Betrayed (Rosato & DiNunzio, #2)(17)
“Good point, I’ll text her.” Aunt Barb reached for her purse and got the phone.
“What are you going to say?”
“I’ll tell her we’re running late and not to worry, is all.” Aunt Barb texted away, as the light from the phone screen shone upward, illuminating her laugh lines, which bracketed a sly smile. “I can get you out of anything, even ballet lessons. Remember?”
“Of course.” Judy chuckled at the memory, from when she was only six years old. Her mother had decided that her tomboy daughter needed some civilizing and signed her up for ballet lessons, but Judy hated every minute of them. She’d begged to quit after the first recital, in which she starred as a dancing poodle in tiara-kid makeup, a pink tutu, and a puffy pink tail. Her mother had relented and let her quit only because Aunt Barb had prevailed upon her to let Judy take drawing lessons instead, which had led to her lifelong love of art and painting.
Aunt Barb looked over. “I still remember the song from the recital. Isn’t that crazy?”
“I remember it, too.” Judy decided to sing it, to cheer her aunt up. “‘We are little dancing poodles, and we are here to say…’”
Aunt Barb joined in, “‘We come from France, to do our dance…’”
“‘But we only do ballet!’” they sang together, then laughed. Judy’s throat thickened. She loved her aunt and couldn’t imagine losing her, not now or ever. “I can’t believe you remember that.”
“Are you kidding? I still have PTSD.”
Judy chuckled, then turned right and left, following her aunt’s directions through corn and soybean fields and past horses grazing in rolling pastures, their outlines indistinct in the darkness and their whinnying cutting through the night air. The fields gave way to farmhouses and barns, then to trailers and smaller homes, until they spotted a small cast-iron sign that read, WELCOME TO EAST GROVE. The town was of colonial vintage like Kennett Square, and quaint brick and clapboard houses lined the road, their wooden porches just steps from the curb. Judy headed for the outskirts of town, past a check-cashing storefront and a shabby Mexican tacqueria.
Finally they came upon a long, low series of square buildings, only one story high, mere cinderblock boxes attached in a row, like railroad cars. They had no windows, so there was no way to tell if anyone was inside, and the only light came from flickering fixtures on the roofs of the buildings, which cast jittery cones of light on the worn asphalt lot.
“Here’s Mike’s.” Aunt Barb gestured at a driveway that had no sign, except for PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO THRU TRAFFIC. “That’s the parking lot.”
“Why no sign?” Judy steered into the lot, where there were a few old cars parked in a row.
“Everybody knows where Mike’s is, he’s one of the tiny, independent growers. He owns about ten other growers, all independent. He produces exotics.”
“What’s ‘exotics’?” Judy turned off the ignition and put on the emergency brake, looking through the windshield and noticing for the first time that the buildings had large numbers painted on the cinderblock, in black. The building on the end, closest to them, was number seven.
“Fancier mushrooms. Portabella, mitake, shitake, cremini. But he hires the undocumented.”
“How does he get away with it? What about Immigration?”
“The way the system works is that Immigration stages a raid only if there’s a significant number of complaints, in relation to the size of the workforce. Bottom line, nobody complains.” Aunt Barb picked up her water bottle and took a sip of water. “Immigration isn’t the real problem, anyway, the IRS is. If a grower submits a list of social security numbers and they’re not good, it takes the IRS three months to figure that out. So in three months, after the grower gets the IRS notice, he fires the employees and they go to another grower, or another location of the same grower, like Mike’s.”
“Really?”
“That’s how it worked with Iris. She’s worked at all of his locations for about a year now.” Aunt Barb eyed the buildings. “It’s like a shell game, because even workers with legitimate green cards have only six months in the country, then they have to go back. They worry they can’t get back in, but plenty of them do, and they end up at one of the shadier growers.”
“Was Iris afraid of being caught?”
“She worried about it constantly. She lived in fear of being deported, always looking over her shoulder. You saw her, she was so quiet, she learned to be invisible.” Aunt Barb paused, and her eyes glistened anew. “There are so many undocumented workers here, and everywhere.”
“But that doesn’t make it right.” Judy believed in the law, even if it meant siding with her mother.
“I know, but they’re here, living in a parallel universe. They’re an open secret.”
Judy thought of the undocumented workers she’d seen in the city, the busboys smoking outside the back door of the restaurants, or the men who delivered her takeout pizza by bicycle. “We know and we-don’t-know.”
“Yes, and the interesting thing about an open secret is that people look the other way, literally. Iris became the kind of woman whom people looked away from. Unmemorable and marginalized, even more than the average middle-aged woman.”