Before the End, After the Beginning by Dagoberto Gilb

Author:Dagoberto Gilb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2012-10-16T16:00:00+00:00

WHY KIKI WAS

LATE FOR LUNCH

I had to stop at the Shamrock on the corner of Las Americas and this woman comes up to me while I’m putting in gas and says can I give her a ride to pick up her check. I say no, no I can’t. What does it mean if she’s telling me she wants to pick up a check? Who would care, who should? A check isn’t an appointment with a hospital or court or picking up a daughter or son at school, not even a lost doggie. She’s kind of pacing nervous around there, and I can’t tell if she’s waiting for someone or a cab, though not a bus, because there’s no bus stop here. Then I thought I should take her, because I realized I’d been too mean to somebody too fast. So I call her over and say where do you have to go. Only to Copia, she tells me, and I tell her to go ahead and come on. I’m thinking I will drop her off at the exit and I even tell her I’m going to have to drop you off right there on Copia so I can get right back onto I-10 because I’m in a hurry to get over to the westside. Her name is Iris. I don’t think she really cared what I said but like it or not it was all I was going to do. I’m not sure how comfortable I will be with her in my car but she is the one quickly talking about what a beautiful day it is—I guess it was and with the windows down, the air feels fresh and cool—and she’s saying how her family never noticed anything like this, they are so selfish and care about themselves and not really even about each other enough. She gave an example of a cook-out on Saturday and the fight that her brother-in-law got in with their cousin because he is dating some ex-girlfriend, which got her sister mad, too. She is living in Odessa now and was here just for a few days because of their dad having cancer and also because she’s so homesick, especially for some tamales from Rosie’s. I told her that, yeah, of course I’d eaten tamales from there, everybody loves those. Iris liked them best during Christmas and she tells me her mom and her aunts, when they make them, they think theirs are so much better. When she asks I say, yeah, I do go to Kiki’s across the street, too, a lot, to be honest. I like to go there and not only because that’s my nickname, too. She ­really went on like I maybe owned the restaurant and wasn’t telling her. I tell her would I be driving this if I owned it? She thought I was funny but when could I be if she hadn’t stopped talking?

I don’t know why I expected her to be walking south on Copia after I

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