Salt & Concrete

Chapter 2: THE MIDDLE CHILD

People who didn't grow up in a house like Rena's liked to ask, with a kind of soft horror, what it was like to have eleven siblings. The truth was less dramatic and more permanent than that. It wasn't an event. It was weather. It was simply the climate she'd been born into, and like anybody born into a climate, she didn't experience it as remarkable — she experienced it as Tuesday.

Marisol Delva's children arrived roughly one every eighteen months for the better part of two decades, four different men contributing to the number though only Delroy Beaumont's name meant anything to Rena. By the time Rena came along, seventh in the line, her mother had long since stopped being surprised by hardship and started simply managing it, the way a good captain manages a ship taking on water faster than it should — not with panic, but with a bucket in each hand and a route to shore already worked out in her head.

The eldest, Yolanda, was practically a second mother by the time Rena was born, sixteen years old and already fluent in the particular exhaustion of raising children who weren't legally hers. Then came Mateo and Junior, close enough in age to be mistaken for twins. Then Camila, who left for good at seventeen. Then the twins, Bianca and Beatriz. Then Rena. Below her: Anthony, Desmond, baby Marisol — named for their mother, called Little Mari — then Frantz, then Odalys, and finally Pierre, the baby.

Being the middle of twelve taught Rena an economy of attention she'd carry the rest of her life. There wasn't enough of her mother to go around, and a middle child learns fast that you don't get what you need by asking loudest. The babies got fed first because babies screamed until they were. The oldest got listened to because they'd earned it. The middle just learned to take care of itself, and to take care of whoever was smaller.

Rena's job, unofficial but absolute, was Anthony and Desmond, the two brothers directly behind her. She walked them to school. She checked their shirts for holes before they left the house because Marisol was already gone to her first shift by six, cleaning offices downtown, then catching two buses to a second job doing hair out of a friend's kitchen, then home by seven to cook whatever the ends of the week could still afford. Rena packed the good bread for her brothers' lunches, and ate the questionable heel of the loaf herself without saying anything about it.

She started working for real money at eleven. Ms. Odessa, the same woman whose oxtail had nearly gotten kicked off Rena's plate the day she met Tree, ran a small hair-braiding operation out of her front room, and she paid Rena two dollars an hour to sweep up hair and hold squirming toddlers still while their mothers got their heads done. By twelve she was doing simple cornrows herself. By thirteen she had her own small clientele, five dollars a head, cash folded into a sock she kept at the bottom of a shoebox that also held a photograph of her father and a rosary her Cuban grandmother had sent from Hialeah before she passed.

The money went into the house — a few dollars slipped into her mother's purse some weeks when the lights bill came due before payday did, the rest saved toward whatever emergency Rena's twelve-year-old instincts told her was coming, because in Palm Court an emergency was never a matter of if.

"You work too hard for a little girl," Ms. Odessa told her once.

"I like it," Rena said, which was half true. She understood, in the wordless way children understand the truths adults try to spare them, that liking the work and needing the work were not mutually exclusive.

Her siblings scattered across the spectrum of that same hard math. Mateo and Junior ran errands for an older man on the third floor who paid better than any legal job would have and asked no questions. Yolanda worked the register at the Winn-Dixie and turned every check over to their mother without being asked. Bianca and Beatriz cleaned houses on the weekends out in Coral Gables, coming home with sore knees and stories about refrigerators that made their own ice.

And underneath all of it ran the current nobody spoke about directly but everybody understood: that Delroy Beaumont's business trips were not entirely legal, and that Palm Court itself operated on a set of unofficial rules — who you paid respect to, whose corner was whose — that existed parallel to the laws written down in Tallahassee and had very little to do with them. It wasn't spoken of as crime. It was spoken of as how things worked. As the weather.

There was a particular Thanksgiving, the year Rena turned twelve, that stayed with her longer than most. Money had been especially tight — Delroy had been gone nearly four months, and Marisol's second job had temporarily fallen through — and it looked like there wouldn't be much of a holiday at all beyond the county food bank distribution.

What happened instead became family legend. Ms. Odessa organized a collection, floor by floor — a turkey donated by a church two blocks over, side dishes from six different apartments. By four in the afternoon, the courtyard had transformed into the biggest party Rena had ever seen — folding tables dragged out from a dozen apartments, mismatched plates, more food than she'd seen in one place in her whole life.

Marisol cried that day, watching her children eat until they were full, and when Rena asked why she was crying if everything was good now, her mother said, "Because it shouldn't have to be like this. But I'm crying 'cause it's also beautiful, that people do it anyway. Both things are true."

School occupied a strange, dual position in Rena's early life — a genuine sanctuary in some respects, where a correct answer counted the same regardless of how many siblings you had waiting at home. She was a good student, unshowy about it, until Ms. Whitfield noticed, in the seventh grade, that Rena's writing carried an unusual precision.

"You have an eye," Ms. Whitfield told her, handing back a graded essay about a Tuesday afternoon at Ms. Odessa's braiding table. "Most people your age write around the truth. You write straight at it."

It was Anthony, the brother directly behind her, who articulated something Rena carried with her the rest of her life, said offhand one evening while she counted her week's earnings into the shoebox.

"You gonna leave someday," he said. Not a question.

"Leave where?"

"I don't know. Somewhere that ain't here. I can tell. You count that money different than the rest of us count ours. Like it's going somewhere specific."

She hadn't fully understood what he meant at ten years old himself, only that he'd named something true before she had words for it — that even then, braiding hair on a front stoop for five dollars a head, some part of Rena Delva had already begun quietly building an exit, one dollar at a time, long before she had any concrete idea of what door that exit would eventually lead through.

Church occupied its own place in the rhythm of the household, a weekly ritual Marisol treated as non-negotiable regardless of how exhausted the week had left her. Sundays meant matching hand-me-down dresses, ironed shirts for the boys, and a two-block walk to a small storefront congregation whose pastor knew every child in the Delva family by name. The church community became an extension of the same mutual-aid network that had produced that Thanksgiving — a place where money moved quietly between families in need, where a word to the right deacon could produce a bag of groceries or a ride to a doctor's appointment.

Rena was baptized at eleven, the same year she started working for Ms. Odessa, and she remembered looking up afterward to see her mother crying in the front pew, the same complicated mixture of pride and exhaustion and hope that would appear on Marisol's face again years later, reading a scholarship letter at the kitchen table.