What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Claire Jimenez
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Genre: Sisters Fiction
- Price: Free
- File Size: 2 MB
- Publish Date: March 7, 2023
Nina
Afterwards, sometimes, as a teenager, I would stand at the bus stop where
my sister went missing, concentrating on the deli down the block, the way
the sign on its front door would blink the word Open. I tell you, I would
stand there squinting for so long that sometimes a bus would stop and
mistake me for somebody waiting. I tried to picture it, 1996: thirteen-yearold Ruthy standing there outside after track practice, five o’clock, alone,
book bag graffitied by Sharpies, her red hair knotted and wrapped into a
bun. In my head, I’d play out all the different scenarios—our family,
shakily divided across a three-way split-screen mounted on the wall in my
brain.
While Ruthy was shivering at the bus stop waiting for the S48, as she
always did after track practice, me, Jess, and Ma would have already been
at home, the handouts for my fourth-grade homework scattered on top of
the table, Ma flicking the last pieces of wet onion clinging to her fingers
into a hot pan. That night Jess had taken the phone from the kitchen into the
small downstairs bathroom so she could whisper into the receiver in private
—some sophomore-year secret that nobody even really cared about
anyway; still, she lowered her voice. On the other side of the Island, by the
mall, my father, who managed a hardware store, would be in the middle of a
shift, helping the receiving crew unload a truck of refrigerators, jamming a
finger between the twenty-foot shelving and a hand cart, cursing out the
motherfucker who sideswiped him with a shopping cart, “Puñeta.”
The alarm did not sound until seven o’clock, when Ma stood on her toes
to pull a stack of dishes out of the cabinet and plate the pollo guisado.
Ruthy should’ve been home by six.
Six fifteen at the latest.
Suddenly aware of the time, Ma wiped her hands on the back of her tight
jeans and blinked, then tilted her head to the side and stared past me, as if
she were having some otherworldly vision.
“Nina, where is your sister?” she asked me from the stove.
As if I could answer.
I was still trying to remember how to add two fractions with different
denominators. A series of multiplication signs were floating on my handout.
The paper was disintegrating where I tried too hard to erase away my
mistakes.
I wasn’t worried about Ruthy. During Christmas she had single-handedly
beat up a boy-cousin thirty pounds heavier for calling her butt-ugly: “Oh,
you going to cry? Look who’s fucking ugly now,” she’d said, while he
blubbered on the basement floor and tried to hide his face.
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