LA MORENITA, Chapter 26

During the next few weeks they fought over food, over music and even over the stray Mexican phrases that slipped out of M’s mouth from time to time. Then just before a payday, M received a recipe from N’s mother in the mail. She wanted to surprise N with his favorite meal. Unfortunately, he didn’t come home that night until well after ten o’clock. When he came through the door, it was obvious he was drunk. “Where have you been?” she demanded. “I fixed your favorite meal!”
“Oh, no!” he jeered. “Not enchiladas again?”
“Think again, smart guy,” she said. “I fixed Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes, gravy and fresh green beans. With apple pie a’ la mode for dessert.”
He looked at her through sullen, half-closed eyes. “Dammit! Just leave me the hell alone! Okay?” He went into the bedroom and, without taking off his dirty work clothes, flopped backwards onto the bed. Within minutes, he was snoring.
She stayed up a while, fuming and scraping the cold food from his plate into the garbage pail. Then she went into the bedroom and prodded him, trying to get him to slide him over in the bed.
Slowly, he stirred. Fixing her with a mean glare and pointing his finger, he growled, “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” Then he closed his eyes and went back to snoring, leaving her even less room than before.
She took a blanket from the closet and spent the night on the couch.
The next day, before he got up, she called her mother. “Mama, I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she said. “I’ve got to get out of this marriage.”
“Dios mio, m’ija!” her mother said. M imagined her mother crossing herself as she said it. “Marriage is forever in the eyes of God. If you make one mistake, don’t make two. He is a nice boy and a good provider. Better than any of the Mexican boys you brought home. Figure out what you are doing wrong and change it.”
An hour later, he still had not gotten up. She went in to prod him awake. After what seemed like an eternity, he woke. “Whaa–what in the hell are you doing?” he moaned.
“You’ve got to get up,” she said. “You’ll be late for work.”
“No, I don’t. I got laid off yesterday.”
“Oh, sweetheart! Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shook his head, then held it tightly in his hands.
“That must be a heck of a hangover you got there.”
He nodded.
“What can I do to help?”
He shrugged.
“I can get a job.”
“No!” he shrieked. His anger brought him up out of the bed and onto his feet. “How will that make me look? Like I’m so lame I have to have my wife support me?”
“But it’ll only be for a short time until you start working again. I can always go back to El Rincón. All my old customers will be glad to see me. I’ll get big tips.”
“No!” he said. “I want you to stay away from those people.”
The hairs on the back of her neck bristled. “I just want to help,” she said. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
“You know what I want you to do?” he shouted. “I want you to shut up!” With one arm, he shoved her to the floor. He stormed out of the bedroom, then out of the house.
During the next few months, they fought mostly over money. At first, he paid the bills with money he made from the small home repair jobs he was able to scrounge. When these jobs dried up, he searched vainly for jobs during the day, and drank heavily with his buddies at night, most of the time drinking until sunrise and sleeping the next day through most of the morning and part of the afternoon. One night he did manage to make it home before daybreak, and when his crawling into bed jostled her awake, the two of them argued so bitterly that they completely stopped talking to each other.
Three days after their bitter argument, he came back to the house in the early afternoon, acting like the man she’d fallen in love with. “Hi, sweetie,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “We gotta get packing. I just talked to my uncle. He’s got a job lined up for me.”
“A job?” she asked. “A real job? Where is it?”
“Richland, Washington” he said. “At the nuclear reservation. He says if I can get there in less than two weeks, it’s guaranteed good money and lots of job security.”
“But I don’t know anybody in Washington state.”
“You will after I introduce you to my uncle. Besides, it’ll give us a fresh start. Things shouldn’t be as hard on us up there.”
“What do you mean? What things? What shouldn’t be as hard on us?”
“You know. Our marriage. Your being Mexican.”
“I’ve never been outside of Texas. I don’t know if I want to leave.”
“Things can’t possibly be as bad as they are here right now.”
“But this a big step. Can’t we just think about it?”
“Look, M. Here’s our choice. We go to Washington state, where I can get paid top dollar, or we stay here where we’re both starving. What do you think we should do?”
She shrugged and shook her head.
“Good,” he said. “Then it’s settled.”
When she announced to her parents that she and N were moving to Washington state, her father took the news stoically. Her mother beamed and said what was prophesied in her dreams and the tarot cards was coming true. Her sisters exploded. “Bad enough you had to marry the damn gringo,” her oldest sister said. “Now you’re going to move far away from the rest of your family.”
“What else can I do?” M argued. “He’s my husband.”
“That’s easily fixed.”
“Don’t you know that family is more important than any gringo husband?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Our parents. They’re not in good health, and they may need you during this time. The family may need you.”
M stared blankly at her sister. She didn’t want to leave her family. She would miss them all. In fact, she was overwhelmed by thoughts of leaving Texas. But her duty was clear. M didn’t sleep much that night, but she woke with a resolve. She got out a road atlas and began tracing the route from San Antonio across Texas and then up through New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Oregon all the way to Richland. When N got home, she showed it to him. “Look at this route,” she said. “A little over twenty-four hundred miles. I’m guessing we can make it in about thirty-six hours.”
N shook his head. “There’s got to be a better way than going through those God-forsaken stretches of Texas highway.”
“No, there isn’t,” she insisted. “This is the best way.”
He took the atlas and lay it on the kitchen table. After considering the possibilities, he traced out a route up through Northern Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming before heading northwest, going through Idaho and Oregon, then into Washington state.
“Why do you want to go through Kansas?” she asked. “It’s flat as a pancake.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But if takes going through Kansas to get out of Texas, I’m all for it.”
She fed him cheeseburgers, fries and coleslaw. Afterwards, he took a shower. While he showered, she traced his route, carefully marking the mileage on each leg of the journey. “When he got out of the shower, she said, “Come here. Look at this.”
“Look at what?” he said, peering over her shoulder.
“The two routes,” she said. “Yours is a little over twenty-two hundred miles. Only two hundred miles less than my route. The way I’ve got it figured, that should take about thirty-three hours.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” he said as he pushed her aside and sat down.
“Measure it out yourself,” she said as she got up.
Forty minutes later he turned to her. “Two hundred miles is two hundred miles,” he said. “And look at that big chunk of Texas we’ll be avoiding.”
“Yes, but in Texas, that’s all open highway,” she said, pointing at the map. “Not like all those junctions we have to pass going up through Oklahoma and Kansas.”
“Aw, come on,” he countered. “Kansas is just as wide open as Texas.”
“You ever been there?”
“No, but look at the map.”
“It’s all the same,” she said. “Boring. It may be shorter, but it’ll seem longer when we drive through it.”
“Name me one reason why we should waste the extra gas and go the long way through Texas.”
“Because I’ll feel better about leaving if we go my way.”
He looked at the map and at her figures on paper next to it. He looked up at her and scowled. “Okay,” he finally said.