OUTSIDE, IT WAS STILL DAYLIGHT, OR MAYBE IT WAS DAYLIGHT again. As the endless hours ticked by, it was hard to judge, and with no one to talk to, there was nothing for Latisha to do but think. And wait.
She had always longed for a sister. She didn’t know why. Friends who did have sisters didn’t seem to like them much, and they argued, bickered, and fought about everything. But Latisha would’ve liked to have some other presence in Granny Lou’s shotgun house—someone to talk to and share secrets with while Granny Lou was watching her soaps and her mom was studying.
When Latisha had asked about having a sister, her mother brushed the request aside. “For you to have a sister, I’d need to have a husband,” Lou Ann had said, “and who has time for one of those?”
Of course, the girls Latisha knew who did have sisters didn’t necessarily have fathers anywhere around, either, so that wasn’t the whole answer. The real answer was that Lou Ann didn’t want a second child. And when Lyle showed up, neither did he.
But now, as Latisha grieved for her lost companions—Sandra, Sadie, and Amelia—she realized that she did have sisters. The other girls had become her sisters through incredible trials and appalling hardships. The only thing she could do for those lost sisters was grieve for them, pray for them, and remember.
Growing up, Latisha had known that her family was poor and that a lack of money had always been a problem. Still, even in Granny Lou’s house they’d had a television set, air-conditioning, and indoor plumbing. It wasn’t until Amelia showed up that Latisha had glimpsed what her version of poverty had entailed.
Amelia and her grandmother had lived in a one-room shack with no running water. Once a week a man with a water tank on his truck would stop by and fill the water barrel outside their house. Amelia didn’t know exactly where the water came from. What she did know was that it had to be boiled—on her grandmother’s makeshift wood-burning outdoor grill—before you could drink it.
“Even in the winter, my grandmother cooked over a wood fire outside,” Amelia said. “But she made the best tamales. I got to help her sometimes. She taught me how to roll them into the corn husks.”
“What’s a tamale?” Latisha had asked.
Sandra was incredulous. “You’ve never tasted a tamale? Didn’t you ever go to TacoTime or a taco truck?”
“East St. Louis isn’t big on taco trucks,” Latisha said.
That’s what she said, but the real problem would have had more to do with the gang-fueled animosity that existed between the black and Hispanic cultures. They might have lived in the same geographical areas, but in terms of interaction and shared experience they might as well have occupied separate universes.
“So what’s a tamale?”
Amelia had explained about making the masa dough, placing the dough on corn husks, and adding a filling made from a spicy pork-and-chili mixture before rolling up the corn husks and steaming the tamales in a vat of water—also on the fire outside.
Latisha tried to imagine why you would put some kind of corn bread and stew into a corn husk to cook it. Despite the fact that Amelia loved tamales and Latisha doubted she’d care for them, she had decided that if she ever did get away—if she managed to live—she would try at least one tamale, in memory of Amelia.