1986:

Little green cabs, like bullets, washed across the streets. Spiky drops of rain fell, splattering across the trashy sidewalks. Drizzling on a billboard for Joya sodas. Walking home, Catarina Fernandez, wearing an orange coat with big plastic buttons, showing her flashy side at 58, was thinking of her daughter.

Gray hair and wrinkles that grew with each day made Catarina look like a soap opera actress on TV. But, when people told her that, she would smile, shake her head softly and forget she heard anything. Villoro, her neighbor, was outside watering his plants. Light blue raindrops fell on his T-shirt of President Miguel Hurtado, his slimy hair darkened by the rain, which was getting heavier. Their tiny houses, hers a blood red and his of cement, were connected to each other. She hated how he always hummed pop songs from the radio when he did this, as the limp water hose in his hand moved around and around. Before opening the black, barbed fence, she looked down at her bright green shoes she bought yesterday and how they were all wet.

“Hola,” he said. Like ordering from the local taqueria.

She looked up, opened the door into her small front yard and ran up to her wood-colored door.

“Como estas, Villoro?” she yelled over the water’s hitting the pavement. He did this, water his plants in the rain every chance he could, and always in that horrible T-shirt of the President. Villoro voted for the rat back in 1982.

“Estoy delicious, como dicen los Americanos”

She had always thought he was gay or at least curious. Villoro was a banker, in his fifties too, who worked briefly for the mayor when he was younger. He had bushy eyebrows, small lips, green eyes and pale skin. Not like Catarina’s dark brown body. Crisp pops sounded over her voice.

“Ves la lluvia, verdad?”

“Por supuesto, Cati, pero, si uno no le da gasolina, quien entonces?”

He knew that her husband, who worked for Pemex, never came home after he went to Mexico City on business back in ’77. That he left her alone with a daughter who used to click pens while Mom took pictures for a living. Rain fell harder as she opened her door, stood inside her house, and wiped her feet on a poodle-like rug. She talked to Villoro through an open window.

“Pinche lluvia, te va llevar un dia Villoro, vas a ver,” she yelled. Made him know that she hoped the rain would take him away one day.

She went to close the window, trying to close it, but it was stuck.

And he just laughed, deep and loud, his veiny hands still waving the limp water hose.

“Como se llevo a Olivia” he mumbled, thinking she couldn’t hear him.

Her window screen couldn’t stop Catarina from overhearing. She stopped trying to close the window and thought about running out in the rain and shoving the water hose down Villoro’s throat.

And then she thought of her daughter again.

The rain had taken her.

Two years ago, a phone call told her that she drowned in San Francisco, at a pool in an apartment complex. And Catarina, without papers or a car, never got the chance to see her daughter’s dead body. For five nights straight, she dreamed of what she must have looked like, who buried her, what clothes she wore.

Rain was spilling into the house. She finally shut the window, watching Villoro behind the rippled wet glass. Catarina put down her thick black glasses on her dusty side table, the ones she bought at this fake jewelry store in the Barrio Antiguo. Sitting down on a soft couch, the rose-colored one she’d had for nine years now, since Rodrigo left. But, she was much happier when he did. She just wishes he could have taken his dirty underwear.

She had her camera. His bathroom she turned into a darkroom. Her two wrinkled fingers turned on the switch of a large, white lamp. Catarina had a feeling it was going to rain all night.