Still Water Saints by Alex Espinoza

Author:Alex Espinoza
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588365750
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Agua Mansa had changed since I had left for college. The freeway had been widened, the mounds of dirt the tractors gathered pushed back and held up by tall concrete walls with engravings of speeding locomotives and mountains etched into their surfaces. An apartment building near the house I grew up in burned down one night and in its place a Baptist church called the Holy Nazarene was built. On Descanso, a Salvadoran restaurant that sells pupusas now occupies a building that used to be a Taco Bell. Even though I recognized streets and locations, I had a hard time getting around. I got a job teaching second grade at Wyatt Elementary. Despite knowing exactly where it was, and even though I left early enough to give myself plenty of time, I took a wrong turn and got there a few minutes late, frazzled and embarrassed.

One of the few places that looks exactly the way it did when I was a kid is the Botánica Oshún. The botánica was the place my mother came to only when other measures had failed. She believes in the power of the unknown, in the intangible strength and magic of rocks and stones and amulets. There’s a thing to be said, I remember her saying once, about something as unassuming as a lucky coin or a medalla someone wears around their neck, the way these things absorb the hopes and desires of the owner, the way they act to harness, to stockpile, so much life energy that even the simplest and most ordinary of articles can retain so much strength, can have the ability to make great and wonderful things happen.

“Sure,” I had said. “Sure, Mom.”

Today, women hover around the counter in polyester skirts, their faces shiny from the liquid foundation they dab onto their cheeks with cotton wedges. They peer at the talismans in the cases, pointing and muttering, wondering which is good to help a sick baby or a dying parent.

I take a seat by the window, drumming my fingers against the back of my chair.

“I’ll be with you soon,” Perla says to me as she walks over to a woman about my age in a pair of cotton stirrup pants and red sneakers.

“I’d appreciate that,” I say. “I’m kind of in a rush.”

The woman she’s helping asks Perla, “And this will help with the rash? The doctor said it was from the diapers. I’ve started using the cloth ones.”

“Make sure you put it on him every day,” Perla tells her customer as she rings her up.

The woman pays and leaves. Perla tucks the twenty-dollar bill in the register and shuts it. “You’re the Pérez girl, aren’t you?” she says to me once we’re alone.

“Yes,” I say. “Nancy.”

“How are your parents? Do they still live out there in Vegas?”

“Yes.”

“I miss seeing your mother at Mass and in here. How is she?”

“Good,” I say. “Except she doesn’t like that there isn’t one of these places out near her. At least not that she knows of.

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