You give up your seat on the bus because that is the kind of woman you have trained yourself to be. Tired, overworked, under-thanked, still polite. The old woman grips your wrist before she gets off at a cracked bus stop on the east side of San Antonio, her fingers cold and dry as paper, and says, “If your husband gives you a necklace, put it in water before you wear it.” You almost smile, because the sentence is too strange to belong to real life, but there is something in her eyes that turns your bones to glass.
By the time you make it back to your apartment complex off Culebra Road, the whole thing feels like a weird scrap of city folklore. You climb the stairs past peeling paint, hear somebody’s television blaring through a thin wall, and tell yourself you have bigger things to think about. Rent is due in ten days. Your boss has been circling layoffs. Your husband has been coming home later and later with excuses that never match the smell on his shirts.
From the outside, your marriage to Mauricio Vega still looks salvageable. Eight years together, no children, shared bills, shared bed, shared routines so stale they have started to feel like old bandages fused to skin. The distance between you did not arrive all at once. It came in layers: late nights, turned-over phones, conversations taken in the hallway, showers the second he got home, a sudden interest in cologne for a man who used to buy the same cheap deodorant every three months.
