Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

lost my office job when I failed a drug test and my mother was relentless and finally I said okay, I can afford to check out for twenty-eight days if it will get you off my back. It was a religious place, twelve steps, all that. The staff didn’t really care. They were making money. I never talked.

Almost everyone made me sad except Mario. Abstinence only, which meant that Mario, who was there trying to wean off a Lortab habit, couldn’t get any medication assistance. So of course rehab failed. Of course he left rehab with a new dealer contact (his roommate) and a job at the clinic (also via his roommate, former employee). It was okay, though. Mario doesn’t believe in that abstinence-only bullshit, and unless you’ve used opioids, you wouldn’t understand, he says. Like addiction is more like a spectrum. It’s more like a balance. Like if you’re strung out and your whole life is fucked up, then yeah, you need to stop. But if you’re mostly clean and you want to indulge in something once in a while … how realistic is it that you’ll never use any kind of substance ever again?

He got kicked out of a sober-living house when they found his Percs, and by then we were talking every day and I said, Come, I’ll take care of you. Mario believes in gray areas, and people like my mom believe everything is black and white, and I’m not sure where I fall, except that Mario is the smartest man I’ve ever known. He can explain everything like how buying a house is the smartest investment and we can get a mortgage even without our parents’ help and even if we don’t have our own money and he never asks me about my family and he clings to me like I am the piece he’s been missing all this time.

I learn so much from Mario and I start to wonder if this is what I missed not going to college like him. I listen and it feels like growth. I listen and sometimes I drink and sometimes I do a little coke and stay up all night talking or molly and fuck and fuck or benzos when I need to finally get some sleep. And it’s fine. It’s mostly the weekends. And Mario, he doesn’t even touch the Oxys, just sells them or trades them for Percs but it’s just to keep the migraines at bay, not even as much as before. I’m afraid of addiction, I’ve seen what it did to my father. So we’re careful. I don’t say no—I’m not another girl—but I’m careful. I hug his head.

The woman’s husband comes around Christmastime. The woman’s husband is handsome, with legs too spindly for his body, like a gazelle in a suit. Isabel walks him to my counter and says, he needs a cream for his dry skin but nothing that smells too flowery. Then she walks away to browse shoes, and I tell the husband about our line of men’s products in blue-black containers that suggest sailorly conquest and rapacious strength. I’m sorry for my wife, the husband says, she sounds so dumb sometimes. I don’t know how to respond, so I say do you use a daily antioxidant to battle signs of premature aging? He frowns and walks away. I place a hand on the cold glass counter and picture it cracking under my weight. I am thin and wispy like a bowl of feathers, like crumpled paper tumbling in the wind. Nothing cracks in my presence.

At home, Mario nods off again. All he does lately is sleep. I make dinner and set the table, but he does not wake. I curl beside him on the couch and say hello, I am home, but he does not wake. I lay my head over his chest and listen to his heartbeat and I kiss his chin. Love me, I whisper. Look how happy we are, I say.

I don’t understand why you don’t at least come home, my mother says. I mean, just to visit. I’m not saying you need to live there.

We are sitting in her car and it’s pouring rain outside, the kind so dissipated it almost looks like it’s raining in reverse. She is dropping me off at the mall after taking me to get a haircut. She is wary now of giving me big chunks of cash but wants me to do my hair at her fancy place anyway.

A woman needs to have presencia, she says, and then she starts going into her thing about how she always puts on a full face of makeup every morning even if she’s just staying home and doing nothing, which I will never understand.

Mom, I say. You should leave him.

Who, your dad? she says, laughing. She is staring straight ahead at the water hitting the windshield like how she sounds typing with her long, perfectly round nails.

Do you realize he just lies in bed all the time now? she says. Do you realize how sick he is? I mean, I’m the one who has the power now. The seats in her car are heated, which seems like such a waste in Miami, but I’m comforted nonetheless, tucked into the nest-like embrace of warm leather. I try to make myself smaller, shrink deeper.

But you fight all the time, I say, and I lean my head against the passenger-side window. I watch another mall employee, plastic bag held over her head, running toward the door of the department store. I am glad to be early. I am glad not to have to run in the rain.

My mother pinches the top of her nose like she’s getting a headache. It’s the kind of thing she does when she’s being dramatic. I love her, I really do—I just wish she made better choices.

Jeanette.

What?

You’re being ridiculous. We don’t even fight anymore. He doesn’t even have the energy if he wanted to.

She places a hand between my