Milton Ramos
Marilys Irrizary Ramos.
Even her pregnancy was probably bullshit.
Another family taken away from him. And for what: fifteen hundred for the bogus plane tickets, eighty-five hundred for the bogus bribe.
A lousy 10K.
Fuck her.
It was time to get back in the game.
Here’s what he didn’t like about giving his daughter away to Anita:
1.
Her two-story clapboard was only a curb’s width distant from the city-bound service road of the Staten Island Expressway, cars flying by as if the first to reach the Verrazano Bridge was entitled to free head.
2. She was a smoker.
3.
She drank. As far as could tell, nothing harder than white wine, but still . . .
And here’s what he did:
1.
Her husband, Raymond, was a nice enough guy who owned a gas station and made decent money.
2.
She was a thirty-five-year-old teacher’s aide who worked at a K-4 public school but who couldn’t have children of her own, and her eyes always had that slightly tense quivery thing going on, which hopefully meant that she desperately wanted a kid before her time ran out.
3.
The house was not just neat but clean, the velour couch and matching chairs in her living room sheathed in vinyl, the wall-to-wall carpet as pristine as a putting green.
4.
And lastly, she was slender, at least by his standards, and the most fattening things in her refrigerator, which he opened on the pretense of getting a soda, were a still-sealed log of Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese and a small bubble pack of Genoa salami.
“What do you mean you’re being targeted, what does that mean?” Anita asked him.
They were sitting at her dinette table, Sofia watching cartoons in the dustless living room, a small overstuffed suitcase at her feet.
“Some big-time banger I put away sent down orders from upstate for his crew to take me out. Gang Intel found out about it from a CI.”
“But what does that mean?” Anita nervously playing with the cellophane on a new pack of Merit Lights.
“Probably nothing. I spoke to the NYPD Threat Assessment Team, they already had TARU put up surveillance cameras around the house, plus a directed patrol unit rolls by once an hour twenty-four/seven. I’m not really worried about it? But that doesn’t mean nothing’s going to happen.”
“Milton, Jesus.”
“It comes with the territory.” He shrugged. “The thing is . . .” looking to Sofia, who was quietly eating mozzarella strips, eyes on the screen. “The thing is, if something does happen to me? Sofia . . .”
“Of course.”
“So I was thinking . . .”
“Of course.”
“Or if I’m unable to take care of her for whatever reason . . .”
“Of course of course of course.”
Milton felt relieved but also freaked, his cousin going for it way too fast. “Don’t you want to talk to Ray first?”
“Why. We’ve being trying to have a child for the last five years.”
“Still . . .”
“He’d be doing handstands, trust me.”
“And you like her, right?”
“Do I like Sofia?” she whispered. “The bigger question is does she like me.”
Good question. Sofia hardly knew her.
“Don’t be ridiculous, you’re her favorite aunt.”
“I’m her second cousin, if you want to get technical about it,” Anita said, still whispering.
“Whatever,” Milton said, “blood is blood.”
“Wow,” Anita said.
“It would be a simple matter of writing you into my will as Sofia’s guardian.”
“We have that second bedroom, I mean Ray’s just using it as an office, you know?”
“Good,” Milton said tightly.
“I mean what does he need it for?”
Too fast, too fast, Anita just going with the excitement without a moment’s reflection, as if Milton were offering her a puppy. And she didn’t seem too worried about his own dangerous situation, horseshit story that it was.
“And I have to say, the schools around here?”
“Terrific.”
“Plus I’ve been around kids Sofia’s age five days a week for the last five years, so it’s not like I don’t . . .”
“There you go.”
This was a life-changing commitment, how could she not hesitate?
“I mean I would really love her up, Milton, you know I would,” Anita’s hands trembling a little as she finally opened the pack of cigarettes. Then, catching him staring, she tossed the whole thing in the sink.
“No more of these, I can promise you that.”
“Relax, I’m still alive.”
But she was a good person and he had to believe that if things went south for him—when things went south for him—Sofia would have a soft landing here.
“Wow.” Anita shivered. “This is almost enough to make me want to bump you off myself, you know?”
The impact, a heartbeat after he blindly backed out of her driveway into the expressway service road, spun his rear end a full ninety degrees so that he was suddenly facing the oncoming traffic and the smashed front grille of the Ram 1500 that had T-boned him. The driver, big enough to star in TV ads for his own ride, was out of the truck so fast that at first Milton thought he had been ejected. It was all he could do to stow his weapon under the seat before Bigfoot reached his car.
“The fuck!” the guy shouted, pounding on Milton’s hood.
Like she was some goddamn rescue dog . . .
Milton got out of his car. Behind the damaged truck, the nonstop honking of the city-bound cars now trapped in the one-lane road was like the sound track for his fury.
“It was my fault,” Milton said. He took out his wallet, but the guy slapped it out of his hands before he could even start to fish for his insurance card.
“I feel like stomping your ass.”
“You can try,” Milton said.
Like she was a puppy in a cardboard box . . .
Thrown by Milton’s matter-of-fact invitation, the big man hesitated.
“I think you should try.”
Anita was nuts, was a child herself. She was just jumping on this without a thought in her head.
“You’re crazy.”
“And you’re a fucking cunt,” Milton said.
Red-faced with throttled violence, the guy started to tilt forward from the hips like a dipping bird, his breath puffing Milton’s hair. Praying for the punch to come, Milton stood his ground and waited for it, even though he pretty much knew he had already cut off the guy’s balls and that nothing would happen. And nothing did, Ram Tough man settling for a string of low face-saving curses as he returned to his front-mangled ride and took off, leaving Milton feeling so thwarted he thought his heart would break.
Milton stood in Sofia’s bedroom, surveying the scatter of dolls and books and games. She would need things, obviously, but he could only send over a little of her previous life at a time in order to allow everyone, his daughter and her new parents, to gradually become accustomed to their roles. He didn’t want anyone to panic.
But what did she need right away. Clothes. What kind of clothes. What did an eight-year-old girl wear. Even when she was a toddler he had never dressed her, barely took notice of what she had on unless it was something too tight for her frame.
Socks. They didn’t take up much space, so he figured he could get away with three pairs without raising eyebrows. Underwear, T-shirts. Again, three of each, everything tossed into a large Hefty bag. Her floral corduroy jeans, into the bag. How about a dress, a skirt. No, two skirts; no, one, but where did Marilys keep them? This should be Marilys’s job, Milton at first mildly annoyed about that, and then the irony kicked in, making him sit down before he fell down.
A moment later, once again galled to the edge of his teeth by the divide between the grief givers and the grief takers, the fuckers and the fucked, by the eternal inevitable of his violently miserable life, Milton walked out of the room dragging the half-full garbage bag behind him and headed for the basement.
A few minutes later he was out on the street, the bag, much heavier now, spackling the sidewalk red from his front door to the trunk of his car.