Drought

My mom called today to tell me that there were no more avocados in Texas. The rain hadn’t come for months and months, and Papa’s garden was brown instead of red. She cried as she told me that we could no longer have Cita’s guacamole, that the tomatoes and onions were gone, too.

I remember one hot day when the humidity made the air thick with a sticky film. It was saturated and you knew the rain would come soon to flood the streets so that we could drive along and spray the car clean. Mom made me leave the cool house for the beach, an hour away in the pickup without air.

We went and it was hot. We came back and I was salty and sticky and my clothes clung to my skin. Papa came out of the house, his eyebrows taut like his weathered hands. He stood in his garden next to the cucumbers and the chain-linked fence and grabbed my hand. He looked up at the sky. It was time for the rain again.