Sweet Jiminy by Kristin Gore

Author:Kristin Gore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2012-01-09T17:46:25+00:00

Rosa Gonzalez had worked a long, exhausting day in the hot Tortillas kitchen, after a sleepless night in which the baby had screamed every hour and a half. As the sun was setting, she finally stopped for a break. She escaped the heat of the kitchen to sit outside in one of her pretty new chairs and watch swallows swoop and swerve in plague-proportion swarms. She marveled at their synchronized, undulating waves and imagined she was at some kind of avian ocean’s edge.

Two trucks pulled up and broke her reverie. She didn’t recognize them, which was rare. Tortillas catered primarily to the Latino community within Fayeville. It wasn’t often that others wandered in, although Rosa assumed it would just take time to convince the rest of the town to give them a try. She knew her food was good. In America, all you needed was to be good and work hard, and success would follow. This is what she firmly believed.

Five young men piled out of the trucks, two out of the first, three from the second. They had tattoos and buzz cuts and looked like they hadn’t yet reached their twenties. Rosa briefly wondered if they might be soldiers since she knew that lots of young Fayeville men signed up for the armed forces. But there was an undisciplined air about this particular group that made her reconsider. She didn’t really care who they were or where they came from. If they were hungry, she would feed them.

Or she’d get Juan to feed them. She wasn’t quite recovered. She stayed seated, but greeted them with a smile.

“Hello!” she said brightly. “Welcome to Tortillas!”

She and Juan had argued about whether to give in to the erroneous local pronunciation of the name or to insist on the correct version. Rosa had advocated assimilation, saying it didn’t really matter and that they’d get more business if they didn’t turn people off by making them think they couldn’t talk right. Juan had insisted they pronounce it the way it was supposed to be pronounced. He assured her people would come around, that they might even enjoy learning a bit of Spanish.

“Tor-tee-yas?” one of the young men repeated. “What’s that mean?”

He had a tattoo of a bull with longhorns on his right upper bicep.

“They’re a little like thin pancakes, made with corn or flour. We make them with corn. You wrap chicken or beef in them. They’re delicious! Come inside and try.”

Whenever she had to explain what tortillas were to people, she felt secretly sorry for them, like they were sheltered children who’d been deprived of very basic knowledge available to everyone else. And sometimes she found people’s ignorance disingenuous. Who hadn’t heard of a tortilla, in this day and age? Still, she had to stay polite.

“They’re a little bit like hot dog buns, but for Mexican food,” Rosa continued, determined to connect with these potential new patrons. “Did you know hot dog vendors used to give people gloves to eat their hot dogs

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.