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

this.
    â€œOh, the photo. The one with your friends.
Amigos. Amigas?
I’m sorry my Spanish isn’t better,” she said.
    I understood this, and said, in English, “It’s okay. My English should be better. It’s America, your country.”
    â€œOh, I thought you were born here,” she said.
    â€œI was. But it’s your country.”
    She showed Aurora and me out, saying she was running late for a medical appointment. We descended the sharp incline back to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill. There were no benches—only Mexicans rode the bus around here—so Aurora and I squatted on the curb, massaging our calves and keeping our feet at what we hoped was a safe distance from the sports cars and new “minivans” speeding down the boulevard. We waited under the shadows of manicured wall hedges and palm treetops whose dry, spiny fronds crackled in the breeze like a brushfire.
    â€œI want a house like his,” Aurora said. “I want to live here.”
    â€œIt’s very expensive,” I said. “You need to stay in school.”
    â€œYou don’t need to go to school to be rich anymore. I want to have a pool party here,” Aurora said.
    â€œMy job is to work here,” I said. “Your job is to go to school.”
    â€œRick said I could come and swim,” she said. “You can’t decide for both of us.”
    â€œThat wasn’t an invite to swim,” I said.
“Era una invitación a trabajar.”
    Cleaners must arrive early, before their bosses have had their morning coffee, newspaper, and can mess up their houses any further. To get to work on time, I walked to the bus stop when the moon was still out. No one was around except the
borrachos
swaggering back home to their wives’ cold beds when the bars closed, or the crazy bag lady who wore winter coats year-round, prayed at my bus stop bench as if it were a pew, and talked about her “friend,” the Virgin Mary, asif Our Lady of Guadalupe was going to show up on the Line 200 bus at five in the morning. I hated rising early then, so I learned the driver’s name and acted friendly; in a few weeks, he’d wait an extra minute or two for me at my stop if I was running late, though I had to listen to his endless bragging about how he kept to his schedule and always followed the rules. Don’t know what page of the rule book chatting up women passengers was on, but I knew what his game was. Women can see through a man in a way men will never realize. That’s because men never change—they’ll slow time down trying to get under your dress, then speed it up once they’ve done it. I was still recovering from Hector, my one attempt at true love. He turned out to be a yo-yo lover, a man who stings you more coming back than going away.
    There were many cleaning ladies and maids riding that bus every morning, fanning out across Los Feliz. Working on traffic islands or mountainous front lawns were armies of gardeners who came in their own pickup trucks, their turtle-shell backs inching across unruly grass they sharpened into crisp right angles.
    You could hear us coming by the sound of our plastic buckets, knocking what we carried inside them around: spray bottles with homemade cleaning solutions, collapsible mop handles and scouring pads, dried out sponges and boxes of rubber gloves (many owners of these houses, mine included, didn’t supply their own cleaning supplies as promised; we’d eat the cost along with our complaints), and a symphony of jangling house keys. If you weren’t trusted with keys, you’d better get used to the curb.
    It took me a while during those first weeks to learn a different rhythm of doing my job. At the law firm, I had to let others know I was there. Figuring out the best ways to be heard but not seen is a crucial skill for a cleaning lady so I wouldn’t surprise anyone staying late, or walk in on lawyers