This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz Read Free Book Online

I’m in charge of four other workers, I make an American wage, but it’s a donkey job. I sort through piles of sheets with gloved hands. The dirties are brought down by orderlies, morenas mostly. I never see the sick; they visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets, the alphabet of the sick and dying. A lot of the time the stains are too deep and I have to throw these linens in the special hamper. One of the girls from Baitoa tells me she’s heard that everything in the hamper gets incinerated. Because of the sida, she whispers. Sometimes the stains are rusty and old and sometimes the blood smells sharp as rain. You’d think, given the blood we see, that there’s a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.
    My girls are not exactly reliable, but I enjoy working with them. They play music, they feud, they tell me funny stories. And because I don’t yell or bully them they like me. They’re young, sent to the States by their parents. The same age I was when I arrived; they see me now, twenty-eight, five years here, as a veteran, a rock, but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
    A few of the girls have boyfriends and they’re the ones I’m careful about depending on. They show up late or miss weeks at a time; they move to Nueva York or Union City without warning. When that happens I have to go to the manager’s office. He’s a little man, a thin man, a bird-looking man; has no hair on his face, but a thatch grows on his chest and up his neck. I tell him what happened and he pulls the girl’s application and rips it in half, the cleanest of sounds. In less than an hour one of the other girls has sent a friend to me for an application.
    The newest girl’s called Samantha and she’s a problem. She’s dark and heavy-browed and has a mouth like unswept glass—when you least expect it she cuts you. Walked onto the job after one of the other girls ran off to Delaware. She’s been in the States only six weeks and can’t believe the cold. Twice she’s tipped over the detergent barrels and she has a bad habit of working without gloves and then rubbing her eyes. She tells me that she’s been sick, that she’s had to move twice, that her housemates have stolen her money. She has the scared, hunted look of the unlucky. Work is work, I tell her, but I loan her enough for her lunches, let her do personal laundry in our machines. I expect her to thank me, but instead she says that I talk like a man.
    Does it get any better? I hear her ask the others. Just worse, they say. Wait for the freezing rain. She looks over at me, half smiling, uncertain. She’s fifteen, maybe, and too thin to have mothered a child, but she’s already shown me the pictures of her fat boy, Manolo. She’s waiting for me to answer, me in particular because I’m the veterana, but I turn to the next load. I’ve tried to explain to her the trick of working hard but she doesn’t seem to care. She cracks her gum and smiles at me like I’m seventy. I unfold the next sheet and like a flower the bloodstain’s there, no bigger than my hand. Hamper, I say, and Samantha throws it open. I ball the sheet up and toss. Slops right in, the loose ends dragged in by the center.
    —
    NINE HOURS OF SMOOTHING linen and I am home, eating cold yuca with hot oil, waiting for Ramón to come for me in the car he has borrowed. He is taking me to look at another house. It’s been his dream since he first set foot in the States, and now, with all the jobs he’s had and the money he’s saved, it’s possible. How many get to this point? Only the ones who never swerve, who never make mistakes, who are never unlucky. And that more or less is Ramón. He’s serious about the house, which means I have to be serious about it, too. Each week we go out into the world and look. He makes an event of it, dressing like he’s interviewing for a visa, drives us