By Benjamin Schmitt
Tomás had worked in the Mayfield’s deli for eight months, slicing meats and cheeses, making sandwiches for customers. He worked forty hours a week there and helped at his uncle’s restaurant during evenings and weekends. With such a busy schedule, you might assume he had no time for love, but you’d be wrong. He had fallen for Mabel, a checker on the day shift. Whenever he saw her, his heart would sink to the bottom of a mysterious ocean filled with all the mysteries of life where he felt like it might burst from deep-sea pressure. They had only spoken periodically. She mostly talked about fashion videos he had never seen, and he would try to follow along until their glances brushed against each other, spilling confused smiles all over the conversation. But Tomás was shy, and he knew that in four months his visa would expire. Whenever he contemplated the possibility of returning to Nicaragua, a police baton smashed the pleading hands of his childhood, so he came to accept all manner of things, including the sexual advances of his twice-divorced fifty-two-year-old boss Jackie. Thus, it did not come as too much of a surprise when Jackie, knowing his situation, called him into her office one day, caressed his muscular twenty-two-year-old shoulders, and proposed marriage. And what was he supposed to do? Weeks later, the two of them were married in a judge’s office where traffic citations and certificates of eternal union rained down from the high heavens, collecting in piles and batches on the desks. They honeymooned in Vegas; Jackie drank apple martinis and played the slots while Tomás wandered the neon streets at night—entranced not so much by the luxury but by a cruel brightness slapping the rows of palm trees. When they returned to work Tomás discovered that his nervousness around Mabel was gone and he wasn’t the first man to hope for love in adultery.
Benjamin Schmitt is the Elgin Award-nominated author of four books, most recently The Saints of Capitalism and Soundtrack to a Fleeting Masculinity. His poems have appeared in Sojourners, Antioch Review, The Good Men Project, Hobart, Columbia Review, Spillway, and elsewhere. A co-founder of Pacifica Writers’ Workshop, he has also written articles for The Seattle Times and At The Inkwell. He lives in Seattle with his wife and children.
