cell block, ten minutes through a corridor maze, and remembered what she had told the deputy public defender: “I am not a fighter.” But perhaps she was. She could be a Mexican superhero wrestler, the Masked Inmate, springing into the air in her yellow jail overalls, with ankle-high pink leather boots and a purple cape trailing behind her. She gave another solitary chuckle and thought that it was nice to be able to get out of her cell and talk to Ruthy for an hour, and then to jostle through the rushing crowds of secretaries in the yellow jumpsuits who crowded the passageways.
Halfway back, just past the point where the orange line turned off toward the cafeteria, Araceli felt a jolt to the head and stumbled, tumbling through an instant of blindness. She landed facedown on the floor and regained her sight, touching yellow and blue and green lines on the cement, trying to remember which one she was supposed to follow. “Baby stealer!” someone shouted above her. “Kidnapper!” Someone kicked her in the spine as she tried to rise to her knees, sending her back to the hard coolness of the floor. Someone is trying to kill me. The inmates formed a circle around her, she could see their feet sticking out through the rubber sandals everyone had to wear, toenails freshly painted ruby and tangerine. Where do they get nail polish in here? How did I miss the dispensing of the nail polish? A whistle sounded and all the painted toenails ran away, replaced by the heavy black shoes of a guard. Araceli looked up and saw a tall uniformed and muscular Scandinavian giant with a ponytail. The guard pulled her up, but Araceli’s head wanted to stay on the ground. “Gotta get you outta here, girl,” the guard said. “Get up. Or the crowd will re-form.” Araceli’s legs wanted to give up, but the guard wouldn’t let her fall, and they started to walk back toward the cell, Araceli taking three good steps for every bad one that couldn’t support her weight, being held up by this woman with the torso of a weight lifter. “You gonna make it?” the guard asked.
“Creo que sí,” Araceli said.
They started to move forward again, the guard’s arm around Arace-li’s waist. Suddenly the guard lifted her into the air with a grunt, and all of Araceli’s thoughts were erased by the unexpected sensation of being embraced by the stout construction of the guard’s arms as she carried Araceli over the lines on the floor. Araceli wanted to coo, it felt so good, all the tension in her spine and face and the pain of the blows suddenly slipping away.
Maureen opened the front door at 4:50 in the afternoon, thinking that it was Scott, but found instead an older, heavier, and slightly darker version of her husband. John Torres carried a suitcase and wore the expression of a man forced to rescue a drowning woman too stupid to know she couldn’t swim. “It has come to my attention that you guys are kind of falling apart here,” he announced. “That’s why I’m back. And that’s why I’m gonna move in. I’m going to take that little house in the back your maid had, since I’m assuming she ain’t coming back. I’ll stay four nights a week, which is probably as much as I can take.”
Maureen opened her mouth to speak, but could not find words to resist the affront.
“I can cook. I can clean as well as anyone,” he said, with a kind of wounded determination. “And I sure as hell know how to make a bed, which is more than my son knows. I won’t do the dishes, but I can cook a pretty mean pot of beans and just about anything these kids will eat for breakfast. You can leave your boys with me here and I can babysit, and you can take a break with my granddaughter, which I take it was what led to this mess anyway. And I’d say you probably need a break too, because, to be frank, you’re looking kinda worn down, daughter-in-law.” He took in her frazzled appearance with a quick up-and-down. “I know you’re not supposed to say something like that to a woman, but let’s get down to brass tacks here. You need the help. You’re wearing out like some of the guys I used to pick lettuce with. I’ll work for free. Just let me eat my own arroz con pollo