging, and when I helped him to his feet this Spanish girl who was taking care of him started bawling as if I was leading him off to the gas chamber. He had a fever like a motherfucker. I could feel the heat through the denim of his apron.
Jesus, Rafa, I said.
He didn’t lift his eyes. Mumbled, Nos fuimos.
He stretched out on the back seat of his Monarch while I drove us home. I feel like I’m dying, he said.
You ain’t dying. But if you do kick it leave me the ride, OK?
I’m not leaving this baby to nobody. I’m going to be buried in it.
In this piece of crap?
Yup. With my TV and my boxing gloves.
What, you a pharaoh now?
He raised his thumb in the air. Bury your slave ass in the trunk.
The fever lasted two days, but it took a week before he was close to better, before he was spending more time on the couch than in bed. I was convinced that as soon as he was mobile he was going to head right back to the Yarn Barn or try to join the Marines or something. My mother feared the same. Told him every chance she got that it wasn’t going to happen. I won’t allow it. Her eyes were shining behind her black Madres de Plaza de Mayo glasses. I won’t. Me, your mother, will not allow it.
Leave me alone, Ma. Leave me alone.
You could tell he was going to pull something stupid. The good thing was he didn’t try to go back to the Barn.
The bad thing was that he went and basically got married.
—
REMEMBER THE SPANISH CHICK, the one who’d been crying over him at the Yarn Barn? Well, turns out she was actually Dominican. Not Dominican like my brother or me but Dominican Dominican. As in fresh-off-the-boat-didn’t-have-no-papers Dominican. And thick as fucking shit. Before Rafa was even better, she started coming around, all solicitous and eager; would sit with him on the couch and watch Telemundo. (I don’t have a TV, she announced at least twenty times.) Lived in London Terrace, too, over in Building 22, with her little son, Adrian, stuck in a tiny room she was renting from this older Gujarati guy, so it wasn’t exactly a hardship for her to hang out with (as she put it) her gente. Even though she was trying to be all proper, keeping her legs crossed, calling my mother Señora, Rafa was on her like an octopus. By visit five, he was taking her down to the basement, whether the Hallelujah Crew was around or not.
Pura was her name. Pura Adames.
Pura Mierda was what Mami called her.
OK, for the record, I didn’t think Pura was so bad; she was a hell of a lot better than most of the ho’s my brother had brought around. Guapísima as helclass="underline" tall and indiecita, with huge feet and an incredibly soulful face, but unlike your average hood hottie Pura seemed not to know what to do with her fineness, was sincerely lost in all the pulchritude. A total campesina, from the way she held herself down to the way she talked, which was so demotic I couldn’t understand half of what she said — she used words like deguabinao and estribao on the regular. She’d talk your ear off if you let her, and was way too honest: within a week she’d told us her whole life story. How her father had died when she was young; how for an undisclosed sum her mother had married her off at thirteen to a stingy fifty-year-old (which was how she got her first son, Nestor); how after a couple years of that terribleness she got the chance to jump from Las Matas de Farfán to Newark, brought over by a tía who wanted her to take care of her retarded son and bedridden husband; how she had run away from her, too, because she hadn’t come to Nueba Yol to be a slave to anyone, not anymore; how she had spent the next four years more or less being blown along on the winds of necessity, passing through Newark, Elizabeth, Paterson, Union City, Perth Amboy (where some crazy cubano knocked her up with her second son, Adrian), everybody taking advantage of her good nature; and now here she was in London Terrace, trying to stay afloat, looking for her next break. She smiled brightly at my brother when she said that.
They don’t really marry girls off like that in the DR, do they, Ma?
Por favor, Mami said. Don’t believe anything that puta tells you. But a week later she and the Horsefaces were lamenting how often that happened in the campo, how Mami herself had had to fight to keep her own crazy mother from trading her for a pair of goats.
—
NOW, MY MOTHER, she had a simple policy when it came to my brother’s “amiguitas”: since none of them were ever going to last, she didn’t even bother to learn their names, paid them no more heed than she’d paid our cats back in the DR. Mami wasn’t mean to them or anything. If a girl said hi, she would say hi back, and if a girl was courteous Mami would return the courtesy. But the vieja didn’t expend more than a watt of herself. She was unwaveringly, punishingly indifferent.
Pura, man, was another story. Right from the beginning it was clear that Mami did not like this girl. It wasn’t just that Pura was mad obvious, dropping hints nonstop about her immigration status — how her life would be so much better, how her son’s life would be so much better, how she would finally be able to visit her poor mother and her other son in Las Matas, if only she had papers. Mami had dealt with paper bitches before, and she never got this pissy. Something about Pura’s face, her timing, her personality, just drove Mami batshit. Felt real personal. Or maybe Mami had a presentiment of what was to come.
Whatever it was, my mother was super evil to Pura. If she wasn’t getting on her about the way she talked, the way she dressed, how she ate (with her mouth open), how she walked, about her campesina-ness, about her prieta-ness, Mami would pretend that she was invisible, would walk right through her, pushing her aside, ignoring her most basic questions. If she had to refer to Pura at all, it was to say something like Rafa, what would Puta like to eat? Even I was like Jesus, Ma, what the fuck. But what made it all the iller was that Pura seemed completely oblivious of the hostility! No matter how Mami acted or what Mami said, Pura kept trying to chat Mami up. Instead of shrinking Pura, Mami’s bitchiness seemed only to make her more present. When she and Rafa were alone, Pura was pretty quiet, but when Mami was around, homegirl had an opinion about everything, jumped in on every conversation, said shit that made no sense — like that the capital of the United States was NYC or that there were only three continents — and then would defend it to the death. You’d think with Mami stalking her she’d be careful and restrained, but nope. The girl took liberties! Búscame algo para comer, she’d say to me. No please or nothing. If I didn’t get her what she wanted, she would help herself to sodas or flan. My mother would take food out of Pura’s hands, but as soon as Mami turned around Pura would be back in the fridge helping herself. Even told Mami that she should paint the apartment. You need color in here. Esta sala está muerta.