Where is Nancy? I don’t know why she’d think it’d be okay to meet up in a closet. The plan was for her to get here as soon as the cantico ended. That was five minutes ago. Good thing my watch still lights up otherwise time would be an issue.
She’s been eyeing me since her family switched over to our congregation. At first it was only her sisters and mom coming to the meetings. Both of them light skinned like my mom’s prized china set—the one with the deep blue, hand-painted waves. The waves, like the hermanas, were calm and cool but you could sense ferocity by their bodies, the roll of their eyes; they would break and bend themselves in ways that would both calm and drown you. Both of the sisters were too cool to talk to anybody. The other witnesses thought they were stuck up.
Nancy got braver and approached more frequently ever since her dad started coming to the congregation, but I wasn’t worried. He liked me, attended a few of my bible studies, and always invited me to preach. He would even serve me a plate at some of the witness functions—something my mom had stopped doing years back. “Ve y sirvete tu,” she’d say.
I can only see the orange fluorescent light coming through the crack under the door, looking like the fideo my ma makes.. This maintenance closet is cramped and my ass hurts from sitting on the sink. It smells like wet mop and lavender Fabuloso. I wonder what she’s waiting for. She’s the one who slipped me the note when I dropped my bible this past Thursday at the Hermano Cuevas’ house.
She always wore a black shirt with form fitting faldas. Her hair was always in a bun and sometimes she’d wear big hoops like the ones my sister and her white friend would wear. She slipped the paper in my crappy lil’ hard cover bible with the ghost white pages. I hated it—the rigidness of the cover, the fake leather and rectangular shape. How could something with so many words be so empty? Maybe it wasn’t the book that did that. Maybe it was the people speaking on behalf of the book. The note said, “Meet me in the closet after the second cantico.” It even had a glossy pink kiss on it.
This isn’t the first time. Before we were behind the congregation swapping spit underneath the moon and the stars that the streetlights on 26th street hid from us.
I can hear my mom making some commentario about the hijo projimo and the sound reverberates through the salón. I remember after the first time me and Nancy met— “cuida tus miembros,” she harped. But my miembros needed some love, and I couldn’t be the last of my friends to lose it. Plus I already lied to them saying I did it, just like I lied to Nancy about getting high before meetings.
I should go but maybe I’ll wait a bit. This place stinks. I wonder how much longer she’ll be. My mom is going to beat the crap out me when I get home. My dad will probably have to opt in to being a parent for once. I hope she’s okay—Nancy. She once told me how much she hated her dad because he used to beat her mom and how now that he’s a witness he thinks himself the centerpiece, the cabeza de la familia, the glue—even though in my experience glue never keeps anything together. I hope my mom is okay too.
There’s the final cantico. From here, it sounds like the ocean. I wonder where Nancy is, and if she’ll meet me elsewhere. The white china collects dust in a locked cabinet near a picture of me and my sisters and Alexis before he died, there’s small fire burning underneath starlit sky and in this moment Nancy and me are doing things we normally couldn’t do. I’d like to know her favorite color, at some point. My father is caressing my mother’s face. He holds her to his chest, syncing his every breath with hers, and he holds her and everything she bears with a great care so as to not break it. And my mother accepts this. She buries her head in his chest–her ear so close she can feel the warmth of his blood. She mouths words I cannot hear and he catches them in his ears the way his mouth caught droplets from the spigot other families’ homes on hot days his family had no water. I try to mirror his actions as the strength of the waves sends sand onto our sun-kissed faces. I want to hold her how people do in the movies.
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Ruben Miranda-Juarez Jr. is a Chicago born but Cicero raised mexirican writer currently residing in Washington State. He graduated from DePaul University in 2015 and cites Francesca Royster and Billy Johnson Gonzalez as key figures in helping him grow as writer and person. He hopes to con an MFA program into letting him in so that he can teach the youth cool stuff.
Photo: Jeremy Bishop
