“De nada, Engracia. Gástalo sabiamente.”
Spend it wisely. Why did he say things like this?
“Voy a comprar un patín para mi hijo.”
A skateboard. For her son. She was old enough to have a child with a skateboard.
“He’ll be happy.”
“Sí. Eso espero.”
She had a wide face and when she smiled, her eyes narrowed into deep-set black ribbons. Arturo smiled back, pleased to think that she had a son, that she could buy him a gift, that the boy would be happy.
He had worked at the El Capitan for forty-three years. Had known Odell Dibb, and worked for June when she doubled the size of the place, and then for their son, Marshall. Now the Dibbs had all left, and the El Capitan should have been gone too. Marshall had sold to a Chinese investor who immediately announced that the casino would be torn down. But the economy fell apart, and everything in Vegas just stopped: overnight it seemed. There was a huge empty lot down the street where the Stardust had been imploded, but the El Capitan hadn’t closed and hadn’t disappeared; it just sat, and nobody, not even the rich people, had the money to get rid of it. Most of his carnales had gotten out while they could, but Arturo figured he’d just ride the ship down. There weren’t any jobs anywhere, and who would want an old Mexican guy with bad lungs?
Of course, they all had bad lungs after a lifetime inside casinos. The word now was that it was best not to go to a doctor, not to do anything; the doctors wanted to operate, wanted to confirm cancer. But of course it was cancer. All that smoke, all those nights. Surgery just stirred things up, made you die quicker. Marge said that she’d had black spots on her lungs for nine years, and she would not let a doctor touch them. Just leave those spots sit, and if you were lucky, your own tissue would encase them—that was Marge’s idea. She was a tough old broad, and she’d been right about a lot of things. She could be right about the lungs too.
Arturo didn’t know. He didn’t like doctors much, and he didn’t know anything about his lungs. The world was for young people, like this maid, anyway.
25
Engracia struggled to unhook the head of the vacuum cleaner from its notch on the canister. Cleaning Ms. Navarro’s house was different from cleaning a hotel room, and she got tired of doing everything a different way in each house. It was strange how trivial things could bother her, when, in fact, she cared nothing at all about what she was doing, or how her day went, or whether something got done. Even now, if the plastic bit of this vacuum snapped off, she would feel bad to have done it.
Sweating, struggling to wrench the pieces apart without making a sound that might draw Ms. Navarro near, she cracked her elbow against the washing machine.
“Mierda.”
Ms. Navarro appeared in the door.
“Do you need help?”
“No. I’m fine. I—I fix it.”
Ms. Navarro had followed her around the first two times she had come. She wasn’t used to having a maid, and had given Engracia the job only because one of the priests had asked her to do it. This made Engracia nervous. She wondered what she sounded like to Honorata. An idiot, probably. Her English was fine but not when she was rattled. Diego had chattered away in English, and she had understood perfectly. She hadn’t even told him to speak in Spanish, as most of the other mothers did, because it pleased her that he could speak so well.
Diego.
“I’m making something for Malaya. She’ll be home in a while. Can I fix you a plate?”
“No. Thank you. I’m not hungry.”
Ms. Navarro’s daughter had purple and green stripes in her hair and a tattoo that looked like a serpent winding up her neck from somewhere inside her shirt. Engracia rarely saw her but found her a bit alarming. She could not imagine letting one’s child look like that.
“I make the beds now.”
“Don’t worry about my mother’s room. She’s staying with a friend who had surgery this week.”
Engracia nodded and started up the stairs with two sets of sheets, thinking that she could be done with Malaya’s room before she got home. Sometimes the girl would skip school, and when she did, she would stay in bed until well past noon. Her room got the morning sun, and Engracia was amazed that she could stay asleep, swaddled in blankets, with the sun beating in and the second floor so warm that Engracia would feel slightly nauseous as she scrubbed out the shower.
Someday she would return to the El Capitan to work. They had told her she could have her job back any time she wanted, at least if the El Capitan was still open. Engracia was thinking about it. She didn’t like working in homes, and while she appreciated that the padre had gotten her these jobs—that he understood she needed something to do every day—eventually she would go back to the El Capitan. It was just hard going back, as if her life were still the same.
Malaya’s room had a deep-orange wall and a poster of Manny Pacquiao on it. Diego had been wild for boxing too; it was something he shared with his dad. Juan was in Las Vegas twenty years ago when Chavez fought Taylor—it was the first time he had crossed the border—and he and Diego had spent hours watching old fights on YouTube and hashing out why Chavez was the greatest Mexican fighter of all time.
This is how it was for Engracia, day after day, alone with these memories, these thoughts. She supposed it would be like this until she died—until finally she died—because she agreed with the padre: she did not have the choice about how long she lived.
Engracia snapped Malaya’s sheet expertly under the mattress. She tugged the comforter up straight, and placed the girl’s collection of pillows and teddy bears back on the bed. The room was a sort of archeology of girlhood: a row of puppets on one bookshelf, a doll-sized American Girl dresser and bed in the corner, a pile of CDs with titles scribbled in blue and green marker: Aimee’s Mix, Road Trip 1987, Don’t Listen to This Sober. There were photos of little girls on soccer teams and at Fern Adair dance recitals; there was a dried-up corsage, a Homecoming Court banner, a collection of flip-flops, tangled necklaces hanging from a metal stand, and a leopard-print padded bra on top of the bureau.