to be doing what she was doing with the person in front of her. She looked at him, kissed him on the head, then opened his pants and put him in her mouth.
Reeling from pleasure, Chon fell back onto the stool behind him. He looked out at Main Street through the store’s windows, foolishly afraid that anyone would see what was going on. Ana relented for a bit, looking up at Chon with those new eyes, and scared him more than the thought of being caught with his pants down. Stroking him, she smiled and with a knowing shake of her head said, “You’re so fucking wonderful, do you know that? If you were twenty years older, we’d never do this. You’re too good for me. I’ll never deserve someone like you, but thanks for being here now.”
She went back to her business of thanking Chon. He looked down at this woman—forty-three years old, widowed once, with a delinquent daughter and two ex-husbands—working him vigorously, expertly, he thought, in her mouth. He was aware for the first time that she was more than someone with whom he was complicit in the act of using and being used. She liked him. The responsibility of that realization nauseated Chon. Because, while he was currently placed precariously between her teeth, he was not the only one in this arrangement who was made vulnerable in the frame of the floor to ceiling windows at The Pachanga’s storefront
She had offered him a cigarette that night. He accepted it to avoid any conversation in the darkness outside of The Pachanga—Ana smiling in the moonlight like a gargoyle atop the ice machine, Chon still feeling aftershock tremors of pleasure running through his belly. When she lit a second and offered Chon another, he declined and drove home. Fancy as it was supposed to be, the cigarette tasted off to Chon.
“So Bill called you and let you know?” Chon asked. To Chon’s mind, Bill Guerra wasn’t such a bad guy—just a parent, like Ana, who couldn’t deal with his lost-cause daughter. He wouldn’t tell Ana that though.
“Fuck that asshole. He isn’t telling me anything. The detective in her case has been calling me. They might bring him up on charges for letting her get into all this shit. It’d serve him right.” Ana looked at her cigarette, which she’d lit crookedly. She licked her index finger and ran it up the side of her smoke to quell its diagonally advancing cherry.
“And you? Any news on your chula?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Chon said, “her parents sent her to stay with some family friends over in Corpus. They didn’t want her to be around all this craziness. They’re going to keep her over there until school starts.”
“Well, that sucks for you, Chon-chon. You wait for an opportunity like this to come along and your girl leaves the county.” She laughed smoke through her nose.
“Ana, those guys died,” Chon said, shaking his head.
“And? Death is a perfect opportunity for new love. That’s how Bill got me—when Jo-Jo had his embolism. Believe me, in this life you get left so much that it doesn’t matter how—if they die or leave you for someone else or even go gay or something like that. All that matters is if you get found by someone else. You know?”
So much of this struck Chon as wrong. But he didn’t want to argue with Ana however much he hoped it wasn’t true. He had lately realized that he could—if he chose to—change any of her beliefs or ideas by simply disagreeing with them. For that reason, he stopped disagreeing with her completely. He knew Ana was lost right now, had been for as long as he had known her. He resisted, as strongly as he could, her attempts at finding herself in him. They hadn’t had sex in weeks.
“Anyway,” Ana said in the wake of Chon’s silence. She slipped off of the ice machine onto the trashcan and stepped down onto the milk crate. “Her parents are right to get her away from this place. It’s like people around here aren’t happy enough sharing the same however many square feet of town, they have to share their sadness over two boys most of them didn’t even know.”
Chon nodded, holding the door open for Ana. He went behind the counter and opened the register.
“You left me two tens,” he looked at Ana.
“Just drop some from the safe,” she said on her way to the back.
“Ana,” Chon said when she came back with her purse on her shoulder, “they come once a week to fill the safe. We’ll run out of tens if we drop them so many times.”
It was Sunday. Rocha was off, so Ana had worked the first shift.
“Sorry, Chon-Chon, I promise I’ll be a good girl from now on and be real careful with the register,” she said, walking out.
“Ana,” he called to her, “have you even closed your till?”
She stood in the doorway and stared at him. “No. Will you count it for me?”
“You know, you’re a cashier. You have to count every now and then,” he said, opening the drawer and counting the money in it.
“Not to close my till, not when you’re here to do it for me,” she said with a smile.
He looked up at her and rolled his eyes. A girl no older than thirteen walked into the store. She wasn’t from Greenton, but Chon thought he recognized her. Ana walked to the counter, putting her purse down to wait for Chon to run her numbers in the register.
The girl interrupted Chon’s counting. “Do you guys sell the stars?” she asked. “The John stars?”
“Yeah,” Chon said, starting over on the dimes.
“How much are they?” the girl asked.
“$2.70…$2.80…$2.90…” He raised his index finger to indicate to the girl that he needed one minute. He wrote down the total.
“$5 a pop,” he told the girl.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll take five.”
“Alright,” he said. “That’ll be $25. Just hang on a second. I have to open this register.”
There were only seven nickels in the register. Chon looked at Ana and at the nickel slot in the register. She shrugged.
“Isn’t it open right now?” the girl asked. “My brother drove me over from Premont because you guys are the only store selling the real stars. We’re getting one for his car, one for my parents’ and some for our neighbors.”
“Well—” Chon began. Ana turned toward the girl.
“Listen, little girl,” she said, “he has to count the money in the drawer and put the total in the machine to close the last shift’s totals. It’ll take five minutes tops. But if you keep interrupting him, he won’t be able to finish, and we won’t sell you any damn stars. Understand?” Ana took the pack of Best Values from her purse and pulled out a smoke and her lighter.
Chon counted the pennies quickly, added the drawer total, and ran the numbers. The printout he put in an envelope with her credit card receipts said Ana’s drawer was forty cents over. He input the total as his starting balance and rang up five John stars.
“Alright, sweetie,” he said to the girl, who was staring at her feet, “$25.”
The girl gave him two twenties. He gave her back three fives.
“You didn’t have to—” he began to tell Ana.
