World Literature Today, July-August, 2010 by Jennine Capo Crucet
Right after Mrs. Cabrera says, in front of everybody, not to waste her time if I can’t come to class with my homework done, I decide once and for all to stop coming to her class for good, so I push back from my desk and just walk out of the room, past her big open mouth, out to the parking lot to my car. And because it’s on the way, I roll by Eddie’s house (Eddie who never goes to school these days), but his ride isn’t there and the garage door is closed, so I keep heading home and figure I’ll deal with Abuela.
I park in what used to be my dad’s spot to keep my car in the shade. Nothing will mess up your dash faster than this sun, which is why my dad claimed that spot with a fierceness that I never challenged until he left. Because of the dark interior, you burn your hands on the steering wheel if you don’t turn on the AC and let the car cool down first. Whenever I have to take Abuela to the doctor, she makes me go turn the car on before we leave, so that it’s cold inside when she gets in. She hates my ride–thinks I dropped it low on purpose to mess with her arthritis. I’ve told her, “That’s the style for cars.” But for her, the style hasn’t meant anything for years. All she knows is her bones hurt.
When I open the front door, I see the TV’s on to Univision’s mid-afternoon novela. The volume is out of control, so I know Abuela’s home and not on one of her walks. The soap opera’s about a woman deal ing with a cheating man–they’re all always about a woman dealing with a cheating man–and only Abuela has time to waste watching trash. Not that she has much else to do since she moved in almost five months ago. She either spends the whole day watching novelas and cooking, or walking slowly around the neighborhood saying “hi” to people who don’t know her. A lot of times she’ll go to work with my mom and clean offices, make coffee–Abuela says throwing some man’s garbage out from under his desk makes her feel like she still matters, has a purpose. She’s been talking like that–dramatic as the soap operas–since she came here after Abuelo finally died.
Jennine Capo Crucet was born to Cuban parents and raised in Miami, Florida. Her debut story collection, How to Leave Hialeah, won the 2009 iowa Short Fiction Award, the 2010 John Gardner Fiction Award, was named a Best Book of the Year by both the Miami Herald and the Latinidad List, and was a finalist for the Chicano/Latino Literary Award. She is the recipient of the John Winthrop Prize & Residency for Emerging Writers, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Epoch, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, and other magazines, and her book reviews appear in L Magazine, a New York City weekly. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she works for the One Voice Scholars Program as a counselor to first-generation college-bound high school seniors in South Central and downtown LA
roll up garage doors