The smell of simmered onions and garlic, tomato, and something sweet and green, unfamiliar, rises from the stew’s fog. White balls, like lumps of grits and brown meat, peek out of the juice like little mountains in a lake of red. She watches me bring a spoonful to my opened mouth.
“You want to know what’s in it?” she say before I eat.
“I’m not picky,” I say, shoving it in and swallowing it down. I fill my spoon again.
“It has stomach in it,” she say.
I stop the next spoonful midway to my mouth.
“Beef stomach,” she say.
I send it on in and muddle, “I eat chitlins, too — pig intestines.” If she wasn’t watching, I’d tilt my head back and drink it whole.
“I like you,” she say. “We’ll get along just fine. I’ll show you how real friends should treat each other.”
All I want is that.
No promises I cain’t keep for her. No nothing. If I could find somebody like me and Hazel was, I’d be better. And for now, I could help out around here.
Soledad stirs her food and her face lightens with a memory of something. “Cynthia hated menudo. I used to make it for her anyway.”
“Cynthia can’t stand anything to do with something’s insides,” I say. “Bits neither.”
“Is that right?” Soledad say.
“Yes, ma’am. If she tastes the grit of black pepper in her food she’d spit it out.”
“So you know her pretty well, then?”
“No, ma’am. Not at all.”
“Well, it sounds like you ate with her.”
“Sometimes.”
“Sounds regular to me if you knew how she liked her food.” Soledad twirls her spoon and sighs. “She’d be satisfied giving me what was leftover after she ate.”
Soledad starts saying grace: “Dear Heavenly Father. .”
When she finishes, I watch her long fingers move along the table. They’re dainty soft, like their ends are made of swan feathers, brushing the spoon to lift it from beside her bowl. She dips the silver in the stew and puts it to her mouth in a smooth stroke. So light those fingers are. Weightless, they seem. Her thin lips, delicate, too. Like egg shells sipping spice on her tongue and into the pockets of her cheeks.
“It wasn’t the leftovers that bothered me,” Soledad said. “It was sleeping on her floor where she put every drifter or any of her girls who stopped working. Hurt my back that way. In fact, it was a splinter there that caused an infection. She spent ten days treating it. That floor was the last thing we argued about before I left her. Did she tell you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“How’s that floor treating you?”
“I sleep in her son’s room. The second bed. His dog’s got the other half of his.”
“She allows you to take care of her son?”
“Nine years old and he’s like a brother to me.”
Soledad stops eating altogether. She sets her spoon down on the side of her plate like she’s re-setting the table.
“So you do sleep in a bed?” she say.
“Not at first. Before, I slept on her old trunk that she made look like a bed.”
“Well. .” she say, blinking too much, making me feel like I said something wrong. “It doesn’t seem like you had it so bad after all.” She picks up her spoon again, runs it into her stew, pushes the meat to the sides of her bowl, stabs the meat with her spoon, and shimmies it in half. “Would take me all day to make this,” she say. “Never a thank you. She’d just keep reminding me of the stomach inside.” Soledad rolls her tortilla and dips it in the stew, bites the top of it. “Cynthia has a way of turning any good thing to nothing.”
That’s true.
“How was she when you left?”
I lift my shoulders. Don’t want to talk about Cynthia no more.
“Well, we shouldn’t be speaking of her anyway,” Soledad say.
“All right,” I say.
“Too much good food to waste, right?” Soledad spoons her stew, eats it, and taps her napkin to her lips. “Tell me,” she say, “do you have a boyfriend? Or someone?”
I nod. My heart hurts again. I say, “But he don’t love me no more.”
“Men are that way, aren’t they? Get what they want and go,” she say. “No matter. There will be others.”
“Yes’m.”
She flattens her napkin on her lap. “See,” she say. “I’m not all the bad that Cynthia makes me out to be, am I?”
I don’t say nothing. A couple people said Soledad was crazy and others said she was right to leave the brothel when she did. But I don’t know if you can be crazy and right at the same time. Or maybe we’re all a little crazy.
“She probably speaks horribly of me,” she say.
“No, ma’am.”
“She never has anything nice to say about anybody. But maybe you wouldn’t tell me what she’s said anyway.”
“I would. Honest. But she don’t talk about you.”
“Talk bad about me, you mean?”
“She don’t talk about you at all.”
She stops eating.
“I mean, she don’t talk much about nothing.”
“Nothing, huh?”
Soledad pushes herself away from the table. She’s back in the kitchen, clattering around in it.
I shouldn’t have said nothing. I need this place to stay. So I’m just gonna sit here and be quiet.
She comes back in tossing three steaming tortillas straight on the table, mostly dried out. They crumble into pieces and catch in the tablecloth. She sets a fresh bowl of soup on top of ’em, reckless, so some of it laps over the edge.
“I left them on too long,” she say, and sits back down, breaks the hot tortillas with her fingers. “You consider Cynthia your friend?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“How close?” she say.
I lift my shoulders and keep eating.
Soledad drags my bowl from under me, leaves me holding my spoon above the table. “So what do you do for her?” she say.
“Do?”
“What do you do to earn your keep?”
“I clean.”
“Clean?” she say. “How much does she sell you for?”
“I never. . I mean. . I only clean.”
“Sounds to me like she’s a better friend to you than she was me.”
She slides my bowl back, picks up her spoon and taps the table with the wet end of it, making a moist spot on her tablecloth. I can feel her watching me. All of this talk is confusing. I feel like I keep saying the wrong thing.
She say, “I’m glad you and Cynthia are friends. Did she tell you her family owned slaves?”
“Yes’m.”
“Tell you her daddy beat ’em, killed ’em, sold ’em?”
“Yes’m.”
“So I guess y’all talk about a lot but nothing at all.”
She stands straight up and goes back to the kitchen.
I don’t look up but I can hear a drinking glass clunk on the countertop followed by the familiar ting of glass touching glass, then the gurgle of alcohol pouring in.
Soledad comes back to the table holding a drink. I can smell it’s gin. Cynthia’s favorite.
She say, “I’m sorry. I ask too many questions, don’t I?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Just making conversation, is all. But right now you need to eat and we’ve already promised not to waste a good meal on Cynthia.” She laughs a little, smiles at me. I do, too. Take some more of my soup. I can eat this every day even though it burns my throat from spicy. It’s good, though. Something maybe Hazel mighta made to kill a cold.
She say, “So where are you from? Your family?”
“All over,” I say, lying. Jeremy used to say that it’s easier to not have a beginning. That way new friends don’t judge you too fast. I want Soledad to be my friend.