Yours to Keep by Serena Bell Page A

was.
    “Your new yanqui boyfriend?”
    When Ricky was angry, his language devolved into a stew of Spanglish and curses. He wasn’t angry yet, though, just suspicious. Edgy.
    “No es mi novio.” —“He’s not my boyfriend.”
    “¿No? Quién es?”
    “I work for him. I tutor his son.”
    “He called. He wants you a half hour later.” Emphasis on “wants.”
    “Don’t be gross, Ricky. It’s a job.”
    “I’m sure it’s not the only job he wants you to do around there.”
    “Ricky.”
    They were in the kitchen, the dingy, fifty-year-old kitchen, with its avocado and goldappliances, the electric range-top that worked intermittently, one burner on Thursday, another one on Friday, a bonus two functional burners one Saturday for no discernible reason.
    “I don’t like the idea of you working for him,” Ricky said.
    He’d like it even less if he knew how she felt about Ethan, but she wasn’t about to say that. “You don’t like the idea of me working in Beacon at all.”
    “I’m dealing with the idea of you working in Beacon. It doesn’t bother me so much anymore. But working for a man? Where’s his wife? He good-looking?”
    She sighed. “What’s that got to do with anything? I’m not seeing him.” It was the truth, but it felt like a lie. What the hell? What was she doing? “His wife is dead. He’s a single dad.”
    Something softened in his face.
    What a bundle of contradictions he was, her Ricky.
    She went to him and put her arms around him. He resisted for a moment, then hugged her back. He touched her hair. “ Hermanita, I worry. I worry all the time about you.”
    “I know.”
    “You’re keeping your mouth shut, right?”
    She nodded, thinking of what she’d already told Ethan about herself, far more than she’d ever told an employer.
    “You can’t trust anyone.”
    She remembered how Ricky had coached her as a little girl. “If anyone asks you where you’re from, you say, ‘Here.’ If anyone asks you if you’re an American, you say, ‘Yes.’ If anyone asks you about your parents, you say, ‘My brother is my guardian.’ But the most important rule of all is that you shouldn’t hang around long enough to let people ask you those kinds of questions.”
    He’d taken care of her like a father, better than a father, since her actual father had abandoned them. She wouldn’t have graduated from high school if Ricky hadn’t worked three jobs to support the rest of them while she was a student.
    But she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was done with high school, had two jobs of her own, was bringing in more than half the household’s income now. And she wasn’t Ricky, either. Like Cara, Ricky was more Dominican than American. He would probably have gone back to D.R. by now if it weren’t for the kids. He was fifteen when they arrived here, beyondthe reach of schoolteachers, stubborn about choosing Dominican friends, unwilling to learn English. And he’d only gotten angrier and more entrenched when their father failed to join them in the United States. When their mother died. When he discovered the deceptions and screwups and began to understand the consequences.
    She was different. She’d always been an American. She’d been at the top of her class in school. Her best friend had been a little blond-haired white girl, whose house she spent more time in than her own, playing Barbies and eating American meals and glomming onto the sophisticated English patterns of her friend’s highly educated parents. She couldn’t choose to live in Ricky’s world any more than he could choose to live in hers.
    “He’s a good guy, Ricky.”
    All the softness went out of him, and he let her go with enough emphasis that it was almost a shove.
    “You cried for a month after that other yanqui asshole.”
    “Walt.”
    He crossed to the kitchen sink, looked out the window at the peeling back of another triple-decker like theirs. He leaned on his hands. He’d been working out in his friend