Night at the Fiestas: Stories by Kirstin Valdez Quade Read Free Book Online

means you’re literate.” She hadn’t been prepared for her own screaming rage, or an existence, which, even in the house his parents bought them with real art on the walls, still seemed cramped and insignificant. And above all she hadn’t been prepared for pregnancy: Cordelia, a curled exacting weight in her womb, anchoring her in the life she’d chosen.
    Monica looked up at the back of her daughter’s dark, disapproving head on the crumpled pillow.
    Well, hadn’t Monica done her best to undo all that? It hadn’t been easy to leave Peter, and it certainly hadn’t been easy dating with a child. Regardless of how pretty you might be, add a kid to the mix and your value plunged. Surely she deserved some credit. She was lucky: Elliot Rios was brilliant, attractive, a good person. And most important, he was good to Cordelia. He’d bought her a globe for her birthday, let her wear his hand lens around her neck so she could inspect rocks and dirt. He’d made her a geology kit in a canvas sample bag with her name on the label. It contained sample bags, a Sharpie, a bottle of weak acid to test for calcite, and a roll of pH paper. Before she or anyone else drank anything, Cordelia determined its pH: Folgers coffee, milk, apple juice. “Really yellow,” she’d announce before quaffing her juice with gusto. “Pure acid.” Cordelia might take Elliot’s kindness to her for granted, but Monica didn’t have that luxury.
    They’d had idyllic evenings together, evenings Monica could never have imagined when she was seventeen: the four of them clustered around the hissing Coleman lantern with its glowing green mantle, Beatrice nursing, Cordelia absorbed in her workbooks, filling in boxes and pasting stickers. Elliot would tell Monica about the things he’d found in the desert: a concrete Jesus in a gulch fifty miles from the nearest settlement, a fossilized camel jaw, pieces of a crashed World War II fighter plane. And she would tell him about the old man at the Lucky Token who’d called her a sight for sore eyes, or how Cordelia had made a name for herself at school for knowing to use a hyphen when she could not fit the word into the end of the line.
    Certainly these were pleasures her mother would never understand with her cheap ideas about success and her determined pursuit of gaiety. Monica’s mother: hell-bent on having the things that were unimaginable in the ranching town where she’d grown up, liquor cabinets and televisions and shag carpeting. Monica couldn’t leave that desperation behind fast enough.
    Tonight, Monica decided, they’d all sleep in the foldout bed together, the whole family, warm and close. She longed for Elliot so deeply her throat ached.
    “When you grow out of it, can I have your dress?” Cordelia’s voice was gruff, her head still turned away.
    “Sure,” said Monica, feeling as though she’d won an argument. “But I don’t intend to grow out of it.”
    A T FIRST M ONICA THOUGHT the knocking was the wind, and then with a surge of fear, the NASA engineer, come to get her. She felt naked in the dress and pulled on her vest.
    “Who could it be?” she asked Cordelia theatrically, heart pounding. She glanced at the knife drawer.
    On the step stood a little girl. She was wearing a purple coat fringed with dingy fake fur on the hood; the hood was down and the coat unzipped, and in her hand she carried a smudged pink backpack. This was Amanda, from across the way, and Monica smiled with relief, remembering the pale watching face and her own absurd fear.
    Monica knew Amanda from the schoolbus stop, where (while Cordelia fussed over Beatrice, sneaking looks at the older kids) Amanda’s big brother whipped at the ground—and Amanda—with a dangerous length of rope. She lived crammed in with her enormous relatives: parents, grandmother, uncle, brother. Amanda alone was thin, skinny, really. She reminded Monica of the baby orangutan at the Albuquerque zoo, startled-looking and wiry, bounding