“Paso Fino” by Fred Arroyo (Fiction ’97)

Excuse me, honey.

I saw her approaching from the end of the aisle and thought, My God, no, already hearing her wheezing through her mask. She was in a wheelchair, a flowered yellow and blue housedress, her arms skinny as a foal’s legs, her hair pulled back, the steel gray severe. Made me wonder how strong she might have once been. An oxygen tank was cradled next to her thigh, the translucent green tubes twisting up behind her surgical mask. For some reason I didn’t move out of the way, lost in my own concerns, turning some cheap baking pan over in my hands. I quickly regretted not moving out of the way—wondered, what is wrong with you. I had not been around anyone for some 6 months. December to February had been rather bleak. There were some nights shaped by bourbon and wailing. Yesterday I had five hour-long online conferences; unexpected, exhausting. They left me frazzled, on edge, blurry.

She coughed, a phlegmy smoker’s cough.

Excuse me, I finally said, and leaned closer to the shelf. I felt her wheel brush the back of my thigh.

A Sunday. The dollar store. I had some razors, dish soap, the Advil I needed. I added the baking pan to the basket to make some cornbread to go with a pot of red beans. I had recently come from upstate New York, about 15 miles from the border, and there was a Dollar Store out on the highway on the edge of the village. I never went inside. I’d slow down as I passed. There were always these beautiful gleaming black horses and carriages in the parking lot. Sometimes I’d see the women leaving the store in their bright calico dresses and white-fringed bonnets like clouds hiding their eyes. I thought of my father’s horses. The black flies were horrible in August, and he had these gray masks—a fly mask he called them—to keep them from biting his horses. This was another thing that reminded him he wasn’t in Puerto Rico. The masks. The flies. He could sometimes be humane, I realized, once he passed away, especially when it came to his horses.