Carina Valencia

[NebulaCloud]

~~ Three years ago, 816 AS ~~

The clink and rattle of dishes being set out for lunch had awoken Carina before she was completely ready, but today she didn't have many daylight hours to spare before she had to head to the foundry anyhow. The Houstonian sun was stubbornly beating its way through the quaint yellow, outdated floral curtains drawn in a vain effort to keep its heat at bay as she made her way sleepily out into the common room. The house she lived in with her parents and sister was barely big enough for two people to comfortably cohabitate - a common room with a little kitchenette lined up in the corner opposite the front door, and two bedrooms and a single bathroom tucked away on the opposite end. There were days when it was a gamble whether or not the faucet knobs would actually provide running water, and the electricity browned out quite frequently. Still, her mother was a wizard at keeping it in order and feeling like a well-looked-after home, and she and Consuela pitched in every chance they got.

Her mother Aracely, a tallish, gracefully slender woman with a few gray streaks in her otherwise thick black hair that looked as if they had been deliberately placed there, looked up from setting the table at her. “Oh, lo siento, mija,” she apologized, drawing a quiet hissing breath in through her teeth. “I didn't mean to wake you.”

“That's okay, mamá,” Carina replied, rubbing some stubborn vestiges of sleep from her eyes. She surveyed the place settings - four of them - with some slight confusion. “I thought Connie would be working late tonight?”

“Not tonight,” Aracely said, arranging the last place setting on the small, wobbly square table. “She sent a wave saying she should be home by four.”

The news made one corner of Carina's lips twitch upward involuntarily. She and her sister had completely opposite work schedules; when she was working, Consuela was at home asleep, and vice versa. Even a few hours over a meal together sounded like a treat. She raised her closed fist to her chin and kissed the side of her index finger, and whispered a quiet prayer of gratitude as she made the sign of the cross on herself. “Have you told Dad about my plan yet?” she asked, scratching her backside absently as her mouth stretched wide open in a noisy yawn.

Aracely froze almost imperceptibly, and then looked sheepishly back at her, surprisingly not seeming to have even noticed the unladylike display. Instantly Carina knew she had either forgotten, or had never worked up the nerve to tell him. “I'm so sorry, mija,” she said quietly.

She pursed her lips tightly and sighed. Almost as if on cue, the footsteps fell outside the front door just before it swung open, revealing the stocky frame of her father Felix. He was not what one would call a giant or a hulk, but he sat in a squat, sturdy frame of moderate size, with very little arm hair and a dark goatee circling his mouth. His eyes were narrow slits that, coupled with the goatee obscuring his lips, gave him the impression he was always scowling. Surprising to most was his relative lack of wrinkles and total absence of gray hair. Felix could possibly pass for a man ten or twenty years his junior - he most certainly didn't look like a man in his fifties. Nobody really had much of an explanation for it, but Carina had a hypothesis of her own, however unpopular with some.

Felix was not someone who could be called driven or motivated. In fact, it was somewhat alarming to his daughters that he showed so little signs of stress or worry over caring for his family, especially not when his daughters had little choice but to work themselves half to death in order to help put food on the table and be sure the utilities stayed on. He never shyed from soapboxing about how he was the man of the house and everything they had they owed to him, even though he hadn't been able to keep a steady job for more than a year ever since her younger sister had been in her last year of high school. And Carina had been harboring a growing resentment towards him because of it. For all his talk about being the bedrock of their family, about men being the stronger sex, about being the one responsible for their livelihood, he certainly didn't have much to show for it. She had for a long time now felt like caring for her little sister and making sure her mother had the basest of supplies to keep their house in order was more her own responsibility than her father's.

She didn't want to be angry about having to work a miserable job to help put food on the table, but a part of her simply couldn't help it. She loved her family and was fiercely protective of them; anyone foolish enough to cross them or insult them around her usually was met with a fist in their face. Despite her smallish frame, she had gained something of a reputation around the smog shrouded industrial slums of Pasadena City as a scrapper. There weren't many who knew her that risked inviting her ire, and those who did more often than not wound up with more than a few bruises to show for it.

It was mostly that she simply did not see much of a future in her work at the foundry. She had clawed her way to the position she had, but she was no fool. It would be nearly impossible for her to rise much more than she had, and life was not getting any less costly on Houston with rising taxes to pay for the hostilities with Rheinland, not to mention the burgeoning population of convicts in orbit about their homeworld or in the new Sugarland prison around Brazos, millions of miles away. But what she feared most from the endless cycle of labor was to find herself resentful of her own family for her lot in life.

She had decided months ago that something had to change, and there was really only one way to ascertain that she never reached that breaking point while still picking up the considerable slack in providing for the family that her father left in his laziness. It wasn't ideal, and it would keep her away for months at a time, but she knew her family would support her decision.

Everyone, that is, except Felix.

As was the typical custom, Felix responded to his wife's pleasant greeting with a mere grunt and strode over to the table and sat down crudely with an impatient and expectant look on his empty plate. Carina suppressed the urge to sneer at him and simply walked over to the kitchen sink, giving her mother a quiet look of annoyance. Aracely frowned slightly as if to scold her for doing so.

Carina turned the knob on the faucet, and after a few coughing sputters of air a meager trickle of water seeped out. Even soap was too expensive to buy on a regular basis, so she proceeded to scrub her hands with a rough granite stone that sat on the edge of the washbasin.

“Oye, Chely,” her father said gruffly to his wife. “I get home after bustin' my back for eight hours and you can't even have a meal ready on time?”

“Lo siento, papi,” Aracely quickly apologized. Carina's shoulders sagged a bit as she sighed. “It's almost ready. Consuela said she would be here too.”

Carina saw the disapproving scowl on her father's face as she turned, shaking the moisture from her hands. “She did, did she?” he grunted. “Irresponsible little girl, don't she know we got bills to pay? She needs them hours.”

“Why didn't you stay and work a bit longer then, Dad?” Carina snapped, sitting down across from him.

“Cari!” her mother scolded, frowning at her.

Felix narrowed his eyes at her. “Watch your tone, mija,” he reprimanded her sternly. “You don't got any idea what I do every day.”

Carina started to retort, but another look from her mother silenced her. Instead, she pursed her lips even tighter and folded her arms, resting her elbows on the rickety table.

“Elbows off the table, please, Cari,” Aracely said as she went back to the kitchenette, checking on a clay pot of beans that were simmering on the old, discolored gas stove. “Felix, I think Cari had something she wanted to tell you.”

Carina obediently, if reluctantly, withdrew her arms from the table and slouched back in her chair. She knew that as soon as her mother saw her sitting like that, she'd ask her to sit up straight like a person with some semblance of manners, but that was one key difference between the two of them. Consuela was very much like their mother -- always sat up straight, folded her hands neatly in her lap when they were idle, and was soft spoken and reserved like it seemed a lady should be. Carina was far more brusque in her manner, even downright crass sometimes. She habitually burped during meals, never expected men to hold a door open for her, and had a mouth that could only be attributed to hanging around steelworkers for the past five years. For all the mild annoyance it brought her mother, she knew it drove her father absolutely insane. Maybe that was part of the reason, at least unconsciously, she did it.

Her father beckoned her to sit up straight with one of his thick fingers. “Quit sitting como una vándala,” he said, provoking a roll of her eyes as she scooted up in her seat just barely enough to feign compliance. “What you got to tell me?”

She cleared her throat and looked squarely into his eyes. “I heard that the LPI prison transports are taking applications for deck hands,” she said, her voice carrying a hint of a insolence, almost daring him to argue with her.

“So?” he said.

“So I'm thinking of applying.”

Felix immediately shook his head and waved his hand as if shooing away a fly. “No, mija,” he said. “No daughter of mine is workin' for those crooked cops.”

“The pay is more'n twice what I make at the foundry,” she pressed, never taking her dark brown eyes from him. “Plus a per diem, plus hazard pay, PLUS one standard month off for every two on.”

Felix laughed a little. “That's what they're promising, eh?” he chuckled.. “You're too young to get it, I know, but they'll find all kind of ways to cheat you out of it, Cari, I promise you. The LPI are a bunch of crooks, no better'n the ones they're arresting.”

She smirked sarcastically at him. “No better than you, you mean.”

Aracely's head whipped around from the pot of beans. “Cari, ya,” she whispered sharply.

Felix glared sharply at her. “What exactly you mean by that?”

“I mean that you're still bitter about your stint in Huntsville,” she said. “Ain't their fault you got yourself on the wrong side of the law.” She knew she had twisted the dagger a bit hard, but she didn't care. She knew a few people who were proud that they themselves or a family member had served time in prison, but she had never understood why. Carina had never stopped being embarrassed about being the daughter of a “rehabilitated” felon.

“Carina, that's enough,” her mother repeated.

Seeing that her father had no response aside from the angry glare he had pitched at her, she sat back in her chair again, satisfied that she had made her point.

Felix clenched his teeth and ground them together in silence for a moment. Carina revelled in seeing him squirm like a rat caught in a trap. “I served an unfair sentence for somethin' totally legitimate,” he hissed, even though he had to know that Carina wasn't stupid enough to believe it. “And one more smart-ass comment like that, mija, and I'll slap you into next week.”

Carina almost dared him to try it.

“Besides,” he continued, after taking a deep breath to calm himself, “it's too dangerous.”

Carina scoffed. “Too 'dangerous?'“ she asked incredulously. “You think the steel mill is a cake walk, then?”

“Long as you don't daydream and pay attention to what the hell you're doin', mija, you ain't likely to get hurt on a broom,” he said. “Bits of metal and machines are predictable. Felons ain't.”

“Neither is someone who dozes off at his machine because he's worked to exhaustion,” she retorted. “The foundry is every bit as dangerous as sharing a ship for a few days at a time with a bunch of locked up criminals. Besides, I can handle myself.”

Felix leveled his gaze at her again. “Schoolyard brawls ain't the same as when a dangerous criminal jumps you. You think you're tough, but you ain't as tough as you think, little girl. The kind of people they shuttle around on those transports ain't cuddly and cute like me.” Carina made a visible effort not to laugh at that. “I don't want my daughter around a bunch of felons,” he repeated. “And that's that.”

Carina folded her arms defiantly across her chest again. “That ain't what your problem is,” she said cooly.

“Oh no?” her father challenged. “What's my problem, then?”

“You just can't stand the thought of me not being under your thumb anymore.”

A belly laugh erupted from her father, much to her chagrin. “Oh ho ho ho,” Felix chortled. “Little girl, you'd be beggin' to come home inside of a month.”

Carina felt her face get hot, but before her angry outburst could spring forth, Aracely set the steaming clay pot of beans on the center of the table between them. “Felix, Cari, please, enough of this,” she pleaded. “Let's talk about it later when we've calmed down, okay?”

She started to protest, but one more look from her mother silenced her, and all she could do was glare across the table at the impossible oaf of a man sitting in front of her. She wanted to smack the smug look off of his fat face.

As if nothing had happened, Felix reached forward and started to serve himself a plate, still grinning to himself.

“Felix, espérate!” Aracely scolded him, and for a moment Carina thought she was going to swat his hand. “Wait for Consuela, and we can at least have the decency to say grace?”

“Then let's say grace already,” Felix said gruffly. “Consuela knows what time supper is, and if she wanted to make it on time, she'd be here by now.”

Carina just sat there, feeling her blood boiling in her veins, but swallowed her anger the best she could, for her mother's sake.

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