How to Leave Hialeah

The Next Move

4 2 The Next Move Two years before my wife Nilda died, she went back to Cuba against my wishes. I always said that I would never get on a plane again unless it was back to a free Cuba, which meant that in thirty-nine years of marriage, the only airplane Nilda and I had ever been on together was the flight that took us from Cuba, and we hadn’t even sat next to each other because Celia, our daughter, perched herself between us before I could say anything. I’d always thought Nilda felt the same way as me about not going back. It was true that she hadn’t seen her sisters in twenty-eight years, but I hadn’t seen my mother in the same amount of time. I’ll admit that when I got my uncle’s letter say- T h e N e x t M o v e 43 ing Mamá had died, it was easier for me to be mad at my wife for wanting to return. I’ll give Nilda that. I remember taking Nilda to Miami International—Celia did not go with us because my grandson was sick (Nilda thought he was habitually underfed—I not-so-privately thought that his older sister was stealing his food, the pig). I still had that roofing job, so we were in the work van. My tools and ladders rattled with every bump in the expressway, and the traffic was so terrible that I thought God was punishing me for letting my wife go to Cuba. At home she had stuffed five hundred in cash in a sanitary napkin that she layered between two pairs of underwear. She had another three hundred she would declare, and another one hundred fifty that I shoved in her bra before we left the house so that she could offer it up as bribes, both on this side and over there. And don’t remind me that it cost me over a thousand dollars for her to fly to Cuba in the first place. All this money I had worked to earn, and I was just handing it over to Cubans we’d always thought had picked wrong and stayed behind. I was stuck at the Le Jeune off-ramp light. A man—back then, I would have called him a viejo—sold peanuts on one corner and another even older man (¡viejísimo!) sold churros on the other. I was hungry but refused to buy anything after handing over so much cash to my wife. So instead, while waiting for the light, I thought of sand, and gravity. Nilda had signed us up for this mostly awful Tai Chi class at Hialeah Lakes High School. It met on Tuesday and Thursday nights and on Saturday mornings. I hated the class itself, but the ideas in it were not completely crazy, and in the van, visualizing sand sifting in and out of my foot as I pressed the brake in southwest Hialeah traffic actually calmed me. But in front of Nilda, I always pretended to hate everything about Tai Chi. I don’t know why I did that. I would even make fun of her whenever I caught her doing the breathing exercises after I cut someone off with her in the van. I’d yell things like, Breathing through your mouth won’t make that comemierda a better driver! She would never answer anyway, just put her hand on my knee and hold onto it. Her nails were always even and clean—she stopped biting them when the second grandchild had been a boy—and she still wore a bright 4 4 T h e N e x t M o v e pink polish that had looked right on her when she was young. Her knuckles had already started to swell with arthritis. After dropping her off at the airport, I drove home while trying to make the sand do its thing and relax me. I thought about passing by Celia’s first, but at the time I didn’t like her husband, Ralphie, mostly because he was a grown man who liked being called Ralphie instead of Raphael. This was before they made me move in with them, before I saw how wimpy he was with his own kids, and that a man like that could only be a Ralphie. So instead of going north toward their neighborhood full of Monopoly houses, I...