Page 29 of Sweet
“Flattering, eh?” Chino grinned. “Damn, you got all respectable on us, Spider.”
Spider kept his eyes on the table.
Chino leaned toward him, “Brother, I don’t want you to come back and be a soldier.” He snorted. “I got enough guys for that. I’m not gonna waste your damn hands on a gun.”
Spider looked up. Chino didn’t want him back?
“I want you to come back and do what you’re doing here!” He glanced at the neat stack of notebooks by Spider’s bedside table. “Just better.”
“I don’t—”
“You’re living in a shitty little apartment over a garage, homes. You’re working for someone else. When you come back, we get you your own house. Get you a sweet place in Boyle Heights. We set you up with your own place where you run the show. You got, like, three colleges within miles of that neighborhood. You’d makebank, Spider. Then you could get a kid or two under you that you can train up.”
Spider kept his eyes on Chino, looking for any signs of dishonesty, but he couldn’t see them. Chino was actually offering to set Spider up in his own place with a house, a business—
“We’d be yourinvestors,” Chino continued. “You could keep most of the money—we’d only take a cut—and you give your brothers the family discount.” Chino shrugged. “Keep it in the family. I gotbigplans for you, man.”
His gut and his head were battling. His gut told him that Chino was trying to pull something; his head was filled with the idea of his own house. His own place. The rush of celebration, of everyone eager to get his needle on their skin.
It would take him years to build up anything close to an independent clientele in Metlin, and it’s not like people had as much money here as they did in LA. He could charge twice or three times as much tattooing customers down south, which would more than offset the discount he’d be obligated to give Chino’s crew.
A bank in Metlin would never lend him money. But the gangs? Well, if there was one thing you could say for organized crime: they invested in their own.
He watched Chino pull the cigarette from his mouth, his inked fingers deftly ashing into Daisy’s glass.
Daisy.
He felt her slipping away.
She would never be okay with this. She came from good people. Regular people.
You did too, once upon a time.
He loved Daisy, but he only had her for another eight months. She’d be going away, and then where would he be? Stuck in Metlin, seeing her around town on summer breaks and holidays. Watching when she brought a normal boyfriend into the café to meet her aunt and her mom. Loving her like a pathetic asshole while she moved on with her life.
There was no way Daisy would ever go down south and no way that he would want her to. Even if she was okay with him being associated with Chino’s crew—which she wouldn’t fucking be—it would put her in harm’s way, just like his mom.
“Spider.” Chino’s hand landed on his forearm, right over the two letters that had sealed his fate at age thirteen. “It’s time to come home.”
“Chino” —he tapped his lighter on the table, his mind spinning— “this is a really good deal, man, but I gotta—”
“There’s no rush.” Chino raised a hand. “Spend Christmas with your girl.” The man smiled, and a glint of gold reflected in the lights from the Christmas tree. “She lookssweet.” He slid a card out of his wallet and tapped the edge on the table before he laid it down. “But this isn’t where you belong, Spider. You and I both know it.” He stood and dropped his cigarette butt in Daisy’s glass. “My number’s on the card if you want to talk, but I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.” He drew Spider into a hard, backslapping hug. “I missed you, man. It’s gonna be good to have you back.”
Daisy had managedto stop crying by the time she got to Spider’s door, but she knew her eyes were red and swollen. There was no avoiding it.
There had been so much yelling.
She was the good kid. Her parents had never yelled at her like that before. She did her homework and cleaned her room. She helped around the house, and usually the extent of her mother’s anger was a pair of rolled eyes when Alicia had to remind Daisy twice to empty the dishwasher.
Nothing had prepared her for that blowup.
Her father had yelled at her. Her mother had burst into tears. Her aunts all asked if she was pregnant.
Seriously! What was that?
Kiko and all her cousins had fled, knowing that the barest hint of defiance or rebellion could turn the blast of familial fury their direction. She couldn’t fault their survival instincts. She’d done the same thing herself. When that many Riveras, Oroscos, Mendels, and Rojases were yelling, you headed for the nearest exit.
They were disappointed in her.
