While the cuates eat, she heats the curlers and blasts her copete under the blow-dryer. Fabian leaves right after seven, a cold waffle in hand and two vertical lines already carved between his brows. Then Lore hurries the cuates into the car, calling out a stream of reminders. The boys, even Mateo, are forever forgetting to ask her to sign their permission slips, and with the new school year just begun, there are more than usual.
“Mom, can you at least try not to be late today?” Gabriel meets her eyes in the rearview mirror as she inches forward in the drop-off line. “It’s super hot outside, and it’s boring.”
“Only boring people get bored,” Lore says by rote, one of Mami’s old lines. She’d missed seeing her family for their regular Sunday lunch yesterday. Maybe if she has time this week, she’ll pick up Whataburger and take it over to her parents’ house for a visit.
Gabriel is right, though: not even 8 A.M. and the sun is already bleaching the sky white. The city is under water restrictions—no sprinklers, no mangueras—and everything that should be green is brown or yellow, dead. August is the worst month. Everyone short-tempered with heat, impatient for the modest turn toward fall. What will Christmas be like this year, with few places left to shop and fewer still who can afford to? When retail is the bulk of a city’s economy, watching each store close is like watching the town itself begin to wheeze, its lungs weakening with astonishing speed.
When you need to take a breath, there’s only one place to go—the lungs of the city.
The memory of Andres’s words, his husky voice, nearly takes Lore’s own breath away. She wonders where he is, what he’s doing—whether he’s remembering her, wishing he’d asked how to reach her. Why hadn’t he?
The Zócalo had been humming to early-morning life, the streets already choked and belching, when they made it back to the Centro Histórico. For a heart-stopping moment, as Andres passed the hotel, a thrill had risen up in her: Where would they go? What would they do? But he only parked against the sidewalk half a block away.
They walked hand in hand to the entrance, and Lore saw that the wedding was still being dismantled.
“Well,” he’d said. “Tonight has been one to remember, Dolores Rivera.”
Her married name in his mouth caught her like a splinter: her seating card. But if the night had been so memorable, why hadn’t he asked for her phone number? Maybe he, too, is less available than he seemed. The thought makes her unreasonably jealous, as if she has the right to expect anything of him.
In the back seat, Gabriel is pointing to someone out the window as he and Mateo talk in the strange, truncated twin language they developed years ago, as toddlers communicating in grunts and clicks and odd combinations of vowels and consonants. She’d panicked, thinking something was wrong with them, some kind of speech impediment or handicap. Then they’d laughed, decipherable to her again.
“Okay, off you go,” she says, pulling up, finally, to the drop-off point. She’s already exhausted. Unexpectedly, though, the boys each lean forward and kiss her cheek, and the sweetness of the gesture briefly revives her.
The bank is only five minutes away. For all Laredo has grown, it’s still a small town, insignificant to the rest of the world. Here they are, resorting to asking the federal government for help—job training programs, grants for development, aid to education, anything—and what’s happened? Nothing.
You’re one of the lucky ones, she thinks. So stop complaining.
But isn’t that even worse? Wearing blinders to the reality of a situation because it’s not that bad for you, at least not yet?
Downtown is a tight grid of one-way streets, bordered by I-35 on the east, Park Street on the north, and the Rio Grande on the south and west. This is where Laredo started, its original footprint, and this is where its soul remains—in the San Agustín Cathedral, the Plaza Theatre, the courthouse, the faded facades of innumerable tienditas selling knockoff fashion and shoe shines, jewelry and perfume. In the eight years Lore has worked at the bank, she’s never seen downtown like this: stores boarded and barred, the remaining owners standing behind counters, staring at empty streets. It’s a gauntlet of guilt before Lore finally arrives at work.
But the guilt falls away as she enters the lobby. It’s the smell: Windex and Pine-Sol mixed with cigarette smoke and coffee, and something else, something papery and mysterious—money. It’s the smell of her own ambition, the home she’s made for herself here.
In the break room, someone has brought three dozen foil-wrapped tacos, and despite herself—she could really stand to lose fifteen pounds—she takes one. She can tell by the heft that it’s barbacoa, and her stomach growls as she pours coffee into a Styrofoam cup.
“Hey!” someone calls, and she turns around to see Oscar. “So? What’d I miss? How was the wedding?”
“Boring.” Lore winks. “More important—does the world have another Martinez to contend with?”
Oscar is tall and lanky, with thick blond curls that make most people mistake him for a gringo. He can’t stop grinning, already reaching for his wallet. “Mijo was born on Saturday morning. Eight pounds, three ounces, twenty inches, not counting his—” Oscar raises his brows suggestively.
“Ay, Oscar.” Lore laughs, swatting his shoulder. What is it with men, starting the penis bragging from birth? “?Felicidades! How’s Natalie?”
“Good, good.” He smiles, and Lore can see the wonder on his face, the way Fabian had looked at her once the cuates were in her arms, stunned by her power and sacrifice. She hopes Natalie enjoys it, because it doesn’t last.
When Lore’s extension rings that afternoon, she answers without looking up from the credit analysis she’s reviewing.
“Yes, I’m looking for Ms. Crusoe,” the caller says in accented English. Lore is about to say he has the wrong number when she recognizes the voice, the teasing nickname: Andres.
She slides out of her wheeled chair with a clatter, holding the phone while she circles her desk and kicks the office door shut.
“Andres! Hi. How did you get this number?”
“Just call me Sherlock Holmes,” he says with a laugh. “I dialed information. I hope that’s okay? After we said goodbye, I realized I hadn’t—”
“Of course,” Lore says, before biting her lip. No. This isn’t okay! She’s been trying all day not to think about him, scenes from the weekend replaying in some recess of her mind, a whole other world secretly unspooling.
“How are you?” she asks finally.
“I’m . . . missing you,” Andres says, almost shyly. “That must sound ridiculous.”
“No.” Lore’s cheeks go warm. “It doesn’t.”
“That’s a relief. I’ve never been good at playing games.”
Lore takes a pen between her fingers, tapping each end on the desk like a seesaw. “Did you ever try?”
“Of course,” Andres says, and he tells her about his lab partner in college chemistry. He’d had a crush on her all semester, and finally, after a late study session, they kissed. “My friends were telling me to play it cool—‘Tranquilo, tranquilo, girls don’t like you breathing down their necks.’ So a week went by, and I did nothing.”
Lore groans.
“Exactly. She started getting more and more fría—not laughing at jokes, canceling study sessions—but somehow, I thought this was a good thing.”
“That she was pissed off?”
“Of course,” Andres says, deadpan. “Because it obviously meant she wanted me to ask her out.”
“Did you?”
“Right before she convinced the professor to let her switch lab partners. She never spoke to me again.”
Lore laughs, and Andres laughs with her. She is amazed all over again by the ease of their conversation, how unhesitating Andres is to share stories of his romantic past, however innocent this one was. She wonders what Fabian would have been like if she’d met him as an adult. Would he have told her about ex-girlfriends and old heartbreaks? Somehow, she doesn’t think so. Fabian could always talk about the future for hours, obsessed with goals, progress, a destination. She had loved this about him at seventeen, when most boys couldn’t see past Friday night. But as an adult? What does it matter?, she can imagine him saying.