Now, Lola scoots a trapped foot from under her snoozing dog. Valentine shouldn’t have to see what Lola has to do. She grips the chipped countertop, just for a second, then turns her attention to the knife block. She has to take the butcher knife, even though she knows it might be labeled irrational, ripe for a woman’s hysterics. She can’t lose her shit. Violence must always have a purpose, one greater than standing by, doing nothing. Saving a baby, stopping a thief, making sure a soldier obeys orders.
In the other room, Garcia speaks, low, to Hector, “You break your sister’s heart. You know that?”
“What?” Hector asks, and his ignorance sticks in Lola like a barb that can’t be dug out.
She grips the butcher knife, so large it looks comical in her tiny hand, and strides into the living room. Everyone freezes in a twisted diorama, the kind Lola made in grade school—pilgrims and Indians feasting together at Thanksgiving, slaves tossing off shackles, George Washington on a rearing horse. Heroes who had jack shit to do with little Lola, granddaughter of shitting-in-a-hole poor Mexican immigrants living in South Central under her junkie mother’s watch.
In this diorama, everyone has turned to Lola. Everyone is looking to her to see what they’re supposed to do.
But Lola is the leader. Lola must do this particular dirty work.
When Hector sees her coming for him, he doesn’t know to move. She is his sister. She has never so much as laid a hand on him. But he has seen what she did to Carlos in this very room, Lola thinks, just as he has the good sense to let his feet struggle to get under him, to help him get up and run away, but his heels give out, and his ass lands right back in his chair. No one’s touched him. Still, he’s a prisoner.
Marcos and Jorge have dragged out the tarp. Garcia tilts up Hector’s chair so they can spread it under him. It pleases Lola, to see her men working as one.
“Lola. What the fuck?” Hector asks his sister. But she is not his sister. She is his leader, and she can’t allow him to be a boy. “I said I was sorry.”
Lola resists the nagging urge to tell him he should have thought of that before, that he’s only saying these things out of fear. He’s not sorry he helped Blondie survive. But she doesn’t want to sound like his mother. She’s not his mother. No one was his mother, and no one was her mother, and she’s fine, and he fucked up.
“What are you doing?”
Hector’s saying all the things an angry, entitled child would say. He told her he was sorry, he must be thinking, and isn’t that enough for his sister?
Still, his petulance cuts her more than a pleading apology, because it reminds her that he is hers. In that moment, she knows she can’t kill him.
She touches Hector’s cheek and feels his whole body relax under her palm. It takes both her small hands to hold one of her baby brother’s. The right one. She raises it to her heart so he can feel her life beating there.
“Thank you…” he whispers. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
In one quick movement, Lola draws the knife and tries to slice clean through Hector’s trigger finger. She wants it to happen fast, to punctuate her “you’re welcome,” but it turns out slicing through bone and sinew is rough work. She has to jump on Hector’s lap, to take his hand in hers, to anchor herself as she saws and he cries out. The whole thing takes a good fifteen seconds.
As blood spurts and Hector screams beneath her, Lola feels her own heart beating steady.
The scent of recycled fry grease assaults Lola as she enters Mamacita’s Bodega and Taco Stand. It’s nine a.m. now, four hours after she shot Darrel King’s girl between the eyes. Already Juan and Juanita Amaro have fired up the grill behind the small lunch counter so that it’s too hot to cook eggs.
Juan, sleeves pushed up, mans the smoking apparatus, playing the different meats—beef, pork, chicken—like his own personal symphony. Juanita presides over the cash register, a manual apparatus that requires her to press hard at the keys with crooked, bony fingers. Mamacita’s customers must be prepared to wait while Juanita rings them up, then wait some more while she scrawls a handwritten receipt.
Lola wonders if Lucy is here, somewhere in the small back break room, the Amaros maybe using the ancient television with its grainy picture as babysitter.
Lola picks up a plastic basket with one handle missing. She swings it onto her left forearm and strolls the aisles, not sure why she’s here, other than the fact that she woke up and needed to leave the house. Since Marcos took Hector to County for stitching she hasn’t been able to set foot in her living room. It’s not because she thinks the hospital will ask too many questions. Hector is a brown banger with a missing trigger finger. No cops are gonna show up at Lola’s door wanting to know what happened. They know all they need to know—this banger can’t shoot. Lola has done them a favor.
Mila, Darrel’s girl, is another matter. Mila was white, and Mila was sleeping with a drug lord. Mila will be a person of interest.
Lola’s fingers lift cushions of bagged white bread and sweating jugs of milk into her flimsy basket.
“Lola?”
Veronica. The only women out shopping at this hour are over fifty. The girlfriends are asleep in twisted sheets, sticky from a night of trying to keep their men at home.
Veronica kisses Lola on the mouth and asks, “What are you doing here so early?”
“Shopping.”
Veronica makes a face at the white bread in Lola’s basket. “What you gonna make with that?”
Veronica makes migas for breakfast, and her lunch meats keep company with tortillas. Lola knows this, because Veronica made lunch for a schoolgirl Lola at least three times a week. In Veronica’s mind, white bread should have no place in Lola’s home.
“French toast,” Lola mumbles, and Veronica frowns. It irks Lola that the older woman’s judgment stings.
“Maybe you can fatten up your brother,” Veronica says, shrugging.
“What?” Lola’s voice comes out too loud. Juanita looks up from her place at the register, and Juan turns down the vent. Are they trying to eavesdrop?
“Hector’s too thin.” Veronica tsks, a small cluck with her tongue to the back of her lips.
You fix him then, Lola wants to say, but she doesn’t want Veronica accepting the challenge. Hector is her child to screw up, then fix again.
“Lola,” Veronica says, pulling her into the freezer aisle, where iced, meat-filled doughs and frozen pizzas surround them. Now Juanita peers over her register and Juan his grill, information as much a commodity to them as the tacos and cheap groceries they peddle. “The man at the barbecue—”
“A friend,” Lola says, knowing Veronica is referring to El Coleccionista.
“Bullshit,” Veronica says. “We didn’t raise you blind.”
“ ‘We’ didn’t raise anyone.”
“You’re too hard on your mother,” Veronica says, but the words are rehearsed, recited, meaning nothing. Veronica believes her best friend, Maria, ruined her children’s lives, and for that, she will never forgive her. Still, obligation forces her to utter this same sentence every time one of Maria’s offspring dares to imply she wasn’t a good mother. Because they are her children, and she is their mother, and that is the way of it.
“Okay. He’s cartel. So what?”
“So the ladies of the community are concerned. About his…leadership.”
“Garcia knows what he’s doing,” Lola says.
“He gets in bed with the cartel, chica, he’s not the only one who’ll suffer.” Veronica pulls Lola closer, as if she’s divulging a secret, which of course she’s not. “Did you know Los Liones comes after families, too?”
“Garcia knows what he’s doing,” Lola repeats. She wishes she could tell Veronica the truth—that she, Lola, is the leader of the Crenshaw Six, and that she knows what the fuck she’s doing and would Veronica just lay off for once? She is so close, then she thinks of Kim, and of the bullet she, Lola, put between Garcia’s ex-girlfriend’s
brother’s eyes. She thinks of Kim’s monthly phone calls to those poor overworked detectives who complimented Lola’s coffee. She thinks of how, if Kim knew Lola was really running things, Kim would know, somehow, who had murdered her brother. Kim would scour the seven hundred thousand acres of the Angeles National Forest herself. And Kim would turn Lola in. Lola is safer in the shadows, because her own neighborhood doesn’t know to put a target on her back.
Los Liones, of course, is a different story, because they do come after families, and she has sixty-eight hours to live.
“You put a lot of faith in one man,” Veronica is saying.
Lola doesn’t respond. She reaches behind Veronica’s puffy black hair, streaked with frazzles of gray, and grabs a package of ice cream sandwiches. The box seems to wilt as soon as she takes it out of the freezer case. Even with the window unit blowing cold air, it is still summer inside Mamacita’s.
When she reaches the register, Juanita Amaro pretends to add some figures on a calculator. Juan turns back to his grill.
Lola places her basket on the counter, her shoulder sinking as the weight is lifted. She hadn’t noticed the weight until it was gone.
“This all?” Juanita asks, painting on a smile. She has a missing front tooth she can’t afford to get fixed.
“Eight tacos, pork and beef,” Lola says, reaching for her wallet. Then, to her own surprise, “How’s Lucy?”
“Huh?” Juanita asks, the smile gone.
“Lucy. How is she?”
A look passes between the old couple, and it takes a moment for Lola to realize she’s not breathing.
“She’s fine,” Juanita recovers.
“Back with her mother,” Juan says, looking down at his wrinkled hands and greasy apron. So Lucy is with Rosie, the Amaros’ junkie daughter. Lola recognizes the look between the couple as shared shame. But Rosie is Lucy’s mother. What else could they do?
Still, the fact that they let her go angers Lola.
“Forget the tacos,” Lola says. Because what else can she do to punish them besides give them less of her dirty money?
Lola is surrounded by sick—a white electric stove with two burners, a dish rack, a refrigerator that rattles and hums its way through the thick summer heat, and the smell of dead fish coated in bright, strong lemon.
Lola hates this place. She scrubs at a stain that won’t come off the linoleum. The knees of her cargo pants are black from grime, her forehead coated in a slick sweat that will keep coming, she knows, hours after she leaves this shithole.
She has come here today, as she does every week, to commune with past sins, although the past sins are not her own. She atones because no one else will.
The bucket of soapy water has long since turned from clear and clean to dark and muddy. Lola tosses the scrub brush into the bucket, letting the dirty water slosh out the sides. She likes this feeling of leaving something a little unclean—it is the least she can do to spread a tiny torment of her own.
Lola grew up too fast in this kitchen, this house, and no matter how much industrial-grade, lemon-scented cleaner she uses, she can’t wash off the stink and the ruin that coat it—and her.
“I made tea.” The voice behind her is soft, feminine, faded. Her mother holds out a mug of lukewarm water and tepid brown swirls.
“Thank you,” Lola says, and she gets off her knees, because her mother doesn’t get to see her like that. She arches her back, letting her spine pop, and thinks twenty-six is too young for a body to make these noises. She has no doubt this is the place that aged her.
Lola takes a sip of the tea and wants to spit it out—it is some herbal crap that her mother has taken up, now that she’s clean and wants to imbibe anything that claims it will keep her that way. Yet what would it matter now if she were using? She has no children to raise, no job to go to. Maria Vasquez will die of some long illness that costs a lot of money and pain. Why couldn’t she have taken up heroin in her golden years, when it might even have done her some good, relieved her of some loneliness?
Lola says only, “It’s good.”
“Green tea with fenugreek,” Lola’s mother says, and then, because her mind hasn’t held on to the specific alleged attributes, adds only, “It’s good for you.”
“Tastes like it,” Lola says, hoping her mother understands the implied insult, but Maria Vasquez just looks through Lola to the dirty window behind her. She is clean, but her brain is Swiss cheese, with holes where there should be room for smiles and laughter and the memories of all the fucked-up shit she did when she was high.
“Place looks better,” Maria says. She is telling Lola she’s a good housekeeper, a good woman, doing what she is supposed to do—caring for her aging mother. Garcia’s mother is also aging, but she had sons—three of them, with three different fathers who disappeared the requisite year after their respective children were born. Granted, Garcia’s mother moved to Santa Fe years ago, but she cleans her own house and cooks her own meals. If she’d had daughters, Lola knows, she would do none of this—she would fade faster into their maternal care. She would stop moving. Then again, Garcia’s mother wasn’t a junkie, just a young girl who wasn’t careful with what little birth control she could get her hands on.
A timer dings, and Lola retrieves kitchen towels to remove a Pyrex dish from the oven. The enchiladas she’s made will feed her mother for the week. Maria can’t be trusted to keep useful kitchen items like oven mitts or ladles around the house. Lola buys them for her, and they disappear. Lola’s first thought is always Did she pawn them for drug money?, but what useless things to pawn. The heroin you could get for a couple of oven mitts would kill you, and the television, a fifty-inch flat screen courtesy of Garcia, is still mounted on the living room wall, watching over the tattered furniture that sags underneath even Lola’s insignificant weight.
“What happened to the oven mitts I bought you?” Lola asks her mother.
“I use paper towels.” Maria shrugs and sips her tea.
“Paper towels don’t keep your hands from burning.”
“Huh,” Maria says, as if she’s never realized this. If Lola gave a shit, she would go to her and turn her palms over to see if they were streaked red.
“Are you selling them?” Lola asks.
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. I buy them for you, but they’re not here. So where are they?”
“I don’t…I can’t remember,” Maria says as it finally dawns on her this conversation has jack shit to do with oven mitts.
“Forget it,” Lola says, because she always stops the conversation, whether it’s about oven mitts or getting out of the house or cleaning her own toilet, when her mother realizes Lola is telling her she’s a shitty person and she wishes she would just die.
Lola does not ever want to say that to her mother.
“What did you make?” Maria asks, falling back on etiquette, and Lola is thankful. She doesn’t want to think about the things she did on this dirty kitchen floor to earn Maria some smack money.
“Enchiladas.”
“I can’t have beef. My cholesterol.”
“They’re chicken,” Lola says. Growing up, she and Hector ate Spam and hot dogs and sugary fruit punch three times a day. They watched their mother shoot up. Lola did things with and to men, so Maria could shoot up. And now Maria’s concerned about her cholesterol.
Maria looks to her tea, maybe reading the brown swirls there. Then she says, “I’m sorry.” Lola doesn’t know what this particular sorry encompasses—her mother does apologize constantly now. She’s sorry about the dirty dishes in the sink, or the linoleum that won’t get clean, or that Lola has to come over here every week and make sure her conditions are livable, just because Lola is her daughter and these things are expected. “I should have known you’d remember about the beef.”
Lola prefers the apologies like this, doled out like a thousand tiny pinpricks to Maria’s heart. For an instant, Lola wants to take her mother in her arms and
squeeze until blood and guts and life fluid inch through her pores like garlic from a press. It is a mixture of love and hate, this thought, and it frightens Lola. She is used to only hate where her mother is concerned.
“Make sure you eat these enchiladas within the next three days. I don’t want you keeping spoiled food in your fridge.” Lola grabs her bag, a Prada knockoff that velcros shut.
“That’s it? You’re going, just like that?” Always wanting more, junkies.
Lola opens the back door to go, then, just to ruin her mother’s day, tosses it over her shoulder, “Hector’s in the hospital.”
Mamacita’s mingled smell of grease and salt, maybe from the ocean, maybe from food or urine, hits Lola’s nose again at seven a.m. the following morning. Forty-six hours to live. Or does she have forty-eight? She can’t remember. Being with her mother does that to her, makes her mind weak. She will err on the side of caution and go with forty-six.
She is standing outside the Amaros’ bodega with Kim and Veronica, mugs of cooling coffee in hand. Together with other Huntington Park residents, they form the audience for the clusterfuck of a death dance that’s happening behind the yellow crime-scene tape in front of them. Even though Huntington Park has its own police department, a dead white girl must warrant some kind of joint task force pissing contest. Huntington Park PD is here. LAPD is here. So are the sheriffs. Everyone must want to be a white girl’s hero.
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