The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel

Author:Patricia Engel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-03-31T16:12:13+00:00

When we were kids, Carlito and I ate the crummy lunch provided by the school’s public assistance program. We faced our butter and baloney sandwiches and waxy apples while other kids ate lunches their parents packed for them, full of treats and last night’s dinner. Carlito would identify these kids and take their food from them, giving me half of everything, until the lunch lady caught him and turned him in to the principal.

“I don’t care how much you hate the food they give you, stealing is wrong,” Mami told him after she got the call from the school.

“How am I supposed to get what I want if I don’t take it?” Carlito asked.

Mami never answered him.

When Carlito was an altar server at the church, he started a little side business taking the flowers people left at the feet of different statues of saints, selling them outside the supermarket or at gas stations, or just to other boys from school to give to the girls they liked. One of the priests confronted him but Carlito argued he was doing no harm, and those flowers got thrown out at the end of every week anyway. The priest never told our mother, but Carlito decided to move on to cemeteries, picking bouquets off tombstones and out of the vases on the walls of mausoleums.

Instead of selling the roses and carnations himself, he put me to work. I’d stand by gas pumps, tell people I was selling the flowers to raise money for our school so we could buy new books and pens and art supplies, while Carlito watched and waited nearby. He gave me a dollar for every five that I made. He’d be ceremonious about it when he later counted the bills on his bedroom floor, making me hold out my palms until he placed the bills on them.

“Bien hecho, hermanita.”

Or on days I didn’t sell so much, he’d shake his head disapprovingly.

“You can do better, Reina. Make your big brother proud.”

He always gave me a bonus of a few dollars to make sure I kept my mouth shut about the whole operation and didn’t start feeling guilty, confessing to Mami what we were doing. Carlito taught me there was a price to be paid for my silence and complicity, and I was honored to be his secret keeper.

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