Free Rust by Julie Mars

the local courthouse recording inmate after inmate stepping up to the podium in his orange jumpsuit to be charged, Rico couldn’t help but see his brother’s face superimposed on each one; and when he heard their list of crimes, he felt sick inside, sick enough to switch the channel and say, again, that if that shit passed for news, they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
    It was inevitable that his spirits were sinking, or had already sunk completely, as they pulled back into the driveway after church—as if church itself was a stick Elena used to pry open the lid they all tried to keep jammed down over Fernando’s memory; and once his ghost got out, it took a while for it to evaporate again. Rico would walk his mother to her casita , promise to come back later to pick her up for a big homemade supper, and then busy himself around his property, no matter how hard he had to look to find something constructive to do. His compound was the best kept place in the whole South Valley, he thought, perhaps a bit cynically. Who else repainted the metal on the casement windows every year? Who else had upgraded from an entry gate that just got dragged along to one that slid on compact little wheels? Who else could say they hand-built not one but two buildings from the ground up, collecting the adobe by the shovelful?
    Rico opened the door to his own house, which was still quiet, though Jessica and Lucy were already up and dressed. “ Buenas dias, Papi ,” Lucy called from the kitchen. “How was church?”
    “The same as it always is,” he replied. “A job.”
    Lucy laughed. “If Abuelita knew how you feel, she wouldn’t make you go.”
    “Let’s make sure she never knows then,” he said, opening the door to his bedroom and tiptoeing in to strip off his church outfit and put on his work clothes. Rosalita was sprawled out on the bed, as if she automatically doubled her space the minute he got up. She was a heavy sleeper, and he took a few seconds to watch her. She had on a short-sleeved nightgown with tiny flowers all over it, and her hair, which she kept long, looked like a black cloud on the pillow. She was just thirty-nine years old and had already put in twenty-three years with him, most of them good. They had raised three daughters, facing all the problems of parenthood together as a united front, and the girls were proof that they did a passable job. But now he felt he hardly knew her. She had become a woman who would fling her legs and arms wide when she was alone in a bed, no longer a wife who wrapped herself around her man and couldn’t sleep unless he did. She rarely talked to him anymore about anything important, went along as if it were perfectly normal never to mention such things as no sex for four years, or a mother-in-law who had needs Rosalita far too often had to handle alone. It was eerie for Rico, and came with a sense of unacknowledged danger, as if her personal tectonic plates were shifting way below the surface and a tidal wave was not only inevitable but on its way.
    He had not told her about the welding lessons with Margaret. Perhaps that was slightly deceitful. He didn’t know. But she had become so cut off from him, so mysteriously private and locked into herself, that it seemed unnecessary—even pathetic—to go out of his way to share something new in his life with her. He felt, and it seemed true to him even when he thought about it at length, that she didn’t care what he did as long he paid the bills and showed up at the dinner table every night like a husband and father should.
    Carefully, he hung up his dress shirt and blue jeans, creased along the legs from Rosalita’s iron, and put on an old brown T-shirt and a pair of cut-off sweat pants. As he turned back around, he saw that Rosalita’s eyes were half-open in a dreamy way, and she was watching him or at least looking in his direction. It stopped him, that look, made him consider climbing back into bed with her. But