It felt sinful to chase cake with soda. The bright food coloring and carbonation were unsympathetic against her tongue. The sweetness of it made her teeth hurt, but it tasted reassuring.
Aria felt like she had taken a turn down a street and wound up immersed in a completely different country. Had it not been for the specific situation that had brought her there, she imagined she would have been much less warmly welcomed. Her mind was not disquieted by the incident that had led to all of this. She was used to it. Violation was just an unlucky part of life and Aria felt like there was no point in dwelling on what could never be changed. Instead, she pretended to be on vacation. She tasted the foreign flavors and smelled the foreign smells. She let her eyes take in all the things in the store that she had never seen before.
Eventually, Pedro and Consuelo got up to leave. Aria didn’t know where they were headed to, maybe back to the Home Depot parking lot to see if they had missed their chance to land a job or not. Pedro paused after hugging Lolita, but before walking out of the door, he called out, “Hey Aria, you be careful eh?” as familiarly as if she were his sister.
“Thank you, guys,” Aria called back at him, extending her hand toward him in thanks through the air. Consuelo tipped the brim of his baseball hat and the two of them ducked out the door.
Lolita was uneasy. She looked over at Aria as if trying to decide what to do with her. The look made Aria feel like she had worn out her welcome. Not wanting to burden her any further, Aria took the lollipop that Lolita had also given her from the table and placed it in her coat pocket. She got up and asked, “Should I put these anywhere?” referring to the mess she had made at the table.
“No, mija, it’s OK. It’s OK, I’ll take care of it,” Lolita said, coming over to usher away the mess herself.
“Thank you, really, thank you so much for everything,” Aria said, not knowing how to repay the generosity that Lolita had shown her.
“Just be safe and don’t get yourself into any more trouble.”
Aria shrugged and nodded her head.
“Let the Virgen María guide over you,” Lolita said, patting Aria on the sleeve of her coat.
Aria walked through the aisles to the door of the store. “Thank you again,” she said, extending one last appreciative look in Lolita’s direction.
She decided to walk a different way back toward the car lot, having to backtrack a few times because the route was unfamiliar. The idea of waiting to see Omkar in the boredom of the empty car lot was usually tedious, but after the intensity of the day so far, it felt soothing. She pulled out the Rebanaditas lollipop from her pocket and tore off the yellow wrapper. Aria was confounded to see that the lollipop was covered in a dust that looked like chili powder. She didn’t know whether to expect it to be sweet or savory. She stuck out the tip of her tongue to find out. It was salty. She could not find any sweetness beyond the taste of salt and the sting of the hot pepper. “How strange,” she thought to herself. But she put it in her mouth anyway. Overwhelmed by the off-putting taste of pure hot chili powder, she held it in her mouth for a few seconds before the faint flavor of watermelon candy peeked through. She smiled to herself because the experience was symbolic of the day so far, which had started off unsavory and turned out sweet.
Up until that day, Aria had been afraid of Mexican men. She had thought them to be venal and barbaric. Never did she imagine that two of them would be the preventers instead of the perpetrators of a crime against her. It felt strange to know nothing about them aside from their names, even stranger to ponder the webbing of life. It never ceased to amaze Aria to imagine people’s separate lives and to see how the threads of their life paths were suddenly woven together in one place for one singular experience.
Perhaps those life paths would stay woven for a while, like hers and Taylor’s had. Or perhaps they would never cross one another’s paths again. Either way, Aria could feel some cosmic orchestration at work in the world at times like this.
CHAPTER 25
A couple of hours had come and gone since Aria returned to the car lot. The afternoon sun was high and harsh. Only Robert and Anthony were milling around their camps.
Aria was writing in her journal in the shade offered by the inside of the Land Cruiser when a commotion outside stole away her attention. It was Ciarra returning to the lot with Aston in tow. But she wasn’t alone; she was followed by a black man that Aria didn’t recognize. The man was tall. His shoulders were slightly hunched around a concave chest. The bones of his face were chiseled. A stifled mustache sat atop his thick lips. Even from where Aria was watching, the large diamond earrings that pierced both of his ears were clearly visible. His perfectly trimmed hair looked like a thick mat of black moss. He was wearing a neon lime sport jumpsuit and impractical black high-top Jimmy Choo sneakers that were an obvious status-driven fashion statement.
Aria cracked the cruiser door open quietly so she could try to hear what they were saying. She could just make out a word here and there, enough to gather that the man was Ciarra’s pimp.
Ciarra had met the man when Aston was still a baby. After Aston’s father had abandoned them for his flop of a music career, Ciarra had been suffocating under the financial and emotional weight of having become a single mother at 19. On one occasion, a
