Free A Handbook to Luck by Cristina Garcia Page B

regulation jumpsuit. Her voice was a gravelly drawl that softened whenever she called his attention to an inadequately trimmed slab of beef.
Rico, honey, leave some fat on the sides or there won’t be anything left to barbecue.
Enrique was usually up to his elbows in bloody chunks of meat. The sound of her voice combined with the smell of animal blood and all that raw meat got him so crazily hard that he could have made it right then and there with a hunk of rump roast.
    Enrique remembered how in Cárdenas, every boy in the neighborhood had been in love with his mother. Not only was she beautiful—Mamá had lightly freckled skin and a tight little waist—but nobody else’s mother could do a triple somersault or hypnotize a snake. The men on the corner spoke admiringly of Mamá. They celebrated her curves, her charming Panamanian accent, her petite hands and feet. Enrique didn’t like it when they spoke of her like that but he couldn’t have said why. Now he understood.

    All day trudging from class to class, Enrique was reminded of the Stations of the Cross: stop, suffer, stop, suffer some more. The campaigns of Charlemagne. Irregular French verbs. Poems he couldn’t make heads or tails of, expunged of punctuation. In the middle of a calculus test, he was called to the principal’s office. Papi was in the hospital, seriously hurt, Mr. Hunter told him. Enrique didn’t wait to hear the details. He ran to his car and raced off, accelerating through every red light in Las Vegas. At least his father was alive, he kept telling himself. Nobody could lose both parents before eighteen, could they?
    At the Lord and Savior Hospital downtown, a nun in an old-fashioned habit escorted Enrique to the elevator, past the faded flower shop and the lobby’s noisy row of slot machines. His father’s room was in the intensive care unit on the second floor. Papi was bandaged from head to toe. A nylon dress sock dangled from one foot. His bald wig was off and his thin, gray wisps looked infinitely more doleful than the thick rubber. An arm and a leg were suspended with pulleys in lopsided flight, and his left eye was copiously padded with gauze.
    Papi recognized Enrique at once, even with his other eye nearly swollen shut. “Thank God you came,” he muttered. “I’m surrounded by Catholics.” The words whistled through a missing tooth. He’d been brought unconscious to the emergency room three hours ago.
    The police were calling it a hate crime and a local news station was investigating the incident. Nobody seemed to realize that Fernando Florit wasn’t actually Chinese. The bartender from the Flamingo had already sent a get well card and a bottle of tequila. How had Jorge de Reyes heard about the attack?
    â€œWhat the fuck happened to you?” Enrique whispered.
    Papi tried to shrug but he winced from the pain. “As you can see,” he said wearily, “my heart continues to beat out of long habit.”
    It turned out that he’d been on his way to Armando’s Coffee Shop, where he often spent the morning reading, when a gang of teenaged boys mugged him in an empty parking lot. They were in drag, with Heidi braids and dirndls, and clearly on some serious drugs. Papi had only a five-dollar bill on him. They got mad and kicked him, pushed his face into a bed of shattered glass. Then they broke a few bones for good measure.
    â€œThe strange thing is, I can hear better now,” Papi said, attempting to lift his head. “Ants walking across the windowsill. Jackrabbits in the desert. My whole body is one giant ear. The doctors say it won’t last but I know it will. Think about it,
hijo.
There isn’t a magic act like this anywhere.”
    Enrique stared at his father in disbelief. He was barely alive and all he could think of was capitalizing on some passing sensory freakishness to see his name in lights again.
    â€œ
Por favor,
can you get me