Moondogs by Alexander Yates Page B

said, trying to use his most reasonable and grown-up voice. “We’re back home now. Can you please speak in English?”
    His mother let out a grunt as the blade finally struck the plastic cutting board, the chicken halves jumping a bit as they separated. “You’re making a joke?” she asked. “You’re trying to be funny?” She aimed the knife, handle first, in his direction. “After the last two weeks you think you need
less
practice than you already get? Today, all day, English is worse than Chinese. I don’t speak it.”
    His mother returned to the chicken, first snapping the thighs between her knuckles and then using a fillet knife to cut away the flesh and tendons holding them limply to the body. “I was napping,” she continued after a time, “on the bus. It was a hot bus, a long trip into San José. Your abuela had bought me a lace blouse for my interview and I sat hunched over it, trying to keep it from wrinkling, making sure no dirt or cigarette ash could stain the collar. And I just fell asleep.”
    She dropped the chicken pieces, still bigger and with more bones than Benicio liked, into a deep saucepan and washed her hands withwater so hot that it steamed. “Your father was alone, in a nice new suit.” She dried her hands and smiled, briefly. “A gray one. He’d had a spill, and knocked over a tray of drinks at a restaurant. He was blushing awfully.” She placed the cutting board in the sink and faced him, the shiny slab of marble between them. “It was a short, plain dream. The bus stopped and I woke up. But I knew it. I knew he was the one I was going to marry. I knew a lot of things. I knew about you before you were
here
,” she placed a finger on her belly, “or even
here
,” she placed another on her forehead. “I knew that you’d come earlier than the doctors said, but that you’d be healthy. I knew you’d be a rubio at first, but that every year you’d look more and more like us. I even know …” she paused, looking sly and a bit playful, “what your daughters are going to look like.”
    Benicio wrinkled his nose. She’d teased him about this before. “No te creo.”
    “You do too,” she said, shifting her weight in a way that seemed girlish. “You’ll have two of them. The first won’t be born until you start to turn gray here,” she reached across the island and stroked the hair over his right ear, “and here,” she ran her finger just above his cold-chapped upper lip. “Que te pasa, mi hijo?” she asked after a long pause. “Why would you wait so long? I would have loved to know my grandchildren.”
    It wasn’t until after Benicio graduated high school that he accepted how full of crap his mother was. How could she possibly be able to see the future when she couldn’t even see what was going on right in front of her—couldn’t see, for example, that she was being humiliated by a cheating husband. And if she really could see the future, then why would she have stepped out into that crosswalk just as the girl behind the wheel of the oncoming sedan was about to have a convulsive seizure. Obviously she hadn’t seen herself in dreams the way the paramedics had seen her, pinned between a bumper and a brick wall. Or the way Benicio had seen her when he was called in to identify the body, lying on a metal table with half of her face and all of her body draped in blue blankets that he was instructed not to move for his own sake. If shecould see the future she would have scheduled the salon before grocery shopping and not after. She would have crossed a block up from where she did, or a block down, or five blocks down. She would have gotten a divorce and moved to another city, maybe even back to San José. He would have visited her twice a year and he would have begrudged her nothing.
    BENICIO’S DREAMS , like his mother’s, were the most typical sort of nonsense. Like the one about snow falling among palms and vines on Corregidor Island that he had for a second time