Accidental Love (2 page)

Marisa was baffled. Roberto's parents' car had had something wrong with a tire. Now a nail was protruding from a tire on their car. Were tire problems more common than she realized? She was mulling this new mystery when the elevator opened.

Marisa gasped. In front of her stood Roberto, who looked like damaged goods because of the bandages on his head and right forearm. In his good arm he cradled flowers that were at least a day old and already starting to sag. "You shanky dude," she caught herself cursing in her mind. She pushed aside the guy who was with Roberto, both of her hands closed into fists. She couldn't help herself, even as her mother pulled on her and warned, "Marisa, stop!"

Marisa shrugged out of her mother's grip.

"You cheater! She loved you so much!" Marisa yelled. She hauled off and fired a stiff punch into Roberto's iron-flat stomach—she had always suspected that a tapeworm lay curled in there devouring all those bags of Cheetos. The flowers popped out of his arms. She stomped on them and began to thrash him from all angles. Watching all that wrestling on TV was beginning to pay off.

It had been six years since Marisa had last been sentenced by her mother to the confines of her bedroom, six years since she had taken a pair of scissors and cut her sleeping cousin's pigtails. She had cut the pigtails because ... Marisa couldn't remember why exactly. She could only recall how she'd sat by her bedroom window and watched rain slide down the glass. Her sadness was like the rain—gray, cold, and constant. She was eight then, with a little baby fat that rolled over the elastic waistband of her Cinderella pajamas.

Now that she was fourteen, the baby fat had spread. She lay on her unmade bed bathing her legs in the afternoon sun that cut through the window. She wiggled her toes, their painted red nails chipped
in places. She debated with herself whether thumping Roberto had been the right thing to do. But after she took a sip of cream soda, she concluded that the sorry rat deserved such punishment, and then some. He had cheated on her best friend in the whole world.

Her cell phone began to ring, and she searched wildly about her bedroom. Her eyes raked over the chest of drawers cluttered with soda cans, unused bottles of perfume, lipsticks squat as silver bullets, candy wrappers, burger wrappers, CDs of rockers she never listened to anymore, a single sock, a dried bouquet from a wedding, and other assorted trash that she knew she should cram into paper bags before the short journey to the garbage can. Her room was a mess.

"It's probably Alicia," she told herself. However, when she picked up the phone, she heard a guy say, "Rene, it's me, Trung. I can't figure out the problem."

The problem?
Marisa was at a loss as to what to say, a new sensation because her mouth was always ready to gush out words.

"You there?" the voice asked. "Rene? You there? Your batteries dead?"

She clicked off her cell phone and looked at it. "Dang," she muttered as she let it roll from her fingers onto her bed, as if it were a gun and she had
just committed a horrible act. The cell phone wasn't hers. She bit her lower lip and raised her eyes toward the ceiling. "I bet it belongs to that other guy," she told herself. She recalled the boy who had been with Roberto, the one who had finally pulled her away from him and whose eyeglasses had come off. During the tussle their cell phones had fallen and each must have walked away with the other's.

She called her own cell number, wiggling her toes as she waited for that guy to pick up. But her own rushed voice came on rudely: "YOU leave a message and you speak clearly, you know WHAT I
mean?
" Marisa grimaced at the awkward cadence of her message and the attitude behind her voice. "That's me?" she uttered in disbelief and hung up. She promised herself that once she got her cell phone back she was going to change the greeting.

Her mother rattled the door with a heavy knock.

"Marisa!" she yelled.

Marisa sucked her breath and held it.

"MA-RI-SA! It's time to eat!"

Marisa pocketed the cell phone, let her breath out like a deflating balloon, and yelled, "Okay, okay!" She brushed her hair behind her ears, checked her face in the mirror on the wall, and muttered, "She's always on me."

Dinnertime. Marisa's father sat at one end of the
table. He had the eyes of a worker who wakes up before dawn and starts off for the day just as the pinkish sun appears in the east. They were tired, puffy, and half closed. Her father was a carpenter, a man who often returned home with flakes of wood in his thin graying hair. His rough hands were sometimes bleeding, his fingertips puffed from hits with his hammer.

Marisa plopped onto a chair at the kitchen table. The fourth chair, where her brother Ralphie used to sit, held a basket of clean laundry. Her brother had gone away to Bakersfield State. Now it was usually only the three of them, and sometimes Alicia, and sometimes one of the many aunts.

"Hey, Dad," Marisa greeted. She scooted her chair in and picked up her spoon.

Her father wagged his head, his way of saying hi. He was a quiet man who preferred gestures to long-winded sentences.

"Tell him what happened," her mother started in immediately.

Here we go,
Marisa thought,
dinner talk about my wicked, wicked ways.
She played dumb and said, "What?"

"You know 'what.'" Her mother blew on her bowl of
albóndigas.
The surface of the hot broth rippled.

"You mean that I skipped school and went to
see Alicia. I know Dad would go see his best friend if he was in the hospital." She looked at her father, who was dipping a chunk of sourdough bread into his soup. "Huh, Dad?"

"I don't have a best friend," he answered simply.

"Pete," Marisa reminded him. She set her spoon like an oar into her soup and stirred, creating a current that made the peas and chunks of carrots swim in a circle.

"Oh, Pete," her father remarked as he brought a paper napkin to his stubbly face. "He ran away with another woman. Left his wife and kids. How can I be friends with an
hombre
like that?"

"At least he ran away with another woman, not a guy," Marisa replied. Then she wished she could pull back that string of words and push it down her throat. It was rude, she realized, inconsiderate, and—yes—plain dumb.

"That's not funny at all," her mother said.

"Whatever," Marisa said absently. Again she wished she could retract that comment.

"Don't 'whatever' me," her mother scolded. With a large fork like a pitchfork, she stabbed at some bread in the basket and told her husband their daughter had cut school to see Alicia. What did he think of that?

The father slurped his soup but didn't say anything.

Marisa waited for her mother to elaborate on her adventure at the hospital. She waited for her to tell her father how she'd had to chunk it up with Roberto, but her mother didn't bring up the fight outside the elevator.
Bless her,
Marisa thought,
maybe she's really not so bad after all.
Perhaps her father would have grumbled and lectured her by telling her a long story about how when he was a young man he kept his temper by counting to ten in Spanish. This was in Fresno, where young men at street corners fell over like bowling pins. Times then, as now, were dangerous.

"Your friend, Alicia, is she okay?" Marisa's father tore his bread in half and dipped one piece into his soup. He ate with his face close to the bowl.

"She's getting out of the hospital tomorrow," Marisa answered. She slapped her roll with butter before she dipped it into her soup. "She has to use crutches."

"She shouldn't have been with that boy," her mother interjected. "Rafael, I had a nail in the front tire."

"What
chavalo
?" her father asked. "And did you get the tire fixed?"

"Helen's son," Marisa's mother answered. She told them that Rudy at Rudy's Tire and Wheel had fixed the tire himself. She reminded him that Helen was a person she had known when they both worked in a drapery shop.

"I don't know her," her father remarked.

"Yeah, you do,
viejo,
" her mother mumbled with her mouth full. "Helen Lopez. Her husband is the one who started the nursery on Jensen Avenue. They have real nice roses."

Her father answered, "Oh, now I remember." He lifted a glass of water, drank, and set his water glass down.

Marisa could tell that her father didn't remember, not Helen or Helen's husband. He was a poor pretender.

"This soup is good." Marisa hoped that her compliment would steer the conversation away from Roberto the rat. She blew on her soup and nearly spilled it when her cell phone, stuffed in her front pocket, started to ring.

Her father raised his eyes from his bowl. "You got ants in your pants?" He smiled at his feeble joke.

Marisa returned the smile. She excused herself and rushed from the kitchen into the living room and finally the hallway, where she clicked on the cell phone.

"Yeah," she said.

"This is Rene," the voice said.

"I don't know no Rene." She grimaced.
Dang, I sound stupid,
she thought.
Why can't I say things right?

"We met—," Rene started to say.

"Oh, yeah. At the hospital," she completed. "And you have my cell phone and I've got yours."

Silence. A branch scratched the window on the side of the house. The furnace was kicking on in the basement. Ages of more silence.

"And you want yours back, huh?" Marisa finally asked. She brought a strand of hair into her mouth and began to nibble it like a straw.

"I guess that's why I'm calling."

"Where do you live?" Marisa asked. She could tell that he was a shy person. His voice was small, like a little boy's.

"Do you know where Willow Park is?" he asked. "I live over there, near Hamilton Magnet."

Marisa knew the area. It had nice homes and green, green lawns and its own private security car that circled the neighborhood like a shark. She remembered how she and Alicia had gone trick-or-treating up there and hauled away bags crammed full of wrapped candy bars, not fistfuls of cheap candy, raisins, backyard apples, and walnuts. She
remembered devouring the candy until her jaw hurt and chocolate darkened the corners of her mouth.

"That park's too far away. I don't know how I'm going to get your phone to you."

"I got a bike," he replied. "Do you go to Washington with Roberto? I could meet you tomorrow."

"If you want to," she said. "How do you know Roberto, anyway?"

"I tutor him in math."

Marisa cringed at the sound of her mother's voice calling from the kitchen. She was yelling, "MA-RI-SA! You gotta help with the dishes!"

Marisa held the phone away from her mouth. "I'm talking on the phone, Mom!" she screamed in return. When her mother didn't cry, "Then get off the phone," Marisa raised the cell phone back to her ear. "Sorry," she told Rene. "Can you meet at three thirty?"

"How about four thirty?" Rene asked. "I got a chess meeting."

"Chess meeting!" she nearly exclaimed. But she held her tongue and agreed to meet in front of her school. She hung up and stared at the phone, trying to reassemble what the boy looked like. Her memory could only bring up Roberto's startled look when she landed an impressive punch to his gut.

"Dishes!" Marisa's mother yelled.

Marisa returned to the kitchen. She slurped the rest of her soup and nearly fit a whole roll into her mouth before she thought better of it. She wasn't hungry; plus, she could hear her mother's footsteps padding toward the kitchen. Her mother would badger her about eating too much—one bowl of soup should be enough for any girl. She thought for a moment that it was like prisoner's food. Bread and water.

Her mother came into the kitchen.
"Mira,"
she said. She waved something in Marisa's face that at first she thought was a dead bat. "You washed your black sock with the whites."

"I didn't do it," Marisa snapped back.

"What, did the sock walk into the whites and say, 'Bleach me'?" Her mother started to stuff the leftover rolls into a plastic bag.

Marisa plucked the once-black sock from her mother's hand and pushed it into her back pocket like a flag used in flag football.

"
Mi'ja,
I don't want you to cut school again," her mother said softly.

"I won't," Marisa said weakly.

"We want you to do well in school." She hugged her daughter and said that she was a good girl. "You're our only daughter."

To Marisa that was one of the sweetest things her mother had said to her in a long time. Her mother
usually told her things to do—pick up clothes, put the milk away—and was constantly warning her about trouble she could get into if she wasn't careful.

"I want to do good, too. I don't want to mess up."

Her mother hugged her and left the kitchen when her husband began wailing that there was something wrong with the remote control.

Marisa gathered the bowls and spoons from the table and carried them to the sink. She turned on the water and waited for it to rise in the plastic tub before she submerged the dinnerware. She squirted dish soap into the steaming tub, pushed her pudgy fingers into rubber gloves, and started on her evening chore. She found herself thinking about that boy with the sweet voice, whose face she could have remembered if she hadn't been so busy pummeling Roberto.

Marisa sized up a gangly boy approaching on a bike. He looked familiar, so she guessed he was Rene. He wore dress pants, like the kind her father put on for church, and a plaid button-down shirt with his shirttail tucked in. His eyeglasses were slightly bent on his face. As he pedaled she made out white socks with three red stripes near the top.
Dang, the boy's a nerd,
she thought. Was he really the same one who had been with Roberto?

"Hi," Rene squeaked after he kicked a leg over the bar and glided his bike onto the patchy lawn in front of the school. He brought a handkerchief from his pocket and swabbed his face. "I got here in—" He peered at the large watch on his skinny wrist. "In twenty-three minutes. I would have gotten here
sooner, but I had to stop for construction." He extended a sweaty hand. "I'm Rene Torres."