Free Bulletproof Vest by Maria Venegas Page B

as husband and wife.
    When they were first married, he could hardly believe that it was she—alive and in the flesh—breathing next to him. He fumbled around under the blankets, wrapped his arms tight around her small waist and buried his face in her long neck. “If you ever leave me, Pascuala, I will find you and kill you,” he whispered in her ear.
    â€œYou wouldn’t dare,” she said, laughing at him. “Usted me lleva por dentro como la sangre en sus venas.” She was right. Back then she had flowed through him like the very blood in his veins, and to kill her would be to snuff out some part of himself, but now there is only the smoldering of the flame that had once burned so bright for her.
    He orders another stiff one, thinking that perhaps this was her plan all along. Get him out of the way so that she could have her blessed freedom. So that she could do as she pleased with the ministers. Take road trips with them. Stay in roadside motels with them. The last time he had seen her, they had stayed at a roadside motel in the outskirts of Monterrey. She was in town visiting her mother and he went to see her. They had sat in the kitchen and talked, and he had offered to drive her to the airport. Then, on the day she was to leave, the unexpected happened. A snowstorm blew through town, knocking out power lines, and shutting down the local airport.
    The nearest airport was six hours away in Monterrey, and since he had been drinking right up until her departure, he had enlisted a chauffeur, paying a man from La Peña to drive his truck for him. They had driven out of the snowstorm and into the desert, and the whole time she was sitting next to him, she must have already been scheming, must have already known there would be no borrowed birth certificate. Had he known what her plan was then, he might have done it. How easy it would have been to pull off the road, drive into the heart of the desert, find a deep gulley, and take all her identification. Their kids would have thought their mother had gone to Mexico and disappeared.
    They pulled into a roadside motel in the outskirts of Monterrey and that’s where they spent their last night together as husband and wife. In the morning, he drove her to the airport and she jumped out of the truck, grabbed her suitcase, and walked away. She went through the revolving glass doors without ever looking back. It was as though she were afraid that if she hesitated, the doors of the airplane would slam shut, the engines would roar, and she’d be left behind, stranded on the wrong side of the border with him for eternity. They had been married for nearly twenty-five years, had eight kids, and she had not even bothered to say goodbye. He could have lived with the rejection from that country, and from her even, but now to be rejected by his own flesh and blood. This was unbearable. He had not only lost his firstborn—he had lost them all.
    â€œThe next time I see Pascuala,” he says to no one in particular, polishing off his drink and setting the glass back down on the scuffed surface, “I’m going to put my .45 to her forehead and send her straight to her God.”
    The men standing closest to him chuckle, slap his back, saying cut the crazy talk, Jose. Maybe to them it’s nothing but crazy talk, but for him it’s something so real he can almost taste it. It is no longer something hypothetical, something festering in that deep dark pool of bitterness. It has pushed beyond the confines of his thoughts, has clawed its way to the surface—he has uttered it, and in doing so, has breathed it to life.

 
    5
    THE GRAPES OF WRATH
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    AS NIGHT SETTLES , the moths appear on the other side of the window, drawn by the light of the chandelier. They search the glass for an opening, a way to come inside, to move closer to the light. It’s late August, the start of sophomore year, and I’m sitting at the head of the