Read Online Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario - Free Book Online Page B

is wound tight. She and Enrique have clashed for months. Ana Lucía is the only breadwinner in the household. Even with his job at the tire store, Enrique is an economic drain. Worse, he is sullying the only thing her family owns: its good name.
    They speak bitter words that both, along with Enrique’s grandmother Águeda, will recall months later.
    â€œWhere are you coming from, you old bum?” Ana Lucía asks as Enrique walks in the door. “Coming home for food, huh?”
    â€œBe quiet!” he says. “I’m not asking anything of you.”
    â€œYou’re a lazy bum! A drug addict! No one wants you here.” All the neighbors can hear. “This isn’t your house. Go to your mother!”
    â€œI don’t live with you. I live alone.”
    â€œYou eat here.”
    Over and over, in a low voice, Enrique says, half pleading, “You better be quiet.” Finally, he snaps. He kicks Ana Lucía twice, squarely in the buttocks. She shrieks.
    His grandmother runs out of the house. She grabs a stick and threatens to club him if he touches Ana Lucía again. Enrique turns on his heel. “No one cares about me!” he says. He stomps away. Ana Lucía threatens to throw his clothes out onto the street. Now even his grandmother wishes he would go to the United States. He is hurting the family—and himself. She says, “He’ll be better off there.”
    GOOD-BYE
    María Isabel finds him sitting on a rock at a street corner, weeping, rejected again. She tries to comfort him. He is high on glue. He tells her he sees a wall of fire. His mother has just passed through it. She is lying on the other side, and she is dying. He approaches the fire to save her, but someone walks toward him through the flames and shoots him. He falls, then rises again, unhurt. His mother dies.
“¿Por qué me dejó?”
he cries out. “Why did she leave me?”
    Even Enrique’s sister and grandmother have urged María Isabel to leave Enrique, to find someone better. “What do you see in him? Don’t you see he uses drugs?” people ask her. Her uncle is also wary of the drug-addicted teenager. He and Enrique both work at the same mechanic’s shop, but the uncle never offers him a lift in his car to their job.
    María Isabel can’t leave him, despite his deep flaws. He is macho and stubborn. When they fight, he gives her the silent treatment. She has to break the ice. He is her third boyfriend but her first love. Enrique also provides a refuge from her own problems. Her aunt Gloria’s son is an alcoholic. He throws things. He steals things. There are a lot of fights.
    María Isabel loses herself in Enrique. At night, they sit on some big rocks outside his grandmother’s home, where they have a bit of privacy, and talk. Enrique talks about his mother, his life with his grandmother María and his uncle Marco. “Why don’t you leave your vices?” María Isabel asks. “It’s hard,” he answers quietly. When they walk by his drug haunts, she holds his hand tighter, hoping it will help.
    Enrique feels shame for what he has done to his family and what he is doing to María Isabel, who might be pregnant. María Isabel pleads with him to stay. She won’t abandon him. She tells Enrique she will move into the stone hut with him. But Enrique fears he will end up on the streets or dead. Only his mother can help him. She is his salvation. “If you had known my mom, you would know she’s a good person,” he says to his friend José. “I love her.”
    Enrique has to find her.
    Each Central American neighborhood has a smuggler. In Enrique’s neighborhood, it’s a man who lives at the top of a hill. For $5,000, he will take anyone to
los Estados.
But Enrique can’t imagine that kind of money.
    He sells the few things he owns: his bed, a gift from his mother; his leather jacket, a gift