By Nicole Mestre
My stepmother grabbed the car’s rusty window handle and spun it around once. From the backseat of my dad’s mustard-yellow Hornet, I watched the glass creak down two inches before getting stuck. Her head bobbed back and forth as she tried to force the handle back around. Her jerky movements were out of sync with the 1984 summer hit, Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” blasting from the radio. The bullet-shaped car, which was thirteen years old like me, hadn’t weathered the last decade too well. And—an hour into our four-hour drive from my home in Miami to my dad’s in Orlando—I was worried that it wouldn’t survive the trip.
She jammed her hands through the two-inch slit in the passenger window and shimmied the glass a quarter of the way down. The light rain erupted—as it did every afternoon—into a full-blown August shower and blew in through the open window.
My dad stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. It was so full it infused the rest of the car with its stale scent. He turned on the windshield wipers. The wipers—with broken-off rubber pieces trailing them like tentacles behind an octopus—were ineffective in moving the water off the glass. It was impossible to see more than a few inches in front of us. My stepmother, who I called La Bruja, tried pulling the slippery glass with her hands. But she needed a dry towel or shirt to do it. I had both in the suitcase I was resting my feet on, but didn’t offer either to her.
“I’m getting wet,” La Bruja said in the faux British accent my mom claimed she adopted to eradicate her Jamaican one.
The rain was coming in strong enough to reach my dad. His flared jeans, flannel shirt, and long hair—the same auburn color and shoulder length as mine—were damp.
Raising her voice, she asked him, “Did you hear me?”
“Ling, it’s your own damn fault for opening the window in the middle of a rain storm. It was a stupid thing to do.”
Undeterred, Ling said, “I’m not stupid.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he snapped.
“I guess I’m also too stupid to understand what you’re saying.”
“You’re acting like a child.”
“So are you.”
“Why did you open it?” he asked.
“All I wanted to do was throw this out,” she said, holding up a half-eaten apple.
“You were going to litter?” I asked. It was the first time I had spoken to her all day. The back of my dad’s car was decorated with a hand-sized sticker of Bob Marley, the panda from the World Wildlife Foundation, and a Greenpeace rainbow sticker. In his world, it was all right to knock up the Cuban girl you met at the University of Florida, marry her, and leave her with a six-month-old baby because you needed to go find yourself in California. It was even okay to marry a stranger you had met on a flight back to Miami and to see your only daughter once or twice a year. Littering, however, was not cool.
My plan backfired. For the first time since the heavy rain started, my dad took his eyes off the road. He looked at me through the rearview mirror. His eyes—like mine—were the color of green glass. With the seriousness of a priest giving absolution he said, “Michelle, Ling would never litter.” He explained, “Apples are biodegradable, so it helps when we return it to the land. Do you know what biodegradable means?”
Ling turned back to flash me a triumphant smile. Her kinky hair lay wet and flat against her head, her eyes, which were her only feature that matched her maiden name of Chung, were narrowed in victory, and her nose and mouth flared in satisfaction. Unlike my dad and me, my stepmother didn’t have the pallor of a hemophiliac. She was the color of café con leche. The same as my mom. My dad’s unabashedly racist mom had once said that my dad liked his wives—Ling was the third one—dark. Although her comment disgusted me, it didn’t surprise me. When I was born, she didn’t ask my dad if I (her first grandchild) was a boy or a girl. All she wanted to know was if I was white. “She looks just like you,” my dad had told her.
“Your father’s right. It’s bloody biodegradable,” Ling said, holding up the decaying apple. She flung it out the window and slid across the long front seat to where my dad was sitting. He put his arm around her narrow shoulders and said, “I’m sorry about that, hon. You know I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said and then twisted around to face me. The rain had smeared her heavy makeup, causing two bruises of black gunk to appear under her eyes. With her curly hair and botched makeup, she reminded me of a sinister clown from a horror film.
“Michelle,” she said. “Your mother called your father last night to let him know that you didn’t want to come to see him.” This wasn’t news to me; I had begged my mom to do it. “If the two of you continue to interfere with your father’s visitation, we’ll get the courts involved.” It was the first time that day she had said more than ten words to me. Her breath smelled of cigarettes and the rubbing alcohol my mom used on my mosquito bites. I recognized the smell. La Bruja had been drinking. And she was an aggressive drunk. Scared she’d whack me across the face if I spoke, I waited for my dad to defend me. He didn’t. Not knowing what else to do, I shrugged my shoulders.
“It’s rude to do that,” she said. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“No, ma’am.”
She gave a satisfied nod. My dad handed her a t-shirt and told her to use it to close the window. “I don’t want you to get sick,” he said. She closed it, scooted back over to my dad, and put her head on his shoulder.
I opened my book—my escape from the world of capricious adults—and started reading. I laughed when I read the first line at the top of the page of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret: “We must, we must, we must increase our bust.” Although bust was a foreign word to me, because my mom used Spanish words to refer to my private parts, I knew it meant boobs. I also knew that all of this related to sex, related to the book The Joy of Sex I had found in my dad’s sparse library the last time I visited him, and related to the naked picture of La Bruja that had slipped out when I looked through the book. She was lying on their bed with her legs splayed open. One hand was buried in her pipi and the other one was grabbing her teta. The picture was my only clue as to why my dad married La Bruja. Since it wasn’t her looks or personality, it had to be her immense tetas. I stuffed the picture back into The Joy of Sex, which my dad kept next to his collection of Stephen King books. The memory of the picture aggravated the nausea caused by sitting in my dad’s cigarette-infused car.
“I feel nauseous,” I said.
“You mean nauseated,” La Bruja said.
“I feel nauseated,” I repeated.
“I can’t pull over now,” my dad said. “We need to wait until we reach an underpass so that you don’t get soaked.” Looking at me through the rear-view mirror, he said, “Baby girl, you do look a little green.” He asked Ling, “Can you check Michy’s temperature?”
“I don’t carry a bloody thermometer with me,” she said.
I pressed my palm against my forehead as I had seen my mom do a million times. “I don’t feel hot. Just carsick.”
“Don’t you dare vomit back there,” Ling said. “I’m not picking up after you. I’m not your damn maid.”
My dad shook his head and muttered something under his breath. It sounded ominous. “Ling,” he said, using an overly patient tone. “Why don’t you give her one of the plastic bags we have up here?” Ling passed one to me and scooted back to her side of the car. She was so close to the passenger door she seemed to be hugging it.
Ten minutes later, we reached the underpass. My dad pulled over to the side of the road. Ling let me out of the car and jumped back into it. Everything was bathed in a gray light, and it smelled like the dead rat I had found a week after Halloween in the rotting jack-o’-lantern on my front porch. Adding to the sinister feeling was a trio of helmetless bikers—encased in black leather—parked right by us. Three years earlier, poor Adam Walsh had been kidnapped from a nearby Sears in Hollywood and killed. After his severed head was found in a canal, my mom no longer let me ride my bike around the neighborhood. And she definitely wouldn’t have left me unsupervised in an underpass full of fearsome-looking bikers. I knocked on my dad’s window. “It’s kind of scary here,” I said after he rolled it down.
“You’re a big girl.”
“Do you mind keeping the window down?”
“No problem, babe.”
I waited for him to volunteer to come out with me. He didn’t. I walked a few feet away from the car. As I stood there waiting to be sick, I overheard him talking to Ling. “It was mighty maternal of you to go out there with her, hon,” he drawled out in the Southern accent he reserved for sarcasm. I couldn’t hear her response. When she stopped talking, my dad said, “I get it. I get it. She’s my kid. But all you do is talk shit about her. Have you ever considered making some effort with her?” She must have said something especially nasty because he shouted, “She’s thirteen years old for fuck’s sake.” His words echoed around the underpass.
When I heard my dad shout, I took a breath so deep that the dead animal smell slammed into my nose and throat. I bent over and vomited. When I was done, I saw the bikers were looking sympathetically at me. One even gave me a thumbs-up. I wiped my mouth and returned to the car. As soon as I settled back in, La Bruja said, “I told you not to eat all of the crap. I know you Latinos love your fried food and your arroz con pollo. But you’re not eating like that with me. I’m not going to pull over every time you feel sick.”
“It’s not the arroz con pollo,” I said. “It’s the cigarette smoke. It makes me sick. Daddy knows it too.”
She lit another cigarette. They had already gone through half a pack. She blew a mouthful of smoke into the backseat and said, “Didn’t we agree when you were on holiday with us that you were a little too old to use the word daddy? Call him dad or father.”
Turning to my dad, she said, “I’ve got to pee. Can we take a break at the next rest stop?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Can I get some ginger ale?” I asked. “It helps my stomach.”
“Michelle,” Ling said. “You shouldn’t drink soda. The little red bumps on your legs might mean you have diabetes.”
My grandfather was diabetic. Walking into my mom’s room once, I witnessed him injecting insulin into the vein of his old-man arm. It was something I thought about every time my mom took me to the doctor for my shots. If doing this once a year was tough, how did he manage to do it daily? I raised my hands to see if they were shaking. My grandfather’s hands trembled when his insulin was low. Mine were still.
“She doesn’t have diabetes,” my dad said.
“I have a background in medicine,” La Bruja said. “I think I would know.”
“You’re a phlebotomist. All you know how to do is draw blood.”
I didn’t care if he was insulting her or defending me, all that mattered was I wasn’t spending the rest of my life shooting insulin into my arm.
“Are you sure, Dad?” I asked.
“Yeah, baby.”
“Thanks, Daddy.” Our eyes met in the rear-view mirror that was hanging crookedly from the windshield. He winked at me. I tried winking back but just blinked at him instead.
“I have to pee,” La Bruja reminded him.
It had stopped raining by the time we reached the rest stop. Ling and my dad got out of the car. She left the door open to signal that I should follow her out. When I didn’t, she popped her head back in and asked, “What are you waiting for?”
“I don’t have to go pipi.”
“Speak like a grown woman. Say that you don’t have to pee. You sound like a dumb spic when you say pipi.” As mean as she was to me when we were with my dad, she was exponentially nastier when he was out of earshot.
“I don’t have to pee.”
“Get out. We’re not stopping in ten minutes when Princess decides she needs to use the loo.”
Trailing behind her, I noticed that the seat of her white jean-shorts were smeared in blood. The stain was the same dull red of the apple she had thrown out the window. I didn’t tell her.
In the bathroom, I took the stall next to her. “Shit,” she said. I assumed she had noticed the blood on her shorts. “Michelle, tell your dad to buy me a sweatshirt.”
“Are you cold?” I asked. I heard the crinkling sound of her unwrapping a pad.
“No.”
“Then why do you need a sweatshirt?” Stained white shorts seemed like the most embarrassing thing on Earth. I wanted her to admit it.
“I got my period and stained my shorts.”
I sniggered.
“It’s not a big deal,” she said. “But I don’t want to walk around like this. Tell your dad to get me a sweatshirt and come back in with it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Stop that white-trash shit with me,” she said. “I know your grandmother goes for it, but I see right through it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Anything that reminded her of my grandmother—a woman that refused to meet her, or any of dad’s wives—upset her.
I found my dad at one of the rest stop stores that sold every variety of Florida memorabilia—alligator toys, oranges, and Disney World souvenirs.
“Can I get a Mad Libs?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Get a ginger ale too.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Call me Daddy, baby. You have to excuse Ling. She doesn’t know how to act around kids. And …”
“And what?”
“She had a miscarriage. It happened a few months ago. She didn’t want me to tell you, but I thought you should know.”
Maybe Ling’s pants were stained because she had another miscarriage, I thought.
“Ling asked for a sweatshirt,” I told my dad.
“Why don’t you pick it out?”
As I walked over to where the clothes were kept, I smelled burgers, fries, and grease. There was an especially strong odor of fried onion rings. That’s when I noticed a Burger King counter a few feet away. I picked up a shirt and sniffed it. It was infused with the scent of onions. I dropped the shirt and went to the bottom of the pile to find something that didn’t smell like a fast food joint. One option was a neon pink top with a picture of Minnie Mouse dressed as Madonna. Ling claimed that Madonna’s music was “rubbish,” and said Disney World was the epitome of everything wrong with the United States. If my dad hadn’t confided in me about her miscarriage, I would have picked it. But now I knew, so I kept looking through the clothes until I found a plain red sweatshirt I knew she’d like. It was soft, and when I sniffed it, it didn’t smell like my dad’s wannabe hippie brother who refused to wear deodorant. I walked it over to the register where my dad was waiting.
“Is this okay?” I asked, holding it up.
Barely glancing at it, he said, “Yeah, it’s fine.”
“I picked red because it’s her favorite color.”
“It is?” How had he not noticed? She always wore one article of red clothing.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then it’s fine.” He dumped the sweatshirt next to the register. I added my ginger ale and Mad Libs to the pile.
By the time we were done paying, Ling had come out searching for us. When she saw that I had put my arm around my dad’s waist, she said, “You act more like his wife than I do.”
I let go of my dad and blushed. Her accusation reminded me of the naked picture of her I had seen.
“Stop that,” my dad said. His face was red. She had gone too far. Ling rushed out to the car. My dad chased her. I ran after them. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked when we reached her.
She didn’t answer. He took a step closer to her. He was a foot taller than she was. With his right hand he grabbed the top of her underarm and pinched her.
“I asked you a question,” he said, twisting her skin.
She looked down at the ground and said, “It was cold in there. I just wanted to get back out.”
He let go of her arm, shook his head, and said, “I’ve had enough of your crap. I want you to behave.”
She nodded her head, and he unlocked the door. For the next half an hour, the only sound I heard was my dad and Ling exhaling cigarette smoke. When I started feeling nauseous, I asked my dad, “Can I have my ginger ale?”
As he passed the bag of stuff to me, Ling said, “You got her a soda? She’s going to end up fat like her mother.”
“Maria’s not fat,” he said.
“I knew it,” she said raising her voice. “I knew it. You still love her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You just said she wasn’t fat.”
“She’s not and neither is Michelle. I told you to behave.”
“You can’t tell me what to do,” she shouted.
My dad shifted his cigarette from his right hand to his left. Steering just with his left hand, he let his right one fly across the front seat. He slammed the back of his palm into her open mouth. The pinky ring he wore clanked against her teeth.
“Enough,” he said.
She must have known he’d hit her again if she didn’t say something, because she turned to him and said, “Yes, enough.”
I noticed two things as I looked at her face. Her upper lip was bleeding, and she didn’t seem surprised by my dad’s sudden violence.
I retreated back behind my book. The first line I read was: “Then Miss Abbot told us since we were in the sixth grade and very grown up, there were certain subjects we would cover during the school year. ‘Certain very private subjects.’ That was all she said but I got the idea.”
The sentence—yet another reference to the protagonist’s preoccupation with her period—reminded me of the satisfaction I felt when Ling paraded into the rest stop oblivious to her blood-stained shorts. I had felt the same joy when my dad slapped her. He was finally defending me, I had reasoned.
I set my book down and picked up the bag holding the sweatshirt I had so carefully picked out for her. I caught my dad watching me in the rear-view mirror. His eyes were tilted upwards. Was it possible he was smiling? Ling had once told me—after I overheard my dad call her a “dirty whore”—that he wasn’t the person he pretended to be. I slipped the sweatshirt over the seat. It landed on Ling’s lap. She bunched it up into a pillow, set it against the window, and rested her head on it. Minutes later, she started snoring. Ignoring my dad, who kept on glancing back at me, I lifted up my book and continued reading.
Nicole Mestre lives in Miami, Florida with her husband and two teenage daughters. She recently retired from the practice of law to focus on writing fiction. In the Fall of 2018, she will begin the MFA program at Florida International University. This is her first published story.
