Free The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho by Anjanette Delgado Page B

family. They live in Washington Heights.”
    â€œIs that where she met Henry’s father?” I said, even as the answer came up from somewhere inside me, surprising me: no.
    â€œThat’s what I thought. But Henry is seven and change, so you do the math.”
    â€œShe was pregnant when she left.”
    â€œExactly. And I think she came back because of him. To find him. Or to force him to take care of Henry.”
    â€œWhat makes you think that?”
    â€œWell, first she moves in asking for a month to month lease and a discount because she’s just here to resolve ‘an important family issue.’ Then she begins to ask to use my printer to make copies, and every time I’m able to catch a peek, it’s a legal-looking form, an application, or a copy of something official like a birth certificate or a medical record.”
    â€œMaybe she’s sick,” I said quietly, thinking about my mother.
    â€œAnd she’s always asking me to watch Henry or to get him onto the school bus because she has to go downtown at these ungodly early hours. Now, what does all that tell you?”
    â€œNot much, Iris.”
    â€œShe’s going to court!”
    â€œWell, maybe not court, but you may be on to something. She may be going through a child support case process with the state attorney’s office. It makes sense. She won’t be able to get Medicaid to help with Henry’s medical bills unless she has at least made an attempt to locate his father and have him pay child support. Maybe that’s all it is.”
    â€œMaybe, but get this, yesterday, she asks me to take care of Henry today because it’s teacher-planning day and she didn’t want to take him where she was going. So I ask her, ‘Where are you going?’ and she sort of waves me off, saying that if all went well, everything would change, and that Henry was going to be a very happy boy. You know, you’re right. I say she’s either suing the bastard for child support or she had sued him before and the state just found him.”
    â€œWell, I’ve had a few clients with the same problem, and it can take years for the child support enforcement division at the state attorney’s office to locate a father, if that’s what she’s doing.”
    Except it was Thursday. Last I’d heard, the child support enforcement division didn’t see clients on Thursdays. Still, maybe Abril had found herself a badass Miami motherfucking lawyer, as my client Silvia would say, though I decided not to say so, asking instead: “So you think Henry’s father is here in Miami and doesn’t want to do the right thing?”
    I was starting to get a strange, yet not altogether unfamiliar, feeling about all this, an uneasiness the source of which I couldn’t quite locate inside my body.
    â€œI think there’s more to it. You know, Henry does have her last name,” she said, twisting a strawberry pink lock of hair with her right index finger and a blond one with her left.
    â€œSo what? You can give a child any last name you want, and you said yourself she got the money to go to nursing school, so maybe he is paying child support.”
    â€œMaybe he’s married and famous,” she said, ignoring me.
    â€œThat doesn’t mean anything. If he’s famous, all the more reason to avoid a scandal.”
    â€œMaybe he refuses to give poor Henry his lousy last name and the child support he’s entitled to,” finished Iris, as if finally articulating a theory she’d been working on for some time.
    â€œYeah, I can see that,” I said, surrendering. “Maybe Henry is Enrique Iglesias’s love child. Or Luis Miguel’s!”
    â€œHey, she’s pretty enough and smart. Maybe it is Luis Miguel.”
    â€œHe doesn’t have a house in Miami.”
    â€œThat you know of. And you don’t need to own a house to run out on your wife, girlfriend,