Friday, January 22nd
Keila called for an emergency family meeting. Claudia, Olivia, and Patricia were to come to dinner without their husbands or children. To their surprise, Oscar was sitting at the head of the table, his beard shaven and his fingernails clipped. A tiny round Band-Aid on his cheek revealed his inability to pay attention. The three sisters had noticed Oscar’s obsession with the weather and his languor when it came to almost anything else, but all three of them were too busy with the business of life to be concerned and they dismissed his behavior as a temporary eccentricity. Only Patricia sat next to him, holding his hand and staring at the turned-off TV for a few minutes before moving on to more interesting activities, like perusing people’s profiles on OkCupid (oh, the little cybervoyeur). She thought of discussing the lethargy she sensed in him, but decided just to give him signs of love as she always had, without questioning him.
Keila opened a bottle of prosecco and passed out the glasses without asking if anyone preferred something else. The seating arrangement at the family table had been unalterable since the girls could remember, so each found her assigned spot in strict birth order, sensing some sort of momentous announcement.
“I’m sure you can guess why I called you. There’s not much to say,” said Keila. She took a deep breath.
“I hope you called us to apologize for your stupid carelessness,” said Olivia, measuring her words, trying, unsuccessfully, to control the volume of her voice. “What was so important around the house for you to ignore your granddaughters? And you, Dad, was the blank screen of the TV more entertaining than watching the twins?” She slammed the table for emphasis and went on, “How many times have I told you, have we told you, Claudia, Patricia, that the pool is a hazard? If you’d fixed it and put a fence around it, this accident would have never happened. That’s city code, for God’s sake! How can I ever trust you again?”
Her eyes welled up as she sat down. She’d said it all and yet she still felt a lump inside her rib cage, as if she’d swallowed a pillow.
“I am very sorry, Olie,” said Keila, breaking a long silence. “I’m sure you’ll find in your heart to forgive me someday, even if I don’t deserve it, because that’s just who you are. But I know I will never forgive myself.”
“I may be able to, Mom, but I don’t know if I’ll ever trust you with the kids again. Do you have undiagnosed ADHD? You’re always thinking about something else. You can’t leave two three-year-old girls to wander around a house by themselves with an abandoned pool filled with water festering with bacteria,” said Olivia, then turning to Oscar, “And you, Dad, snap out of it. If that pool is your way of telling us you’ve checked out, I hope you learn to tell us in a safer way. You don’t need to take us all down with you. Just look what happened! Dad, say something, Dad!?”
Oscar opened his mouth but couldn’t say a word. His cheeks reddened with shame. That was all he could express.
Claudia took a sip of prosecco and got up to leave.
“I’m really not hungry anymore. Mom, do you want to tell us why you called for this dinner before I go?”
“I’m sorry, sweetie, it’s not the right time now. Why don’t you all come back tomorrow and we can talk about it?”
“Fine,” said Claudia, and headed for the door.
“I’m sorry I ruined your dinner, Mother,” said Olivia, finding a level of sarcasm that she didn’t know she had. She left without touching the warm chayote in butter.
Saturday, January 23rd
A bang and a rumble woke Oscar up at 6:00 A.M. He found his robe under a pile of clothes on the chair and went out to the yard to find that a crew of workers had taken down a portion of the fence; three of them were already busy emptying out the pool with submersible pumps. They had also brought concrete chisels, jackhammers, shovels, and wheelbarrows. A dump truck waited in the alley to haul away the rubble and debris.
“What’s going on?” he asked one of the workers. But before he could get an answer, Olivia walked in through the opening on the fence.
“It was obvious last night that you weren’t going to do anything about this,” she said. “I had to pay them extra for the rush job. This can’t wait a day longer.”
“I’m so very sorry, Olie. I was there, too. I could have watched the girls. I could have fixed the pool and installed a security fence around it.”
“You could have. But you didn’t.”
She turned away and addressed one of the workers. “Gracias por venir tan pronto, Miguel.”
She had worked with them in the past whenever she had to demolish a pool for a client. They were part of her trusted crew, her guys. In spite of the tense moment with Oscar, there was still a sense of camaraderie with the workers, who called her “Archi.” Once they finished draining the standing water, they were to demolish the side walls and prepare the hole to backfill it.
Oscar stepped aside and watched from the yard’s portico. Keila came out followed by Daniel, Patricia’s twelve-year-old son, who had also woken up with all the noise, to look on.
“We deserve this,” she mumbled to Oscar, and went back into the house.
“Why is Aunt Olivia doing this, Grandpa?” asked Daniel.
“We don’t want the twins to have another accident,” Oscar explained, trying to sound calm.
“But why is Bubbe so upset? Is she mad at Olie for destroying the pool?”
“On the contrary. She, well, both of us, feel very ashamed for failing to take care of Diana and Andrea. We got distracted and look what happened.”
“That sucks.”
“More than sucks.”
That evening, after the workers had left and the pool was a dark hole in the middle of the yard, a grim reminder of the twins’ accident, Claudia and Olivia arrived for the emergency dinner that hadn’t happened the night before.
“Good call, Olie,” said Patricia when she came downstairs to meet her sisters. “Nobody was going to remove the damn pool if you didn’t do it.”
“You’re welcome to come over and use mine. I keep the water at ninety degrees,” said Claudia.
“Dinner’s on the table, girls,” yelled Keila from the dining room.
After everyone sat in silence at their habitual places, Keila passed the reheated dinner from the night before, poured prosecco from a new bottle, and said, bluntly:
“The reason I called you for this dinner is to announce to you that your father and I are divorcing.”
Claudia had just taken a sip of her prosecco, but was the first to reply, in shock, after spilling part of her drink on the tablecloth. “I thought you were going to tell us you’re selling the house.”
“I don’t get it. You’ve been married, what, thirty-eight years?” said Olivia, the devastating consequences of the news not quite registering.
“Thirty-nine.”
The second after Keila corrected Olivia, all thirty-nine years—her romantic evenings with Oscar, their children’s births, their family vacations, the school carnivals, their days at the beach, their fights and disagreements—popped out of her memory archive, reminding her of something she wasn’t willing to admit. She pulled up her sweater’s sleeves, a habitual tic, and took a hefty swig of her prosecco.
“Why bother? You’ve hung in there for so long, why give up now?” said Patricia in a broken voice, her eyes a dam about to break. “Is it because of the twins’ accident?”
“No, it is not, but that didn’t help. Listen, I don’t know who this man is, but he’s certainly not your father. The man I married vanished last year and I’ve got this sad avatar instead.”
Oscar flinched and went back to staring at his empty plate. His daughters’ voices seemed to fade, becoming a mumble of fright and disbelief.
“Dad is probably just going through some strange phase. What are you going to do later, when you’re old and alone?” asked Patricia, drying a tear with her napkin.
“I’m not thinking about that now,” said Keila. She tucked her signature strand
of gray hair behind her ear and refilled her glass of prosecco, hoping no one noticed that her hand was shaking.
“We might not be around to keep you company. I might move away,” said Olivia in a futile attempt to dissuade her mother.
“Can’t you make up? Can’t you get over whatever you two are going through?” asked Claudia.
“I’ve made my decision and it is final.”
Patricia tried unsuccessfully to hold her tears as she stared at the platter of chicken in almond and chipotle sauce with rice—one of Keila’s famous recipes—that sat untouched at the center of the table.
“And what do you have to say about all this, Dad?” she finally asked Oscar, who seemed to have been invisible to everyone until that moment.
“I have no say. Your mother is determined. You know how she is.”
During the long silence that followed, Patricia asked herself how she would give the news to Daniel. Her parents were his de facto parents, as they helped raise him along with Olivia while she finished school. And once she turned on the question faucet, a steady flow of unknowns overcame her. How would Daniel take his grandmother’s decision? Would he neglect his studies like that other sixth grader whose parents had split a few months before? Would he start acting reckless and withdrawn? Would there be any more Sunday family dinners? Would Keila keep the house and Oscar have to leave, or the other way around? Of all their friends, who would side with Keila and who with Oscar? Was one of those friends the cause of the breakup? Could it be an affair? Surely not, at their age. Irreconcilable differences would be a ludicrous reason after so many years of marriage. But then, what did she know?
Suddenly, their family home began to look more like a house. A Spanish Revival–style house just like any other in Rancho Verde, just like any house featured in any given real estate app, a house divested of all meaning, staged for the listing photos: 4 bed/4 bath, den, enclosed courtyard, tiled roof, faded mustard-yellow stucco walls, arches everywhere, a generous portico, detached garage with adjacent artist’s studio and maid’s room common in Los Angeles homes of the era, kitchen fitted with state-of-the-art appliances and a service door to the backyard that seemed an afterthought, a typical feature in houses built in the 1920s, when the area behind the house was used only to hang the laundry out to dry in the sun and let the kids get their clothes dirty. Suddenly all the improvements lovingly done by her parents over the years seemed to vanish in her mind, an involuntary defense mechanism of sorts. If her home was lost, none of the renovations would have any meaning: the family room addition, the pool (now in the process of getting demolished), the brick patio with the big table to accommodate their friends on endless weekend lunches and barbecues where everyone raved about Keila’s cuisine, the lavender that surrounded the pergola leaning against the garage, the succulents, the sage, the California fuchsia that grew along the west fence, and the painstakingly groomed ficus hedge in the back by the sweet gum trees, all carefully selected to be water-wise and fire-safe to reduce the risk of propagating fires in the wildland-urban interface where Rancho Verde had been developed.
Claudia’s questions were of a different sort: Who would keep the house? Would the assets be split fifty-fifty? What about the house Keila had inherited from her parents in Mexico City? Would a divorce affect the family trust? Why were her parents doing this to her?
“You won’t survive by yourselves,” said Claudia, raising her voice.
“I’m not going to accept this,” said Olivia, not knowing where that reaction had come from.
“Aren’t you going to defend yourself, Dad?” Patricia asked, now seriously concerned about Oscar’s ennui, or was it preemptive defeat? He surely was not quite in the room, and the fact that Claudia and Olivia didn’t seem to notice irritated her to the point of wanting to get up and leave, but she stayed out of solidarity with her father.
Oscar shrugged and looked at Patricia intently, as if he needed to reveal a secret to her but couldn’t.
Keila refilled her glass of prosecco again, opened a new bottle, and looked at Oscar, hoping to see him differently, perhaps with enough compassion to make her change her mind. The lines across his forehead seemed more pronounced now. The skin of his eyelids draped over his eyelashes like warm blankets, but there was no warmth in his gaze. He seemed focused on the curtain, or maybe it was the windowsill. She imagined herself making scrambled eggs with matzo and strawberry jelly for breakfast and having no one to share it with. At first the idea seemed attractive, but projecting it into a distant future, she wondered if she would enjoy the solitude, or if it would become a painful loneliness impossible to cure. She lacked the vision needed to foresee the details, and this caused her to feel an overpowering discomfort.
“This is what you will do,” instructed Claudia finally. “You will find a couples therapist and will give yourselves one year before making a decision. Promise us. Now.”
Claudia’s command took Keila by surprise. The fact that her daughters were adamantly rejecting her decision to divorce Oscar was incomprehensible to her. One could imagine this kind of resistance in small children, still vulnerable and depending fully on their parents for their well-being. She would never have left Oscar while the girls were growing up. She’d had no reason to; life had truly been blissful. The most distressing event she could think of in her thirty-nine years of marriage was when Oscar sold the last remaining piece of the ranch in the Santa Clara Valley in Northern California. Rancho Horno Caliente, a thirty-eight-thousand-acre spread of rolling hills, creeks, natural wells, and warm breezes, had been in his family since before Mexico lost California to the United States, back in 1848. The great Don Rodrigo Alvarado and his wife, Doña Fermina de la Asunción Ortega, had received the rancho’s grant from Governor Figueroa himself on the recommendation of the reputable Don Juan Bautista de Anza back in the early nineteenth century. The land was awarded to them since they had proved to be seasoned rancheros. It was there where the couple raised their twelve children and bred fine cattle. But over time Oscar’s grandparents, parents, and uncles divided the land and sold most of it to developers. The pastures where horses and cows once roamed happily unattended was now the land where tech industry behemoths thrived. Apple, Netflix, eBay, and Roku had built their headquarters there and transformed the placid family rancho into what is now known as Silicon Valley. Keila never forgave Oscar, not for selling the last lot, as the transaction had proved to be a successful business decision, but for not asking her first.
Now that the girls were married and settled, she had no reason to endure Oscar’s descent into the puny little man he’d become. Worse, even, he was like an anvil tied to her neck. She felt as if she were sinking into a bottomless underwater cave, the kind she and Oscar had once explored while scuba diving near Tulum. On the other hand, she thought, feeling averse to Oscar did not grant her the right to make such a drastic decision without giving it at least a second thought. She couldn’t ignore the conspicuous opposing forces in her mind: What kind of example would she give the girls by divorcing their father? Her single war cry when it came to marriage had always been: “Stick it out!” So now, precisely because her daughters were married and settled, she’d have to make good on her position and drag the anvil around another year.
“Fine. Get me a referral. You girls must have quite a few friends in therapy.”
Sunday, January 24th
Keila canceled the family dinner.
* * *
Oscar spent his day just like any other in the past year, except for the fact that his wife of thirty-nine years had just announced to his children that she was calling it quits. He’d watched Keila throw some reusable grocery bags in the trunk of her car and drive off, possibly to shop for produce at the farmer’s market, a passion of hers. He’d helped Daniel with his math homework, always a mystery subject for the boy. He’d called Olivia about the twins. Perhaps he could visit them later? Would Olivia allow him to be near them again after his devastating failure to watch them? He�
�d brought a blanket out to the patio, bundled up, and sat under the pergola. What his feelings were as he watched an empty nest about to fall from one of the nearby gum tree’s branches was anyone’s guess. If only he weren’t so successful at hiding his pain, if he could at least confide in Patricia, his chamaquita, the anguish that was consuming him. But instead, he pursed his lips and stared at the nest, not quite understanding it as a metaphor.
* * *
Demolishing her parents’ swimming pool turned out to be hard work. Still exhausted, Olivia paid a visit to Lola, her childhood nanny, in Highland Park, a historic area in Northeast Los Angeles, where she’d lived since she could remember. Traffic was light coming from Santa Monica, where she was renovating an apartment building, so she took the 10, then zipped right through Downtown on the 110 North toward Pasadena, the oldest freeway in the city and the one with inexplicable tunnels with no reason to exist as they held nearly no soil overhead. She knew the area well, having flipped a few houses there in the past couple of years.
“Mi niña adorada!” said Lola as she saw Olivia standing at the door. “What a surprise! What are you doing in this neck of the woods?”
A wall-to-wall collage of picture frames—crooked from so many minor tremors—hung behind the couch, filled with family portraits: A young couple with two little boys appeared in several of the photos, Lola’s older brother, Sebastian, and his wife and sons. There were a few older ones in black-and-white of another family, this one with the parents and an older boy and a baby girl. That was Lola’s parents with Lola and Sebastian. In another photo, Lola, a teenager, smiled, embraced by her nephews. She recognized a photo of her and her sisters, Claudia and baby Patricia, as little girls sitting on Lola’s lap in their backyard.
“So, how’s your brother? It’s Sebastian, the one in this picture, right?” asked Olivia, pointing at one of the photos.
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