Give It To Me. Ana Castillo

and started texting people who didn’t want to hear from you.

      The one thing you wouldn’t do was pick anyone up. You’d seen enough Dateline mysteries. (There was that pretty Russian blond who got into a hotel elevator with a big dude. Cyclops huge. It was caught on camera. Later, you saw him casually leaving the building pulling a large suitcase on wheels. The victim was in that suitcase folded up like a rag doll. Incredibly, she survived.) As for God’s hand in the matters of Palma’s life, she was dealt the revengeful, wrathful Lord of the Old Testament. If he even ever bothered with a gentile, he had no reason to be any more compassionate with her religion-free existence than he was to Job, Adam, or Moses, who he was constantly testing and they were his favorites.

      Palma Piedras had survived thus far. She’d survived Abuela’s house and tío Jim-Bo and Pepito’s whininess during his childhood (spoiled from her grandmother’s preferring anything with a penis. That’s why he got Palma’s room). Pepito was a terrible two when he came to their household. The kid got into everything, drank toilet water with the cat. The tomcat, good for killing rats, taught the new household member a few survival tricks of his own. It was as ugly as a boil on your ass, but Pepito was all the opposite. Whose looks he had inherited she didn’t know because Palma never met his mother. She suspected he was Jim-Bo’s kid and that one of the skanks he went out with on Saturday nights brought Pepito over to Abuela’s, once the baby could walk and had stopped sucking titty. He didn’t look like Jim-Bo; he looked like the Angel Gabriel.

      When he was seventeen Pepito got a girl in the neighborhood pregnant or so the girl claimed when she came over with her mother and father to force Pepito to do the right thing. Now you see what you did? Abuela said, probably imagining the horrors of having the girl move in, drop a kid, and then leave it there for her to raise at eighty-something. She slapped Pepito. He was taller than the shrunken grandma, of course. Taller than Jim-Bo. A boxer, in fact. Only Abuela could touch him and get away with it. Pepito decided the right thing was to leave home.

      Palma was done with her first marriage and, by then, living on her own. It took her eight years to get her bachelor’s degree. During the day she worked as a docent at the Art Institute. Tour guides normally had their degrees in fine arts. Palma Piedras, lone satellite orbiting in space, had her ways.

      Now Pepito was out and they decided to meet after all those years. She concluded he wouldn’t care that she was forty-plus (to his thirty-two) because he was like a brother to her. Palma had sent him money now and then. Who else thought of him? A pining ex-girlfriend looking up old boyfriends when finalizing a divorce or drunk with her girls when one would say, Whatever happened to that melt-in-your-mouth caramel, what was his name? Pepito, she’d say. It came right to her lips as if he were waiting for the return of his tongue. She looked him up or asked around and got his address. They’d started writing and she’d send money. Palma figured there were ex-girlfriends because there was one true fact, besides his nature, the Mexican killer instinct, and that was his being a lover. Or so she imagined.

      One time when she was living on her own, and Pepito was all of fourteen, he cut school and had the nerve to go to her flat. She was home with a cold that day, studying in bed. He bought a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and a small jar of Vicks VapoRub. She thought he was el Niño Fidencio with a buzz cut. Palma felt like the loneliest woman in the world when she was sick like that. He left them on the kitchen table and followed her to the broom-closet-size bedroom where the sick woman climbed back into bed. He looked at her hard, smiling. Fourteen and already cocky. A man with secrets. Fucking, no doubt, not jacking off like a choir boy.

      She was all snot and puffy eyed. Her long hair was pulled up in a bun with stray hairs stuck to her sweaty neck. His big cousin stared back at him. Are you in a gang? She asked him. What? Me? Naw, man. I ain’t stupid. She wanted him to fuck her but all she said was, That’s good. You’re a good kid. Abuela would kill you, if you did join a gang. Jim-Bo . . . Aw, he said, waving a hand, meaning he didn’t give a flying fig about their uncle. He called him tío, like she did, when he was little, but as soon as he passed Jim-Bo in height he referred to him by name—if he felt like being polite. He was right. If he had been Jim-Bo’s son, as the primitos were both led to believe while Abuela never came out and said it, why hadn’t Jim-Bo stepped up to the plate? Too late by the time Pepito was in her micro-pad, three stories up in the big apartment building she lived in then. Palma remembered Giovanni and his Magic Flute fingers and looked at her little cousin’s. They were nothing like the boy’s in the classroom coatroom. Pepito’s were powerful. He was already boxing. Maybe he did it to keep himself out of a gang. Maybe he was lying to her and had already gotten into one.

      Well, I best be going, prima, he said. Grin. Secrets. My girl’s waiting downstairs for me, he said, hand on the front doorknob. You have a girl? Palma asked. Yeah, of course, I got a girl, man, he said. It was about twenty-two degrees out that day. She wrapped a blanket over her shoulders, went to the window, and watched him exit downstairs. A waif in a heavy coat, mittens, ski cap, and long, black hair waited out there. He took her hand and they trudged off in the snow. The girl slipped on a patch of ice and he quickly grabbed hold and steadied her.

      Palma didn’t see Pepito for a long time after he left Abuela’s. Or at least, she couldn’t remember. Abuela caught her up on him. He was living for a while with a girl a little older than himself who had two little kids. She came over one time and complained that he had not come home all night. Another time, she came by, crying because he had left her. What do you want me to do to him? Abuela said to the girlfriend each time. He’s a grown man, now. He don’t listen to nobody, anyway. The third time the girlfriend came by, before she could state her complaint Abuela stopped her, didn’t even invite her in. You want to be with a man like that then be woman enough to accept how he treats you, she said. But I love him, the girlfriend said. Abuela closed the door in her face. Pero, lo quiero, Abuela mimicked in Spanish. Bah, Abuela said.

      Palma Piedras never went to her grandmother with complaints about the men in her life. She never went to the viejita during the good times, either. The granddaughter knew well enough that the old woman would cast her pessimist spell on her new love and kill it. Abuela didn’t trust men. She loved only Jim-Bo. She didn’t trust women, either. When Palma was fifteen, her equivalent of the quinceañera, the fifteen-year-old princess party given to most girls, was a short speech. Remember, if you get yourself pregnant and have to drop out of school, you’d better not come to me. I’m not raising any more hüerquillos. (Punks. She and Pepito.) A few months after Palma’s fifteenth birthday, when she got pregnant that winter, her best friend’s mother took her on three bus rides out of the city to a private doctor’s office in Lincolnwood. They worried that public-funded clinics might require her guardian’s consent. The lady fronted the three hundred smackaroos the private doctor charged, a fortune for the girl.

      She stayed in bed for a few days complaining of the cramps, which often had her bedridden back then, so her abuela may have not suspected anything. If she did, she didn’t say. After that Palma’s boyfriend and she had anal sex, their idea of contraception. Her boyfriend dropped out of school, joined the Army, and she soon forgot him and his pulsating dick that sought every orifice of her body. It was easy to forget him because she soon heard he had another girlfriend all that time and she was pregnant with his kid. The dick was killed when home on furlough before the baby was born. A drive-by, they said.

      With all due respect, he wouldn’t have kept her attention long; by then, what she wanted was to be the next Picasso. Since the girl learned to hold a crayon, she made art. On the white, bloodied butcher paper Abuela discarded, brown carton flaps, and backsides of junk mail. Whatever the girl found to color on became her media. Abuela wasn’t big on buying supplies for Palma’s “fooling around.” In college, svelte and with a passion for dressing up—with or without much of a wardrobe—she designed clothes. They stayed mostly on paper. Art was an expensive enterprise. Somewhere along the line Palma took a turn and instead became an admirer of fine arts and fashion, a coveting aficionado as a tour guide and translator.

      She also (and maybe for reasons unrelated to the progenitor of her eliminated embryo) began to see herself as the heroine of the tragedy that was her life. Palma pretended they’d had a great love and that he died a war hero. She never told this story to anyone, just to herself until she