style="font-size:15px;"> The walkway up to the house was strewn with marigold petals, a tradition in a velorio.
“They really went all out,” Ric’s wife, Karin, said.
“What did you expect?”
Ric had attended the Autonomous University of Sinaloa for all of two semesters, majoring in business, and all he really learned about economics was that a cheap condom can be far more expensive than a good one. When he told his father that Karin was embarazada, Ricardo told him he was going to do the right thing.
Ric knew what that was: get rid of the thing and break up with Karin.
“No,” Núñez said. “You’re going to get married and raise your child.”
Ric Sr. thought the responsibility of having a family would “make a man” out of his son. It sort of did—it made a man who rarely came home and had a mistress who would do everything his wife wouldn’t. Not that he asked her—Karin, while pretty enough, was as dull as Sunday dinner. If he suggested some of the things that Belinda did, she would probably burst out crying and lock herself in the bathroom.
His father was unsympathetic. “You spend more time running around with the Esparzas than you do at home.”
“I need a boys’ night out now and again.”
“But you’re not a boy, you’re a man,” Núñez said. “A man spends time with his family.”
“You’ve met Karin?”
“You chose to have sex with her,” Núñez said. “Without adequate protection.”
“Once,” Ric said. “I don’t have to worry about sex with her much now.”
“Have a mistress,” Núñez said. “A man does that. But a man takes care of his family.”
Although his father would shit bricks sideways if he knew Ric’s choice of a mistress—an out-and-out psycho who is also his head of security. No, Dad would not approve of La Fósfora so they’ve kept it on the down low.
His old man had more to say. “To disrespect your marriage is to disrespect your godfather, and that I cannot allow.”
Ric went home that night, all right.
“Have you been bitching to my father?” he asked Karin.
“You’re never home!” she said. “You spend every night with your friends! You’re probably fucking some whore!”
Whores, plural, Ric thought, but he didn’t say that. What he said was “Do you like this big new house? How about the condo in Cabo, do you like that? The Rosarito beach cottage? Where do you think all that comes from? The clothes, the jewelry, the big flat-screen your eyes are always glued to. The nanny for your daughter so your telenovelas won’t be interrupted. Where do you think all that comes from? Me?”
Karin sneered. “You don’t even have a job.”
“My job,” Ric said, “is being that man’s son.”
Another sneer. “ ‘Mini-Ric.’ ”
“That’s right,” he said. “So someone who’s not acting like a dumb bitch might think, ‘Hmm, the last thing I want to do is run my husband down to his dad and risk cutting all that off.’ Of course, that’s someone who’s not acting like a dumb bitch.”
“Get out.”
“Jesus Christ, make up your mind,” Ric said. “You want me home or you want me out, which is it? One fucking night with you and it turns into a life sentence.”
“How do you think I feel?” Karin asked.
That’s the best she can do, Ric thought. If he’d called Belinda a dumb cunt, she would have shot him in the dick and then sucked the bullet out.
“Here’s the point,” Ric said. “You want to bitch, bitch to your girlfriends over one of your lunches. Complain to the housekeeper, complain to the worthless little piece of shit dog I paid for. But you do not, ever, complain to my father.”
“Or you’ll what?” She got right in his face.
“I would never hit a woman,” Ric said. “You know that’s not me. But I will divorce you. You’ll get one of the houses and you’ll live in it alone, and good luck trying to find a new husband with a kid on your hip.”
Later that night he crawled into bed, drunk enough to soften a little. “Karin?”
“What?”
“I know I’m an asshole,” Ric said. “I’m an Hijo, I don’t know any different.”
“It’s just that you …”
“What?”
“You just play at life,” she said.
Ric laughed. “Baby, what else is there to do with it?”
As an Hijo, he’s seen friends, cousins, uncles killed. Most of them young, some younger than he is. You have to play while life gives you the time to play, because sooner or later, probably sooner, they’re going to be putting your favorite toys in a box with you.
Fast cars, fast boats, faster women. Good food, better booze, best drugs. Nice houses, nicer clothes, nicest guns. If there’s anything more to life than that, he hasn’t seen it.
“Play with me,” he said.
“I can’t,” she said. “We have a child.”
Now that she’s settled into young motherhood, raising their little girl, their marriage has evolved from open hostility to dull tolerance. And, of course, she had to accompany him to Adán’s velorio, anything else would have been “unseemly” in his father’s eyes.
But it didn’t help that Belinda was there, too.
On the job.
Karin noticed her. “That girl. Is she security?”
“She’s the head of security.”
“She’s striking,” Karin said. “Is she a tortillera, do you think?”
Ric laughed. “How do you know that word?”
“I know things. I don’t live in a cocoon.”
Yeah, sort of you do, Ric thought. “I don’t know if she’s lesbian or not. Probably.”
Now Karin sits next to Ric, looking every bit as miserable as he feels, but gazing dutifully at the coffin (Karin does duty like a nun does a rosary, Ric thinks) as befits the wife of the godson.
Which reminds Ric that he became Adán’s godson on the happy occasion of his wedding,
