Bodega Dreams Read Online Free

Have I ever been in any trouble? I’m here, right?”
    “But what if one day Enrique doesn’t tell you where he is taking you and actually takes you somewhere bad? What if the police bust him and since you were with him you get in trouble too? That happens a lot, you know.”
    “Sapo would never do that to me.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I know.”
    “Julio, when we were teenagers at Julia de Burgos, I knew guys had to play this macho game and I knew you didn’t really want to play but you had to. Even though you were this kid who just wanted to paint. I liked you even back then.”
    “I liked you too—”
    “No, let me say this, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “I remember when they would call you on the loudspeaker to go down to the office and paint this for Mrs. So-and-So, or paint a muralfor an assembly. It happened a lot. Sometimes you would miss all eight periods because you were painting something for some teacher. I remember how cool you thought it was that you were singled out and had this special privilege. But I knew you were being ruined by those terrible teachers. You were just a kid. You should have been in a classroom and they didn’t care about you, they only wanted you to make their assemblies look good.”
    “So what are you getting at, Blanca?”
    “Listen, I know this neighborhood, Julio. Just because I go to church doesn’t mean I don’t know this neighborhood. Here it only matters what they can break, take, or steal from you. I know that Sapo is your friend. I know that. But his friends are not your friends. His friends don’t have friends.” I saw her point. It was a good one. But I just played it off as if she was wrong and told her to go to sleep. Without saying another word Blanca handed the remote back and slowly walked into the bedroom. I guess she’d had her say and was leaving it up to me.
    •
    BUT THE fights with Blanca over Sapo only got worse. Finally, during her second trimester, Blanca didn’t even bother, more out of preoccupation with the baby than out of hopelessness. When she knew I was going to hang with Sapo, she would throw her hands up in disgust and ask the Lord for forgiveness. To forgive me, that is, never her. Always me. This also meant I couldn’t touch her. I was impure and her body, round as the moon, was still the temple.
    I can’t say I blamed her. When I asked her to marry me, her pastor, Miguel Vasquez, had warned her that if she married me—a worldly person, a mundane—she’d lose the privilege of playing the tambourine in front of the congregation. That meant a lot to Blanca. At times she’d beg me to convert so she could be in good grace again. Besides, she hated going to church by herself. Now I know about wanting some sort of recognition, of wanting to have some sort of status, but when I think about yelling things like
Cristo salva!
I get the heebie-jeebies. You don’t know what it’s like inside a Pentecostal church full of Latinos. They really get down to some serious worshiping, with tambourines here, tambourines there, some guy beginning to wiggle on the floor because he has the Holy Ghost in him. The pastor gives his speech, yellingabout Christ coming, every week Christ is coming.
Christo viene pronto! Arrepiéntete! Arrepiéntete!
Then an entire band goes to the platform and begins to jam on some of that religious salsa. It’s like a circus for Christians. But the one thing you could never make fun of about Pentecostals was their girls. They had the prettiest church girls in the neighborhood. You knew their beauty was real because they didn’t wear any makeup and still looked good. And I had married one of the the prettiest. Like with Sapo while I was growing up, I needed Blanca with me so I could feel valuable. No, I didn’t want to mess that up.
    •
    THEN ONE day when I came home from work and was getting my books to go and meet Blanca at Hunter, I got a call from Sapo.
    “Yo, Chino, whass up?”
    “Whass up, man.”
    “So