Sueños de una mujer muy buena

Maria stood in a line of women, the sound of popping filling the greenhouse air as they dead-headed marigolds, when the whispers began, which grew into mumbled words and then slid over the palates of flowers so thick with health they looked like orange carpet. 

Maria shouldn’t have talked, they said. She should have kept her damn mouth shut. Everyone knew Jim, the owner, was a bastard, but what was worse, the way he would slide a bit too close to the women or the ICE detention facility in Battle Creek?

Maria had left her trailer that morning for the greenhouse, driving – as always – five miles below the speed limit, her head just poking over the top of the 1995 Dodge Shadow’s steering wheel as cars swooshed past her on Portage Road.  Her time bomb heart pounded in cadence with the sectioned concrete. The fat man’s laugh still hung over her like a saturated sin.

Since arriving in Michigan from a barrio outside Juarez, Maria had been honing a new life for herself, and Lorena and Carlos, her kids. Gone was the needly rain on the corrugated metal roof, the clouds of slow-death blowing over the trash-strewn streets, the slap of her husband’s open hand for reasons he’d never say.              

For cash and no questions, the woman tended to all matter of grown goods. And they all drank daily from the sour cup of anxiety, hoping foolishly that the glass walls of the greenhouse, opaque with millions of dirty droplets, would shield them from Immigración.

            The verbal jabs seemed to weave into the smoky sweet scent that grew after the careful pinch of each shrink-shriveled head. Rage rose in Maria’s gut.

They didn’t know how tight Jim would squeeze her hands to keep her from clawing at his eyes. How hard he’d push her against the edge of the Formica countertop as he’d close in to lick her cheek. His sick laugh as he’d walk out of her trailer and back into his life.

            Or how she would stand at the open door, bawling, the stenchy saliva from Jim’s tongue still stuck to her face, listening to him tell her: “don’t bother telling the police. They’ll never believe you.”

            But after two years of that, she did. And they did believe her.

            Last week, Maria sat in the courtroom with Carlos when the verdict was read. Guilty on all counts. Sentencing in 30 days.

            Unwilling to face prison, Jim soon split town. He left his wife, and their three kids, too. He had the cash and the means. He could build a life somewhere else. Like a snowflake, he’d quietly land on some Wonderbread ‘burg, and begin again.

            Maria saved her tears for the ride home. As she wiped them, they turned the orange on her fingers into a thin paste, which she rubbed into the rusty skin of her cheeks. It rooted quickly and then vanished. 

The next morning, milky light from a still high moon slid through the frayed curtains in the trailer’s one bedroom, where Maria slept with her kids, brightening plumes of dust that kicked-up as she crept silently across the carpet, toward Lorena, now captured by the deepest of dreams.

            She ran her fingers through Lorena’s straight, jet-black hair, laid hard and flat over the quilt Maria had brought from home. Maria laid down next to her, closed her eyes and tried to hitchhike onto the dream that was holding onto Lorena, firm and tight.