Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement

Author:Jennifer Clement
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 0804138788
Publisher: Hogarth
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

The next day Mike picked me up on the side of the highway. He acted as if nothing had happened. It was as if my mother had not shot his sister. It was as if he were not picking me up in a red Mustang instead of boarding the bus to take me to my first job as a nanny to a young boy in Acapulco.

We’d made a date for nine in the morning and I thought he’d never get there. Passenger trucks tumbled past, covering me with dust and diesel fumes as an hour went by. Finally he rode up in the new red convertible and reached over, swung the door open, and gestured for me to get inside. He had his iPod earbuds stuck deep into his ears so he just gestured to get in the car.

His music was turned up so loud I could hear a soft beat coming out of the earbuds. We raced down the highway with him bopping his fingers on the steering wheel. At one point he turned and offered some Trident Cool Bubble chewing gum. He held up two fingers to say, Take two. I took two of the pieces, chewed it up hard, and blew small bubbles that crushed and broke open in my mouth as we moved down the road.

Mike steered with his knees as he lit a cigarette. He was wearing a gold ring with a large diamond on his thumb. He had a tattoo of the letter Z on his pointer finger. The letter Z made everything quiet inside of me. Don’t say anything; don’t say anything, I said to myself. Z stands for the most dangerous drug cartel in Mexico. Everyone knows this.

Mike was not going to talk about what had happened to Maria. He was plugged into his iPod listening to rap and I was staring out the window at herds of goats. As I looked at him, I thought Maria did not belong to him. She did not even look like him. In that car, at that moment, I knew she was the one I loved most. I did not know this before, even when I held her broken arm in my arms.

Don’t come back, my mother had said to me last night when she helped me pack up my few belongings. The woman who helped me pack was my new mother. I was still not exactly sure what form this newness would take. This was my after-she’d-shot-Maria mother. It was going to take some time to get to know each other.

Everyone’s goal was to never come back. It used to be that there was a whole community that lived on this mountain, but that ended when they built the Sun Highway from Mexico City to Acapulco. My mother says that that highway cut our people in two pieces. It was like a machete that cut a body in half. Some people were left on one side of the black oily asphalt and some were left on the other.

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