Happy hour at Tom’s: four tables; average age of customer, impossible to say, but definitely no less than decrepit; beer gut city and one lady hacking up a lung at the bar. Frances was waiting for Tomas to finish something in the back alley, an under-the-table meat deal or some other business he wanted no witness to. She popped a French fry dripping with gravy into her mouth then pushed the plate of fries closer to Tomas’s brother, Oscar.
He was long and bony, his hair shaved close to his head. Rita told Frances that the cord had been wrapped tight around Oscar’s neck when he was born and that’s why he was simple. That’s why he was her responsibility, hers and Tomas’s, because they were all Oscar had in the world – whatever family Tomas and Oscar once had were dead or lost to migration.
