Chapter 2: EARLY AUGUST

For four days, Simpática kept Maya locked in the bedroom, insisting she stay there because she had been “bad and evil.” She allowed her to use the bathroom and provided adequate water but the meals were skimpy, mostly copious amounts of Albin protein powder. During the day when Simpática was gone, Maya laid in bed listening to cars passing and people talking outside. At times she thought about the parade she had missed and went through her dance routines, pretending to be on the Sanchez float moving along State Street, even grasping for the balance bar for support. At night she heard her mother in the next room mumbling, cursing, pouring glasses of gin, bumping into furniture, sometimes falling, and then when it was late, snoring.
        Maya and Simpática lived in a dreary stucco apartment building sometimes referred to as the “Ladera Pits” on Ladera Street on Santa Barbara’s lower west side. Its residents included drug users, drug dealers and downtrodden people living on the edge. It was a place where mothers’ day was celebrated on the first and fifteenth of each month when welfare checks arrived. One morning a dead man was found at the bottom of the swimming pool, barely visible through the murky water. There were loud parties and occasional fights, knifings, and shootings. Maya and Simpática steered clear of most of this, except for run-ins with Keith Kyler, a young man with a large head and vacant eyes who often invited Maya to his apartment, and Mr. Kronbach, an older, leather-faced man who forever sat in a chair on the landing across the way staring at Maya through mirrored sunglasses.
        They had lived in this apartment for a year, arriving after being evicted from somewhere else and relocating through a welfare department miracle. Simpática and her children had been crisscrossing Santa Barbara’s lower East and West Sides for years, at one time or another living on Coronel, San Pascual, Chino, Painted Cave, De la Vina, Gillespie, Almond, Blanchard, Quarantina, Castillo, and Cacique Streets.
        The inside walls of their apartment were dirty and gloomy with several holes punched in the plaster, the floor brown with stains and dust balls. The cheap furniture was dirty and broken, strewn illogically about the place with missing legs and tears in the material. The kitchen counters were covered with trash, dirty pots, pans and dishes, a toaster lying on its side, and several unopened boxes of napkins. And everywhere there were Albin brochures and boxes of Albin protein powder. Like all Simpática residences, it was more of an empty warehouse than a home. The one bedroom, where Maya slept, and sometimes Simpática, was decorated with a forlorn portrait of a praying Jesus and several dog-eared posters tacked to the walls.
        Maya was Simpática’s sixth and youngest child, born into a dysfunctional