This Is How You Lose Her(14)

Tonight we’re supposed to see another. He walks into the kitchen clapping his chapped hands, but I’m in no mood and he can tell. He sits down next to me. He puts his hand on my knee. You’re not going?

I’m sick.

How sick?

Bad enough.

He rubs at his stubble. What if I find the place? You want me to make the decision myself?

I don’t think it will happen.

And if it does?

You know you’ll never move me there.

He scowls. He checks the clock. He leaves.

Ana Iris is working her second job, so I spend my evening alone, listening to this whole country going cold on the radio. I try to keep still, but by nine I have the things he stores in my closet spread before me, the things he tells me never to touch. His books and some of his clothes, an old pair of glasses in a cardboard case, and two beaten chancletas. Hundreds of dead lottery tickets, crimped together in thick wads that fall apart at the touch. Dozens of baseball cards, Dominican players, Guzmán, Fernández, the Alous, swatting balls, winding up and fielding hard line drives just beyond the baseline. He has left me some of his dirties to wash, but I haven’t had the time, and tonight I lay them out, the yeast still strong on the cuffs of his pants and work shirts.

In a box on the top shelf of the closet he has a stack of Virta’s letters, cinched in a fat brown rubber band. Nearly eight years’ worth. Each envelope is worn and frail and I think he’s forgotten they’re here. I found them a month after he stored his things, right at the start of our relationship, couldn’t resist, and afterward I wished I had.

He claims that he stopped writing to her the year before, but that’s not true. Every month I drop by his apartment with his laundry and read the new letters she has sent, the ones he stashes under his bed. I know Virta’s name, her address, I know she works at a chocolate factory; I know that he hasn’t told her about me.

The letters have grown beautiful over the years and now the handwriting has changed as well — each letter loops down, drooping into the next line like a rudder. Please, please, mi querido husband, tell me what it is. How long did it take before your wife stopped mattering?

After reading her letters I always feel better. I don’t think this says good things about me.

—

WE ARE NOT HERE for fun, Ana Iris told me the day we met, and I said, Yes, you’re right, even though I did not want to admit it.

Today I say these same things to Samantha and she looks at me with hatred. This morning when I arrived at the job I found her in the bathroom crying and I wish I could let her rest for an hour but we don’t have those kinds of bosses. I put her on the folding and now her hands are shaking and she looks like she’s going to cry again. I watch her for a long time and then I ask her what’s wrong and she says, What isn’t wrong?

This, Ana Iris said, is not an easy country. A lot of girls don’t make it through their first year.

You need to concentrate on work, I tell Samantha. It helps.

She nods, her little girl’s face vacant. It is probably her son she misses, or the father. Or our whole country, which you never think of until it’s gone, which you never love until you’re no longer there. I squeeze her arm and go upstairs to report in and when I come back she’s gone. The other girls pretend not to notice. I check the bathroom, find a bunch of crumpled-up paper towels on the floor. I smooth them out and put them on the edge of the sink.

Even after lunch I keep expecting her to walk in and say, Here I am. I just went for a stroll.

—

THE TRUTH IS I am lucky to have a friend like Ana Iris. She’s like my sister. Most of the people I know in the States have no friends here; they’re crowded together in apartments. They’re cold, they’re lonely, they’re worn. I’ve seen the lines at the phone places, the men who sell stolen card numbers, the cuarto they carry in their pockets.

When I first reached the States I was like that, alone, living over a bar with nine other women. At night no one could go to bed because of the screams and the exploding bottles from downstairs. Most of my housemates were fighting with each other over who owed who what or who had stolen money. When I myself had extra I went to the phones and called my mother, just so I could hear the voices of the people in my barrio as they passed the phone from hand to hand, like I was good luck. I was working for Ramón at that time; we weren’t going out yet — that wouldn’t happen for another two years. He had a housekeeping guiso then, mostly in Piscataway. The day we met he looked at me critically. Which pueblo are you from?

Moca.

Mata dictador, he said, and then a little while later he asked me which team I supported.