Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz Page B

was also happy sometimes. I loved my mother and it’s not as if she was really mean to me. I knew she had lots of problems. People can’t help it when they have problems. Everyone in the world has problems—even rich people. At least that’s what Jorge’s father said. Jorge’s mother said that maybe it was true that rich people had problems too. But she also said, “If the rich don’t care about the problems of the poor, then why should the poor care about the problems of the rich?”
    The rich and the poor, they were big topics of conversation in Jorge’s house. In my house too.
    2.
    My mother never hit me, not once, not ever, and she kissed me just when I needed to be kissed. She would read books to me in English and I likedlistening to her voice. I asked her where she had learned to read and speak in English. She said her mother had sent her to Loretto High School in El Paso. It was a good school, a Catholic girls’ school. “Those were the best days,” she said, “but we lost all our money.” My mother hated being poor. I told her once, “We’re not so poor.”
    She glared at me.
    “We have food and a house and—”
    She stopped me cold in the middle of my sentence. “What does a boy know about money?”
    I didn’t argue with her. My mother didn’t like people to disagree with her.
    All my aunts lived in El Paso and sometimes we would stay with them on weekends. My aunts, they weren’t really rich. But they weren’t really poor, either. When we went to El Paso, my mother would take me shopping and buy me clothes. She told me once, “The clothes here are a better quality.” She had this thing about quality. She liked elegant and beautiful things. She had lots of jewelry and she wore it all the time—rings and necklaces and earrings and bracelets. I think she probably thought my father wasn’t a quality man. Or maybe he couldn’t buy her quality—elegant, beautiful things. All he gave her was me.
    I just couldn’t get my mind off where my mom got the money to buy me clothes, to pay for rent, to buy food, to do anything. She had a car and she had the money to put gas in it and she had nice dresses—but she didn’t work. She told me she did, but I knew she didn’t.
    When I was about nine, things started to get weird. My mother started to disappear more and more. I would come home from school and the house would be empty. Sometimes she would be gone for more than a week. She would give me money to buy myself food or whatever I needed. She nevergave me Mexican pesos. It was always American dollars. Sometimes when I woke up in the morning, there was no one home but me. And then sometimes she would spend days and days in bed. I would make her soup. Well, I didn’t actually make the soup. I just went to the store and bought it and opened the can and warmed it up. She didn’t eat it anyway. I didn’t know what was wrong. And I asked her, “Maybe you should go to a doctor?”
    “A doctor?” she said.
    “Yeah. I think maybe you’re sick.”
    She gave me one of her looks. I didn’t like those looks. It was her way of slapping me. We lived that way for about a year, her slapping me with her looks.
    And after awhile, I didn’t want to be around my mother anymore. It made me sad. And it made me mad too.
    One day a man knocked on the door. I was reading a book and I had the radio on. I never knew whether I should open the door or not. My mom never gave me too many rules. She did tell me I shouldn’t speak to strangers. But I spoke to strangers all the time and nothing bad ever happened. So I just decided to answer the door. A man stood there and he seemed nice. He was wearing a suit and he was wearing cologne and he seemed nice. “Is your mother here?” he asked. His English was perfect.
    “No,” I said. “She’s not here.”
    “Do you know when she’ll be back?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Your English is good,” he said.
    “I speak Spanish too,” I said. “I like Spanish better than