THE BIG MOVE (Miami Hearts Book 2) Read Free Page A

When Faith had invited me, after all, I’d volunteered to make homemade chips and salsa. Those items, however, weren’t normally included in my grocery budget, so I’d had to scrimp this week. The food everyone had sent me home with was what was going to fill my belly until next week.
                  I popped the box into the fridge and looked around. An apartment was simple to clean when it was so small, so that was one benefit. To save more money, I’d downsized from a one-bedroom abode to a studio. Without Antonio there, it made much more sense. I didn’t need the extra space. I had a comfortable couch that I could make my bed of every night. In the day, those blankets got tucked away, and it became my seating area.
                  I never entertained, so I was comfortable with my level of poverty. It was a necessity, living well within my needs. I’d practiced it in Honduras and when Antonio and I had first arrived in Miami.
                  We didn’t have two coins to rub together when we finally arrived in the city, bedraggled, weary and thinner than when we’d left Tegucigalpa. We were in awe of Miami, and a little afraid of it, fighting a constant battle to fit in and look like we belonged.
                  We watched the city’s very poor, homeless individuals to gauge what they did to survive, how their fellow citizens treated them, and what we would have to do to adapt here.
                  This was how we discovered the blessing of shelters and soup kitchens — warm, wholesome meals and safe places to sleep that didn’t entail alleyways and encounters with the police.
                  It was through one of these charitable organizations that Antonio was able to obtain a job — and that we found our first apartment, a subsidized property. We were happy, hopeful, and open to whatever the universe saw fit to bestow on us, lucky thus far and ready for luck to strike even more. We’d come all this way, out of dire situations. Luck had to change for people sometime, didn’t it?
                  When I landed some work cleaning office buildings, we were able to buy the car — used, and on a payment plan, but the car set us free from the expense of taxi and bus fares. It was a clunker, and something of a gas guzzler, but loveable. We’d never dreamed of owning such a thing in our neighborhood. Being able to afford it now was both exciting and an affirmation that coming to the United States had been the right decision. There were opportunities here that would’ve never been available to us otherwise. Sure, it wasn’t my dream to vacuum carpets and scrub toilets of white collar Americans. But dreams started somewhere.
                  At night, though, dreams turned into longing.
                  “Antonio,” I said one such night while looking at the orange lights of the city, the humid air reminding me of home, “don’t you miss it? Just a little bit? Somewhere deep inside you?”
                  We’d had valid reasons for fleeing our home country — valid and very mortal reasons — but on some nights, Tegucigalpa throbbed with an energy and a vitality that Miami lacked. If only things had been different, maybe we wouldn’t have had to uproot our entire identities just to survive.
                  “Miss it?” He snorted as he joined me at the open window. The air conditioner was a luxury we weren’t used to, and we often joked about its prevalence. I shivered at my work, shivered at the grocery store, shivered any time I walked in off the shimmering, hot street and into an artificially chilled building. I was used to the heat, welcomed it. It was nice for the outside air to move through the apartment, and I loved to throw the windows open — we boasted a grand total of two — as soon as I got home from my work.
                  “Don’t get me wrong,”