Yours to Keep (27 page)

Ethan made a “hmm” sound and lowered his lips to her hair. She lay now with one arm and one leg thrown over him, her hair fanned out across his chest.

“Ricky barged right into the middle of my class to yell at me. I made him leave, but he told me we’re going to talk about it tomorrow morning.” Which she was dreading. He’d be cooler by then, surely, but it was still an awful thing to contemplate, Ricky’s rage and bluster.

Ethan emerged from her hair, his jaw set. “He wouldn’t hurt you, would he?”

“No.” She didn’t sound as confident as she’d meant to.

“Do you want me there?”

She shook her head vehemently. “My gut says that would make things worse. I haven’t told him yet that we might get married.”

Something in his face tightened down, his eyes narrowing enough to tell her he wasn’t
pleased about that. “Will you tell him tomorrow?”

“Yeah. God, he’s going to hate the idea so much.”

Now he looked away, hurt. Then he sighed and turned back, his brows lowered quizzically. “What do you think he’ll do?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. She rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder. Underneath her palm, she could feel his skin rising into gooseflesh. “Cold?” she asked, and she reached down and pulled the blankets over them, snuggled in closer. “I think he’ll try to persuade me not to do it. He might threaten me.” Her voice sounded small even to her own ears.

“With what?”

“Kicking me out?” She wrapped her arms around the width of his chest and squeezed. “Or he might try to cut me off. From the family.” Her voice shook.

He stroked his fingers slowly through her hair. “Could he really do that?”

“I don’t think Cara would let him. But he could cut me off from
him.
And maybe that doesn’t sound so bad to you, given everything I’ve told you about him—”

“No, I know. Brothers can be jerks, but you love them anyway. James is self-indulgent and self-involved, and I have no respect for the way he conducts himself with women, but the idea of doing something that might cut me off from him is still impossible to fathom.”

She held him as tightly as she could, loving the spice-and-sea scent of his deodorant so close to her nose, loving the sheen of sweat on his skin, loving the way he understood, the way he got inside her, loving him. “He takes such good care of us. I don’t think it even occurs to him that his life would be completely different if he hadn’t been saddled with all of us.”

She was crying now, quietly, her tears dripping onto his chest.

“Maybe he won’t make you choose,” Ethan said quietly.

Her hand came up, found his cheek. She rubbed her palm over the place on his jaw where today’s stubble had formed, then traced the backs of her fingers over his mouth.

She smiled through her tears as he began making love to her again.

Ricky appeared inside the door of the cafeteria the moment her second class let out. His face was gray-green and unshaved, his lids sagging with fatigue. He looked old, much older than she’d ever seen him look, old enough, finally, to be someone’s father, despite his baggy jeans
and navy track jacket and do-rag. Her heart swelled with love for him, and she hurled herself at him, threw her arms around him. He stayed stiff, though. She tried to hug the anger and hurt out of him, but he wouldn’t relent, and after a moment or two she let go.

He wouldn’t look at her.

They sat across from each other at one of the carved-up old tables. This had once been Ana’s elementary-school cafeteria, where she’d eaten peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with her friends, but it had never been Ricky’s. Ricky’s childhood was more than a thousand miles away, on an island she wouldn’t recognize as home.

Ricky spread his big hands out over the scarred surface of the table, and she waited for him to speak first. When he didn’t, when he just looked down at the table, she said, “Ethan asked me to marry him.”

Now he looked. Eyes blazing. “No.”

It was her turn to avoid his gaze. But she held her ground. “I want to marry him.”

“Ethan? That his name?” More a growl than words.

“Yeah. That’s his name.”

“Are you pregnant?”

Surprised, she looked him full in the face. “No,” she said belligerently. “You know I’m not.”

“Then why would you marry him?”

That caught her by surprise. Why was she marrying him? Things had started out so simple with Ethan, so primitive and elemental, his desire, her response, but now it was so complicated. Sex? Citizenship? Love? Last night, in the heat of their lovemaking, love had been the single thread connecting everything. Today, their motives were a spiderweb again.

Ricky made a short sound of impatience. “He live in a big, fancy house? Got a lot of money?”

She was on the brink of crying out that none of those things mattered to her, but he kept going, not giving her time to respond. “He’s paying for the fancy-pants lawyer, huh? Going to make you his lawfully wedded wife and a citizen? I wouldn’t have picked you to marry someone just to get legal.” His voice dripped with scorn.

She knew he’d have been less angry with her if she’d admitted to being pregnant. What Cara had done was stupid. It had trapped them all here. But it hadn’t been a betrayal.
Ana had chosen Ethan over her Dominican family, the life he could give her over the life that Ricky had done his best to build for them.

“He’s a great guy.” Her voice sounded small, her words inadequate. “He’s a doctor.” As if that somehow stood in for what he meant to her, when his being a doctor signified as little to her as his big house or his money or the fact that he was paying for the lawyer.

“Oooh, a doctor,” mocked Ricky. Only the hard set of his jaw gave away how angry he was. The rest of his body was so relaxed as to be insolent.

“He’s a good man.” Her voice was stronger now.

Ricky shifted in his seat. His eyes narrowed, mean. “He’s going to get bored with you.”

She was caught off guard. “What?”

“You’re his charity project. Those rich doctors. Always looking for people to save. You get to be a doctor in the first place by having a savior complex. Thinks he’s God, thinks he can help everyone. You’re the latest.”

She made a small, dismayed noise, her body jerking forward as if she were going to cut him off.

He barreled past her voiceless objection. “It won’t last. He won’t stay interested in you. The spice wears off—and that’s what you are, spicy-spice girl, hot Latina girl, exotic dark-skinned private-stripper girl—”

She felt as if she’d been slapped, or punched in the stomach. The breath went out of her, and she choked back acid.

“—and then he’s done with you. He gets you a green card, he adds you to his list of good works, then he divorces you and marries one of those skinny rich bitches so he can have white babies.”

“No!” she cried. “It’s not like that! He’s not like that.”

“Everyone’s like that,” Ricky said tiredly. “Every white guy thinks he wants a piece of mocha ass, every black guy thinks he wants at those peachy-white tits, but you find out it’s not worth the trouble. Not half the trouble. You marry this guy, you’re going to end up like Mama. He’ll find some way to be done with you and move on. You wait and see.”

She’d risen from her seat, and now she gave her chair a hard shove and backed away from him. “Screw you, Ricky! Screw you!” In English.

He didn’t raise his voice or look at her. “I’m telling it like it is,
hermanita.
You’ll see. Before long.”

“You’re wrong, Ricky. You’re so wrong.” She shoved the chair again, and it crashed to the floor. She turned and fled.

“We’ll see,” he said behind her, quietly.

She turned at the exit to look back at him. He’d put his head down on his hands. She watched for a moment, but he never moved, and she pushed through the double doors and out into the frigid November air, leaving him behind.

Chapter 24

She walked for a long time on the streets in her neighborhood. The kids were, for the most part, in school. Neighbors with jobs were at work or sleeping off their miserable third shifts, which left the streets in the possession of out-of-work men. It had always been somewhat this way in Hawthorne, but it had been worse in the past few months, with the recession. They were mostly older, gray creeping into their hair. They sat on their front stoops and their porches; they loitered on the sidewalks in pairs. They watched her appreciatively as she passed, hooted and whistled sometimes. The ones who knew her called out her name. The ones who knew Ricky well were more respectful; they nodded or tipped their caps as she passed.

Cars cruised up and down the street, too—tricked-out dealer cars and cars vibrating with loud music and strung-out gangbangers, some of them with their heads hanging out the window, yelling what they’d do to her sweet ass. At this time of day, the words meant nothing; they were blowing off steam. Night was different. At night, that same yelling was the prelude to real trouble.

She walked and walked until her heart’s pounding came from exertion and not from fury and misery. That bastard, that bastard, her asshole brother, how dare he say, how dare he imply …!

It was a funny thing, she saw, as she began to calm down, as cooler thoughts inserted themselves into the rant: Ricky hadn’t said anything she didn’t know. The marriage was temporary, that’s what he’d said. A marriage of convenience. Ethan would marry her and make her legal, and when he was done with that, when they’d gotten bored with each other, well, then, all bets were off. Ricky might have put it harshly, but he was only restating what Ana knew she’d agreed to. She had no right to expect a marriage to Ethan to be anything else; he’d promised her no more than that.

And yet: When Ricky had put it like that …

It sounded so ugly. So dirty. A brief period of time in which the heat of their attraction to each other would rule. A chance to be legal. And, in time, the end of what had always been
a contractual arrangement. Divorce. The end of—what had he called it? The spice. He hadn’t said jungle love, but he might as well have. She was a chance for Ethan to get a little mocha, live on the dark side, and, oh yeah, incidentally, indulge his savior complex.

Vile, really.

Ricky had to be wrong.

She realized, now, that she needed Ricky to be wrong. She wanted this to be more, to be the real thing. A forever thing.

She stepped over the shards of a shattered bottle.

She’d been kidding herself. She’d give up every other piece of the fantasy—the credit card, the bank account, the Social Security number, legitimacy for her brother and sister—for what she really wanted, which was for Ethan to feel about her the way she felt about him. Head over stupid heels in love.

She was way more of an idiot than she’d previously suspected.

Sure, she wanted to belong to her country. And if you’d asked her a month ago she’d have said she wanted that more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life.

But not anymore. What she wanted most, what she wanted so much that it was like a constant, dull ache in her now, was to belong to him.

“Are you so tired you’re barely functional?” Ethan asked her when she got into the car. He’d cranked the window open on the drive over, the cold air like a slap across the face, keeping him awake.

“Yes.”

“How long can we keep up this pace?” Though the thought of spending a night without her was completely unpalatable.

“We’re going to have to keep it up at least one night longer,” she said. “I’m taking you out tonight.”

He laughed. “Okay, lead on.”

She directed him to a location near her neighborhood. He recognized the grungy-looking Market Basket grocery store and wondered if that was where she and her family shopped for food. Out of laziness, he often bought his and Theo’s groceries at the expensive quasi farm stand in town, where the produce prices were reasonable but the prices for
packaged food could slay you, if you bothered to look. He bet Ana knew the price of every item she set in her grocery cart. It had never occurred to him what a luxury it was not to have to pay attention to things like that. Or to whether you had cash on hand to pay for it, the credit card always a safety net. There were no safety nets in Ana’s life.

He wanted to change that. He wanted her to someday forget her care and cautiousness. Or, better yet, he wanted her to be able to choose to use her care and cautiousness as deliberate tools instead of defenses that she could never drop.

They parked on the street. He hid the GPS and made double sure the car was locked, while she watched with amusement. She took his arm and leaned her head on his shoulder while they walked a few blocks. She turned him down an alley.

He balked. “Are you sure it’s safe back here?”

“You are such a white boy,” she said affectionately.

They were in front of a club called Blue Jeans. Despite its surroundings, Blue Jeans was in good shape. It occupied a low graffiti-free brick building with small, intact windows. All the street lamps worked passably well, casting a circle of light around the building that illuminated a collection of shivering outdoor smokers in a rainbow of skin tones. Solo acoustic guitar spilled out the door along with several teenagers, jostling one another and calling out insults.

She led him inside to a table near the stage. The ceilings were low, the light dim. Cozy. Strings of white Christmas lights hung in the corners, mobiles and wind chimes dangled from the ceiling, autographed posters and head shots papered the walls.

He sat across from her. A frowsy middle-aged waitress materialized and slapped paper coasters down in front of them. “What can I getcha?”

He ordered a Dogfish Head 60. Ana hesitated, then ordered a Heineken.

“Do you want the sign-up sheet?” the waitress asked.

“Sign-up sheet?” Ethan asked.

“It’s open-mike night.”

Ethan laughed. “No, thanks. You don’t want me up there.”

As he spoke, the teenager who had been performing stepped off the stage to the accompaniment of scattered applause, and another teenager stepped up.

A teenager with a head of dark hair badly in need of a trim, who flipped his hair out of
his green eyes and caught Ethan’s eye. And smiled.