birthday. There was always a pig roast… a pig big enough for a hundred people or so… all the relatives… innumerable, here in Hialeah alone… plus all the neighbors from the wet concrete yards. His parents and Yeya and Yeyo and even he himself knew the neighbors so well, they had come to call them Tía and Tío, as if they were real aunts and uncles. If he went AWOL from this party, he would never be forgiven. Celebrating Grandmother’s birthday was a very big thing in the Camacho domain… it was practically a holiday… and the older she got, the more sacred it got.
There were grandparents living in the same house as their middle-aged children all over the place in Hialeah. Until his brother and his sister married their way out of the house, this casita was like the YMCA. There was one bathroom for seven people from three generations. Talk about people getting into each other’s hair…
Oh, Magdalena! If only she were beside him right now! He would have his arm around her… in front of everybody… right now… and she would be joking about all the concrete front yards and all the put-upon wives of Hialeah. Why didn’t everybody get together and water just one tree? That was what she’d be saying. She’d bet there weren’t a dozen trees in all of Hialeah. Hialeah started out as a dirt prairie, and now it was a concrete prairie. That was the kind of thing she would say, if only she were here… He could feel her body leaning against his. She was so beautiful—and so smart! She had this… way… of looking at the world. How lucky he was! He had a girl more gorgeous, quicker, brighter than—than—than a TV star. He could feel her body against his in bed. ::::::Oh, my Manena.:::::: His body hadn’t touched hers in that way for almost two weeks. If it wasn’t the hours he worked, it was the hours she worked. He never knew that nurses for psychiatrists had to work so long and so hard. This psychiatrist was a big deal, apparently. He had patients practically stacked up at the hospital, Jackson Memorial, plus the ones who came in to his office all day long, and Manena had to tend to patients at both places. Nestor never knew psychiatrists had so many hospital patients. Oh, but he’s very prominent, very much in demand, Manena explained. She was working day and night. Recently it had become so hard, there was no time to see her at all. When he finished his Marine Patrol shift at midnight, she would be in bed asleep, and he didn’t dare call her. She had to start work at 7:00 a.m., she had explained, because first she had to go by the hospital for a “pre-check” and then to the office for a full day of patients that ended at 5:00 p.m., but Nestor’s shift began at 4:00 p.m. Just to make things worse, they had different days off. The whole thing had become impossible. What was to be done?
He had called her cell phone not all that long after he got back to the marina. No answer. He texted her. She didn’t text back… and she must have known about it. If his father was right, everybody knew about it.
He had to see his Manena!… if only on Facebook. He rushed back to his room, got dressed as fast as he had ever gotten dressed in his life, and sat down at his laptop, which he kept on a table that only barely fit into the room, and went online… Manena! There she was… It was a picture he had taken of her… long luxurious dark hair streaming down to her shoulders… her dark eyes, her slightly parted, slightly smiling lips—that promised… ecstasy didn’t even begin to say it! ::::::But stop fantasizing, Nestor! Go to the kitchen and get some coffee… before you’re afflicted with company you don’t want to have.::::::
He sat in the kitchen in the dark, drinking a second cup of coffee, trying to wake up… and thinking… thinking… thinking… thinking… He couldn’t very well call her this early, 6:45 on a Saturday morning… shouldn’t text, either. Even the beep beep beep of a text message might wake her up.
A light came on, and he heard a familiar flush and glug-glug-glug of a toilet. Damn! His parents were getting up… Camilo the Caudillo would be heading right here… A wisp of hope!… His