The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico by Sarah McCoy

skirt. “I want to go to Titi Lola’s,” I continued.
    She eyed the frizz clipped sideways down my back. “I can call her today. I have to go to town on Saturday for an ALA meeting. I’ll drop you at Titi’s and run my errands, sí ?”
    That worked perfect, and it meant that Mamá wouldn’t be hanging around the salon telling me how to do my hair. A few weeks before, she’d started taking English lessons through the American Legion Auxiliary, and I guessed they were working because she brought home a thick English textbook with more words than my Dick and Jane. She sat at the kitchen table reading for hours when she wasn’t on the couch crocheting and watching telenovelas . It made me boiling mad. She was only learning English so Papi and I wouldn’t have our own language anymore. She wanted to get between us and was using words to do it.
    Titi Ana took Mamá to the ALA meetings. It was a women’s club for the wives of the Borinqueneers. Papi was a Borinqueneer before I was born, and so was Tío Benny. They were part of the Sixty-fifth Infantry in Korea. Papiwas in G Company. G like a guiro . Tío Benny was in C Company. C like a cuatro guitar. I imagined the Sixty-fifth as a big troubadour band, each company a different instrument. I liked thinking of Papi making the rat-ti-tat sound of a scraped hollow gourd while Tío Benny played his guitar. Papi didn’t talk much about Korea except to say that the weather was bad and the food made him sick. He kept his uniform in the back of his closet. I used to sneak into his room and smell it. Korea was sweet and sour like morcilla , blood sausage. I licked it once to see if it tasted the same, but I only got a tongue full of fuzz that tasted like the bitter bark of sugarcane.
    That next Saturday, after breakfast, Mamá came into my room. “Are you ready?” She wore a pink blouse that Vee-ed tight to her chest, then billowed out at the bottom where her waist was growing. I liked it, but I wouldn’t tell her that. A red, white, and blue ALA badge with Papi’s name and company was pinned to the left side of her shirt, just above the bulge of her breast.
    “Sí,” I said, and slipped into my pumps. I was only a little shorter than Mamá in them. We almost stood eye to eye. I’d grown three inches since the summer before, and with the heels on, everything looked different. From there, I realized how small Mamá was: short, thin from her head to her waist, then plump from the hips down, like all the muscle and fat had run away from her head and settled in her culito . I was sure I took after Papi—tall, with long legs and strong arms. Papi and I could climb every tree on our finca while Mamá seemed to grow tired from lifting her crocheting needle. I couldn’t wait until I was taller. That would be a fine day.
    We normally walked to town, but Mamá had been sick on and off all winter. Now that she felt better, she didn’t want to risk getting wet in a rain shower. Sometimes in the spring, showers passed from one end of the island to the other in a comb of water. Drenching rain for a minute, then mist rising before the sunshine. Since Papi was home putting up new wire fencing in the chicken coop and tending to the gandule bush in the garden—the green pigeon peas had mites—we took his jeep to town. Mamá kept the top up and barely let me roll down the windows; she said she didn’t want the wind to mess her hair. Inside was hot and thick with her perfume; the bottled roses stank too candy-sweet to be natural. She kept the radio off and pumped the brake at every turn, starting and stopping all along the bendy road. It made my stomach feel like a beaten egg, frothy around the edges. I closed my eyes and hung my fingertips out the cracked window so they could drink in the air.
    It took us twice as long to get to town as it did when Papi drove. When we finally pulled up to Titi Lola’s salon, I opened the jeep door before Mamá put the car in park.
    “Ay bendito ,