A Permanent Member of the Family by Russell Banks

Author:Russell Banks [Banks, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Retail, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9780061857652
Google: CSsTAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0061857653
Barnesnoble: 0061857653
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2013-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

BLUE

Ventana steps off the number 33 bus at 103rd Street and Northwest Seventh Avenue in Miami Shores. It’s almost 6:00 P.M., and at this time of year the city stays hot and sticky thick till the sun finally sets at 8:00. She walks quickly back along Seventh, nervous about carrying so much cash, thirty-five one-hundred-dollar bills. She doesn’t want to pay for the car with a check and then have to wait till the check clears before she can drive it home—no way a used-car dealer who doesn’t know her personally will accept a check from a black woman and let her take the goods home before the check clears. She wants the car now, today, so she can drive to work at Aventura tomorrow and for the first time park in the employees’ lot and on Sunday after church drive her own damn car, drive her own damn car, to the beach at Virginia Key with Gloria and the grandkids.

The credit union closed at four so she took the money—one hundred dollars a month secretly saved over nearly three years—out of her account during her lunch break and later in the American Eagle ladies’ room stashed the packet of thirty-five bills in her brassiere. She wore a high-necked rayon blouse, even though she knew the day would be hot as Hades and the air-conditioning in the buses would likely be busted or weak. The number 33 at seven o’clock in the morning leaving from her block in Miami Shores to the number 3 in North Miami all the way out to Aventura Mall and then back again over the same route in late afternoon, early in the day or late, air conditioner working or not, it didn’t matter, she’d be in a serious sweat just from walking from the bus stop across the long lot to the entrance of the mall and back. And the day was hot from early to late, and she did sweat more than if she wore a sleeveless blouse or T-shirt, but she got through the afternoon with no one at American Eagle Outfitters knowing about the money she was carrying and is relieved now to be walking up Seventh and finally arriving at the gate of Sunshine Cars USA with the money still intact in her bra.

She’s forty-seven years old and for twenty-five of those years has been a legally licensed driver in the state of Florida, but this will be the first car Ventana has ever owned herself. Her ex-husband, Gordon, when she was still married to him leased a new Buick every three years and let her drive it with him riding in the backseat as if she were his chauffeur; her son, Gordon Junior, when he went into the Navy bought a new Camaro with his enlistment bonus and parked it in her driveway and let her drive it while he was at sea until he couldn’t afford to insure it anymore and had to sell it; and for a

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