The Consequences by Manuel Muñoz

Author:Manuel Muñoz [Muñoz, Manuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

COMPROMISOS

Mauricio would stop and buy the oranges on his way back into town. He would need them as a treat for his young daughter, Rocío. She had the unfortunate gift of sensing unease in a silent room and he had to appease her. Last August, right at the start of third grade, he was sent to pick her up from school and Rocío noticed the stricken look on his face as he drove. She had seen it, but not understood it. At home, his daughter could hear how angry and hurt her mother was, but she understood only that it meant Mauricio would not stay at the house any longer, that her father would come only every few days. Even now, deep into January, Mauricio didn’t know exactly what Alba had told the kids. Their older son, Alonso, was in high school with his own troubles, and if he missed having Mauricio around, he never let on. Rocío was different. Since December, Mauricio had had restless nights, sitting up in the thin bed of the one-room he was renting in Kingsburg, one town over. The hours got later and later, closer and closer to dawn, and he couldn’t shake the sense that he had made a terrible mistake. The restlessness had decided for him. He would have to come back. He would have to ask forgiveness.

On the morning he decided to ask Alba to let him back, the January fog had not lifted, and he had to wait, along with everyone, for the density to break. The Saturday traffic was slow and heavy and impatient, people late for their second-job shifts, their errands. On days like this, he knew, no one would have time to stop for the old Mexican woman who sold the smallest of the winter oranges from under a white tent at one of the rural intersections outside of town. She would stand near the edge of the road sometimes, waving for customers to come, which they did out of pity or loyalty. “Mírala,” Alba used to say, before they had kids, on their way to spend the day walking the Fulton Mall in Fresno. “That’s going to be me one day,” she said, “when it’s all over.”

“She’s somebody’s mother,” Mauricio would say, which was the kind of thing they said to each other as a private reminder to be kind to those around them. This is why Alba had married him, he knew, why they had started dating in the first place. Alba had sensed in him that same dutiful nature that made her the responsible one of three girls in her family, just as pretty as her chola sisters, who lived for cruising Mooney Boulevard in Visalia, their mother always yelling at them. He knew what it meant, even way back then when they were in high school and had only coins in their pockets, to pull over at the white tent and buy the old woman’s last bag of summer fruit.

This morning, though, the old woman wasn’t there.

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