Junot Diaz - This Is How You Lose Her

And then quietly I’d ask, Has he been eating? Has he been sick at all?

Pura glanced at my brother. He’s been muy fuerte.

No vomiting? No fevers?

Pura shook her head.

OK, then. I got up. Bye, Rafa.

Bye, dickhole.

Doña Rosie was always with my mother when I returned from these missions, to keep Mami from seeming desperate. How did he look? la Doña asked. Did he say anything?

He called me a dickhole. I’d say that was promising.

Once, when Mami and I were heading to the Pathmark, we caught sight of my brother in the distance with Pura and the brat. I turned to watch them to see if they would wave, but my mother kept walking.

—

SEPTEMBER BROUGHT SCHOOL BACK. And Laura, the whitegirl I’d been chasing and giving free weed, disappeared back into her regular friends. She said hi in the halls of course but she suddenly had no more time for me. My boys thought it was hilarious . Guess you ain’t the one. Guess I ain’t, I said.

Officially it was my senior year but even that seemed doubtful. I’d already been demoted from honors to college prep — which was Cedar Ridge’s not-going-to-college track — and all I did was read, and when I was too high to read I stared out the windows.

After a couple weeks of that bullshit, I went back to cutting classes, which was the reason I’d been dumped out of honors in the first place. My mom left for work early, got back late, and couldn’t read a word of English, so it wasn’t as if I was ever in danger of being caught. Which was why I was home the day my brother unlocked the front door and walked into the apartment. He jumped when he saw me sitting on the couch.

What the hell are you doing here?

I laughed. What the hell are you doing here?

He looked awful. He had this black cold sore at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes had sunk into his face.

What the fuck you been doing to yourself? You look terrible .

He ignored me and went into Mami’s room. I stayed seated, heard him rummaging around for a while, and then he walked out.

This happened two more times. It wasn’t until the third time he was crashing around Mami’s room that it dawned on my Cheech and Chong ass what was happening. Rafa was taking the money my mother kept stashed in her room! It was in a little metal box whose location she often changed but which I kept track of just in case I ever needed some bucks on the quick.

I went into her room while Rafa was mucking around in the closet, and slid the box out from one of her drawers, put it snug under my arm.

He came out of the closet. He looked at me, I looked at him. Give it to me, he said.

You ain’t getting shit.

He grabbed me. Any other time of our lives this would have been no contest — he would have broken me in four — but the rules had changed. I couldn’t decide which was greater: the exhilaration of beating him at something physical for the first time in my life or the fear of the same.

We knocked this over and that over, but I kept the box from him and finally he let go. I was ready for a second round, but he was shaking.

That’s fine, he panted. You keep the money. But don’t you worry. I’ll fix you soon enough, Mr. Big Shit.

I’m terrified, I said.

That night I told Mami everything. (Of course, I stressed that it had all gone down after I got home from school.)

She turned the stove on under the beans she had left soaking that morning. Please don’t fight your brother. Let him take whatever he wants.

But he’s stealing our money!

He can have it.

Fuck that, I said. I’m going to change the lock.

No, you are not. This is his apartment, too.

Are you fucking kidding me, Ma? I was about to explode, but then it hit me.

Ma?

Yes, hijo.

How long has he been doing it?

Doing what?

Taking the money.

She turned her back to me, so I put the little metal box on the floor and went out for a smoke.

—

AT THE BEGINNING of October, we got a call from Pura. He’s not feeling well. My mother nodded, and so I went over to check. Talk about an understatement. My brother was straight delusional. Burning up with fever and when I put my hands on him, he looked at me with zero recognition. Pura was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her son, trying to look all worried. Give me the damn keys, I said, but she smiled weakly. We lost them.

She was lying, of course. She knew that if I got the keys to the Monarch she’d never see that car again.

He couldn’t walk. He could barely move his lips. I tried to carry him but I couldn’t do it, not for ten blocks, and first time ever in the history of our nabe there was no one around. By then Rafa had stopped making any kind of sense and I started getting really scared. For real: I started flipping. I thought: He’s going to die here. Then I spotted a shopping cart. I dragged him over to it and put him in. We good, I said to him. We great. Pura watched us from the front stoop. I have to take care of Adrian, she explained.

All Mami’s praying must have paid off, because we got one miracle that day. Guess who was parked in front of the apartment, who came running when she saw what I had in the shopping cart, who took Rafa and me and Mami and all the Horsefaces up to Beth Israel?

That’s right: Tammy Franco. Aka Fly Tetas.

—

HE WAS IN for a long long time. A lot happened during and after, but there were no more girls. That part of his life was over. Every now and then Tammy visited him at the hospital, but it was like their old routine; she would just sit there and say nothing and he would say nothing and after a while she would leave. What the fuck is that? I asked my brother, but he never explained it, never said a word.

As for Pura — who visited my brother exactly never while he was in the hospital — she dropped by our apartment one more time. Rafa was still in Beth Israel, so I wasn’t under any obligation to let her ass in, but it seemed stupid not to. Pura sat down on the couch and tried to hold my mother’s hands, but Mami wasn’t having any of it. She had Adrian with her, and the little manganzón immediately started running around and knocking into things, and I had to resist the urge to break my foot off in his ass. Without losing her poor-me look, Pura explained that Rafa had borrowed money from her and she needed it back; otherwise, she was going to lose her apartment.

Oh, por favor, I spat.

My mother eyed her carefully. How much was it?

Two thousand dollars.

Two thousand dollars. In 198—. This bitch was tripping.

My mother nodded thoughtfully. What do you think he did with the money?

I don’t know , Pura whispered. He never explained anything to me.

And then she fucking smiled.

The girl really was a genius. Mami and I both looked like creamed shit, but she sat there as fine as anything and confident to the max — now that the whole thing was over she didn’t even bother hiding it. I would have clapped if I’d had the strength, but I was too depressed.

Mami said nothing for a while, and then she went into her bedroom. I figured she was going to emerge with my father’s Saturday-night special, the one thing of his that she’d kept when he left. To protect us, she claimed, but more likely to shoot my father dead if she ever saw him again. I watched Pura’s kid, happily throwing around the TV Guide . I wondered how much he was going to like being an orphan. And then my mother came out, with a hundred-dollar bill in hand.

Ma, I said weakly.

She gave the bill to Pura but didn’t let go of her end. For a minute they stared at each other, and then Mami let the bill go, the force between them so strong the paper popped.