“Yes, once, to say, can he come over here, but then, he give away, gave away, his cell phone, on account of he said there’s something in the phone, a detective could find him,” Josie muttered, staring at her knees.
So he’d paid attention to my warning about the GSM signal. “Why doesn’t he want to go home?”
Julia gave a syrupy smile. “He’s in l-o-v-e with the little wetback here.”
Josie slapped her sister; Julia started pulling her hair. I put the baby down and yanked the sisters apart. They glared at each other, but when I let them go, they didn’t lunge for each other. I picked the baby up again and sat cross-legged on the floor.
“Billy’s family, they were rude to Pastor Andrés,” Josie added. “Billy, he really cares about this neighborhood, do people have jobs, do they have enough to eat, like that, and his family, they just want to exploit us.”
Billy had definitely been preaching to his little wetback, and she was an attentive student. The baby grabbed at my earrings. I unclutched her tiny fist and pulled out my car keys for her to play with. She threw them on the floor with an excited crow of laughter.
“Who’s Freddy?” I asked.
The sisters looked at each other, but Julia said, “Just a guy who goes to Mt. Ararat, it’s a small church, we all been knowing each other since we was little.”
“Since we were little,” Josie corrected.
“You want to talk Anglo, be my guest. Me, I’m just a teenage mom, I don’t have to know anything.”
“Your mom and your aunt are such bad liars. I know, that makes you cry to hear it, but it’s true,” I spoke to the baby and blew bubbles on her stomach. “Now, who is Freddy really?”
“He’s really just a guy who goes to Mount Ararat.” Julia stared at me defiantly. “You ask Pastor Andrés, he’ll tell you.”
I sighed. “Okay, maybe, maybe. There’s something about him you don’t want me to know, though. It wouldn’t be his DNA, would it?”
“His what?” Julia said.
“DNA,” Josie said. “We covered that in biology, which you’d know if you ever went to school, it’s like how people identify—oh.” She looked at me. “Like you think he’s María Inés’s father or something.”
“Or something,” I said.
Julia spoke through clenched teeth. “He’s just a guy at church, I hardly know him except to talk at church.”
“But this casual acquaintance told you he heard old Mr. Bysen call the church and threaten the pastor with deportation?”
“It—he thought we should know,” Julia stammered.
Josie was crimson. “Billy been—Billy has been—singing in the church, like, since August, and him and me, we went out for a Coke after rehearsal once, I guess maybe in September, and Mr. Grobian, he’s at the warehouse, he’s Billy’s boss, like, he saw us and he told on us, like, it was a crime, Billy taking me for a Coke, and then Ma, she heard, she said no way can I see him ’less Betto and Sammy are with me. So it’s like I have to babysit if I want to see him, which would be horrible if you was on a date, to have your brothers with you, but, see, his ma, his mom, she don’t—she doesn’t want him going out with me, so we never really was dating. Were dating. Except yesterday, he took me up to the hospital to see April.”
So Billy had fallen in love with Josie, so much in love he was teaching her English grammar. And she loved him right back, which is why she was changing her speech. And that was also why Billy was fighting the idea of going back to Barrington. Maybe his ideals played a role, too, but mostly it was those pesky stars, crossing lovers once again. I thought of my own jealous worries about Morrell and Marcena Love—you don’t have to be fifteen to live in a soap opera.
“You won’t tell Ma, will you, Coach?” Josie said.
“I can’t believe your ma doesn’t already know,” I said. “You’d have to be brain-dead not to know when there was an extra person in this apartment. She’s probably just too depressed about the fire at Fly the Flag to deal with you and Billy right now. And about that fire—what’s the story on this soap dish? Which one of you bought it?”
“I got it at By-Smart,” Julia said quickly. “Like Josie said, I bought it for Sancia last Christmas. They’re real cute, these frogs, and they don’t cost hardly anything. But they had like a hundred of them, so how can I know if it’s the one I bought or not? Where you find this, anyway?”
“Outside Fly the Flag. In all the rubble from the building.”
“Outside Ma’s job? What was it doing there?” Julia’s bewilderment seemed genuine—she and her sister looked at each other, as if seeing whether the other knew something she wasn’t saying.
“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t mean a thing, but it’s my only clue. By the way, Betto thought you got it for someone else, Julia.”