The Seven O'Clock Tamales

There's a woman who sells tamales on the corner by the hospital, next to the pole that always has a different "missing" flyer on it. She arrives at six-thirty with a cooler, a big pot wrapped in blankets and a blue plastic stool. By seven-fifteen, when we get out of shift handover, there's already a line. It's a line of wrinkled scrubs, dark circles and people who don't want to talk.

I've been buying from her for six years and I don't know her name. She calls me "my night queen," which isn't my name but gets close.

The order

It's always the same: one tamal with poblano strips and cheese, one sweet one if there are any, and a chocolate atole in a styrofoam cup with a lid that never fits. Twelve pesos a tamal, twenty-five for the atole. Two years ago the tamal went up to fifteen and she apologized, really apologized, with both hands on her chest. I told her not to worry and she gave me an extra napkin, as if that made up for inflation.

There's an unwritten order. ER first, then the lab, then the cleaning staff, who have been waiting a while and never complain. The doctors come last, always in a hurry, and she makes them wait a little longer on purpose. I love that about her.

One time, after a hard night, the kind I don't talk about, I just stood in front of the pot without saying anything. She put the tamal in my hand, closed my fingers around it and said, "Go on, while it's hot." That's all. She didn't ask. I remember that sentence better than many things people have said to me with better intentions.

The blue stool

Yesterday, Sunday, I did something I never do: I showed up early. I swapped shifts with Pao and started at nine at night instead of seven, but before that I stopped by at six in the evening, freshly awake, with the pillow crease still on my face. I wanted to know whether she was still there at that hour.

She wasn't. Her blue stool was chained to the pole with a bike lock, alone, like a dog waiting for its owner. It gave me a strange feeling to see it like that. I realized that all these years I had only seen her in my early morning, as if she existed only when I'm getting out. That she has another day, another home, other people she calls "my queen" in the same tone.

This morning, when I came out, I asked her: "What time do you get up, ma'am?" She laughed. Three-thirty, she said, because she wraps the tamales herself, one by one, with corn husks that arrive from Amealco on Tuesdays and Fridays. Eleven years. Before that she sold outside a factory that closed.

I ate the poblano tamal in the car with the engine off, watching the line empty out. I held the cup of atole in both hands, warm, my fingers still smelling of corn husk. An hour later, in my room with the curtains shut, the room still smelled like that, and I fell asleep that way.