My name is Graciela, and I hate it, so just call me G. I'm here because I got sent here. And I got sent here 'cause my mom caught me screwing Freddy in her bed. I don't know what pissed her off most, that I was cutting school, that I was fucking Freddy, or that I was doing it on her clean sheets. So she said, That's it.

Next thing I know, she's pulling me out of school and putting me on a plane heading for Florida out of JFK. Says Freddy was the last straw. Ask me, it was the sheets, but whatever. She packed my one bag herself, just shoving stuff in there, going on about how I was fifteen and had no respect. No respect for her, no respect for school, no respect for myself, and how her Tía Nilda, who raised her, had taught her respect. I was gonna ask if all that respect Tía Nilda taught her was why she'd bounced from loser to loser ever since Papi split when I was four. I wanna know if all that respect is why she jumps from shitty job to shitty job, and why we move from bad apartment to worse apartment every couple years. But the way she was grabbing fistfuls of clothes and shoving them into that duffel bag made me realize if I so much as said boo, she'd be grabbing fistfuls of my hair instead.

Besides, when she said Florida, I thought beaches and palm trees had to be better than sitting in some dumb classroom listening to some teacher going on about how passing some standardized test was gonna determine my whole goddamn life. Except when I get here, I find out Tía Nilda lives in Ocala. She picked me up in Tampa, headed north, and kept on driving. When I ask about beaches, she says we're more in the interior. "Tú sabes," she says, "como dicen en español, en el interior." I tell her I don't 'cause I don't speak Spanish, but what she means is we're in the middle of the state miles and miles from any beach, or any anything, not even palm trees.

When I ask why she's living in Ocala and not in Tampa where Mami grew up, she says God called her and her husband to spread his word where it was needed. No shit, she says this with a straight face like they got a phone call.

Tía Nilda is super religious. She lives alone 'cause after she and my great-uncle got "called" to Ocala, he straight out dropped dead of a heart attack. I was gonna make some crack about how the connection must've sucked on that call, but I sorta felt sorry for her. She is bony thin. She only wears dresses. Shapeless, almost to her ankles, like rolled-in-on-a-covered-wagon, seriously ugly-ass dresses. She doesn't drink alcohol and she doesn't drink coffee. No meat. She does jack shit from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday except go to church. Friday night, Saturday morning, and back again Saturday night. Her church doesn't look like a church, I mean with like rows of seats and a steeple. It's just looks an old store. Some mini-mart that shut down.

Tía Nilda prays for me, and prays for my mom, and prays for herself, and prays for the entire whole freaking world. She thinks if my mom hadn't walked away from God, Papi wouldn't've left and she'd be living a better life. Tía Nilda tells me this as she fixes meatless spaghetti. I point out that she didn't walk away from God and she got left just like Mami. I see her flinch. She puts the lid on the spaghetti pot, and says I need to think about my eternal salvation.

But I've already thought about eternal salvation. First off, nothing is eternal. Nothing lasts—not my dad sticking around, not the brief times when my mom is happy 'cause she figures this job, this guy, this place is the one that'll stick. Nothing good ever lasted for sad, shrunken Tía Nilda neither. She never figured her husband would drop dead unexpectedly. Or that she couldn't have her own kid, or that the abandoned one she did raise would move away at nineteen and never return. She just got sent the backup team—a second kid for her to rescue. Somebody else who's not sticking around.

And salvation? Salvation comes when I fly the fuck outta here. I'll meet up with Freddy—or some other dude like Freddy 'cause like I said, nothing lasts—and we'll eat a blood-red steak at Applebee's, and then do it on clean sheets.


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