How to Leave Hialeah (Iowa Short Fiction Award) by Jennine Capó Crucet

Author:Jennine Capó Crucet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-12T19:34:00+00:00

They put their towels on the sand, which felt hard-packed beneath them. This part of Miami Beach was old, but like so much of Dade County, it still clung to the idea of glamour, choosing to ignore the years when police cars cruised right on the sand, pounding the shore worse than any natural wave. This half-dead beach is where Hector dropped their things. Yamila was surprised to see so many people there on a Wednesday, though she knew a weekend day would be much worse. The condition of coming on a weekday had made Hector finally agree to come to the beach at all; that, and her promise to show him that at thirtynine, she could still pull off wearing a bikini. They found a spot not too close to any of the groups of teenagers, whose towels and boom boxes and shining bodies dotted the sand.

Hector's towel snapped in the wind as he put it down, and he walked around all four sides of it, pressing down on each corner with the toe from his bad leg, balancing his weight on the good one. Yamila used several of his mother's Tupperware-still full of food-to anchor the edges. Rap music competed with reggaeton and salsa, but from where they sat, they couldn't tell the music apart from the teenage voices yelling around them. Hector lowered himself to the ground, his track pants making plasticky noises as his legs fumbled against each other, until he was finally down with his legs stretched out in front of him. Yamila stared at his feet, at the yellowed toenails; she could see clearly the threeinch difference in leg length. He flexed the foot of the bad leg, so that the lengths evened out.

Yamila had wanted to ignore his limp when they'd first met almost a month before. She worked as a bank teller, and he'd come in to cash a check. She'd first thought, as he approached her counter, that he was limping on purpose, trying to walk with some style to make himself seem younger, but instead crossing over into parody. As he walked away from her, she'd changed her mind; maybe it was a blister. The next day, he came back with no checks to cash, but approached her window anyway to ask her out. And because she'd thought that maybe someone a decade older than her would have more money and be less likely to cheat on her, she said yes.

He'd told her about the polio, about his mother's refusal to have him vaccinated when it became available in Cuba, over their third margarita. She'd been too buzzed to keep quiet about her disgust with his mother for this, saying, How could she-not my baby, if I had one. He didn't recoil when she said this-in fact, he leaned in closer-and he told her more about his mother: how he still lived with her and how they fought like brother and sister, how she still made him lunch for work,

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