10
You figure you can keep it to a one-time thing. But the next day you go right back. You sit gloomily in her kitchen while she fixes you another cheeseburger.
Are you going to be OK? she asks.
I don’t know.
It’s just supposed to be fun.
I have a girlfriend.
You told me, remember?
She puts the plate on your lap, regards you critically. You know, you look like your brother. I’m sure people tell you that all the time.
Some people.
I couldn’t believe how good-looking he was. He knew it, too. It was like he never heard of a shirt.
This time you don’t even ask about the condom. You just come inside her. You are surprised at how pissed you are. But she kisses your face over and over and it moves you. No one has ever done that. The girls you boned, they were always ashamed afterward. And there was always panic. Someone heard. Fix the bed up. Open the windows. Here there is none of that.
Afterward, she sits up, her chest as unadorned as yours. So what else do you want to eat?
11
You try to be reasonable. You try to control yourself, to be smooth. But you’re at her apartment every fucking day. The one time you try to skip, you recant and end up slipping out of your apartment at three in the morning and knocking furtively on her door until she lets you in. You know I work, right? I know, you say, but I dreamed that something happened to you. That’s sweet of you to lie, she sighs and even though she is falling asleep she lets you bone her straight in the ass. Fucking amazing, you keep saying for all four seconds it takes you to come. You have to pull my hair while you do it, she confides. That makes me shoot like a rocket.
It should be the greatest thing, so why are your dreams worse? Why is there more blood in the sink in the morning?
You learn a lot about her life. She came up with a Dominican doctor father who was crazy. Her mother left them for an Italian waiter, fled to Rome, and that was it for pops. Always threatening to kill himself and at least once a day she would have to beg him not to and that had messed her up but good. In her youth she’d been a gymnast and there was even talk of making the Olympic team, but then the coach robbed the money and the DR had to cancel for that year. I’m not claiming I would have won, she says, but I could have done something. After that bullshit she put on a foot of height and that was it for gymnastics. Then her father got a job in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and she and her three little siblings went with him. After six months he moved them in with a fat widow, una blanca asquerosa who hated Lora. She had no friends at all in school and in ninth grade she slept with her high school history teacher. Ended up living in his house. His ex-wife was also a teacher at the school. You can only imagine what that was like. As soon as she graduated she ran off with a quiet black boy to a base in Ramstein, Germany, but that hadn’t worked. To this day I think he was gay, she says. And finally after trying to make it in Berlin she came home. She moved in with a girlfriend who had an apartment in London Terrace, dated a few guys, one of her ex’s old Air Force buddies who visited her on his leaves, a moreno with the sweetest disposition. When the girlfriend got married and moved away Miss Lora kept the apartment and got a teaching job. Made a conscious effort to stop moving. It was an OK life, she says, showing you the pictures. All things considered.
She is always trying to get you to talk about your brother. It will help, she says.
What is there to say? He got cancer, he died.
Well, that’s a start.
She brings home college brochures from her school. She gives them to you with half the application filled out. You really need to get out of here.
Where? you ask her.
Go anywhere. Go to Alaska for all I care.
She sleeps with a mouth guard. And she covers her eyes with a mask.
If you have to go, wait till I fall asleep, OK? But after a few weeks it’s Please don’t go. And finally just: Stay.
And you do. At dawn you slip out of her apartment and into your basement window. Your mother doesn’t have a fucking clue. In the old days she used to know everything. She had that campesino radar. Now she is somewhere else. Her grief, tending to it, takes all her time.
You are scared stupid at what you are doing but it is also exciting and makes you feel less lonely in the world. And you are sixteen and you have a feeling that now that the Ass Engine has started, no force on the earth will ever stop it.
Then your abuelo catches something in the DR and your mother has to fly home. You’ll be fine, la Doña says. Miss Lora said she’d look after you.
I can cook, Ma.
No you can’t. And don’t bring that Puerto Rican girl in here. Do you understand?
You nod. You bring the Dominican woman in instead.