Read Online The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse - Free Book Online

movies—“The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain!”—had the answer. Yet whatever English I pieced together dissolved when I walked into the harsh sunlight outside.
    When something really stumped me—paying taxes, for example—I asked for help. More Mexicans speak English than you imagine and understand it better than they let on. That’s how I met Hector, in church; he could already speak English but never had time to teach me. (I should have known a man who could speak two languages could live two different lives with two different women.) How could I find time to learn English, when I left my house at dusk like a vampire, working in empty, haunted offices all night? And some vampire I was, frightened by all those ghostly sounds in an office, like copy machines that powered on for no reason or phones that rang endlessly. Before sunrise, I scurried out the service entrance with a horseshoe back, clenched shoulders, callused feet, and skin reeking of ammonia.
    That’s why Rick’s letter arriving when it did gave me faith we were not destined to live our lives as victims. The papers painted Aurora and me as tragic near-martyrs, symbols of a community the city had forgotten. Aurora couldn’t face her classmates because of this and some incident at school that she started telling me about, then stopped when she told me I’d gotten the details wrong (someone called her “a dirty Mexican”). After the shooting, she stopped telling me anything, became a sour and sullen stranger in my home. She changed schools and talked to me even less, but she was still my translator and my negotiator when I went to meet Rick. Cards and letters flooded our mailbox, but Rick had written on the most handsome stationery that he was looking for a cleaning lady (or better yet, a houseboy), and if I wasn’t interested, would I inquire in the neighborhood in exchange for a “finder’s fee”?
    We rode the bus a half hour to Los Feliz and met Rick on his frontdrive under a gang of aging palm trees. He led us around the grounds, which included a shady grotto and swimming pool carved out of a hillside shielded beneath a canopied jacaranda tree that had thin green sprouts and young, tender, but still unripe ivory buds peeking out from its branches.
    â€œYou have a swimming pool!” Aurora said.
    â€œDo you have a boyfriend?” Rick asked her.
    â€œMaybe.” Aurora smiled a confident, gap-toothed grin that meant she was lying.
    â€œYou can have a pool party with your boyfriend anytime. If he has an older brother, he can come and bring his friends, too,” he said.
    When I asked her how much the job paid, she began a back-and-forth conversation until I agreed on a schedule of three times a week, six hours each day. Aurora negotiated thirty dollars per cleaning day, with Rick providing the cleaning supplies.
    â€œMy wife will keep everything fully stocked,” Rick said. “She’s inside.”
    In a living room that could fit my entire childhood Chavez Ravine home, Rick’s wife sat curled on a fancy corduroy couch (a couch I’d come to know very well), her head draped over a glossy magazine. I couldn’t tell whether she was asleep or awake. There was a booming, echoed silence, what you’d hear in a cathedral.
    Aurora dove onto the couch. Startled, his wife jerked up, and Rick motioned stiffly for her to shake my hand.
    â€œHello, Mrs. Calhoun,” I said.
    She dragged her legs off the couch, adjusted her silk blouse, then pinched the waist of her trim, creased slacks. “This is Felicia, the woman from the newspaper,” Rick said.
    â€œHello, Felicia,” she said, standing the same height as me in stocking feet.
“Hola. Buenos días
and
hola,
Felicia.” She hugged me at an angle, like she was using tongs.
    â€œMy wife was the one who spotted that photo in the paper,” Rick said. She looked surprised to hear