Kissing Arizona by Elizabeth Gunn Read Free Book Online Page A

after work, trading jokes and drinking. He came home later and later to an angry wife and two bickering kids. Soon he began to say, of the situation he had himself created, ‘Who needs this?’
    After a big noisy fight in which he threatened her with his fist and she hit him with the pan she was washing, he stayed away a week. Finally he came in the afternoon with two friends in a pickup, put his clothes in one plastic trash-bag and his tools in another. Marisol followed him around the house, yelling at him, asking him what he expected her to do. Luz followed him too, crying, ‘Daddy, I love you!’ He never answered either one of them, just kept his head down and gathered his gear.
    Victoria would not cry. She stood by the door, furious, watching him pick out his skivvies and socks from the drawer where the parents’ underwear was mixed together. The final coldness of the way he separated his clothing from his wife’s was somehow more insulting than his staying away had been – that was neglect; this was indifference. When he walked toward her dragging his two bags she stuck her tongue out and gave him the finger. This so shocked both parents that for one galvanized moment they cried out in unison, ‘Victoria, que verguenza !’
    Her father raised his hand to strike her but she dodged away, screaming, ‘I hate you both!’ That shattered the last moment when the couple might have said anything to one another. Pablo threw his bags in the back of the pickup and took off with his friends.
    Marisol was devastated. She cried non-stop for two days, collapsing onto beds and even, once, into the recliner. She quickly sprang up from there, tearing her hair, shrieking that it was Pablo’s chair. They had picked it out together, she wailed, and all the saints could see that now he had broken her heart. When she threw herself on the bed instead, Victoria climbed into the chair, adjusted the backrest and made herself at home. She took possession of it entirely, refusing to share it with Luz.
    The girls watched TV the entire weekend, snacking on cookies and chips. Their mother, who had never before spent a day in bed, lay weeping and indifferent to them. They had no idea what she might do next. Growing crankier as their sugar-and-salt-loaded diet clogged their digestive systems, they wallowed in game shows and cartoons, and waited.
    On Monday morning, Marisol got up early, washed her bloated face in cold water and started the coffee, got dressed and woke the girls.
    â€˜Get up,’ she said. ‘You have to go to school. I have to get to work.’ It was as close to a plan as they would ever hear from her. Fatally humiliated, Marisol became essentially unreachable. Her answer to almost every question became ‘ Quien sabe? ’ Who knows? Her other favorite answer was ‘no’. Soon even that was unnecessary, as her daughters quickly understood that with their father gone, their situation was desperate.
    The girls coped in their different ways. Vicky got in every food line she could find and in time learned to do a little careful shoplifting. Luz hung around the neighbors’ houses looking pitiful until they fed her and worked the school system for everything she could get. As she grew, she became as American as possible, worked hard to keep her clothes clean and neat, and copied the hairstyles in People magazine. As her mother sublet most of their rented duplex to noisy new arrivals in order to keep a roof over their heads, Luz drew an invisible bubble around herself and was soon as unreachable as Marisol. Her English became textbook perfect, her grades went to the top and stayed there, she learned to suck up to teachers for attention and prizes.
    Emotionally abandoned, Victoria became an insolent stray named Vicky. She ran with the wild kids, grew a bad attitude. By shoplifting the toiletries aisles in the grocery store, she was able to style herself Gothic, with green