The Flowers

by Dagoberto Gilb

  I nodded.

  “And in my experience, and by numbers, you aren’t cozy with your stepdaddy. Am I right?”

  I wasn’t sure how honest to be or why I should be. “It was my mom that married the dude,” I said.

  “There you go and there you have it, it’s what I’m saying, that’s how I understand it.” He got his breath close to me and would’ve put his hand on my shoulder if it wasn’t greasy. “Young brother, what we say to each other, it’s between us. You see what I’m saying?”

  I was looking at his scar, which could seem raw and wet.

  “Right?” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “All right, all right, that’s good, that’s real good, real good.”

  * * *

  I saw my mom, but I didn’t think she either heard the door or saw me because I was shooting through fast. She was dressed to go out again, only it was a dress I’d seen before. It didn’t even seem very new. She had too much perfume on, in my opinion, because once I was inside, I thought I remembered smelling it from outside. I wanted to tell her even as I was also wanting to pass by without saying nothing. It wasn’t like her, at least I didn’t remember her having so much smell ever before.

  I was already in the bedroom I slept in on the bed I slept on. I’d heard her when she said she wanted to talk to me but I closed the door like I didn’t. I did not want to talk.

  She opened the door. “Don’t you hear me?”

  “I guess not.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “Mad about what?”

  “There’s nothing,” she said, “so let’s drop it.”

  “I didn’t bring anything up.”

  “I have to go out,” she said, “but I won’t be very long.”

  “Okay,” I said. “See you.”

  “I’ll be back before Cloyd comes in.”

  I didn’t care.

  “If he comes in though. …”

  “I won’t say nothing.”

  “I was going to say. …”

  “What I’ll just say is you weren’t here when I got in.”

  “Okay, that’s good, thank you.”

  She was still standing there. “So?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said. “Este es algo que no te vas a gustar, que you won’t like.”

  “What? What is?”

  “What I have to talk about.”

  Nothing was being said. “I thought you were in a hurry,” I said.

  “Okay, es que … it’s that Gina, the woman who lives next door, who lives with Ben—”

  “The ones who live in Number Two. I know their names.”

  “Yes. Well, she came over. She said you’ve been stealing some magazines that belong to them.”

  “Whadaya mean that she said that? Did she say she saw me take magazines?”

  “I don’t know if she said she saw you. I think she says she thinks it’s you.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said.

  “That’s what I told her. I told her you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Good. Thanks.”

  “She says it couldn’t be anyone else.”

  “I don’t know why it could only be me.”

  “Well, what she says is that before we moved in, they never didn’t get the magazines. And now—”

  “Well, I didn’t do it.”

  “Bueno. I just wanted you to know what she said.”

  It made me mad. I didn’t like to be accused of shit. I decided to go out, get out of this bedroom I slept in.

  “Where you going?” she asked me on my way.

  “Out there,” I said.

  “I won’t be long tonight, okay m’ijo?”

  She wasn’t saying what she really wanted to say, which was about what to tell him.

  Though there wasn’t much blue sky, Mr. Josep was sunning himself on the deck outside his apartment and waved me over. As I went, he pushed his door open and dragged out another wooden chair. I went ahead and sat there next to him, but he wasn’t talking so it felt kind of awful, so much I swore I’d never be nice like this ever again. I was watching for my mom to move out and get in her car, but she didn’t. It was smoggy, so all you could see were electric poles that were close, a few pigeons on them. I could hear the TV on in Nica’s apartment, a Mexican talk show, but there was so much noise coming from everywhere, my ears hurt like all of it came from being near his chair.

  “How is school?”

  I wanted to fucking moan! “Fine.” I should’ve gotten up right then and ran. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to steal something. I wanted to go to his office and get that money.

  “School is best thing you do,” he said.

  I got up. “I better go do my work,” I said.

  “Wait. Sit one minute right here,” he said.

  I didn’t, but I didn’t walk away.

  “You like her, don’t you?”

  I didn’t really want to talk, I really didn’t. I nodded.

  He winked at me. It was stupid, an old man’s dumb wink.

  “Good when you are your age,” he said.

  I didn’t know or care what he meant, and I wished I weren’t there.

  “She is the bad woman,” he said, winking.

  It took me some seconds to realize he was talking about Cindy and I was talking about Nica.

  “I say bad,” he said, “and I mean good. Good for you for being a man.” He was smiling.

  I remembered that he saw her that day. I slowed my brain, came back.

  “Only you have to be careful,” he said. “You know, because of husband.” He wasn’t even looking at me. “Two or three days ago, it is me,” he said.

  I thought I heard him say two or three days ago, but that didn’t make sense.

  “He is bad,” he said. “I mean bad, bad for you. You understand?”

  Cindy’s TV was on, a game show that hurt the ears. The apartment was hating the noise too—drying pizza slices were curling up as they tried to escape the box, fast food bags were torn raw and cups flattened out, aluminum cans of beer and soda even wrinkled away and, the biggest losers, cigarettes were crushed in and on them. The apartment stank but not of a smell, not just of drugs and wine and beer but of something fucking up.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. She turned away from the door and flopped onto her couch, swinging her bare feet onto the cushions. “I didn’t know if you were ever going to visit me again.”

  “What?” I said, teasing.

  “I didn’t know. …”

  “What?”

  She turned the TV down.

  “I haven’t been seeing you around,” I said, the only thing I could think of saying. There were clothes hanging on chairs and at the edges of the floor. “Like down in the laundry room.”

  “So did you forget where my door is,” she said, “or how to knock on it?”

  I didn’t say anything back and the game show got quiet for a longer time than usual.

  “What’s been going on with you?” I asked her.

  “I’m lonely here, and I’m bored.”

  I nodded.

  She wanted me to say something else.

  “What’re you watching?” I asked.

  “Whatever’s on.”

  I was still standing, looking to not sit. Now I didn’t feel like staying either. Whatever brought me up here. I’d forgotten this fast. I think I’d been mad and now I wasn’t and I wanted to get out.

  She lit up one of her mota cigarettes. She smoked some, then she passed it to me. At first I didn’t think I would. Then we passed it back and forth a few times.

  Suddenly she wasn’t watching the show, she was watching me. “Come here.”

  Not thinking enough, I did.

  “Do it to me this time,” she whispered.

  I wasn’t sure what I heard because I’d never heard what I thought I just heard.

  She put my hand under her T-shirt
. Then she put her hand on me. She led me to the bedroom. She took off her top and her cut-off sweats—no underwear. She fell on her back but then just as quickly sat up. I hadn’t done anything yet but stand there. She dropped my pants and put her mouth on me. She pulled me onto her. She rolled us and got on top of me. Time passed. Still light out, a faded white coming through the curtain, it blackened in my brain, then the colors and shapes were crossing the back side of my eyes while I watched her and her body with the front of them. She whispered what to do, how hard, how soft. She moved my hands, made them like her hands touching herself, had them touch her where I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. When she said she wanted me, she made me want so much I ached like I lost something permanent in me down there, the pleasure hurting so much I couldn’t imagine it working ever again. Then, we did it all again, its world so far from where we really were, the light so far away from wherever that was.

  Until I remembered where I was. I remembered because the two eyes opened and there was a photo between the piles of envelopes and cream jars and shoe boxes and brushes and everything on and falling off a bedroom dresser. Of her and Tino, the drug dealer. I couldn’t look straight at him, into his photographed eyes, so I made mine go to his white teeth smiling and then my brain saw a rack of guns like Cloyd’s and then I imagined I heard one but I couldn’t hear it go off. Which is how it is, I heard.

  “I better get outta here,” I said, getting up fast. “You’re gonna get me killed.” I was a lot more scared than when I, like, took something.

  “He’s at work.” She didn’t care what I said, or she wasn’t worried, or she really didn’t care.

  “We don’t even know what time it is.”

  “It’s all right, he’s at work.”

  “But what if he comes home?” I might have sounded mad. I was almost dressed.

  “He’s at work,” she said again, but now she was getting up. “So you’re gonna leave right now? You’re gonna leave me here? Please don’t leave me here.”

  “What’re you saying I should do?”

  “Stay. We can watch TV.”

  “Watch TV?”

  “I don’t wanna be alone,” she said in a girly voice. “Please?”

  Now I was dressed, and we were both standing in the bedroom. I noticed his clothes all around the floor too.

  “Please?” she said. “I hate being alone. I’m alone all the time. Please keep me company, please stay. Please?”

  “I dunno.”

  “You don’t know how much I hate being by myself, I can’t.” She got close to me. She put her arms around me like it was Valentine’s Day and we didn’t do what we already did. She kissed me on the neck like she was my girlfriend. “I like you, Sonny. You know I like you, don’t you?”

  I felt the danger like I’d just felt the pleasure, only it hurt higher up, in the stomach. I felt the confusion like I wasn’t on my own feet.

  “He’ll never know,” she said. “I promise, Sonny. I promise not to tell him ever.”

  We walked into the living room together, but she turned toward the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. Another game show was on. She was saying something but I wasn’t listening. I sat on the edge of the couch and fought to tie my shoelaces. In one of his T-shirts, she came over smiling, thinking I’d changed my mind. Not for a second did I think of staying. “I gotta go,” I said, and I was out the door.

  Cloyd was in his office, and he spun and squeaked in his metal swivel chair as I tried to get by his office door.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  I wanted so much to get to that room where I could just lie on that bed. “I dunno, man.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that!”

  It was like I got hit in the face but I didn’t feel the pain there yet. It’s that I was not expecting him to yell like that. I wasn’t even sure what I’d said.

  “You talk to me with respect, you understand?” He was standing up.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know I wasn’t.”

  “Don’t ever talk to me like that again!”

  He was drunk, the red in the bulbs of his eyes at the bottom like it sank down there, or they were the roots growing off the blue above. I nodded at him but turned my sight away. I was too afraid to walk off and I wanted to so bad.

  “Goddamnit,” he said. He was still fuming. “Goddamnit!” he said again even louder, swirling his whiskey around the one ice cube so hard I thought it would come over the lip.

  I hated that I was afraid to leave, to scratch an itch. I hated him.

  “You don’t know where your mother is?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What?”

  “No sir.” It’s that I couldn’t think of what else to say.

  “Where the hell is she?” he said.

  When he finally turned to me I shook my head.

  “So where the hell is she?”

  “I dunno,” I told him. “She wasn’t here when I got home either.”

  “She wasn’t?”

  “No sir.”

  “Where the hell would she be?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, I shook my head. I hated him, I hated this fucking asshole. Now I didn’t even want to go to that bedroom I stayed in. Now I didn’t know where I should go to get away. That’s when we both heard her Mercury rolling down the driveway.

  I couldn’t go to that bedroom. I wasn’t about to stay in this apartment.

  Then my mom came through the back door anyways.

  “I didn’t say nothing,” I told her as softly as I could as she came in. I think she heard me, too.

  Nica was sitting there beside Mr. Josep. She was outside. What would she be doing outside? It was almost dark enough that I wasn’t trusting it was her for a few seconds.

  He waved for me to come up, like they’d been waiting for me there.

  “I tell her about Russia,” he said. “I tell her about when I am in Russia.”

  “You are?” I asked him.

  A tiny red light was blinking into the glass of her apartment window, a reflection, a blip between and under the electrical poles. It seemed like I was the only one distracted by it because it reminded me of the Cloyd’s bloodshot eyes. “Is everything okay?” I asked her. I said that in English. She was outside. I’d never seen her outside her apartment. It was like seeing her in a new way. It made me think everything could change for the better.

  “It is not what you think about Russia. I was young and I came from Spain.” He said that in Spanish, which I couldn’t believe, which I couldn’t understand for a second, because he still had an accent that was like having a full mouth.

  “Spain?” I said.

  “I want to live in Spain,” Nica said in Spanish.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  I stayed in Spanish too. “I don’t. I don’t think so. But I don’t think about it much. It’s that I think about France.” They both listened. They didn’t laugh. “Paris, France. I want to go to Notre Dame, you know, the church, not where they play football.”

  They both stared at me but not like I was a nutcase, and neither of them laughed. It was more like they wondered if I said what I meant.

  “I wish my name was Carmen,” Nica said.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you think it’s a beautiful name?”

  “It is a beautiful name,” said Mr. Josep. “Very beautiful name and very beautiful music.”

  “I am going to name my daughter Carmen,” she said.

  “But you’re not from Spain, are you?” I asked him.

  “I want to tell you a story,” Mr. Josep said.

  “About Spain?” she asked.

  Mr. Josep was all hyped up in his voice, but his body was as wooden as the chair he sat on.

  “No, no, I am talking about Russia. Hear me. It is beautiful, it is beautiful story.”

  “He was going to tell us a love story,” Nica said.

  I couldn’t believe sh
e was standing outside.

  “Yes,” he said, “yes! Hear me! I was with her.” He turned his head, like he was checking on something on the other side of the walls of his apartment. He did have a wife who was always inside. “Her name,” he started, putting his finger to his lips and shaking his head so little that it wouldn’t make noise or something, “is Alexandra, Sasha. I am in love with her. I am afraid she does not love me. I am afraid she does not like me. She is more beautiful than I deserve. The Russian people, the Russian women, they are beautiful, beautiful. I don’t want to scare her and I don’t know what she is feeling with me. She is a good girl in the heart and the spirit, and we are taking a walk. We have not kissed, and I am afraid even to hold her hand. I do though. Does she like me? I do not know, I do not know. We are walking and since I am not from there, she leads me to the river. It is named the Neva River, and it is stupendous. Rich like the most beautiful black hair, which is more black than black, and on its surface the whitest light hits it, like jewels floating on top of small little waves. It is evening but the sun never sets in the summer, it is always in the sky, always daylight and hot. We are sitting at the bank of the river, at the edge of granite rock. Our feet are hanging and the river is splashing us only a little. It cools us from the heat to sit there. It is very peaceful and, like a poem, very romantic. Sasha is sitting next to me. She is close but not yet close enough and I wish I can kiss her but I am afraid because I don’t know and I do not want to spoil what I have. Because I am happy. Look how this is, you see? I am happy to be alive, to be with her thus. But then, wait, you see? I look and I see it. Up the river, an object is floating. I am not sure what it is until I see it and, yes, I am sure that it is a dog. It is a big dog. I don’t want her to see it and I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want to leave but I am afraid if she sees this dog she will want to run, go and go, and this time of us together will be over. The dog is coming toward us in the river. I am sorry to see the dead dog but in truth I am not thinking of the dog, I am not. I am thinking that our time together can all be destroyed, and that it is our destiny to be destroyed, dead as the dog. Then, yes, finally, it cannot be stopped, she sees it. ‘Oh, Josep, look!’ she says. She is breathing with sadness, exactly as I believed she would, and she has put a hand over her mouth. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it is a poor dog.’ The dead dog is not twenty-five feet away, floating down the river. It is dead, dead. But it is not as you are thinking. Instead of wanting to leave, Sasha moves closer to me. Closer. She puts her arm around me, and she rests her hair on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her, which she wants. Now it is better! The dog is dead, yet I am lucky because I am in love and I feel as a man full of his strength.”