Excerpt from What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Looking good, sis," she said extra loud as she pulled me in.

There in her arms, I realized, to my surprise, that I felt shy. In front of my own sister. My mother.

The baggage carousel beeped and the conveyor belt lurched forward and sighed as it rotated the luggage. "Mamita, which one of these is yours?" my mom asked, looking urgently at the bags tumbling onto the carousel.

"Let me get that, Ma," Jess said.

But Mom insisted, not only on pulling the bag off the conveyor belt but also on rolling it through the bright terminal all the way to the parking lot, where she had one last surprise hidden in the car. "Just a little something!"

She pulled out a bouquet of sunflowers from the front seat.

Nestled in between the blooms was a stuffed bear with a miniature graduation cap, complete with a tiny yellow tassel.

"And we got you a cake at home, too," Jess said.

"From Valencia," my mother whispered, before pinching my cheek.

The bear was holding a little card with my name on it.

"Go ahead," Ma said. "Open it."

In the envelope, folded, were three crisp twenty-dollar bills, and I thought to myself, Dear Lord, I am so sorry.

Nowhere in the world could there have been a bigger asshole than me.

In the car I tried to redeem myself. I sat in the front seat with the directions Jessica had copied off Mapquest on a napkin in crayon, while at the same time folding and unfolding a map of Queens, all this while Jessica kept taking a series of wronger turns. Later, over the water, on our way back to the Island, Jessica told stories about the baby's growing teeth. And I told stories about college, aping my professors' gestures and verbal tics.

Our mother, she sat quietly in the back.

Chapter 2
Nina

That July, two months after I landed in New York, I got a job selling lingerie at the Staten Island Mall—Jessica's idea. She was the one who dragged me to the interview at Mariposa's, because one of her girlfriends worked nights there and said they needed a salesgirl bad; it was swimsuit season. And Mariposa's had just put out a whole line of bathing suits. "Make sure you call them, Nina," Jess demanded. "First thing tomorrow."

I tried to get out of it, but there were not many other options. Despite my best efforts, I hadn't gotten into med school. And though newly graduated from a top university, I was broke and blessed with the brilliant luck of the 2008 recession; all the newspapers that year were saying the economy hadn't been this screwed up since 1929. Plus, nobody would hire me because they said none of my skills was actually marketable. And if you've got some kid who's worked five years at Dunkin' Donuts, and he already knows how to work the register, and you can pay him eight dollars an hour, and he's not going anywhere, and he's not going to complain because he never had a degree to begin with, who needs a bio major anyway?

"Plus, we'd have to train you," they said. "I mean, what have you actually done?"

A few weeks into the summer, one bad interview after another, I gave in. "Fine. Okay, I'll apply to Mariposa's," I said.

And Jessica was like, "Don't act like you're doing me a favor. I got a job." Because Jessica loved to point out that she worked at St. Lucy's Hospital, even though she was only a nurses' aide.

On the application, I put down a pile of irrelevant stuff I'd done in college, even my GPA—though it was mediocre. I added that I'd worked in the alumni office during the phone-a-thons where we had to call former students to get them to donate money. ("Frankly, I think you should be refunding me tuition," this one guy said, because he'd been unemployed for the past eight months.)

At Mariposa's, the manager raised one drawn-in eyebrow, its fakeness barely perceptible. The brow kit she used must have been expensive. "You have like zero sales experience, sweetheart."

Excerpted from What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez. Copyright © 2023 by Claire Jimenez. Excerpted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.