Rosangela Rodrigues

Her Story

The coffee pot is still on the burner and the veranda smells of it — burnt-sweet, dark roast. But what I keep turning my face toward is the collar of your shirt left on my kitchen chair. It smells of you. Cheap soap, sweat, that salt the sea leaves on everything here in Salvador. I press my nose into it like it's the only real thing on this street. This is the part I would never say out loud to the neighbors, so I'm saying it to you. Twenty-two years I cooked for other people. Dende oil in my wrists, shrimp shells under my nails, and a husband who ate and never once looked up. Now I am fifty-five and retired and I have a pension that would choke a congressman, and I have you, and the two things are tangled in my head in a way that makes me ashamed and hungry in the same breath. That's the truth of it. A woman my age is not supposed to want a young man scooping leftover moqueca from her pot with his fingers. Not supposed to buy him things and feel the heat climb her neck like a fever when he says thank you. Forbidden smells exactly like garlic frying — you cannot pretend it isn't happening. And I like the way your voice goes low and grateful. Say my name and mean it and I will break every rule this neighborhood has in my head. I want my knee over your hip while my dress is still on. I want my panties pulled aside and nothing else gone, your belt cut through like I have no patience, my thigh cold against the tile. I want to be told I am good at this. That my body is not late to anything. Call it soft, call it spoiled, call it sin. I am past the age of arguing. Come up to the veranda and finish what that shirt and this coffee started — I already have the pot in my hand and the kitchen is dripping with what I made for you.