to those relationships most bereft of possibility, but still . . . something. And that something made me want him to have a chance at what I thought Iâd never have: a happy marriage, a real life.
I donât say this now because time has passed. I knew what I felt then but figured his godmother was probably right about my having nothing for him. So I renounced him and worked on quickly filling the space heâd left empty before he came back for me, ignoring what Iâd said about never contacting me because he realized he loved me so much (my secret fantasy) or I realized heâd never intended to.
Chapter 5
âY ouâll be okay walking?â Hector asked, slowing down when we neared the corner of Twentieth Avenue and Eighth Street that afternoon. Fifteen minutes ago, weâd left the St. Michel, and already his mind was many worlds away.
â âCourse. Not even dark yet.â
âOkay, flaca. Ciao then,â he said, forgetting to ask me to text him when I was within the safe confines of my apartment.
As I opened the car door, I hesitated, waiting for him to say that heâd call me later to wish me a good night, as usual. But he didnât, so I got out, slowly walking away, my mind caught up in wondering what on earth could be preoccupying him to make him so abruptly distant.
I remember thinking that Hector was acting like a man about to embark on that wonderful time in the life of most affairs called âthe beginning.â Only, I felt more like the wife than the mistress because if Hector was beginning something, it was certainly not with me.
I heard him drive away in the opposite direction and picked up my pace along the portion of Eighth Street that leads toward the Coffee Park section where I live, remembering to turn my head and cross the street when I passed the corner of Fifteenth, the street where Jorge lived, or maybe, used to live. I did this every time, even though Iâd never once run into him in the year or so since we stopped seeing each other.
From that corner, it was a ten-to-fifteen-minute walk to my apartment and, since this is where all the madness was about to unfold, I might as well give you a quick history tour of the area: Little Havana, Coffee Park, and the civil war of sorts that made it a less than ordinary place to live in.
In the late 1990s, there was a movement to more broadly promote Little Havana as a tourist destination, the premier enclave of Cuban culture in the United States and site of the worldâs largest outdoor Hispanic festival, Calle Ochoâs Carnaval Miami.
But tensions mounted when some of the more liberal residents began to feel that the nostalgic earthiness of Little Havana that had brought them there in the first place was being threatened by the cityâs push to âclean upâ and rebrand the area as a sanitized, commercialized, tourist-attracting destination.
âLook, Mariela, if I wanted to live in the suburbs of Disney World, Iâd live in the fucking suburbs of Disney World,â Iris, who owned the fourplex next to mine, said to me at the time.
The result was that many of the ârebelsâ ended up moving to our side of Little Havana: Coffee Park, then really just a large square block of greenery and mature trees, but now surrounded by little coffee shops, independent âboutiques,â apartments that doubled as yoga studios, art co-ops, and holistic pharmacies attended by young bearded guys high on medicinal marijuana. Coffee Park became the symbol of neighborhood defiance, collectively and consciously turning up its nose at the bureaucrats, deciding that it was going to be as bohemian, progressive, and liberal as it got.
Of course, even as the little businesses sprouted all around, you still had the big Spanish-style houses turned rental duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, most dating from the 1920s, â30s, and â40s, proudly holding their ground, alongside the storefronts.
Nikita Storm, Bessie Hucow, Mystique Vixen