Jaquira Díaz

“You know I’m gonna pay you back,” my mother said, then winked at him.

       He pulled out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to her, just like that. “Gracias,” she said, then headed inside.

        She was always like this, learning my friends’ names, getting familiar enough to ask for money, or cigarettes, or drugs. It would be this way into my late teens, when I’m grown, when I’m a woman. It was like I was the only one getting older, changing. But Mami, she was frozen in time as that twenty-year-old who listened to Madonna and thought my father was running around on her, still haunted by those same monsters, and even years after we’d left Puerto Rico, she believed we still owned the house in Luquillo, the liquor store, that we would go back there, pick up right where we left off. That it would all be waiting for us to get back.

It was my father who’d taught me to tie my shoelaces like rabbit ears, to catch fireflies at dusk, to eat ensalada de pulpo bought from chinchorros on the side of the road in Naguabo and Luquillo, to play chess. He’d told me stories of coconut palms that bowed to the sun, of jíbaros like his uncles and grandfather, who got up before daylight to cut cane in the cañaverales. Stories of machetes, sweat, and sugar, before paved roads and indoor plumbing and English. Stories of women: Lucecita Benítez, one of Puerto Rico’s most famous singers, who sang about race and liberation; Lolita Lebrón, who fought among men, taking up arms after La Masacre de Ponce; Yuíza, a Taíno cacica who would be resurrected, rising from ash and clay and blood to avenge the death of her people. His tales were spun of history and wind and poetry.

We talked about Miami Beach like it belonged only to us, convinced that the tourists and spring breakers who came down to swim in our ocean and dance in our nightclubs were fucking up our city. We were seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old hoodlums, our hair in cornrows and too-tight ponytails, too much hairspray and dark brown lip liner, noses and belly buttons pierced, door-knocker earrings, jailhouse ankle tattoos. We didn’t have time for boys from Hollywood or North Miami, busters who drove their hoopties with the windows down because they didn’t have A/C, who called out to us trying to get phone numbers as we crossed Washington Avenue or Lincoln Road, our chancletas slapping the sidewalk.