F I C T I O N
Victoria Ramirez
Ma Loves Jete
B
ack when I was working like crazy, trying to start up a plumbing business and putting in long hours, it wasn’t unusual for me to get home after seven at night, when Yankee games from the East Coast were already into the third or fourth inning. I’d wash up and enjoy a beer while watching the Bombers with Ma, and my wife Chevegny didn’t mind eating in front of the TV on tray tables so we wouldn’t miss any of the action. Ma moved to Utah to live with Chevegny and me right before Yankee spring training in 2006. She’d lived in a Florida condo since my dad died, but her arthritis was getting so bad she needed to be with one of us. My brother Eddie, who shared a house with a really neat woman, got disqualified from the start since living in sin was a big Shutterstock issue for Ma. My sister Angie lived in Queens and had a big enough house. But long ago we’d secretly nicknamed Angie’s husband mini-Mussolini, and we all detested him including Ma, who showed uncharacteristic tact when in the jerk’s vicinity. That left Little Connie and me, and my sister assumed Ma would naturally choose to live with a daughter. Dom, Little Connie’s husband, is a sweet guy—he’d have to be to put up with my sister—but their three young sons all were on football teams, and Ma was dead-set against kids so young playing a sport worthy, in her eyes, of mooks and thugs. Even worse, Little Connie was a rabid Mets fan, and to Ma, a Bronxite raised in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, rooting for the Mets was close to a mortal sin. In the end Ma came with us, even though her care fell to a daughter-inlaw and not a daughter, and even though living with us meant leaving the East. Ma was OK with it because her sunny room overlooked our backyard and in the distance, a view of the Great Salt Lake. She quickly scoffed at my suggestion to attend games of the Ogden Raptors, our hometown double A team, arguing she couldn’t spare time away from her TV in the summer and miss a Bombers’ game.