Lizette gave the sheet a sidelong glance. “Because they’re cheap. Use the cold water,” she said. “Mama showed me. I had a lady’s blouse once, all covered in blood, the lacey bib mostly. She said she’d pay me extra if I got it out. Lemon and ice water.”
“What happened to her blouse?” asked Luz with concern.
Lizette shrugged. “Nosebleeds?”
“Sure,” said Luz with a bad feeling, knowing that probably wasn’t the truth. She had seen her own mother covered in blood from her father’s blows more times than she’d like to remember.
A small boy in overalls wheeled a cart beside Luz and Lizette, looking on with a curious face, brown eyes like oiled skillets. The boy stood on the base of the cart and let out yippee sounds, his voice climbing the washery walls.
Lizette huffed, smacking the crisp sleeve of a white shirt across the table. “You gotta go, kid,” she said.
The boy looked at her, defiant. “Where?”
“Not here,” she said.
“But I’m bored,” he said, glancing at his mother a few tables over, covered in children, a baby hanging from her body in a sling, another in a carriage at her side, an older girl helping with the wash. The woman looked like a singing mother doll, the kind Luz had seen in Maria Josie’s old things hidden in the cedar box beneath her bed.
“He’s fine,” said Luz. “He’s just playing.”
“Well please play over by the john,” said Lizette. “That area is empty.”
The boy nodded. “Fine,” he said. “But only because you’re being nice.” He pushed the screeching cart toward the sounds of a flushing toilet.
Luz looked at Lizette, the way her strong arms pressed fabric, smoothing and clearing, laying collars flat. “Are you afraid of it?”
“Of what, Luz?”
“Of it,” she whispered. “Having a baby. You know, a kid.”
Lizette told Luz that she had no idea what she was talking about. “Why would I be afraid of that?” It was clear that her cousin was hiding a truth, a lot like lying.
“Because,” she whispered. “You and Alfonso.” Luz pursed her lips. “I’d be afraid.”
Another baby cried, this one on the floor in dirty socks. She softly pulled at the hem of her mother’s skirt. Luz saw herself in that tug, recalled the way she had once reached for her mother’s waist. Pick me up, lift me. After her father left, Mama drank so much she couldn’t tell night from day. Her eyes didn’t focus—they glimmered black and wet, as if she lived in a realm without sunrise, stuck inside the ether of her own design. She refused to leave that place, convinced Benny would come back for her someday.
When Luz thought of her mother, she often cried and over time, it was as if a large moon had eclipsed the memories of her. Still, sometimes images of her past came swiftly. There was a man once who stumbled into the other side of the cabin, through the hanging sheets and onto little Luz’s bed. Diego woke up, brandishing a knife which he held to the man’s throat until he scrambled his way out of their cabin in untied boots and unbuttoned blue jeans.
“I bet it’s hard to have a kid, to be a mother,” Luz said after some time.
Lizette cleared her throat. She reached for another shirt. “There are ways around it. You don’t have to make a baby every time. Jeez, prima. Don’t ya know that?”
Luz didn’t know that, but she acted as if she did. “Maria Josie makes it seem like you’ll ruin your life just kissing.”
Lizette laughed. “Look, sometimes you just want to feel good. Otherwise, someone like Diego, he should have a million babies by now.”
“Shit,” said Luz. “Maybe he does?” They both laughed a long time until a chunk of sorrow pitted Luz’s guts.
That night, Luz weaved between sleeplessness and dreams. She missed Diego more than she thought possible. Her pillow was soggy with silent tears, and her chest ached with the feeling of being emptied of her parts. In the room’s shadows, Luz remembered when they first came to Denver in a train’s cattle car of people traveling from the Lost Territory, lice and stench jumping from their bodies. Viejos spoke their dialect Spanish. Some prayed in Tewa or Tiwa, others Diné. It was night and very cold. The mountains were jagged peaks. Luz had watched the stars blink through the open roof.
“Are we almost there?” she had asked, snagging Diego’s sleeve.
“Soon, Little Light,” he said.
They were seated beside an old man who wore his sweat-salted braids tucked beneath a black bandanna. He sat on a worn trunk that smelled of copal, his trousered kneecaps bulging like roots. His eyes were whitish pools, and his mouth was folded like a brittle and fallen leaf. Apache, Luz noted by the buckskin medicine pouch with a man riding a horse stitched in blue and black beads dangling around his neck. He spoke his language into the air, keeping his face straight ahead, his eyes locked on some unknown point in space. When neither Luz nor Diego answered, the old man spoke again, this time in Spanish, and asked who were their people.
“The Lopezes from Animas,” said Diego.
The old man turned and lifted his waxy and fat palm, placing it on Luz’s forehead. A coolness moved into her. “Your elders are in the little one.” The old man chuckled and nudged Diego with his thin arm. “Take care of her.”
* * *
—
Diego had been gone now over two months. Maria Josie worked longer and harder than anyone, but she was still a woman and was paid like one, too, and so there was a search for a boarder, someone to split Diego’s portion of the rent, to pitch in for flour and beans, to let others know that a man resided there. It wasn’t that Maria Josie believed a man could protect them any more than she could, but the image of a man served a purpose, just as those wooden painted owls perched along the fire escape. A scarecrow, that was all. Because of this, Maria Josie had to be very careful with her selection. “You cannot trust a man,” she explained to Luz. “Nearly all have some kind of deficiency, some malformation. They’ve been hurt a lot, menfolk, but they do most of the hurting, too.”
There were referrals from aunties at Saint Cajetan’s, their nephews or godsons, railroad workers in their early twenties, lonely men roaming mountains and plains, many having grown up watching their fathers beat their mothers like dogs. The first three men Maria Josie interviewed all left her with a cold feeling, as if a part of them hated her simply for being a woman, and Luz said one of them, a shortish man with a smell like socks, brushed her backside as he moved to exit the front hall. After that, Maria Josie said the hell with men, and she took in a young woman boarder named Milli Alonzo, the cousin of their postman, fleeing the tyranny of her father’s rancho in the Lost Territory. Things went well at first. Milli kept to herself in the main room, only stepping out in a cloud of Shalimar perfume in the evenings for her shift at a supper club called Michael J’s, but after some weeks it was clear that Milli didn’t actually work at the club. She went to the train station instead. That’s where they all worked, those girls. Maria Josie had told Luz she didn’t give two shits that Milli was waiting for soldiers to unload from the trains, taking them upstairs into those rooms by the hour. But what Maria Josie couldn’t tolerate was a thief. Milli stole from Maria Josie, a quartz rosary, gifted to her by her mother. Simo had been etched into the clasp. “If it wasn’t you,” Maria Josie had said on the day she threw Milli out, “then it was Luz. And my blood don’t steal, at least not from their own.”