The Soup and Sorrow Digest

Intermediate ending.

Selena demanded promptly of Ricardo’s acquiescence. He would move that very Sunday evening to his grandmothers. No, they could not stop by Inez’s to explain the new developments. And suddenly Selena waxed appreciative of Elena’s good graces. She had to thank Elena with a large order of food from the tarquería and a small cash gift. 

Waiting for his mother back in the shop, Ricardo waddled in silence outside the family car and mulled tightly the chances of seeing Steve again. Maybe Elena could forward him any messages? But Ricardo knocked himself despondently against the hard car door. Questions surged on this supposed new life. If he must live peacefully, there could be no question of Steve; the chapter was ended.  

Above the dimpled gray of the horizon, the sun was slicing through the wide falling bands of tawny pink. The sky was shutting its light to him, and in the growing gloom, he gathered his arms to himself and looked languidly into the sandy veils over the storefront. Selena and Jésus stepped out the front door with faces vague as foam, their arms sleek in the light, and in their refractive golden presence, Ricardo construed it a good thing, an optimal choice to leave the issue of Steve closed. She opened the driver’s seat, Jésus took the front seat, and Ricardo sank limply into the back. His ribs flexed with pain. Sensations came barreling back to him, the cramped warmth of the interior, the flimsy twisty games between him and his sisters over who would sit by the window, and his doodling over the cracked leather covering the armrest; it all called back to him with the expanding lull of a homecoming. The memories of his old bedroom ceiling lowered closer in its ethereal ember of the glow-in-the dark pasties, this too should be a good thing.

He had been adequate in doodling, in playing music, irritating people to no end. He could try to think more and act less but would not be able to do much more than try. But he would not suddenly be more intelligent or talented or gentle, just remain the shabby kid with deviant tendencies. 

He pulled up sharply into warm pane of his window. The premonition of bootless strife damned him and darkened his eyes to the carmine filter spreading over the slate roofs. A wall front of faux ledgestone speeded into focus, then the long shadow of a palm tree quivering heavily over its rough surfaces. Upon the sight of finials burnished black in the coruscated light, panic seized his veins. He remembered, it was Sunday, a day of rest, day of buds and liquor in Elena’s apartment.

The car pushed to a stop, and he stammered, “Stay here, I’ll be back a moment.” He did not wait for Inez to object before rushing out the door and cutting up the stairs to the glossy exterior of Elena’s door.

The door was ajar; the scent of marijuana trailed through. He pushed it open and saw over the counter the smooth sterility of the cooking top. Bueno. But Elena was splayed on the ground with her back to the bottom rail of a couch. The red rim of a joint sloping down her lips, she stared at the prickly static on the television. He said hollowly through the lonely living room, “Hermana? You left the door open …”

Her red-tinted eyes swung his way, but in an instant, a slippery blubbery smile curved her face, and her arm flailed a joint for him, in the air.

“How’s your face feeling?” she drawled.

A bad question in the middle of a bad afternoon. Sighing, he sat by side her, was about to take the joint but bubbled another cavernous sigh before stubbing it away on the ashtray by her hip.  Ricardo pulled up a gaze to unhelpfully noisy the television—if only he read the grainy gray billowing across its screen for fortunes, or answers on how he was going to explaining this to Selena or his leaving to Elena?

Smoke curled from the ashtray like anemone filaments.  He looked round the stucco crown molding lining the ceiling and thought he would miss Elena and her flighty thoughts or her designs for cookies at two in the morning.