Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  DEDICATION

  For Tom, and for the cantaloupes

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Rebecca Podos

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Before fireworks from our pack of Roman Candles, Sky Flyers, and Screaming Meemies bloom above the roofs.

  Before the booms echo inside of us on the front lawn.

  Before she lays her hand on my chest and asks, “Did you feel that one? Did you feel that?”

  Before I

  Before she

  Before we

  ONE

  Before everything else was New Year’s morning three years ago, in the subarctic dining room at Silvia’s. Crumbs clung to my gloves as I poured tortilla chips into baskets, shivering in my pink peacoat and beanie. The thermocouple on our furnace was broken, so Dad was in the back office, scrambling to get ahold of our repair guy before we opened at noon. In the meantime, my fingers were Popsicle sticks, my breath a cloud. There’d been snow in the air since Christmas, and everything was pale and hard with frost. Even the sun was white in a milky sky.

  Out-of-towners were always surprised by the cold in New Mexico. “Isn’t this the desert?” they whined. “Isn’t it supposed to be sand and sun and margaritas?”

  Yeah, right. Winters could be bitter up north—especially on the scrubby plains where our three-traffic-light town squatted—and the wind would blow you away.

  While I shivered and poured the chips, Jake Mosqueda leaned across the counter. No coat for him; in his scuffed cowboy boots and with his work apron dangling casually from the waist strings, he looked maximally cool. Which was the whole point, of course.

  He tugged on a strand of hair that spiraled out below my beanie. “Princesita! Let me get those.” Jake stacked chip baskets three-deep along his brown forearms, the scar on his knuckles shining under the restaurant lights. Tourists who stumbled through on their way to somewhere better probably thought he’d earned it wrangling cattle, or in an old-timey bare-knuckle boxing match.

  I happened to know it was from reckless flirting and gesticulating near a pot of Dad’s pozole rojo as it simmered on the stove.

  “How’s school?” Jake asked, drifting alongside me.

  “School?”

  “Yeah, how’s art or fractions or whatever?”

  As if I was a four-year-old instead of his bosses’ fourteen-and-a-half-year-old daughter. I was plenty old enough to work regular shifts in the restaurant, child labor laws be damned (not a single business in La Trampa cared about those). And I was old enough to kiss—and occasionally dry-hump—Max Binali behind the high school cafeteria.

  “Great. They’re teaching us shapes now,” I said slowly. “Maybe colors next.”

  “Cool, cool.” He handed me baskets one by one to set on the tables between salt and pepper shakers shaped like little glass cacti.

  The tourists loved them.

  “So I’ve got this problem,” Jake continued, in a way that told me it was soon to be my problem.

  Technically, I owed Jake. After my shift the Friday before, he’d given Diana Reyes, Marilee Smith, and me a ride to a party in the arroyo, the three of us piled on top of one another in the passenger seat of his old truck. This was nothing new. Since preschool, we’d spent most of our spare time piled on top of one another in our backyards, bedrooms, and closets. We ate at the same table in the cafeteria and sat together in every class. On weekends, we played popcorn on Diana’s trampoline, even after we were too big and too heavy and Mrs. Reyes was constantly shouting out the back window for us to behave like ladies. We learned to do our makeup in Marilee’s bathroom, perched on the rim of her tub, passing around disks of blush she got from her mother; my mom’s makeup drawer held nothing but sunblock and the tube of Riveting Rose lipstick she wore when she was especially nervous, but wanted to pretend she wasn’t. And Diana’s super-religious mom didn’t believe in “girls painting themselves like rameras.” A ramera was the worst thing you could be in that household (a marihuano was the second).

  Anyway, there was a zero percent chance Mrs. Reyes would have given us a ride to the party. My parents were working, and Marilee’s big sister was in Albuquerque. Which is why Jake dropped us off on Jimeno Road, already freezing and pinching down the shortest skirts we owned. (Diana’s still reached the tips of her fingers with straightened arms.) We crunched along the slope of the dry streambed, rocks and dead weeds rolling away under our boots. At the bottom, Max Binali and a bunch of his fellow juniors sat on overturned shopping carts, gulping out of red plastic cups. “Ladies,” Max said, and nodded. Then he pointed us toward the keg.

  Typical boy. He’d written my name on his thumb in Sharpie the day before, and all of a sudden he couldn’t remember it.

  In hindsight, the favor hadn’t been worth it, but I doubted Jake would take that into consideration. He clasped my gloved hand in his. “Talk to your daddy, princesita. He does whatever you ask. Tell him to give me more Friday and Saturday nights.”

  “Why?”

  “The tips! Tell him customers have been asking for me. Please?” He pressed his lips to my curled fingers. “I’m saving for this guitar I saw at that place in La Cienega, Fender Bender. Maybe I’ll play for you when you’re a grown-up.”

  I snorted in the most un-grown-up way.

  Jake thought he was hot shit, and okay, most girls agreed. With dimples like canyons and blue-black hair waving loosely around his ears, I could see it. I wasn’t blind. But I knew him, and he was exactly like every other kid in La Trampa who’d stayed stuck.

  Anyone here could tell you that townies did one of three things after they graduated:

  1. Skip college and work for the family business, be it a restaurant, a trailer-size plant nursery, or the Turquoise Depot, all contained within the four square miles of La Trampa proper.

  2. Go to community college or trade school while living over their parents’ garage, then work for somebody else’s family business.

  3. Move away to a big city, make one scary mistake—a lost job, a maxed-out credit card, a DUI—then come home tuck-tailed. Maybe get lucky and snag a spot at that new mini-golf course in Española, or the hotel hiring in Pojoaque.

  For Jake Mosqueda, it’d been door number three. Right after high school, where he’d been the only reasonably good football player his senior year, and thus, a star, he’d gone to Austin for six whole months. Then he got busted for drinking underage, when the bar where he worked was raided. In December, he came swaggering back to all this fanfare, like he was some hometown hero returning to La Trampa after the War. But, really, he was just another number three.

  Funny(ish) story: Technically, our hometown isn’t La Trampa. Its real name is El Trampero, “The Trapper” in English, named after some fur trappers who founded the town. But none of the kids call it that. We call it La Trampa, the trap. And for good reason. Jake might’ve made it out into the world, but he hadn’t made it very far, or lasted very long. A common problem.

>   Me, I had the Plan in place to stop it from becoming mine.

  Jake didn’t impress me, but I did owe him, so I sighed and followed him to the back to talk to Dad. As if he needed my help. Mysteriously, Dad liked Jake. Maybe because, while I loved my father, he was also townie to the bone.

  Stuffed inside the cubby of an office, he sat with his feet propped on the desk and the phone in hand, pleading with our hungover HVAC guy to work on a holiday.

  “Ayúdame, Julian. I’ve got no heat here.” He sighed, dropped the phone to his shoulder, and told us, “On hold. Think he went to throw up.”

  “Gross, Dad.”

  “Need something?”

  “Yeah, just, Jake and I were talking about Friday and Saturday shifts and how me and Estrella always work them, and I thought—”

  “Un momento,” he interrupted, holding up a palm, then grumbled into the speaker, “¡Por supuesto que estoy todavía aqui!”

  I winced at the growl in his voice. My dad wasn’t what you’d call “chatty.” He’d told me stories about my grandfather, who I never met, and my grandmother, who I barely got the chance to meet. How they moved up to La Trampa from Tijuana before Dad was born. How they knew English when they came, but never mastered figures of speech. If Dad told his parents their football team was “on fire,” they’d look at him in horror. “Who was on fire? What fire? ¿Estás bien?” they’d ask. Dad grew up rationing his words and picking them practically, whereas Mom would happily babble to the repair guy, to tourists, to the woman in line behind her at the grocery store.

  So sure, Dad is quiet, but he’s never been cranky.

  “I’ll try again later,” I said to Jake, and turned to hustle him out of the office, but his stupidly broad body was bottlenecking the door.

  “Why, what—”

  We both jumped as Dad swept his legs from the desk, his boots thundering against the tiled floor. “Escúchame, pendejo,” he yelled. “I’ve got a freezing-cold restaurant. Get your ass out of bed and do your job. ¿Me entiendes?” He slammed the phone onto the cradle, propped his elbow on the desk, and knuckled his forehead, fingers pulsing into a jittery fist, clenching and unclenching and clenching.

  “You okay, Mr. Espinoza?” Jake piped up, as confused as I was.

  “Sorry, kids. Just a head-splitter. Too much partying last night.”

  Sure, that would do it. Except that when Marilee’s mother drove me back from their house just after midnight, my parents were already sound asleep, and there was maybe a pair of Coors cans shining in the recycling bin.

  “No te preocupes,” Dad reassured us, slipping into his usual voice, low but soft. “Vanni, take the trash out for me, would you? You already got your coat on.”

  By the Dumpster behind Silvia’s, the spiny shrubs were swollen with frost. I snapped a tube of ice off one of the branches and let it break at my feet, picturing places where the world really was sand and sun all year round. Not that I knew them from experience. I’d never been east of Texas or west of the Arizona border or north of Taos. Never been on a plane, and the only train I’d ridden was the Rail Runner from Santa Fe to Albuquerque.

  But I had the Plan. To not be a one, a two, or a three.

  In three and a half years I’d graduate, and then I’d go away to school. Not in the desert. I’d go to the East Coast, or to California. A coast, at least. I already knew my parents couldn’t give much, but my grades were good, and I had what Mrs. Short, our principal, called “important extracurriculars.” Teachers would write nice recommendations when I applied to colleges.

  And I had swimming.

  I wasn’t, like, an Olympic hopeful. No way would I get scouted. To my eternal disappointment, El Trampero High was too small for a team. Decent bodies of water were rare in my little corner of the state, man-made or otherwise. But for years when I was a kid, my parents took turns driving the hour round trip to Bicentennial in Santa Fe to bring me to swim lessons. And I’d done some competitions with the Santa Fe Aquatic Club. I could have Dad film me and show the coach the reel, do well in tryouts, get at least a partial scholarship to squeeze me through. My laptop’s search history was stuffed with Division II schools with ocean views.

  And after that . . . ?

  It’s not like I hated life in the restaurant, or in La Trampa. My parents were cooler than expected, and I had my best friends, and a lot of bonus friends besides. I had Max, kind of. At least I was pretty sure he’d ask me to his junior prom in the spring. I was on the baton squad, had been on the freshman Homecoming Court in the fall. So I wasn’t miserable or anything on New Year’s Day 2014. Far from it.

  But I knew with my whole heart I wasn’t supposed to be una pueblerina, topping off horchatas and arguing with the HVAC guy at Silvia’s when I was Dad’s age.

  Graduation would be like swim, I was certain. I’d step up onto the block and take my mark, the whistle would sound, and with shoulders relaxed and palms flat out, I’d dive headfirst into the world, warm and waiting, lapping up around my ears, whispering, “Welcome, Savannah Espinoza.”

  TWO

  We stand in the grass-flecked dust beyond the abandoned football field of El Trampero High on the last day of senior year, a fact I’m on the way to forgetting until a husky voice whispers in my ear, breath hotter than the air around us, “What if somebody sees?”

  A fair question. We’re partially sheltered by a copse of mesquite, but not exactly invisible. I can see the dull gleam of the bleachers through the branches, the CONGRATULATIONS, SENIORS! banner still strung up across the scoreboard, the small patch of folding chairs still in neat rows on the field, now cleared of people. If anybody wandered too close to the trees—maybe a janitor cleaning up after the ceremony—and if they bothered to look, I know exactly what they’d see: me, mud-brown graduation cap pressed low on my forehead, mud-brown robes flung open around my jean miniskirt and sleeveless black shirt, unbuttoned up to my bra.

  And a tan, muscled hand snaking around my hips, burrowing beneath my skirt, strong fingers sliding against my zipper.

  I lean into him, trying to feel Jake Mosqueda’s belt buckle through the layers of polyester and denim between us. The ground below burns the soles of my feet, my heels abandoned on the field. “So what?”

  “Your mother will murder you.” His fingers dip a little lower.

  “I’m eighteen.”

  “Yeah, for three whole weeks,” he laughs. Lower, his fingers strum the elastic waist of my underwear. “Well, then she’ll murder me.”

  “Good. Maybe then we can hire a waiter who doesn’t bang all the waitresses.”

  The hand starts to withdraw. “Come on, princesita. You know I’m only about you. You’re the one who doesn’t want a boyfriend.”

  “Don’t call me that.” I wrap my fingers around his wrist, keeping it in place. I know for a fact that he and Estrella rocked Silvia’s two-stall girls’ room during their shift break last week, because I had to cover my tables and the front door, and then I had to help Estrella tuck her tag into her pearl-buttoned shirt when she emerged. But who cares, because he’s right.

  Jake Mosqueda is not my boyfriend.

  Max Binali is not my boyfriend.

  Oriel Trejo is not my boyfriend.

  Will Fischer is not my boyfriend.

  Jaime Aguilar is not my boyfriend.

  The hand plunges and I forget them all and the whole world with them.

  Plodding down Calle Tamara toward the restaurant, I slightly regret sending Jake and his rust-bucket truck on ahead. I’m hotter and damper now than I was sitting on the football field while Mrs. Short droned on about our bright futures.

  As I’m patting my cheeks to check my eyeliner for sweat slippage, a too-familiar car pulls up alongside me. Diana leans over the passenger side of Marilee’s red Sebring convertible; her dad’s until last year, when he sobered up from his midlife crisis.

  “Umm, hey Vanni, do you need a ride or something?” she asks, while Ma
rilee inspects her signature baby-pink lipstick in the rearview mirror. They’ve ditched their caps and robes for the senior party in the arroyo.

  In another world, like a next-door dimension where one tiny butterfly of a thing is different and so everything is different, I would’ve been in the backseat. In fact, who am I kidding? I never rode bitch. I would’ve been in the front, Diana happily and obediently scrunched up behind us.

  “That’s okay. I’m just going to work.” I point up the road.

  “Right now?” Diana frowns. “But it’s graduation! Aren’t you coming to the party?”

  Marilee cranes her neck around Diana to eyeball me with the barest flash of recognition. I heard she’s starting in the teaching program at UNM in September. Diana’s sticking around to work at her parents’ two-man accounting firm; the only accountants in the county, they do everybody’s taxes and know everybody’s dirty business, which pleases Mrs. Reyes endlessly. Diana will sit with them every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening in the pews of the Shrine of Our Lady Parish, the church on our side of town—La Trampa has three Catholic churches, almost one per square mile—and probably marry one of the acolytes within a year or two.

  In a next-door dimension, I would’ve dragged her out of town with me by her frizzy brown hair. Instead, I wave them off. “Maybe I’ll show up later.”

  “Okay, well, say hi to your mom.” Diana smiles sweetly. Marilee speeds away, hair billowing behind her, the cloud of dust from her tires settling over my sweaty robes.

  Probably I deserved that. When I stopped talking to them last year, stopped answering their texts, switched cafeteria tables and class partners, Marilee took it hard. It wasn’t a cakewalk for me, either.

  But I had my reasons. When the Plan became a nonstarter, the last people I wanted around were the ones who’d helped form the Plan in the first place. And who could blame me for that?

  I step carefully around a patch of sidewalk glittering with broken glass, keeping my eyes on the ground.

  As I push through the door at Silvia’s, Jake immediately busies himself brushing imaginary dust off the little podium—today he’s playing host. Chalking the specials on the blackboard beside him, Mom turns and blinks at me in the bright doorway. “Vanni? What are you doing here?” Her dark hair beats against her shoulder in a careless braid as she walks toward me. Over the other shoulder, an ancient dish towel with faded flowers. She looks the way she always looks: beautiful and tired and determined. “I told you to go celebrate with your girlfriends!”