Milton Ramos
She was supposed to come over at nine the next morning for the money to cover her airfare, but instead Marilys showed up at seven-thirty, Milton opening his eyes to see her standing red-faced and trembling at the side of his bed.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m so stupid,” she whispered, her voice clotted with tears. “She doesn’t have a passport. She doesn’t have anything.”
“Who’s she.”
More drunk than hungover, Milton sat up, stood up, and then had to sit back down as the Chartreuse rebooted.
“My mother, why am I so stupid.”
“OK, all right,” grinding the heels of his palms into eyes. “What time is it?”
Marilys dropped down alongside him, her shoulders as slumped as his own. “This was a bad idea.”
“OK, so you’ll go get her when she gets one.”
“No. I mean getting married.”
“Getting married is a bad idea? Since when?”
“Last night I dreamed the priest was blessing us and my mother just crushed.”
“Crushed?”
“Like a flower, when they speed up the movie and you see it bloom then dry up then crush down to nothing. To dust, because she wasn’t there.”
“Wasn’t where,” his skull like a soft-boiled egg.
“There when we got married. She died in her house because she wasn’t with us.”
He took a deep breath, and his back teeth tasted bile. “Listen to me”—taking her hand—“you had a dream. It’s a dream.”
“No.”
“Everybody has bad dreams. You should see some of mine.”
“Mine always come true. Always. When I was a girl, I dreamed one of my brothers was in the hospital, and the next day he broke his back. When I was married the first time, I dreamed my husband got cancer, and I buried him in a year.”
“Then whatever you do, don’t ever dream about me,” Milton joking to smother his growing panic.
Leaning into him, Marilys broke down, her boiling tears searing his skin.
“OK. How about this: we work on getting your mother a green card, a passport, or whatever. Meanwhile you come live with me, have the baby, but we wait to get married until you can bring her over.”
“No.”
“Jesus Christ,” Milton starting to sweat. “Why not.”
“We live like a man and a woman, maybe the same thing happens to her.”
“I feel like a prisoner of your brain right now, you know that?” Despite the sharpness of his tone, he meant it more as a plea than a rebuke, though she seemed not to have heard him at all.
“We can’t do it.” Then, looking up at him like Our Lady of Sorrows: “Maybe I should just go back to work for you, live by myself.”
“You’re killing me.”
“Maybe I should just go back to live with her.”
“In Guatemala? Are you crazy?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
Milton shot to his feet, then immediately sat back down. “What about the baby?”
“It’s still our baby.”
“I know that,” he snapped, then, casting about for the next anchor: “What about Sofia?”
She put her head in his lap, her hand clutching his hip.
“Jesus Christ, what about me?”
She began to cry, her hot tears this time turning him on, which only increased his panic.
“OK,” he said, not raising her head. “Let’s think this through. Who do you know in Guatemala.”
“My family,” she said, then: “What do you mean?”
“All right, your cousin the travel agent, who does he know?”
“I don’t know who he knows.”
“You know what I mean by ‘knows’?”
“I think so,” she said, then: “Yeah, I do.”
“How about you call him.”
“He doesn’t open up until ten.”
“Then call him at ten.”
But it was only eight, and they sat in coiled silence on the bed until nine. Then, without any preliminary communication, they began to go at it—and whether it was the overlay of doom in the air or just the emotional rawness of the last ninety minutes, when he finally rolled off her they were both crying like babies.
At ten, she went down into the den to make the call, leaving him damp-skinned in his bed. He loved the idea of making a family with her, yet until now he had never thought he actually loved her. But something had changed this morning. Milton Ramos was officially in love with Marilys Irrizary. If he had a pocket knife he would carve it into a tree.
Forty-five minutes passed before he heard her coming back up to the bedroom door, forty-five minutes during which he had been afraid to so much as blink. But when she appeared in the doorway her relieved laughter came to his ears like a flock of butterflies.
“He said he has a friend.”
“Dreams,” Milton said. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
“Maybe,” she answered, her face near radioactive with joy.
Her travel agent cousin on Fordham Road in the Bronx had told her that he would be able to swing a round-trip ticket for her, Newark to Guatemala City and back, and a one-way ticket for her mother, all for fifteen hundred dollars, which was a good deal compared to the prices posted online. But in exchange for the deep discount, he wanted to be paid in cash.
Whatever.
The wincer came later in the day when Marilys called him at work to say that her cousin had made some calls to a law firm in Guatemala City with embassy connections and found out that the package price for getting her mother a passport and a U.S. work visa, both delivered within forty-eight hours of payment, would be eighty-five hundred American dollars.
Milton’s first reaction was to balk altogether, his second to negotiate the fee. Unable to do that, and fearful of losing his crazy, superstitious amorcita forever over a few thousand bucks, he bit the bullet, went down to his union’s pension loan unit, and withdrew the money.
Whatever whatever whatever.
At seven in the evening the line for the JFK express bus, which began across the street from Grand Central Station, was nearly two blocks long, the waiting travelers looking antsy and drawn in the early twilight gloom.
“It would have been easy for me to drive you,” Milton said for the sixth time.
“I like the bus,” Marilys said, leaning into him for warmth. “The bus always gives me good luck.”
Fifteen minutes behind schedule, the sleek, oversized carrier appeared at the crest of Thirty-ninth Street and Park, and then just sat there through three green lights, torturing the people waiting two blocks below on Forty-first.
“Anyways”—handing her a gift-wrapped package—“it’s for your mother, from me and Sofia.”
Instead of stashing the present in her bag, which would have frustrated him, she opened it on the spot, flapping out the hemp-colored serape he had bought from a Guatemalan street vendor in the West Village.
“Milton, it’s beautiful.”
“I didn’t know her size, but it’s basically a bath towel with a neckhole so . . .”
Marilys put her hands to the sides of his face and kissed him in front of everybody, Milton still a little awkward with her new full-frontal affection but starting to get used to it just fine.
The bus began to roll downhill to the waiting crowd, but so slowly that it caught a red light while still a block away, some people around them audibly groaning in frustration.
When the doors sighed open a few moments later and the passengers began to get on, Marilys continued to linger with him, until, worried about her missing the flight, he hustled her onto the bus himself.
It wasn’t until she was well on her way out to the airport and he was most of the way back to the Bronx that Milton realized what an idiot he’d been.
Who the hell sends a gift of Guatemalan clothing to a person already living in Guatemala?