Yeah, he said.
After she walked out he put on the radio and started on the speed bag. I stopped pretending I was asleep; I sat up and watched him.
Did you guys have a fight or something?
No, he said.
Why’d she leave?
He sat down on my bed. His chest was sweating. She had to go.
But where’s she gonna stay?
I don’t know. He put his hand on my face, gently. Why ain’t you minding your business?
A week later he was seeing some other girl. She was from Trinidad, a cocoa pañyol, and she had this phony-as-hell English accent. It was the way we all were back then. None of us wanted to be niggers. Not for nothing.
—
I GUESS TWO YEARS PASSED. My brother was gone by then, and I was on my way to becoming a nut. I was out of school most of the time and had no friends and I sat inside and watched Univision or walked down to the dump and smoked the mota I should have been selling until I couldn’t see. Nilda didn’t fare so well, either. A lot of the things that happened to her, though, had nothing to do with me or my brother. She fell in love a couple more times, really bad with this one moreno truck driver who took her to Manalapan and then abandoned her at the end of the summer. I had to drive over to get her, and the house was one of those tiny box jobs with a fifty-cent lawn and no kind of charm; she was acting like she was some Italian chick and offered me a paso in the car, but I put my hand on hers and told her to stop it. Back home she fell in with more stupid niggers, relocated kids from the City, and they came at her with drama and some of their girls beat her up, a Brick City beat-down, and she lost her bottom front teeth. She was in and out of school and for a while they put her on home instruction, and that was when she finally dropped.
My junior year she started delivering papers so she could make money, and since I was spending a lot of time outside I saw her every now and then. Broke my heart. She wasn’t at her lowest yet but she was aiming there and when we passed each other she always smiled and said hi. She was starting to put on weight and she’d cut her hair down to nothing and her moonface was heavy and alone. I always said Wassup and when I had cigarettes I gave them to her. She’d gone to the funeral, along with a couple of his other girls, and what a skirt she’d worn, like maybe she could still convince him of something, and she’d kissed my mother but the vieja hadn’t known who she was. I had to tell Mami on the ride home and all she could remember about her was that she was the one who smelled good. It wasn’t until Mami said it that I realized it was true.
—
IT WAS ONLY ONE SUMMER and she was nobody special, so what’s the point of all this? He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone. I’m twenty-three and I’m washing my clothes up at the mini mall on Ernston Road. She’s here with me — she’s folding her shit and smiling and showing me her missing teeth and saying, It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Yunior?
Years, I say, loading my whites. Outside, the sky is clear of gulls, and down at the apartment my moms is waiting for me with dinner. Six months earlier we were sitting in front of the TV and my mother said, Well, I think I’m finally over this place.
Nilda asks, Did you move or something?
I shake my head. Just been working.
God, it’s been a long, long time. She’s on her clothes like magic, making everything neat, making everything fit. There are four other people at the counters, broke-ass-looking niggers with kneesocks and croupier’s hats and scars snaking up their arms, and they all seem like sleepwalkers compared with her. She shakes her head, grinning. Your brother, she says.
Rafa.
She points her finger at me like my brother always did.
I miss him sometimes.
She nods. Me, too. He was a good guy to me.
I must have disbelief on my face because she finishes shaking out her towels and then stares straight through me. He treated me the best.
Nilda.
He used to sleep with my hair over his face. He used to say it made him feel safe.
What else can we say? She finishes her stacking, I hold the door open for her. The locals watch us leave. We walk back through the old neighborhood, slowed down by the bulk of our clothes. London Terrace has changed now that the landfill has shut down. Kicked-up rents and mad South Asian people and whitefolks living in the apartments, but it’s our kids you see in the streets and hanging from the porches.
Nilda is watching the ground as though she’s afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It’s all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we’re back in the world we’ve always known.