Maid and the Millionaire Next Door by Lizzy Ripp

Author:Lizzy Ripp [Ripp, Lizzy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - NAIMA

I’M DREAMING OF being home in my kitchen—home home, not next door at Ivana’s. My mama is making tamales and talking to her own mother, back home in Mexico, on the phone. My parents came over from Mexico when they were just out of their teens and decided to settle not in California, but here in Miami, hoping to find a home among the flourishing Latino culture and build a life for themselves somewhere far away from home. They did just that—but it never became easy for them. And it never hit me how difficult it really was until I heard that conversation.

My mama was talking to my abuela about something that had happened that day, while we were out shopping together after school for our dinner. My mama had been teaching me words in Spanish. Not much, just a bit here and there. Today, I can definitely speak it, but you can also definitely tell I’ve never lived in a dominant Spanish-speaking country.

That particular day—the day I am remembering in my dream—my mama had been teaching me how to count to ten. I was having trouble with cinco, seis, and siete, all in a row and tripping over the words, giggling, which made my mama giggle as she corrected me, telling me my tongue was getting tied. We were having fun together until we were interrupted by a big, beefy-looking man with a red face, a cowboy hat, and a shirt that looked like it was buttoned up way too tightly around his neck. He was practically bulging it out of it.

“Hey!” he’d snapped, his voice cutting through the air like the crack of a whip. “You shouldn’t be teaching her that shit!” he’d said, pointing a finger thick as a sausage at my mama and then at me. I remember the smile fading off of mama’s face like an egg sliding out of a bowl and into the frying pan. For a long time, she didn’t speak at all. And when she did, explaining to the man that she was just trying to teach me some words, he immediately cut her off.

“We might be in Miami, but we still speak English in this goddamn country!” the man snarled, and my mama instantly stopped talking. I remember feeling so scared that I started crying. Without a word, my mama scooped me up and took me out of the store, leaving behind our groceries. She’d set me up back home in front of the TV and started making dinner with what we had, abandoning what she’d had in mind—and I’d heard her on the phone talking to her mother as I took in Sesame Street. She was crying, I realized with some alarm. It was the first time I had ever, in my remembrance, heard my mother cry.

“It’s just so hard, Mama,” I heard her say. “We’ve been here for so long, and it still feels like it will never be our home.”

I walked up to the

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