life rather than blowing it in a few years.
She hadn’t wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a maid, so she was relieved when she was placed in a pop-up café as a low-wage barista, subsidized by a state grant.
The café got her for free in return for training her, and the grant paid her a meager salary, the idea being that when the grant ran out she’d move on to a genuine job with a gleaming entry on her résumé.
It was like her mother’s death all over again to lose Miguel. As the years passed, she saw him now and then, saving up money to take separate rooms at a Motel 6 somewhere between their two cities. They’d shyly bring each other up to speed by the pool separated from the big rigs in the parking lot by a chain-link fence. By the roar of the idling diesels, they’d sum up their years apart. The blue paint on the bottom of the pool peeled like a sunburn.
Romance never happened for them. She figured they both knew their friendship was a vital brick that kept their walls upright. They didn’t dare mess with the mortar. Life without each other wouldn’t have been worth living. Friends fight—and they did—but only lovers take savage joy in ripping the other from their life.
Brooke had tried to kiss him once at one of these reunions, and he’d put his hands tenderly on her face as he pulled away.
“Mija, if this didn’t work . . . ,” he had said.
“I know. But we’re never going to try?”
“To be honest, if a relationship failed, the friendship would, too. And that would kill me.”
“It would kill me, too.”
So they didn’t risk it, and he resumed being the brother she’d never had. In their world untethered by parents, they provided stability to each other.
They really did best on Facebook, relaxed, joking, unselfconscious. Under their fake avatars, they were each other’s only friend. They live-chatted pretty much daily, and her feed was a long row of funny and sweet things he’d said to her. He was her brick, her wall, her touchstone, her core.
The next day, Brooke shows up for her new job at the coffeehouse. She’s adjusted her speech and her clothing to look like the illegal immigrant she’s posing as, so she can be paid under the table. This is what she’s had to do to avoid being tracked: she changes her name every few years, moves, and finds a job where an employer is happy to look the other direction in exchange for paying a pittance.
With her looks and fluency in Spanish, it’s easy to pass as someone who doesn’t have a legitimate Social Security number. She has long black hair with a bit of natural curl at the ends, dramatic eyebrows, high cheekbones, and caramel-colored skin. Her body is lean and strong, thanks to not being a fantastic cook and not eating many meals out. She’s beautiful, but her understated way of dressing and behaving lets her easily be overlooked.
“Hi, Brooke!” her employer greets her. Jane is an older woman with gray hair braided into a Germanic-looking crown atop her head. She wears vests and approximately three huge silver rings per finger, an entire flea market table’s display on two hands. Jane had explained at Brooke’s interview how she felt sympathy for the plight of so many stranded Mexicans and she knew the government was wrong to impede immigration, so it was her own politically subversive act to therefore hire Mexicans even if they couldn’t appropriately and honestly fill out the I-9 form. She said nothing about how this then released her from the burden of paying minimum wage; no, it was all about screwing “the man,” not screwing the young woman in front of her.
“Going to be a busy day?” Brooke asks.
“It was . . . I had you come after the rush so it wasn’t stressful. This is Maria, and I’ll have her train you. You already know how the equipment works, but we have a few things we do differently from other places you might’ve worked.”
Maria, in a low-plunging tank top that gives a view of what Brooke suspects to be only the top 30 percent of a cresting serpent tattoo, gives her a friendly tour of the workspace, interrupted a few times by customers. Maria stands back and lets Brooke wait on them, and Jane gives an approving smile after each interaction.
After Jane leaves, Maria says in Spanish, “You have to be careful not to make her mad. She threatens to call Immigration.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. When you first meet her, she’s all ‘Oh, I love to help you; I know you had a hard life in Mexico,’ but what she likes is the power of knowing you’re illegal.”
“I’m not, actually,” says Brooke before she can help herself. Way to go. Contradict the fiction that’s keeping you safe.
“Oh, really? You’re working these shit wages because . . .?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“I bet. Anyway, don’t cross her.”
“Okay.”
Maria looks to the glass café front and grins. “Here’s our rush hour. Offices must be very difficult places to work; the workers stream out of them like their asses are on fire!”
Together they grind beans, scald milk, forge designs on the blank canvas of the latte foam. They press paninis and stock the sugars, ease a spatula into the pre-cut slices of a red velvet cake.
When the next shift arrives hours later, Maria leaves without saying goodbye to Brooke. It’s better that way—Brooke doesn’t want to get close to someone who will ask all the questions she’s had to rehearse answers to. But there’s still a pang at how their camaraderie had only been because they were on the clock together.
JULY 11, 2016
The days pass in a slow, loud way—the clatter of plates, the endless screech of the espresso machine. Brooke meets the other employees, their shifts spread so they are all just one hour under full-time so Jane won’t have to pay benefits.
It’s a rainy Monday when a guy comes in and shakes his umbrella in the doorway, creating a pool of water that Jane mutters will cause accidents and thus litigation.
“Go mop it up!” she says urgently to Brooke.
“Sorry,” the guy says as Brooke approaches with a mop.
“It’s okay.”
He gives her a nice smile. He’s in his early twenties like her, wearing a gray raincoat over black pants and nice shoes. His conservatively-cut hair is brown, and he’s clean-shaven, his jawline looking a little raw. More than anything, he’s handsome in a serious way; he looks like a male model in an eyeglasses ad. He’s devoid of the rough edges that define her—the way a stranger can tell you once ate dinners constructed of saltines and peanut butter, and fielded playground queries about a missing, unnamed father.
Unexpectedly, he seizes the mop, cleaning up the
