Doña Yoli? she says, with a surprised expression. Oh no, she says. I never thought that.
Thank you, María, I say. Because my mother has always worried that people do think it’s a portrait of her.
Doña Yoli is much more nice, pues, she says. In your book, the father is the kind man, and María looks at me knowingly, her eyebrows skeptically hiked.
This María Xum really is kind of a gas. Who would have suspected? And I say, You’re a good reader, María.
I do enjoy to read, Frankie, she says.
After signing the book and handing it back, I ask how old Señor Alberto was when he took his own life and she says, He was forty-three, six years ago. He’d be my age. Then María, in a new tone of seriousness, says, Death Comes for the Bishop I also liked very much. We read it in our church reading club, and I think we all did learn many things about Guatemala, but oh, it is so terrible what happens in our country.
Yes, of course, terrible, but thank you, I answer. And before I can think of what to say next, María has to return to her counter, where a short line of customers, some looking back at us with expressions of annoyance, are waiting. She takes payment from one and laundry to be washed from another, hoisting a duffel nearly twice her size onto the weighing scale. In the tip jar on the counter, there is a sole five-dollar bill curled up on a smattering of coins. The door opens twice in quick succession, more customers entering. It really is growing busy, about half a dozen people doing their own laundry, sitting in plastic chairs waiting for their cycles to finish or standing and folding at the tables, others dropping laundry off, picking it up. To most of her mostly female customers, speaking in Spanish and English, María tries to sell Tupperware, pulling out catalogs and samples from under her counter. But she doesn’t offer Tupperware to the few scruffy young men who’ve come in to do their own laundry, every one of them, actually, looking badly hungover.
I glance up at the clock. It’s 12:20 and I’m hungry. I probably should have had more than coffee back at the Starbucks. Should I ask María if she wants a pizza or takeout Chinese? I can go and get some for both of us. Or maybe I should tell her I’ll be right back, find someplace around here to scarf down a burger. I’m standing here in quandariness about what to do when I hear María say my name, and she’s standing right in front of me, and before she can say anything else, out pop the words I’d rehearsed only minutes ago: María, you need to correct your gender prejudices. I bet some of those guys need Tupperware more than the women do, to help them keep their clam chowdah fresh. María looks confused, until her lips part, releasing a tiny cackle like a muffled cough. Ay, Frankie, you never change, she says, smiling. Always joking and teasing! Well, I do like to tell a corny or intentionally weird little joke and get a laugh, though I’m always meeting people who don’t like these kinds of jokes at all. Some even experience them as aggression, yet for others the very same words and delivery ignite at least a small burst of hilarity. Mamita, who loves to laugh, married Bert, who almost never told jokes.
There’s a teenage girl standing alongside María, taller, smiling at me, her cheeks soft slabs. She’s wearing a blue-and-gold East Boston High School Jets hoodie, the very school I wrecked my knee against. María says, This is Rebeca. The girl who lives with her and has come to help in the laundromat after all. Rebeca hoists a brimming plastic laundry basket atop a folding table and for a split second seems terribly flummoxed over what to do or say next. She thrusts out her hand to shake mine, her fingers are icy cold, and she’s saying, even as her eyes, a little bloodshot, shift to María: Nice to meet you. We heard you on the radio. She softly claps María on
