Free A Small Fortune by Audrey Braun Page A

factory work. I almost don’t ask. “What were you doing there?”
    Benicio is the one who looks out the window now. I sense the memories spinning behind his eyes. “Making people laugh.”
    “Making people laugh.”
    “Yes. I was a comedian.”
    “You’re joking.”
    “Good one,” he says.
    “Wait. You mean, like a stand-up comedian?”
    Benicio nods.
    “That’s hilarious. I mean.” I give a slight laugh. “You know what I mean.” I think of how playful he was at the pool with the dog. You cheat, Pepe . How agile and smooth his body cut through the air. I can easily picture him on a stage. “I’ve never met anyone who entertained people for a living. Everyone I know is pretty serious when it comes to work.”
    “Yeah, well, apparently you’ve never heard how comedy is serious business.”
    “Guess not.”
    A quiet sadness fills the air. We drift off in silence. I don’t doubt we’re both feeling the sway of loss, the bottomless dangling that never quite solidifies under the feet.
    We finish off the bread and cheese. The water is nearly gone.
    Then Benicio suddenly picks up where he left off. “The whole point is to make it look easy. There’s an art to it. You have to build up tension and make it pay off. Timing is everything, as they say. And the surprise twists. Not easy at all.”
    “Is that why you quit?”
    He shakes his head. “Now there’s the funny part. If you’re in a country illegally, you probably shouldn’t be doing something that draws attention to yourself.”
    “You got deported?”
    “Live. On the six o’clock news.”
    Countless newsreels flash in my head of immigrants in handcuffs marching past a chain-link fence, the wide-open doors of a paddy wagon waiting to swallow them up. I now know what it is to be locked inside a small, confined space, waiting to be handed one’s fate.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “It was my own fault. I made a name for myself by poking fun at the stereotypes. The tattooed gang stuff, migrant worker, taco maker, guy in cuffs getting deported.”
    “No.”
    “Oh, yes. And someone found out that I was busted in a raid, and there it was, the six o’clock satire. Life imitating art. The last laugh on me.”
    “I’m so sorry.”
    “Actually, I’d say this is the last laugh. Caught in a prescription drug ring.” He shakes his head as if to say how ridiculous it all is.
    We both give a gentle laugh. I drop my hand on his knee without thinking. The mood shifts. There’s a moment when I know I should take it back, withdraw it quickly as if I haven’t done it at all, but I allow the moment pass.
    He stares down at my hand, and after a moment he places his own on top of it.
    Clouds roll in and obscure the evening sun. A dull pressure fills the air. A thick breeze carries the far-off smell of rain.
    Our eyes remain glued to our hands, one on top of the other, a tacky wedding photo pose.
    “It’s hard for me to think of them as bad people,” Benicio finally says. “Leon has been like a big brother to me. And Isabel. My baby sister.” He stops.
    “Does the little boy belong to her?”
    He glances up and swallows, and I see the hurt in his eyes. It’s followed by something else. Something that seems to me more complicated, thorny. “Benny,” he says. “She named him after me. There’s no father. Another cliché for the books. But you have to understand. We didn’t grow up with any of this. Poor, yes, but not this.”
    “What happened?”
    “Long story made short. My parents were killed when a bus they were traveling in was forced off the road into a ravine. They had debts we didn’t know about. I snuck into the States to help pay them and got a job in a frozen food factory in L.A. I sent every dollar home that I didn’t need to survive. I’d always been the class clown, and one night at a comedy club I started this banter with a comedian on stage, and it turned out I was funnier than he was. One thing led to another and I became part of the