Menudo

My mother continued to wear her wedding ring after my father drove away. It didn’t dissuade the male charity, though. She wasn’t particularly pretty. Even as a child, I could see that. But she had a way of joking and using her smile to make men do pretty much anything for her. Her voice was deep and raspy from years of smoking, and she laughed loud and hardy. She didn’t pretend to be offended by men’s jokes like other women did. The garbage man took “prohibited” items. The neighbor’s gardener mowed our front lawn on his way from one paying customer to the other. Sometimes the milkman left two bottles with a charge slip for one. A nickel couldn’t get you much at the T&R market and the fruit was always bruised. But Ralph the owner extended credit to my mother for just about anything. He would even extend her payment due dates. He would sell her two rolls of toilet paper and give her three, or sell her a box of laundry detergent and add a bottle of fabric softener to the bag. Sometimes he would give her recently expired meat without charging a penny.

The first time I saw my mother smile in that special way was a year after my father had left. It was Sunday and most people in our neighborhood ate menudo on Sunday — except for us. We ate menudo on New Year’s Day, or when a neighbor invited us to Sunday breakfast. Eggs were less expensive and sometimes Father John, the parish priest, would give us a loaf of fresh bread. I didn’t know we were different from the other families. There was always food in the kitchen and clothes to wear. The clothes she made from the small scraps of fabric she kept at the back of her closet didn’t look any different from my friends’ clothes purchased at Sears or JC Penney.

This Sunday wasn’t like other Sundays. It was special. It was my mother’s birthday. I watched her finger through her purse and reach down between the couch cushions looking for coins. I watched her apply red lipstick and brush out her curly auburn hair. Then I went with her to Juanito’s Bakery. Customers were lined up outside the building with empty pots to buy the rich Mexican soup for Sunday breakfast. The smell of roasted red chili peppers, tortillas de mano, and steaming tamales filled the air. You might not have been hungry when you got there, but you were starving by the time you got to the front of the line.

The bakery charged for the menudo by the ladle. “Quanto?” the man behind the counter asked. “Four,” she answered. She opened her coin purse, shrugged her shoulders and smiled. I noticed that they seemed to be staring at each other. “One. My child support check hasn’t come yet,” she said, tilting her head to the side and grinning. She didn’t get child support checks. This was before the Deadbeat Dad laws. Then, only men with some sense of responsibility voluntarily paid child support. Our kitchen pantry, once overflowing with food purchased with my father’s paycheck from the Ford Motor Company, had been reduced to one shelf of discount canned vegetables. The man folded in his lips, put four ladles-full into the pot, added a pata, and winked at my mother. “Uno,” he said to the cashier.

The four-for-one menudo always tasted better than the regular menudo.

Lynn Tamayo is a writer living in the Los Angeles area. She is studying English/Creative Writing and Narrative Structure at the University of Southern California. Her work has been published in Semantics Arts and Literature Magazine, Los Angeles, and in The Underground literary magazine, New York. Lynn’s creative work grows from a desire to encourage the elimination of stereotypes and labeling by presenting an intimate look at the individual.