Mexican workers were mowing nearby and one brought over a holder he pulled up from another grave with a thick wire you could stick in the ground. Tenga, señorita, he said. (Señorita. Right.) Señorita Palma caught sight of Pepito, now Joe-the-suit salesman, coming toward her. In dress slacks he acquired a kind of Denzel Washington stride. He was wearing a cashmere, short-sleeved shirt. The Silverman Brothers Suits for Men Store, established 1943, had given the lil ex-con cous’ a makeover. As he grew near she saw he wore a better watch, a gold chain, and what looked like diamond-post earrings. He also cut his hair. He could have been walking out of an Esquire photo shoot. The Native American special issue. Good Lord, where were her vapors? Pepito was swinging a garment suit box in one hand, the way she might have carried a Whitman’s Sampler box. He kissed her right on the mouth, running a tongue oh-so-briefly over her lips. Palma let go of his neck and collected herself, knowing six landscapers’ eyes and a whole lot of dead were watching. I like them shoes, Pepito whispered.
What’s that? Palma asked, smoothing out her dress crunched by the thug hug. It’s for you, he said. Don’t open it ’til Christmas. He laughed a low heh-heh and handed it to her. In silver, swirly letters the top read: Silverman Brothers. It was weighty. Is it a suit for me? Palma joked. Yeah, I got us matching double-breasted tuxes, he smiled.
Pepito reached into his pocket and pulled something out. It was a lock of hair. His ponytail. The Silverman Brothers’ best salesman looked over his shades, and the landscapers pushing equipment in the heat, tongues dragging, lumbered away. The pair walked over to Abuela’s grave holding hands. She could hardly walk on the misogynous spikes as they sunk into the soft graveyard grass. (If she ever became a fashion designer Palma Piedras would start a stiletto line for men called Vendettas.) They scooted down, said an Our Father, and made a sign of the cross. Then Pepito reached into his back pocket and pulled out a Swiss Army knife. He started digging in the dirt until he made a hole deep enough to bury his chongo, which he’d let grow while in prison. It was for Abuela. She used to come visit me, her lil cous’ said. Dabbing the inside corner of one eye, he then readjusted his glasses. Down state? Palma asked. How’d that old woman get there?
Abuela took the bus, Pepito said. The idea of their grandmother going that far from her neighborhood was as unlikely as Palma flying a plane. Abuela went to places besides church, sure. She headed downtown now and then. Sears on special occasions. The lawyer’s office that one time. When did she come see you? Palma asked, as they made their way out slowly toward the street where she left the rental. The old woman had never even visited any of Palma’s apartments in Chicago over the years. She’d never met Rodrigo. She wouldn’t have liked him, in any case, but the point was she didn’t bother. Bother? Yeah, bother was the right word.
When they got to the economy car from Avis parked right outside the ironwork gates, she asked, Can I drop you back at work? He nodded, opened the back door, tossed the garment box in the backseat, and then got in the passenger side. Palma was about to go around when he caught her wrist and drew her to him. You’ve lost more weight, he said, arranging her on his lap and pulling the door closed. You don’t weigh nothing. Are you even here? His voice was heavy in her ear, like the smell in the humidor with don Ed. Pepito was not don Ed, or anyone else before or after, as he gave such wet besos all over she thought he’d suck up her labia through the inside, all the way up and right into his mouth.
Are you even here? Had spoken to her slight frame, but also to the ten years—a lifetime—of his longing for her. Palma’s thong, barely there anyway, was pushed aside and he was in. For a second Palma thought she had a silent stroke. Pepito’s penis had made its way up to her ghost ovaries. The two remained still—very. Abuela, forgive me, she thought. Palma felt his mouth on her neck. He was actually giving a grown woman a hickey. Send us a baby, Abuela, she said. Palma didn’t like babies. She’d hardly liked her abuela. She had no uterus but she might have gotten pregnant then and there. Pepito’s hands were clutching her peach halves and after a few throbbing thrusts she knew he had sent his troops off to infertile territory. She started to come when a cop siren went off, and the squad car pulled up and stopped next to the car. The rest, as they said in Chi-Town, was brown history. Or if they didn’t, then someone should.
14
That night back at the hotel room there was no reply to her texts or voicemails. Palma Piedras had been detained at the station in the spirit of being further embarrassed. She hadn’t been harassed by the city’s finest for such public displays since her high school days at the pier on summer nights. Kids parked their cars and steamed up windows all the time and if they didn’t have a car and were adventurous enough they went down to the beach. It closed at 11:00 p.m. and by 11:05 the cops were patrolling the area.
That day in front of the cemetery there was no proof of any lewd public display. Sitting in a parked car, a rental, Pepito, who even in a Silverman Brothers cashmere shirt looked like the last Aztec warrior with Ray-Bans, undoubtedly sent off the chota alert. Bingo. The cops found out he was on parole. She wasn’t putting it all on her gangsta cousin. A brown woman in the compromising position that Palma was found in spelled puta for pay. It wasn’t just the white conservative neighborhood. She had been propositioned, harassed, and even manhandled from Paris to Ibiza, fancy beaches, promenades with expensive shops and tourist night hot spots, taken for a prostitute, for no other reason that Palma could think of except for her so-called exotic features among Eurotrash Mulches. She always thought such sordid affronts occurred because she had been unescorted, but apparently being escorted by an “exotic” man cancelled it out.
When Palma didn’t hear from him after returning to Albuquerque, his prima worried that the incident had been enough to send Pepito back to prison. She’d forgotten about the box until at the airport the kid who took the keys at the rental found it and came after her. Not until Palma was home did she start getting itchy to open it before Christmas, but in the end she put it away unopened. Palma got back to her translations, went to a Zumba fitness class, and started telling herself that she was pregnant. Pepito’s prima was in love. It had been a long time, but the symptoms were there. Each hour of every day that went by with no word from him was like being hung by her heels. A week went by and then another. She didn’t answer calls or emails.
The editor from Greene & Gaye skyped. Palma took the video call. Well done! the woman said about the work. When Palma was finished with the project, her publisher had a novel to translate by a new English writer. The story is reminiscent of Chéri, the editor said. You know Colette? Yes, Palma knew who the French writer was, and she knew the story of the young man who was ruined by an older woman. It was scandalous writing back then, even in Paris. Sex was the forte of the French. Along with Bourdeax and chocolate croissants. Those people had produced the Marquis de Sade. Palma said she’d do it.
She’d gone to Chicago to put Abuela’s house up for sale. The lawyer reported that Jim-Bo said he was not in a position to buy out her half. She was not prepared to buy out his ass, either. He has a right to stay, the lawyer told her, although you can ask him for rent. Good luck to me with that, Palma told herself, and decided the only way to get things moving was to go there in person, thus, the main purpose for her recent visit. (The morning she went by was the same day when she met Pepito later at the cemetery.) Jim-Bo was at work, but the squatters were there. When Veronica opened the door she immediately grabbed up her dust mop on four legs as if Palma was the dogcatcher. She didn’t exactly invite her in and the uninvited guest didn’t exactly give a rat’s ass.
Palma shouldered the woman out of the way and went straight to Abuela’s room to start collecting her grandmother’s personal possessions. In all frankness, most of it would end up at the Salvation Army, too worn or worthless, but Palma took photo albums with sticky, clear pull-back sheets and random family pictures back with her to Albuquerque for when she sat down to write the cautionary tale that had been the Life and Times of Palma la Piedra. The house was going up for sale, but the lawyer warned her that Jim-Bo didn’t have to take the first offer. Eventually, he’ll have to accept a reasonable one, the attorney said, but with this economy it might take a while, you know.