The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

Jennine Capó Crucet
How to Leave Hialeah

It is impossible to leave without an excuse-something must push you out, at least at first. You won’t go otherwise; you are happy, the weather is bright, and you have a car. It has a sunroof (which you call a moonroof-you’re so quirky) and a thunderous muffler. After fifteen years of trial and error, you have finally arranged your bedroom furniture in a way that you and your father can agree on. You have a locker you can reach at Miami High. With so much going right, it is only when you’re driven out like a fly waved through a window that you’ll be outside long enough to realize that, barring the occasional hurricane, you won’t die.

The most reliable (and admittedly the least empowering) way to excuse yourself from Hialeah is to date Michael Cardenas Junior. He lives two houses away from you and is very handsome and smart enough to feed himself and take you on dates. Your mother will love him because he plans to marry you in three years when you turn eighteen. He is nineteen. He also goes to Miami High, where he is very popular because he plays football and makes fun of reading. You are not so cool: you have a few friends, but all their last names start with the same letter as yours because, since first grade, your teachers have used the alphabet to assign your seats. Your friends have parents just like yours, and your moms are always hoping another mother comes along as a chaperone when you all go to the movies on Saturday nights because then they can compare their husbands’ demands-put my socks on for me before I get out of bed, I hate cold floors, or you have to make me my lunch because only your sandwiches taste good to me-and laugh at how much they are like babies. Michael does not like your friends, but this is normal and to be expected since your friends occasionally use polysyllabic words. Michael will repeatedly try to have sex with you because you are a virgin and somewhat Catholic and he knows if you sleep together, you’ll feel too guilty to ever leave him. Sex will be tempting because your best friend Carla is dating Michael’s best friend Frankie, and Michael will swear on his father’s grave that they’re doing it. But you must hold out-you must push him off when he surprises you on your eight-month anniversary with a room at the Executive Inn by the airport and he has sprung for an entire five hours-because only then will he break up with you. This must happen, because even though you will get back together and break up two more times, it is during those broken-up weeks that you do things like research out-of-state colleges and sign up for community college classes at night to distract you from how pissed you are. This has the side effect of boosting your GPA.

During these same break-up weeks, Michael will use his fake ID to buy beer and hang out with Frankie, who, at the advice of an ex-girlfriend he slept with twice who’s now living in Tallahassee, has applied to Florida State. They will talk about college girls, who they heard have sex with you without crying for two hours afterward. Michael, because he is not in your backyard playing catch with your little brother while your mother encourages you to swoon from the kitchen window, has time to fill out an application on a whim. And lo and behold, because it is October, and because FSU has rolling admissions and various guarantees of acceptance for Florida residents who can sign their names, he is suddenly college bound.

When you get back together and he tells you he’s leaving at the end of June (his admission being conditional, requiring a summer term before his freshman year), tell your mom about his impending departure, how you will miss him so much, how you wish you could make him stay just a year longer so you could go to college at the same time. A week later, sit through your mother’s vague sex talk, which your father has forced her to give you. She may rent The Miracle of Life; she may not. Either way, do not let on that you know more than she does thanks to public school and health class.

– I was a virgin until my wedding night, she says.

Believe her. Ask if your dad was a virgin, too. Know exactly what she means when she says, Sort of. Try not to picture your father as a teenager, on top of some girl doing what you and Carla call a Temporary Penis Occupation. Assure yourself that TPOs are not sex, not really, because TPOs happen mostly by accident, without you wanting them to, and without any actual movement on your part. Do not ask about butt sex, even though Michael has presented this as an option to let you keep your semivirginity. Your mother will mention it briefly on her own, saying, For that men have prostitutes. Her words are enough to convince you never to try it.

Allow Michael to end things after attempting a long-distance relationship for three months. The distance has not been hard: you inherited his friends from last year who were juniors with you, and he drives down to Hialeah every weekend to see you and his mother and Frankie. Still, you’re stubborn about the sex thing, and still, you can’t think of your butt as anything other than an out-hole. Michael has no choice but to admit you’re unreasonable and dump you.

Cry because you’re genuinely hurt-you love him, you do- and because you did not apply early decision to any colleges because you hadn’t yet decided if you should follow him to FSU. When the misery melts to fury, send off the already-complete applications you’d torn from the glossy brochures stashed under your mattress and begin formulating arguments that will convince your parents to let you move far away from the city where every relative you have that’s not in Cuba has lived since flying or floating into Miami; you will sell your car, you will eat cat food to save money, you are their American Dream. Get their blessing to go to the one school that accepts you by promising to come back and live down the street from them forever. Be sure to cross your fingers behind your back while making this promise, otherwise you risk being struck by lightning.

Once away at school, refuse to admit you are homesick. Pretend you are happy in your tiny dorm room with your roommate from Long Island. She has a Jeep Cherokee and you need groceries, and you have never seen snow and are nervous about walking a mile to the grocery store and back. Ask the RA what time the dorm closes for the night and try to play it off as a joke when she starts laughing. Do not tell anyone your father never finished high school. Admit to no one that you left Hialeah in large part to piss off a boy whose last name you will not remember in ten years.

Enroll in English classes because you want to meet white guys who wear V-neck sweaters and have never played football for fear of concussions. Sit behind them in lecture but decide early on that they’re too distracting. You must do very well in your classes; e-mails from the school’s Office of Diversity have emphasized that you are special, that you may feel like you’re not cut out for this, that you should take advantage of the free tutors offered to students like you. You are important to our university community, they say. You are part of our commitment to diversity. Call your mother crying and tell her you don’t fit in, and feel surprisingly better when she says, Just come home. Book a five-hundred-dollar flight to Miami for winter break.

Count down the days left until Nochebuena. Minutes after you walk off the plane, call all your old friends and tell them you’re back and to get permission from their moms to stay out later than usual. Go to the beach even though it’s sixty degrees and the water is freezing and full of Canadians. Laugh as your friends don their back-of-the-closet sweaters on New Year’s while you’re perfectly fine in a halter top. New England winters have made you tough, you think. You have earned scores of 90 or higher on every final exam. You have had sex with one and a half guys (counting TPOs) and yes, there’d been guilt, but God did not strike you dead. Ignore Michael’s calls on the first of the year, and hide in your bedroom-which has not at all changed-when you see him in his Seminoles hoodie, stomping toward your house. Listen as he demands to talk to you, and your mom lies like you asked her to and says you’re not home. Watch the conversation from between the blinds of the window that faces the driveway. Swallow down the wave of nausea when you catch your mother winking at him and tilting her head toward that window. Pack immediately and live out of your suitcase for the one week left in your visit.

Go play pool with Myra, one of your closest alphabetical friends, and say, Oh man, that sucks, when she tells you she’s still working as a truck dispatcher for El Dorado Furniture. She will try to ignore you by making fun of your shoes, which you bought near campus, and which you didn’t like at first but now appreciate for their comfort. Say, Seriously, chica, that’s a high school job-you can’t work there forever.

– Shut up with this chica crap like you know me, she says.

Then she slams her pool cue down on the green felt and throws the chunk of chalk at you as she charges out. Avoid embarrassment by shaking your head No as she leaves, like you regret sending her to her room with no dinner but she left you no choice. Say to the people at the table next to yours, What the fuck, huh? One guy will look down at your hippie sandals and ask, How do you know Myra? Be confused, because you and Myra always had the same friends thanks to the alphabet, but you’ve never in your life seen this guy before that night.

While you drive home in your mom’s car, think about what happened at the pool place. Replay the sound of the cue slapping the table in your head, the clinking balls as they rolled out of its way but didn’t hide in the pockets. Decide not to talk to Myra for a while, that inviting her to come visit you up north is, for now, a bad idea. Wipe your face on your sleeve before you go inside your house, and when your mom asks you why you look so upset tell her the truth: you can’t believe it-Myra is jealous.

Become an RA yourself your next year so that your parents don’t worry as much about money. Attend all orientation workshops and decide, after a sexual harassment prevention role-playing where Russel, another new RA, asked if tit fucking counted as rape, that you will only do this for one year. Around Rush Week, hang up the anti-binge-drinking posters the hall director put in your mailbox. On it is a group of eight grinning students; only one of them is white. You look at your residents and are confused: they are all white, except for the girl from Kenya and the girl from California. Do not worry when these two residents start spending hours hanging out in your room-letting them sit on your bed does not constitute sexual harassment. Laugh with them when they make fun of the poster. Such Diversity in One University! Recommend them to your hall director as potential RA candidates for next year.

When you call home to check in (you do this five times a week), ask how everyone is doing. Get used to your mom saying, Fine, fine. Appreciate the lack of detail-you have limited minutes on your phone plan and besides, your family, like you, is young and indestructible. They have floated across oceans and sucker punched sharks with their bare hands. Your father eats three pounds of beef a day and his cholesterol is fine. Each week-night, just before crossing herself and pulling a thin sheet over her pipe-cleaner legs, your ninety-nine-year-old great-grandmother smokes a cigar while sipping a glass of whiskey and water. No one you love has ever died-just one benefit of the teenage parenthood you’ve magically avoided despite the family tradition. Death is far off for every Cuban-you use Castro as your example. You know everyone will still be in Hialeah when you decide to come back.

Join the Spanish Club, where you meet actual lisping Spaniards and have a hard time understanding what they say. Date the treasurer, a grad student in Spanish literature named Marco, until he mentions your preference for being on top during sex subconsciously functions as retribution for his people conquering your people. Quit the Spanish Club and check out several Latin American history books from the library to figure out what the hell he’s talking about. Do not tell your mother you broke things off; she loves Spaniards, and you are twenty and not married and you refuse to settle down.

– We are not sending you so far away to come back with nothing, she says.

At the end of that semester, look at a printout of your transcript and give yourself a high five. (To anyone watching, you’re just clapping.) Going home for the summer with this printout still constitutes coming back with nothing despite the good grades, so decide to spend those months working full-time at the campus movie theater, flirting with sunburned patrons.

Come senior year, decide what you need is to get back to your roots. Date a brother in Iota Delta, the campus’s Latino fraternity, because one, he has a car, and two, he gives you credibility in the collegiate minority community you forgot to join because you were hiding in the library for the past three years and never saw the flyers. Tell him you’ve always liked Puerto Ricans (even though every racist joke your father has ever told you involved Puerto Ricans in some way). Visit his house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and meet his third-generation American parents who cannot speak Spanish. Do not look confused when his mother serves meat loaf and mashed potatoes and your boyfriend calls it real home cooking. You have only ever had meat loaf in the school dining hall, and only once. Avoid staring at his mother’s multiple chins. Hold your laughter even as she claims that Che Guevara is actually still alive and living in a castle off the coast of Vieques. Scribble physical notes inside your copy of Clarissa (the subject of your senior thesis) detailing all the ridiculous things his mother says while you’re there: taking a shower while it rains basically guarantees you’ll be hit by lightning; paper cannot actually be recycled; Puerto Ricans invented the fort. Wait until you get back to campus to call your father.

After almost four years away from Hialeah, panic that you’re panicking when you think about going back-you had to leave to realize you ever wanted to. You’d thank Michael for the push, but you don’t know where he is. You have not spoken to Myra since the blowout by the pool table. You only know she still lives with her parents because her mom and your mom see each other every Thursday while buying groceries at Sedano’s. At your Iota brother’s suggestion, take a Latino studies class with him after reasoning that it will make you remember who you were in high school and get you excited about moving back home.

Start saying things like, What does it really mean to be a minority? How do we construct identity? How is the concept of race forced upon us? Say these phrases to your parents when they ask you when they should drive up to move your stuff back to your room. Dismiss your father as a lazy thinker when he answers, What the fuck are you talking about? Break up with the Iota brother after deciding he and his organization are posers buying into the Ghetto-Fabulous-Jennifer-Lopez-Loving Latino identity put forth by the media; you earned an A- in the Latino studies course. After a fancy graduation dinner where your mom used your hot plate to cook arroz imperial-your favorite-tell your family you can’t come home, because you need to know what home means before you can go there. Just keep eating when your father throws his fork on the floor and yells, What the fuck are you talking about? Cross your fingers under the table after you tell them you’re going to grad school and your mom says, But, mamita, you made a promise.

Move to what you learn is nicknamed the Great White North. Tell yourself, this is America! This is the heartland! Appreciate how everyone is so nice, but claim Hialeah fiercely since it’s all people ask you about anyway. They’ve never seen hair so curly, so dark. You have never felt more Cuban in your life, mainly because for the first time, you are consistently being identified as Mexican or something. This thrills you until the beginning-of-semester party for your grad program: you are the only person in attendance who is not white, and you’re the only one under five foot seven. You stand alone by an unlit floor lamp, holding a glass of cheap red wine. You wish that Iota brother were around to protect you; he was very big; people were scared he would eat them; he had PURO LATINO tattooed across his shoulders in Olde English lettering. Chug the wine and decide that everyone in the world is a poser except maybe your parents. You think, What does that even mean-poser? Don’t admit that you are somewhat drunk. Have another glass of wine and slip Spanish words into your sentences to see if anyone asks you about them. Consider yourself very charming and the most attractive female in your year, by far-you are exotic. Let one of the third-year students drive you home after he says he doesn’t think you’re okay to take a bus. Tell him, What, puta, you think I never rode no bus in Miami? Shit, I grew up on the bus. Do not tell him it was a private bus your parents paid twenty dollars a week for you to ride, along with other neighborhood kids, because they thought the public school bus was too dangerous-they had actually grown up on the buses you’re now claiming. Your dad told you stories about bus fights, so you feel you can wing it as the third-year clicks your seat belt on for you and says, That’s fascinating-what does puta mean?

Spend the rest of that summer and early fall marveling at the lightning storms that you’re sure are the only flashy thing about the Midwest. Take three months to figure out that the wailing sounds you sometimes hear in the air are not in your head-they are tornado sirens.

As the days grow shorter, sneak into tanning salons to maintain what you call your natural color. Justify this to yourself as healthy. You need more vitamin D than these Viking people, you have no choice. Relax when the fake sun actually does make you brown, rather than the Play-Doh orange beaming off your students-you have genuine African roots! You knew it all along! Do not think about how, just like all the other salon patrons, you reek of drying paint and burned hair every time you emerge from that ultraviolet casket.

Date the third-year because he finds you fascinating and asks you all sorts of questions about growing up in el barrio, and you like to talk anyway. More important, he has a car, and you need groceries, and this city is much colder than your college home-you don’t plan on walking anywhere. And you are lonely. Once the weather turns brutal and your heating bill hits triple digits, start sleeping with him for warmth. When he confesses that the growth you’d felt between his legs is actually a third testicle, you’ll both be silent for several seconds, then he will growl, It doesn’t actually function. He will grimace and grind his very square teeth as if you’d just called him Tri-Balls, even though you only said it in your head. When he turns away from you on the bed and covers his moon-white legs, think that you could love this gloomy, deformed person; maybe he has always felt the loneliness sitting on you since you left home, except for him, it’s because of an extra-heavy nut sack. Lean toward him and tell him you don’t care-say it softly, of course-say that you would have liked some warning, but that otherwise it’s just another fact about him. Do not use the word exotic to describe his special scrotum. You’ve learned since moving here that that word is used to push people into some separate, freakish category.

Break up with him when, after a department happy hour, you learn from another third-year that he’s recently changed his dissertation topic to something concerning the Cuban American community in Miami. He did this a month ago-Didn’t he tell you? On the walk to the car, accuse him of using you for research purposes.

– Maybe I did, he says, But that isn’t why I dated you, it was a bonus.

Tell him that being Cuban is no more a bonus than, say, a third nut. Turn on your heel and walk home in single-digit weather while he follows you in his car and yelps from the lowered window, Can’t we talk about this? Call your mother after cursing him out in front of your apartment building for half an hour while he just stood there, observing.

– Oh please, she says, her voice far away, Like anyone would want to read about Hialeah.

Do not yell at your mother for missing the point.

Change advisers several times until you find the one who does not refer to you as the Mexican one and does not ask you how your research applies to regular communities. Sit in biweekly off-campus meetings with your fellow Latinas, each of them made paler by the Great White North’s conquest over their once-stubborn pigment. They face the same issues in their departments-the problem, you’re learning, is system-wide. Write strongly worded joint letters to be sent at the end of the term. Think, Is this really happening? I am part of this group? Look at the dark greenish circles hanging under their eyes, the curly frizz poking out from their pulled-back hair and think, Why did I think I had a choice?

Call home less often. There is nothing good to report.

– Why can’t you just shut up about being Cuban, your mother says after asking if you’re still causing trouble for yourself. No one would even notice if you flat-ironed your hair and stopped talking.

Put your head down and plow through the years you have left there because you know you will graduate: the department can’t wait for you to be gone. You snuck into the main office (someone had sent out an e-mail saying there was free pizza in the staff fridge) and while your mouth worked on a cold slice of pepperoni, you heard the program coordinator yak into her phone that they couldn’t wait to get rid of the troublemaker.

– I don’t know, she says seconds later. Probably about spics, that’s her only angle.

You sneak back out of the office and spit the pepperoni out in a hallway trash can because you’re afraid of choking-you can’t stop laughing. You have not heard the word spic used in the past decade. Your parents were spics. Spics is so seventies. They would not believe someone just called you that. Crack up because even the Midwest’s slurs are way behind the East Coast’s. Rename the computer file of your dissertation draft “Spictacular.” Make yourself laugh every time you open it.

Embrace your obvious masochism. Make it your personal mission to educate the middle of the country about Latinos by living there just a little longer. But you have to move-you can’t work in a department that your protests helped to officially document as Currently Inhospitable to Blacks and Latinos, even if it is friendly to disabled people and people with three testicles.

Decide to stay in the rural Midwest partly for political reasons: you have done what no one in your family has ever done-you have voted in a state other than Florida. And you cannot stand Hialeah’s politics. You monitored their poll results via the Internet. Days before the election, you received a mass e-mail from Myra urging you to vote for the candidate whose books you turn upside down when you see them in stores. Start to worry you have communist leanings-wonder if that’s really so bad. Keep this to yourself; you do not want to hear the story of your grandfather eating grasshoppers while in a Cuban prison, not again.

Get an adjunct position at a junior college in southern Wisconsin, where you teach a class called the Sociology of Communities. You have seventy-six students and, unlike your previous overly polite ones, these have opinions. Several of them are from Chicago and recognize your accent for what it actually is-not Spanish, but Urban. Let this give you hope. Their questions about Miami are about the beach, or if you’d been there during a particular hurricane, or if you’ve ever been to the birthplace of a particular rapper. Smile and nod, answer them after class-keep them focused on the reading.

At home, listen to and delete the week’s messages from your mother. She is miserable because you have abandoned her, she says. You could have been raped and dismembered, your appendages strewn about Wisconsin and Illinois, and she would have no way of knowing.

– You would call if you’d been dismembered, right? the recording says.

It has only been eight days since you last spoke to her.

The last message you do not delete. She is vague and says she needs to tell you something important. She is crying. You call back, forgetting about the time difference-it is eleven-thirty in Hialeah.

Ask, What’s wrong?

– Can I tell her? she asks your father. He says, I don’t care.

– Tell me what?

Tuck your feet under you on your couch and rub your eyes with your free hand.

– Your cousin Barbarita, she says, Barbarita has a brain tumor.

Say, What, and then, Is this a fucking joke?

Take your hand away from your eyes and stick your thumbnail in your mouth. Gnaw on it. Barbarita is eleven years older than you. She taught you how to spit and how to roller-skate. You cannot remember the last time you talked to her, but that is normal-you live far away. Then it comes to you. Eight months ago, at Nochebuena, last time you were home.

– It’s really bad. They know it’s cancer. We didn’t want to tell you.

Sigh deeply, sincerely. You expected something about your centenarian great-grandmother going in her whiskey-induced sleep. You expected your father having to cut back to one pound of beef a day because of his tired heart.

Ask, Mom, you okay? Assume her silence is due to more crying. Say, Mom?

– She’s been sick since February, she says.

Now you are silent. It is late August. You did not go back for your birthday this year-you had to find a job, and the market is grueling. Your mother had said she understood. Also, you adopted a rabbit in April (you’ve been a little lonely in Wisconsin), and your mother knows you don’t like leaving the poor thing alone for too long. Push your at-the-ready excuses out of the way and say, Why didn’t you tell me before?

She does not answer your question. Instead she says, You have to come home.

Tell her you will see when you can cancel class. There is a fall break coming up, you might be able to find a rabbit-sitter and get away for a week.

– No, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t want you to worry. You couldn’t do anything from up there.

Wait until she stops crying into the phone. You feel terrible-your poor cousin. She needs to get out and see the world; she has never been farther north than Orlando. When she was a teenager, she’d bragged to you that one day, she’d move to New York City and never come back. You think (but know better than to say), Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. When you see her, you will ignore the staples keeping her scalp closed over her skull. You will pretend to recognize your cousin through the disease and the bloated, hospital-gown-clad monster it’s created. You will call her Barbarino like you used to, and make jokes when no one else can. Just before you leave-visiting hours end, and you are just a visitor-you’ll lean in close to her face, so close your nose brushes the tiny hairs still clinging to her sideburns, and say, Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’m busting you out of here.

Your mother says, She died this morning. She went fast. The service is the day after tomorrow. Everyone else will be there, please come.

You are beyond outrage-you feel your neck burning hot. You skip right past your dead cousin and think, I cannot believe these people. They have robbed me of my final hours with my cousin. They have robbed Barbarita of her escape.

You will think about your reaction later, on the plane, when you try but fail to rewrite a list about the windows of your parents’ house in the margins of an in-flight magazine. But right now, you are still angry at being left out. Promise your mother you’ll be back in Hialeah in time and say nothing else. Hang up, and book an eight-hundred-dollar flight home after e-mailing your students that class is canceled until further notice.

Brush your teeth, put on flannel pajamas (even after all these winters, you are still always cold), tuck yourself in to bed. Try to make yourself cry. Pull out the ladybug-adorned to-do-list pad from the milk crate you still use as a nightstand and write down everything you know about your now-dead cousin.

Here’s what you remember: Barbarita loved papaya and making jokes about papaya. One time, before she even knew what it meant, she called her sister a papayona in front of everyone at a family pig roast. Her mother slapped her hard enough to lay her out on the cement patio. She did not cry, but she stormed inside to her room and did not come out until she’d said the word papayona out loud and into her pillow two hundred times. Then she said it another hundred times in her head. She’d told you this story when your parents dragged you to visit Barbarita’s mom and her newly busted hip while you were home during one of your college breaks. Barbarita’s mother, from underneath several white blankets, said, I never understood why you even like that fruit. It tastes like a fart.

Barbarita moved back in with her parents for good after her mom fractured her hip. The family scandal became Barbarita’s special lady friend, with whom she’d been living the previous eight years. You remember the lady friend’s glittered fanny pack-it always seemed full of breath mints and rubber bands-how you’d guessed it did not come off even for a shower. Barbarita took you to Marlins games and let you drink stadium beer from the plastic bottle if you gave her the change in your pockets. She kept coins in a jar on her nightstand and called it her retirement fund. She made fun of you for opening a savings account when you turned sixteen and said you’d be better off stuffing the cash in a can and burying it in the backyard. She laughed and slapped her knee and said, No lie, I probably have ninety thousand dollars under my mom’s papaya tree.

Look at your list. It is too short. Whose fault is that? You want to say God’s; you want to say your parents’. You want to blame the ladybug imprinted on the paper. You are jealous of how she adorns yet can ignore everything you’ve put down. Write, My cousin is dead and I’m blaming a ladybug. Cross out My cousin and write Barbarita. Throw the pad back in the crate before you write, Am I really this selfish?

Decide not to sleep. The airport shuttle is picking you up at four a.m. anyway, and it’s already one. Get out of bed, set up the automatic food dispenser in your rabbit’s cage, then flat-iron your hair so that it looks nice for the funeral. Your father has cursed your frizzy head and blamed the bad genes on your mother’s side since you sprouted the first tuft. Wrap the crispy ends of your hair around Velcro rollers and microwave some water in that I-don’t-do-Mondays mug that you never use (the one you stole off the grad program coordinator’s desk right before shoving your keys in the drop box-you couldn’t help stealing it: you’re a spic). Stir in the Café Bustelo instant coffee your mother sent you a few weeks ago in a box that also contained credit card offers you’d been mailed at their address and three packs of Juicy Fruit. The spoon clinks against the mug and it sounds to you like the slightest, most insignificant noise in the world.

Sit at the window seat that convinced you to sign the lease to this place even though your closest neighbor is a six-minute drive away. Listen to the gutters around the window flood with rain. Remember the canal across from your parents’ house, how the rain threatened to flood it twice a week. There is a statue of San Lázaro in their front yard and a mango tree in the back. Lázaro is wedged underneath an old bathtub your dad half buried vertically in the dirt, to protect the saint from rain. The mango tree takes care of itself. But your father made sure both the mango tree and San Lázaro were well guarded behind a five-foot-high chain-link fence. The house’s windows had bars-rejas-on them to protect the rest of his valuables, the ones living inside. You never noticed the rejas (every house around for blocks had them) until you left and came back. The last night of your first winter break in Hialeah, just before you went to sleep, you wasted four pages-front and back-in a notebook scribbling all the ways the rejas were a metaphor for your childhood: a caged bird, wings clipped, never to fly free; a zoo animal on display yet up for sale to the highest-bidding boyfriend; a rare painting trapped each night after the museum closes. Roll your eyes-these are the ones you remember now. You didn’t mean it, not even as you wrote them, but you wanted to mean it, because that made your leaving an escape and not a desertion. Strain to conjure up more of them-it’s got to be easier than reconciling the pilfered mug with your meager list about your cousin. But you can’t come up with anything else. All you remember is your father weeding the grass around the saint every other Saturday, even in a downpour.

Peek through the blinds and think, It will never stop raining. Pack light-you still have clothes that fit you in your Hialeah closet. Open the blinds all the way and watch the steam from your cup play against the reflected darkness, the flashes of rain. Watch lightning careen into the flat land surrounding your tiny house, your empty, saintless yard. Wait for the thunder. You know, from growing up where it rained every afternoon from three to five, that thunder’s timing tells you how far you are from the storm. You cannot remember which cousin taught you this-only that it wasn’t Barbarita. When it booms just a second later, know the lightning is too close. Lean your forehead against the windowpane and feel the glass rattle, feel the vibration pass into your skull, into your teeth. Keep your head down; see the dozens of tiny flies, capsized and drained, dead on the sill. Only the shells of their bodies are left, along with hundreds of broken legs that still manage to point at you. If you squint hard enough, the flies blend right into the dust padding their mass grave. And when your eyes water, even these dusty pillows blur into an easy, anonymous gray smear.

Your hands feel too heavy to open the window, then the storm glass, then the screen, to sweep their corpses away. You say out loud to no one, I’ll do it when I get back. But your words-your breath-rustle the burial ground, sending tiny swirls of dust toward your face. It tastes like chalk and dirt. Feel it scratch the roof of your mouth, but don’t cough-you don’t need to. Clear your throat if you want; it won’t make the taste go away any faster.

Don’t guess how long it will take for the clouds to clear up; you’re always wrong about weather. The lightning comes so close to your house you’re sure this time you’ll at least lose power. Close your eyes, cross your fingers behind your back. Swallow hard. The windowsill’s grit scrapes every cell in your throat on its way down. Let this itch convince you that the lightning won’t hit-it can’t, not this time-because for now, you’re keeping your promise. On the flight, distract yourself with window lists and SkyMall magazine all you want; no matter what you try, the plane will land. Despite the traffic you find worse than you remember, you’ll get to Hialeah in time for the burial-finally back, ready to mourn everything.