“Thank you, but I can’t pay for it. I have nothing with me,” Aria said.
The woman scoffed as if insulted by the fact that Aria presumed she would have to. “Don’t worry, mija. You’re so skinny you need some food on those bones of yours,” she answered with a laugh.
Doña Lolita looked to be in her late fifties. Her coal black hair, which was entirely gray at the roots, was pulled into a tight bun. Her thin lips were coated with hot pink lipstick, far too bright for her complexion. Her eyebrows were pencil drawn on top of the gray eyeshadow that was poorly applied to her eyelids. Her brown eyes were the color of cola. They sparkled out from the mayhem of her makeup and acne scars. The lard-rich food she had cooked all her life had made her body and face plump. The feel of her was a strange mix of discipline and mothering.
“You can have this, too … And this,” she said, placing three more items she collected from around the store in front of Aria.
“Thank you so much,” Aria said, looking her straight in the face, totally overwhelmed with (and even more guilty about) the care she was being shown.
“OK, is everything OK?” she asked, wanting to know if she could leave Aria to eat on her own.
“Yeah, it’s wonderful,” Aria replied.
Satisfied with her efforts, Lolita went to sit with Pedro and Consuelo at one of the other little tables in a corner by the meat counter. She had fed them too. At another table, a group of four women sat playing cards.
Aria watched the men eat and talk to her. They were speaking in Spanish so she couldn’t tell what they were saying.
Pedro and Consuelo bore furrows on their faces. Their clothes and skin were covered in splatters of bright white paint from whatever job they had been able to find yesterday. Their jeans and work boots were coated with cement dust and their calloused skin and bodies were beaten by manual labor into a kind of crudeness where all elements of mercy were lost. Pedro was friendly. The cruelty that life had shown him had not corrupted his propitious attitude. Consuelo was less congenial. The luster of his heart and inherent goodness was withheld behind a cautious demeanor. He spoke absolutely no English and followed his brother around as if doing so meant the difference between life and death.
Aria could tell from their body language that this was not a lighthearted conversation. They were talking about how to navigate worst-case scenarios in case the police got involved with what had happened to Aria. In the emergency of the moment, Pedro and Consuelo’s conscience had trumped the care for their own safety. Both Pedro and Consuelo were illegal immigrants. They could not afford to exist in the eyes of the state.
Pedro had come to the United States first, nearly ten years ago. A bad harvest season had made the owners of the farm where he lived and worked lay off nearly all of their workers, including Pedro. As a result he could not feed his wife and three children. Growing up in a little town just north of Jerez, Zacatecas, he would often see families whose relatives had moved to the United States, wearing fancier clothing. And at least some of their kids could afford to go to school. Pedro was illiterate. He had never had a pair of new shoes in his lifetime, much less been able to go to school. With no skills other than farming, he found there were no jobs available to him there. The threat of starvation made the risk of crossing the border, to try to work on a farm in California, a risk he had to take. A family friend in the States vouched for him by promising to pay a “coyote” the $5,000 he required to illegally transport Pedro across the border.
Pedro kissed his family goodbye, promising to send them money, and got into the back of a semi truck transporting huge rubber truck tires. Five of them crossed the border in that truck. Aside from a few stops to get out and relieve themselves in the middle of the desert somewhere, each one of them was made to lie as flat as they could against the inner lining of the tires. This way, if anyone opened the hatch of the trailer, all they would have seen was merchandise. Pedro’s tears that day were tainted by the unnatural smell of rubber. Like the men who had made the journey before him, he did not take the risk lightly, simply on the promise of opportunity. Instead, he was torn in half. On one side the heavy doom of the deaths of the family he was responsible for. On the other, the only chance he had at preventing that fate from occurring.
Pedro had taken jobs on several farms over the years before someone told him that he could make more money in a day than he made from farming in a week by standing outside Home Depot and taking the temporary jobs that people who came looking for cheap workers could offer him. Like everything in his life, he had thrown himself into it with no schooling. Having lied that he knew what he was doing so people would hire him in the first place, he had learned how to paint and lay concrete and put up drywall out of pure necessity.
Pedro now found himself in another chapter of powerlessness different from the one he had faced back in Mexico. He lived his life like a fugitive. He couldn’t rent a house because his name couldn’t be on record. And even if he could rent a place from someone who would do it off the record, he would have to decide between his family’s survival and his own. If he rented a house and paid the bills and got groceries, nothing would be left over to send them down
