Total pages in book: 143
Estimated words: 136743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 684(@200wpm)___ 547(@250wpm)___ 456(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 684(@200wpm)___ 547(@250wpm)___ 456(@300wpm)
“I’m good.” I muster a reassuring smile that I hope convinces her because it’s the best I can do right now. “How about pizza for dinner?”
Their agreement is subdued compared to the usual enthusiasm, and I know my girls so well, I can practically see their thoughts floating over their heads. Kids are resilient. They’re trying to go about business as usual, but their father is behind bars. The FBI is involved. They know this could change life as we know it, and they aren’t sure what will happen.
That is one of the parts about being an adult that really sucks. You’re the one who has to be sure or has to figure it out. My parents always figured it out. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I don’t remember worrying about it. I want my girls to have that. Not blissful ignorance. I knew things were hard sometimes, but I was always sure Mami and Dad would see us through.
Thoughts of my parents compel me to the closet when I reach my bedroom. I drag my step stool out and climb up to grab Mami’s chest. Sitting on the floor and lifting the lid, I breathe her memory in and draw her close for comfort.
If she were alive, she would heap a stream of curses on Edward’s name. She would threaten him with my aunt Silvana, who embraces the old ways and still practices Sanse. Mami always said none of that vodou stuff was real, but let somebody mess with us. She’d call Aunt Silvana back on the island so fast. A solitary tear coasts down my cheek and slips into the corner of my mouth. It’s not salty. It’s bittersweet with the remarkable years I had with my mother and the years I’ve had to live without her.
When we were a little older, she talked more about her life with Bray before my father. She told us he’d cheated on her once, and that was it.
“You accept a man shitting on you,” she used to say, “he’ll make himself at home. There’s no three strikes. You use me, take me for granted, you prove you don’t deserve to be in my life.”
She would dust her hands together. “You’re gone.”
Her sassy sagacity teases the edges of my memory, reminding me of the truth. It’s not that I failed Edward. Not that I wasn’t sexy enough or didn’t do enough. It’s not my loose pussy, my almost-forty-year-old self, the fine lines creeping around my eyes. It’s him. His sorry, no-character, vow-breaking ass. Men married to the most gorgeous women in the world still cheat.
Hello, Lemonade?
And yet this wave of not enough washes over me as I stare down at the chest through a scrim of tears. I lift the flag and press it to my face, letting the flag of the Grito de Lares absorb the dampness of my pain. This flag hung in my abuela’s house on her wall. It was a symbol of righteous rebellion and a declaration of war in the name of independence. As I hold the flag, its pride, its anger, its fierceness blanket me.
How dare he?
How could he?
The hurt spreads so deep and so wide, it threatens to swallow me. I’m drowning in it, but I reach for my rage, and like a lifeline it rescues me. The machete glints at me like a wicked smile from beneath Mami’s journal. I push aside the leather-bound book and grab the knife. I hold it flat across my palms, and my mouth waters for vengeance. For retribution. If Edward were standing in front of me, I might chop his dick off and hang his balls from my rearview mirror as souvenirs of how I felled him. How I unmanned him.
But he’s not here.
His things are.
The thought of destroying his expensive wardrobe and slicing up all his handmade shoes hasn’t even fully formed before I’m on my feet with the machete, slicing off the arms of his Armani, tearing through the back of his Marc Jacobs, and amputating the legs from his Gucci. I take my knife to his shelves of shoes, dicing them like vegetables until leather confetti litters my closet floor. I grab that tacky tie Edward’s mama gave him with the red polka dots and chop chop chop until it bleeds all over the closet floor in a mound of ruined silk.
More.
Even taking in the destruction I’ve wrought, the beast in me hungers for more, like Edward’s entire wardrobe was merely the appetizer and I’m starving for the main course. I rush down the stairs and tiptoe past the living room so the girls won’t see, and then I streak out to the backyard. I stand there a moment, glaring at the structure where Edward spent so much of his time. I stalk through the door and assess the space Edward wanted for his “sanity” in a houseful of women.