“Then why do you do it?” Hector demanded. “Why bring La Sopa over here?”
She looked toward Gabe, who stared at the cement. “Love.”
For a second she thought Gabe would say something. Instead, he slumped farther in his chair, cradling his beer, its glass spout nestled against his chin.
“Ay, amor,” Hector said, pulling Esme closer to him. “Mujer de mi corazón, mi vida,” he sang. “Go get me a beer.” He slapped her ass.
Everyone laughed. Bianca’s cheeks reddened again.
“La Bee, you want your man to love you?”
Gabe shifted in his lawn chair, cleared his throat, said nothing.
“Keep that pot of beans hot. Right, son? That what you want?” Hector chuckled.
“I want her to keep her mouth shut in public,” Gabe said.
“Muchacho, the woman’s always right.” Hector turned to his wife, “That right, mujer?”
“Mmm,” Esme murmured, smiling as her husband kissed her. “But leave pobre Bee alone, Hector.”
“Nah, she can handle it.” He turned to Bianca. “So which is it then, Bee? Writer or wife? Your husband doesn’t want you airing his dirty laundry. His caca.”
She told him she would split in two, break the binary.
“There she goes with her fancy college words. Su poesía. Qué bonita, qué loca.”
Bianca rose from the bench. She felt sick. Gabe followed her into the house. The patio door slammed behind him; he grabbed her shoulders and spun her around to face him. “Why do you always embarrass me in front of my family?” His face flushed from the beer.
“You don’t mind when I talk like that with you,” she said, mustering all the haughtiness she could. She was ready for a fight.
“That’s different.” He wiped his palms across the sides of his spiky hair and looked away. “They don’t understand.”
“They understand fine. You just never stick up for me. You used to love my poetry.”
“I used to do a lot of things, Bee.” His voice softened. She stared at him, the man she’d watched grow up. Tall and well-built with bronze skin that released a mixture of Cool Water cologne and sweat, he smelled like a beach in the desert. His broad shoulders were stretch-marked where his muscles had grown faster than his skin. His otherwise clear boyish face, slightly impish with his upturned ears, flashed a scar below his eye where he ran into the side mirror of his uncle’s truck when he was little. Esme and Nana said he was a real travieso, would storm into the house in a fury, knocking plates of food off the table for no apparent reason. But then he would smile his charming dimpled smile and be forgiven. Not much had changed since then.
She sighed, the fight leaving her chest, her stomach. She was tired.
“Come here,” he whispered. He pulled her to his body and wrapped his arms around her, pressing his lukewarm beer bottle to her shoulder. His kisses were rough, his sour breath hot against her face and mouth. This Gabe she knew well. She walked a fine line with him. He loved her or despised her when he was drunk. Tonight, he loved her.
She let him hoist her up, wrapped her legs around him. She was Coatlicue, Azteca mother of all creation, and destruction. She was Coatlicue, fumbling through the dark. She’d break through. She’d find a crossing—or create one herself.
Gabe carried her to the laundry room, locked the door, hoisted her atop the dryer. He reached under her sundress and pulled her thong to the side, pushing his fingers deep inside her, kissing her neck and breasts.
She was a snake. Careful. She could bite. She could. But didn’t.
She combed her fingers through his short, black hair as she held the back of his head. They were drops of water on a hot comal. Their bodies scorched each other. They were not meant to make a meal, only to test the fire.
“You’re sexy as hell,” he groaned. “Mi poeta.”
His breath against her neck. His voice in her ear. A voice that called butterflies from inside her. Made her think in clichés. Colored her dreams in red. I’ve loved you too much too long too hard. Red as the desert. Where oceans were dry as salt flats. Where red meant lost and lost meant dead.
“I love you,” she said.
“Mmm . . . then let me fuck you.”
He pulled her off the dryer and bent her over, face to machine. She pressed her ear against the cool, smooth metal and listened as he slid on a condom then thrust into her.
The echo of a seashell.
He leaned down and kissed her cheek when he finished. She straightened her dress and pulled up her chonies as he opened the door to the bathroom and took a piss.
“Hey, look. I’m sorry you felt uncomfortable out there. I don’t want you making any scenes. We’re trying to butter him up, right? So we might have a chance at a future, our restaurant.” He zipped; she nodded. “Hey, come here,” he said, his voice soft, playful. “You know I love you.”
“Oh, yeah? Or you love my ass?”
He squeezed her ass. “Both. Now let’s get your ass back outside. Don’t get all dramatic again. Save that for your poems.”
The first nights after he’d left for college, he’d promised to come home weekends but never did. She was imprisoned in her house. Mama wouldn’t lessen Bianca’s sentence even though she was losing it, caged in her room listening to Mama and Dad fight. Mama wouldn’t risk Bianca getting drunk and ending up in the hospital again. Couldn’t trust her not to hurt herself at a party.
Bianca had made a plan. She would be a writer. She would get out of town. She’d move to a big city like the postcard of New York her English teacher had given her when she’d admitted she wanted to be a poet but didn’t know how since all poets were dead like Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath and her teacher hadn’t laughed because he’d understood why she would’ve thought so. Instead he’d said she was already a poet, and there were others like her. Outside the Valley, there were such things as open mics and poetry slams and international competitions, and she could join them, she could win.
But then a birth and a death. Both like drowning. Dad had been drunk, and Bianca could never forgive Mama. She should have saved him. Compared to that, Gabe felt relatively easy to forgive. What were ninth-grade bloody thighs next to a father, drunk in a bathtub? The water must have felt so warm on his cheeks, his face, his eyes.
The stars. The beer. The mariachi music and night sky, blinking. She tried controlling herself in Gabe’s backyard. For his family. For Esme. But the alcohol brought it all back. Sourness, bitterness rooted inside her, knotted and spindling her gut. A sick swishing. A turnip or sickly red beet. Pulled from her uterine strings to her feet. Splitting open. A cactus skull. Nopal on the patio. Prickly pear. A bright-pink cactus flower, sprouting then dying in sticky water.