Second Hand Read online

  But I had a plan.

  On Saturday, El’s family reminded him why his fondest wish through junior high and high school had been to become an orphan.

  Everything with his family was a battle. Family gatherings were not quiet idylls on the back patio sipping beer while the kids ran in circles after a couple of dogs. In fact, usually the Rozals looked like the highlight reel from a documentary film about troubled families right before the film crew gave in and called the cops. Someone shouted while someone else cried quietly in the corner, and the doors always slammed. The kids usually did a kind of warm-up to the adults’ drama, fighting over who had brought what toy and how long they’d played with it and whether or not it had been broken before they had it. The adults argued over who had done what family chore or drunk the last beer. Even if El managed to stay out of the opening act, he’d be dragged into it eventually as someone’s unwilling ally, at which point he’d have to say he did or didn’t agree, immediately putting himself on a side. He couldn’t even walk out, because Uncle Mariano would follow and read him the riot act for disrespecting family. El’s defense for dealing with his relatives had been to be so “busy” with work he couldn’t come.

  When Abuela called and told El she needed help moving some things from the attic, however, El didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t say no to his grandmother, and she knew it. After closing the shop early and bracing himself for a long, grueling afternoon, El coached himself for the reality that he’d likely leave the house frustrated and angry. He warned himself not to engage, to let everything roll off his back, and under no circumstances to get embroiled in the drama.

  He rounded the corner of his grandmother’s street, saw the pile of crap teetering near the edge of the front porch, and plugged in so hard and deep it was like he’d never left.

  While he’d known his mom’s hoard would be worse because it always was, and because it had been three months since he’d last been over, the reality of what she’d done to Abuela’s house hit El the same way it always did: as a bitter cocktail of frustration, fear, and loss. The porch swing, where he’d sat joking with the neighbor boy, had snapped and broken beneath the weight of plastic bins, broken yard tools, and God knew what else. Junk. Shit that should have gone out with the trash years ago. Not to his mom, though. Nothing was ever trash to Patricia Rozal.

  She met El at the door, embracing him like the prodigal son, smelling like tortillas and cinnamon. “Emanuel, so good to see you.” She kissed him hard on the cheek and pulled him by the hand deeper into the house. “Mami, Emanuel ya está aquí.”

  The path to the kitchen was as circuitous as ever, taking them around the dining room table—piled two feet high with paper and boxes—around a precariously stacked mess of Rubbermaid bins, and through a tunnel of hanging clothes clogging the doorway. The kitchen itself was mostly okay, because that was Abuela’s domain, but El couldn’t help noticing the piles of mail and the latest shopping on the table.

  He smiled and hugged his grandmother, accepting her kisses as she fussed in Spanish, telling him he was too thin and smelled like smoke.

  Though he could hear the telltale shrieks of Rosa’s eldest drifting in through the window, Rosa wasn’t there, which was a blessing because Lorenzo’s wife Anna was, and as far as El knew, she and Rosa were still fighting. Anna sat at the table with Sary, Miguel’s wife, and Sary’s eldest daughter, Lila, the three of them filling tamales. They’d broken up the tasks, Lila drying the husks, Anna pressing out the masa, and Sary adding the meat and rolling the whole thing up and adding it to the pan of items waiting to be steamed.

  Anna smiled and waved at him, looking weary. “How’s it going, El?”

  “Good.” He moved junk from a chair and sat down between her and Lila. “What about you?”

  El listened as they took turns talking about work, school, and kids. Lila rolled her eyes a lot and played the part of a disinterested pre-teen, abandoning her assigned task of drying the soaked husks to check her constant stream of text messages. Sary asked about the shop, poking El for funny stories about things people tried to sell, and he told her a couple.

  When Patti started to inventory her latest Goodwill purchases, though, El left the table and went to Abuela at the stove.

  “Smells good.” He tried to sneak a bite of beans from the back burner, and smiled when she smacked his hand and waved a finger at him.

  “I know your tricks. No fingers in my pot.” She smiled, though, and turned toward El as she worked. “Thank you for coming, mijo. I miss you when you stay away too long.”

  El missed her too. But admitting that would open up the old argument about his mom, so he didn’t go there. He pointed to the pan of beans in front of him, instead. “Can I stir this for you?”

  “Sí. You stir, we talk.” She handed him a spatula. “So. Emanuel. You meet a nice boy?” He tried to laugh her question off, but Paul’s face drifted into his head. El became very busy stirring the beans, but there was never any getting past Abuela. She sighed happily and patted him on the shoulder. “You ask him out, sí? You bring him to your Abuela. I make him tamales.”

  He didn’t argue because it would only make things worse. Besides, he was distracted by the mental image of Paul tasting his grandmother’s food, face lighting up in joy.

  Of course, the fact that it would happen in his mother’s hoard cooled the image pretty quickly.

  “I don’t have anyone to ask out,” El told her. “Don’t worry about me, Abuela. I’m fine.”

  She clucked her tongue and touched his hair. “You are lonely, Emanuel. You need nice boy to make you happy.”

  “I am happy.”

  She made a face and waved his idea away. “You sit in pawnshop and smoke cigarettes all day. That is not happiness.”

  “Abuela,” El complained.

  “You hide from life. You have no joy, no family, no passion. You sell other people’s things and get cancer and break my heart.”

  “Abuela.” He stopped stirring and reached for her arm, but she moved it away to wipe tears from her eyes. Before he could figure out what to say, she recovered, patting his hand as she took the spatula back.

  “Let me cook. You go talk with your brothers. Go,” she added, when he tried to protest.

  With little left to do, El kissed her on the cheek and went outside.

  Lorenzo and Miguel stood with Uncle Mariano on the back porch, sipping beer and watching the kids run around the yard. They nodded and greeted El as he approached. The kids were crazy loud, cutting off any chance for real conversation, though Lorenzo and Miguel had long since become immune to the noise. Adding to the chaos was occasional static from Miguel’s radio, which meant he was on call for the volunteer fire department.

  “What are we moving down from the attic?” El asked his uncle.

  The grim look on his face didn’t bode well. “Mami wants to try and get rid of a few of Papi’s things.”

  El wished he’d grabbed a beer from the fridge. Hell, he wished he’d snagged a bottle of vodka. “Shit.”

  Uncle Mariano held up a hand. “That’s why the girls are here. They’re going to take Patti shopping while we work. Mami thought maybe you could take some of the things right to your shop so she wouldn’t even see.”

  He was going to need two bottles of vodka. “That’s the first place she’s going to look.”

  “I know.” Mariano sighed and handed over his beer. “I know.”

  Cleaning out the attic didn’t bother El. In fact, it made him feel good, even though he was sure he’d never been dirtier in his life. What upset him wasn’t the work or what they removed to sell or junk. What upset him were the things they left behind.

  He understood his mom was sick, that hoarding was a psychological condition, that it had more to do with unresolved loss and other head-shrinky things than with crass commercialism and sentimentality. On a purely academic level, he even empathized. Reality, though, was difficult to swallow. Reality was slipping on papers that li
ttered the stairs as he helped Lorenzo haul Abuelo’s old tools out to his truck, knowing they had to move fast because if Patti came back before they were done, they were screwed, that the fit to end all fits would ensue. Reality was standing in the sweltering heat of the attic with dust choking their throats as they argued over how much they could take before she’d miss anything. Reality was knowing the piece-of-junk eight-track player they found wouldn’t bring ten bucks in El’s shop but would send his mother into spirals of betrayal, so they couldn’t even throw it out.

  Reality was hauling only three pickup-loads worth of stuff out of the attic and leaving a house full of crap behind.

  They managed to pull it off, though, and by the time the girls got back, the men had returned to the patio with a fresh round of beer and huge plates of food. They kept quiet, knowing it wasn’t over yet, that if they’d disturbed too much on the way out the door she would suspect what had been done. El thought for sure she’d figure it out because they almost never got him to come over unless it was for something like this, and he was ready for the fallout, ready despite his earlier vows to stay out of things, ready to tell his mother she had to let go, that things were only things and didn’t matter, that it was more important her grandchildren had room to play in the house than it was for her to collect every salvageable piece of junk from people’s trash. He was ready, but it never happened. She was too busy showing off the new things she’d bought, the delight and wonder they provided her dancing in her eyes.

  El finished his food as quickly as he could, downed his beer, and chain-smoked his way back to his apartment over the shop.

  He lay awake thinking about what Abuela had said about being lonely. There in the dark, he admitted she was right, but the truth—the cold, hard truth—was that there wasn’t any sure way to happiness, or any way at all, period. Not lasting. Rosa chased men and had their babies. Patti bought crap and combed through garbage. Abuela fussed over people. Denver fucked twinks and bench-pressed cars. Jase fought to keep his bar from the bill collectors.

  Nobody was happy, not really. Everyone was lonely. El and everybody else, they all waded through the misery that was life and tried to find some pleasure secondhand. Pick something at random and cling to that, because there was no magic bullet train to happiness.

  That should have been enough, that talking-to he gave himself. Except damned if he didn’t lie there thinking about the way Paul’s hands had moved when he’d tried to mimic the motion of a weed whacker, Paul’s voice echoing inside El’s head, bright and polite and funny as he said over and over, “Spinny-things.”

  I felt a little silly carrying a cappuccino maker into El’s store, but I made myself do it anyway.

  “Paul,” he said when I walked in. His bright smile made me feel a little less ridiculous. “What are you doing here?”

  “You give people money for stuff like this, right?” I asked as I put the machine down on the counter.

  “That is part of my job description. How’s the weed whacker?”

  “It’s good.”

  “And the job?”

  I fidgeted, flustered by the questions. “Good, I guess.” He seemed to be waiting for something, so I said, “How are you?”

  His smile got bigger. “Can’t complain. My day just got significantly better.”

  “Because you need a cappuccino maker?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, that’s it,” he said in a way that told me that wasn’t it at all.

  I felt awkward, like I was missing a joke. I decided that meant I should get down to business. “So, can you give me money for this?”

  He shrugged and finally bent to look at it. “Probably,” he said. “I’ve never taken one of these before, so you might have to give me a few minutes to do some research. You want to hock it or sell it?”

  “Uh . . .” I felt myself blushing. I wished he didn’t always make me feel so clueless. “What’s the difference?”

  “Well, are you looking for a loan, hoping to buy it back later?”

  “I don’t ever need it back.”

  “In that case, I can buy it from you outright.”

  “I have more, too.”

  “More cappuccino machines?”

  “No, but more kitchen stuff. Mixers and bread makers and grills. Should I go get them?”

  “Are they in your car?”

  “No. They’re at home.”

  He stared at me, as if debating something. A slow smile spread across his face. “I can only take one item a day,” he said, shrugging. “It’s some kind of law.”

  That was unfortunate. It would have been better to have the money in one chunk rather than spread out over a couple of weeks, but it seemed it couldn’t be helped.

  “So you’ll take this today, and I can bring the rest of the stuff, as long as it’s only one thing per day?”

  His smile grew. “Exactly.”

  The amount he was able to give me for the cappuccino maker was depressingly small, but it was better than nothing, and if he paid me the same amount for the rest of the junk in my pantry, I’d be doing well. I took in the panini press the next day, and the waffle maker the day after that. I took the money to the nursery and bought more flowers, and spent the weekend working on my yard.

  Unfortunately, my neighbor Bill had the same idea.

  His rose bushes were in full bloom, and next to them, my string of lilies and bargain bin hostas seemed pathetic. He stood in his front lawn, a sheen of sweat on his bald head, wielding a pair of red-handled clippers. I wasn’t exactly sure what he was trimming. I bent my head back to my own work, trying to dig dandelions out of the dirt at the base of Stacey’s chicken statue.

  “It’s looking great.” The voice came from behind me, and I turned to find Velma. She had a sun visor on today, and a tennis skirt that revealed tan, shapely legs. “The flowers really add a lot of color, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, they were a good idea. Thanks for suggesting it.”

  She smiled at me. She had freckles on her nose. I wondered if she had a dog at home named Scooby. “You should think about some morning glories for over there.” She pointed to the corner of the house. “Put a little trellis there for them to climb. Or maybe some clematis.”

  That corner of the yard did look bare. I’d already spent my money from El, but there were still appliances in my pantry. “Are those expensive?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it would be a nice touch, though. It might make the place more inviting.”

  Inviting?

  Was she one of the judges? I wanted to ask, but she probably wouldn’t have told me anyway. I glanced over at Bill. He was at the nearest edge of his lawn, allegedly trimming something from one of his rosebushes, but I was positive he was listening in.

  I turned my back on him, stepping closer to her and lowering my voice. “Which ones would be more colorful?”

  She lowered her voice too. “The clematis. There are some lovely purples that grow well here.”

  I nodded, already debating which of Stacey’s abandoned appliances would net me the most money at El’s shop. “Thanks for the advice.”

  She waved and went on her way.

  I tried to ignore the weight of Bill’s angry glare between my shoulder blades.

  “You still have a spring in your step,” Denver observed the next time he and El did laundry. “I take it this means Strawberry is still in the picture?”

  El took great pains to focus on matching up his socks on the folding table. “You know, you don’t have to limit yourself to giving me an imaginary love life. You can make one up for yourself just as easily.”

  “Nah. Isn’t half as fun.” Denver grinned as he leaned back against the plastic row of seating, his huge arms taking up the backs of a chair in each direction. “You still stuck at flirting, or have you dusted off that box of condoms in the back of your medicine cabinet?”

  El flipped him off without looking up and reached for the next sock.

  He laughed an
d settled deeper into the row of chairs, making them groan. “You should bring him by the club tomorrow night. I’m working. I could comfort him when you don’t put out.”

  Finishing with his socks, El moved on to underwear. “Give it a rest. He’s straight.”

  “My ass he’s straight.”

  “Did you miss the part where I met him while he was buying a necklace for his girlfriend?”

  “Ex-girlfriend, as I recall. And it wasn’t her I heard he was smiling at drunkenly across a patio table. He’s also still coming in to buy things from you, unless you’ve crawled out from beneath the used toasters to meet him in the real world.”

  “He’s not buying, he’s selling,” El corrected, then paused as he realized his mistake.

  Denver’s grin was feral. “I bet he’s selling.”

  El tossed a pair of socks at his head. “Appliances, dumbass. Cappuccino makers. Blenders.”

  “Kitchen crap, which you bitch all to hell about taking because they never move. Interesting.” He frowned. “You said he’s selling like he’s still doing it. How many appliances does this kid have? He sure doesn’t look like someone who’d be fencing.”

  Shit. “I think my dryer is about done,” El murmured and hurried away.

  Denver didn’t follow, but he didn’t need to, his voice booming over the noise of the spin cycles. “Avoidance. This must be damn good, whatever it is.”

  A student trying to study at a table near the vending machines glared at El, likely because he didn’t dare glare at someone as imposing as Denver. El staked out a spot in front of his dryer, which still had ten minutes to go.

  “You know,” Denver called out, “I think I have some extra crap in my closet I’m going to have to bring in sometime for you to sell.”

  “People are trying to work in here, you know,” El shouted back at him, gesturing to the student.

  Denver made a big show of stretching. “Yeah. I’ll be by on Monday with lunch. We can hang out all afternoon and see who shows up.”