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Another customer, a deaf-mute man, would buy a stick of Fortune red and a pack of nuts every afternoon: Four pesos worth of silence from my brother’s incessant complaints about the exposed pipes running along the ceiling, how we used them to hang laundry. How the damp air clung to our clothes, hair, nostrils. I realized belatedly the customer’s defects. He would write his requests in small scraps of paper he always had on him, smoke at a leisurely pace beyond the window while we waited for the setting sun. Sunlight would slowly invade the upstairs bedroom through slits between curtains always drawn. Forest green walls in the room I shared with my mother and brother did nothing to soothe the heat that ran its sticky fingers on our skin. The first floor was a reprieve. The store meant constantly having to look out so we can ignore the thin, rusty metal rods poking out of the walls or the dips and rough patches on the concrete which made the entire house exude incompleteness, like the people who built it just gave up and went home. The only window was the store front. Thirty pesos load for the flirty boy’s mobile. He would always ask for my name. I lied each time. Yesterday, I was Hannah. Today, Jackie. Tomorrow, Vera.