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My kids know the rules. Roberto and
Emmanuela went off to school, dressed in
doll clothes that still shrink in the sun,
discolored and diminutive like nicknames. As for Juanita, that
little brat, she had until seven. If she was late, helping
Samsona Stagado with her chores, she’d have to stay with her for the
night. That’s the rule, and she knows it. The truth is,
she tries to be late. We have our own problems and
she's sick of everything, like moving the coche before night
falls. You see, the streets fill up with patrol cars,
borrachos and cowboys, and men don’t understand silence the way
undocumented women do. The weekly move keeps us
together. We roll down the windows and listen to music as we
drive up Morando Hill or through Bakersfield Commons, passing
million dollar homes with fountains and trimmed hedges and TV
commercials flashing through bedroom windows. I admire how
well kept people’s sidewalks are, the way they make their homes so
pretty, adorning porches with wicker baskets, little benches made of
birch and banana wood, pots of prickly pear cactus that come from
the Mexican desert. And I love the way California smells at
night. Reminds me of flour tortillas, the kind you buy back
home when the roads shut down during traffic jams as old Mayan women
sell you pineapple tamales wrapped in corn husks that look like
burlap ponchos, and for fifty pesos, you can get a bag of twelve,
piping hot, and passed to you right through the open windows,
fogging up the glass like new lovers. By the time you’re done
eating, the traffic has cleared and the bus is moving again.
I
hope Juanita is strong. Her absence makes my stomach
hurt. And I feel guilty for rolling down the windows, it’s
just that the air smells like a valley in the Yucatan, like a clay
oven in Campeche. If Juanita was here I’d tell her about her
cousins that sleep in library stacks and study in bus depots, that
dance in outfits made from silver curtains. Someday I will
tell Juanita all about Mexico, about the only country that loves you
like a lost girl.
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