Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

“Daughters get either their courage or their fear from their mothers.”

Why did women have children they would someday hate?

And then Mirella learned to put away her sadness, to store it in her body, somewhere out of the way, higher than her stomach, below her throat.

“Make sure they keep their Spanish. It’s the sort of thing you lose in that country.” Emanuel laughed. “Qué no se pierde para allá?”

He sighed and huffed and poured them all more wine, and declared, in his strange Dominicanized Spanish, La vida no es fácil, and Penelope swirled the wine in her glass and agreed, No, no, la vida es dura.

“When she was alive, at least there was a chance,” he said. “Even if most of the time we don’t really know how to change. We can’t hardly figure out how to love right. But there was hope. Now . . . Nothing is as final as death.”