The Girl Next Door by Brad Parks

Tommy continued:
    “He said we can quote them, because I explained they wouldn’t be helping at all if we can’t quote them. But we can’t use their name. We can identify them as ‘a resident who asked not to be named.’”
    “That sounds fair,” I said to Tommy, then gave Mr. Alfaro some good eye contact as I said, “No names.”
    Mr. Alfaro immediately turned to Mrs. Alfaro, speaking in a low and rapid voice. It became obvious Mrs. Alfaro was the witness to the accident. She just wasn’t going to say anything without her husband’s permission. He finished by barking a quick order at the children who, led by the older girl, scampered upstairs.
    Mrs. Alfaro waited for the children to clear out, then began telling her story. I removed my notepad from my pocket and Tommy—speaking in the first person, as if he were Mrs. Alfaro—provided the translation in short bursts:
    “I’m an early riser … I often wake up before the children … I like to look out the window and watch the sun rise … It reminds me of home … One morning, I saw a black … a black, sorry…”
    Tommy interrupted Mrs. Alfaro with a question, which generated a response, then another question, then another response. There were some hand gestures, and I heard automobile brands being discussed.
    “It was a black SUV, but she doesn’t know what kind,” Tommy said. “She said she first saw it on Tuesday morning. It was large and black and had a big, shiny grille plate, which sounds like just about every SUV out there to me. But I think that’s going to be as good as she can do.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    Tommy returned to being the voice of Mrs. Alfaro: “I had never seen the truck before Tuesday, and then it appeared several mornings in a row last week … It would park and wait, park and wait … Always following the girl who delivers the papers … Then it would drive away when she drove away … I kept thinking, ‘What is he doing here? What does he want?’…”
    I could imagine that a black SUV casing the neighborhood in the early morning would be of some concern to her—whether she was here legally or not.
    “Then Friday morning last week, I saw the SUV parked up the street again … And the woman who delivers the papers was there, in front of our house … Then the car was driving … It was driving … no, it was speeding actually, very fast down the road, very fast…”
    Mrs. Alfaro’s voice was accelerating as well, her face flushing from the excitement. Tommy was concentrating on her mouth, almost like he was lip-reading rather than translating.
    “I saw the woman getting out of her car … The black SUV was going very fast … I could hear the roar of the engine, but the woman didn’t seem to be paying attention … The driver, it was like he was pointing, no, aiming toward the woman … I could see the SUV was going to hit her and I wanted to scream, but I knew she couldn’t hear me … And then the car hit her…”
    Mrs. Alfaro was shaking her head, then she finished:
    “It hit her very hard, without stopping … Her body flew into the air, almost like it weighed nothing … And then the car ran over her … I screamed to Felix, ‘She got hit by the car! She got hit by the car!’ … And then Felix called the police … We were hoping that if an ambulance got there fast enough, they could save her … But she was dead … She was dead … It was terrible … May God rest her soul.”

 
     
    Everyone thought they knew him, or at least thought they could guess his story. They looked at him, looked at what he had achieved, saw how important he was, and they assumed he had been born to it.
    He never bothered to correct them. Some men who grow up poor are proud of where they came from, constantly bragging about their lowly beginnings and how bad they had it, because they feel it makes their glorious climb to the top all the more impressive. He wasn’t one of those. To him, that was the whole