by Nina Moreno
I sighed. It felt like I was proving her right about something, and I didn’t like it. I had no business talking to boys with boats. I silently repeated that to myself as I watched him go.
The next morning I worked on finishing my last essay for the study-abroad scholarship. Well, I worked on starting it. I crunched down on a strawberry candy as I ruminated over the blinking cursor and blank screen. It was a demanding thing, the cursor. Come on, Rosa, tell us again why we should give you money. I’d answered every variation of the Why you? question presented to me so far, but here I was, unable to string together a sentence. Maybe I was burnt out. Dual enrollment had fried me. Someone alert the viejitos, Rosa Santos had peaked. I glanced at the date on my calendar to count the days until May, but my attention snagged on today’s date. The day before Mom’s birthday. The day my father’s boat didn’t return. I closed my laptop and went to find Mimi.
The windows were open to the warm, citrus-sweet breeze. I moved through the garden room, drinking in the lush green scent. There was sacred knowledge in these living, breathing roots. Remedies and secret recipes. A collection handed down from one mother to the next. I followed the heartbeat of the house out the screen door and into the backyard garden, where Mimi plucked peppers into a basket before straightening. She pressed her hands into her back and leaned into a stretch. Her eyes closed and she tipped her face to the sun. I wondered over her soft smile and the sudden twinge of guilt that tangled with my good mood.
Reconnecting with my mother felt like trying to balance a set of scales. Did going to Cuba mean I would hurt her, too? I didn’t know how to balance my love for her with my need to leave.
“Do you need help?” I called, coming closer.
Mimi grabbed her basket. When she noticed I was still in my sleep shirt, she said, “Oye, pero did you just wake up?”
I swallowed my sigh. “I’ve been working on an essay in my room.”
Frustration at my tone tightened her expression. She quickly banished it and cupped my cheek. After a moment of hesitation, she said, “Voy a hacer una medicina para la tos.”
“Who’s coughing?”
She laughed. “Everyone. Our flowers are very pretty, pero carajo, the allergies.”
She dropped her hand, and we returned to the garden room where we worked side by side like always. Mimi chopped and measured without following any written instructions. I followed along, peeking over her shoulder, scribbling notes in my journal littered with leaves and pencil shavings. She showed me where to properly cut the peppers. I peeled and chopped ginger, and listened as she hummed to herself and poured golden honey into the bottle, a healing concoction that would soothe a scratchy throat and quiet a persistent cough. I didn’t know if I was a healer like Mimi, but making this syrup with her felt like being let in on another secret, another story about home and family.
When she went inside to make us some tea, I glanced over the clutter of her table. Mimi’s organizational system was nearly as bad as the bookshop’s. Beneath the dried mint was an open notebook filled with Mimi’s cursive handwriting. There were ingredients listed for different oils and potions. Messy footnotes written in quick scrawls and different inks. Orders and reminders about coughs and achy backs. The name Tía Nela stopped me.
I’d never heard of a tía. All I knew of our family was the three of us. Whoever was left in Cuba was gone. Right? But notes about Nela chased one another across pages, written between tonics and plants Mimi noted she couldn’t find outside of her island. She listed Cuban cities, and I hurriedly read each note to see if there were more names or even addresses, but instead I read different accounts of healing. In Camagüey, a sick boy who woke from his death bed. Healed oxen in Pinar del Río that saved a family farm. A mother who found her lost daughter in Holguín. A trail of miracles. How in the world did Mimi know what was happening in Cuba?
“Honey?” Mimi called and I started. I hurried to put the notebook back.
“Please,” I shouted, though my heart was currently stuck in my throat.
Mimi returned with two mugs. I watched her as I took a careful sip, hoping I didn’t look as guilty as I felt, but as the tea warmed my chest, my hand itched to grab the notebook so I could read more. I wanted—no, needed—to know more. I just needed a way in.
“I’m going to the hardware store today with Oscar and Mike. They’re helping me with the wedding.”
“Qué bueno.” Mimi grabbed her spray bottle and turned away to tend the basil.
“What was your wedding like?”
She paused, the bottle in her hand stilling. After a moment, she sprayed the basil. “Small. I also married in the spring.”
I waited on the edge of my seat. “Did you guys get married in Havana?”
“Oh, no.” She laughed. “Papi would have killed me. Alvaro and I married in Viñales, at the church. Alvaro still lived in Havana as a student, but he knew it was important to my family to marry near our farm.”
“Wait, he was a student?”
She nodded. “At the university.”
“The University of Havana?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“But why have you never said it before?”
At this, her defenses crept safely back into place. She focused on the green leaves in front of her. “Ay, mira, this one is wilting.”
I’m going to attend the same college as my abuelo. The words demanded out. I wished I could set them free as my abuela happily shaped memories for me. I would find meaning in the ruins of a language I only knew in scattered, unfinished pieces. But, like a ghost, she drifted away into her plants. My confession settled back into its hiding place, perched on my ribs. A bird with nowhere to go.
Was it lack of bravery holding me back? I was scared of hurting her. And of her breaking my heart in return over something this important to us both.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked, and worried over the scale again. Mimi sighed as the wind chimes sang softly.
“She’s at her new wall. Go and remind her what tomorrow is.”
On the way to the hardware store, I stopped beside the old fire station. My mother stood, her arms crossed, as she studied her empty canvas. The white paint looked fresh. Her jeans were faded and spotted with flecks of color. She tipped her head back, looking so much like Mimi, and I wondered if they recognized their similarities. “What are you picturing?” I asked as I drew closer.
Mom didn’t startle. “Not sure yet.” She glanced at me before looking back at the wall, like she was sizing up an opponent.
On the sidewalk between the buildings, Gladys stopped. She wore her bowling shirt and carried her bag. She looked at us, then at the wall. “What are you going to paint?”
Mom didn’t stop her contemplation. “Not sure yet.”
“Well, make it good,” she said. “The rest of us will have to look at it every day, you know.” She continued on her way. Mom looked like she’d taken a sucker punch.
Once she was gone, Mom said, “It would blow her mind to know people from other places actually pay me to do this.”
“They’ve never seen your work.” She only ever sent her photo albums to me.
“They’re too busy setting wards against my supposed evil.” She sounded tired. Her hair looked darker in the shadow. “People in other places don’t look at me like I’m bad luck. But nowhere else feels right, either.” She tapped her paintbrush against her palm. “It’s easy to have a hometown when you don’t have to leave.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard my mother say it so plainly.
“Have to leave?” I asked, but she continued to stare at the wall. I was so tired of everyone’s silence. I tried again. “Well, you can stay for a while. See what that does for your reputation.” Mom didn’t say anything to that either. She was as stubborn as Mimi.
“What do you want to do for your birthday tomorrow?” I asked, frustrated with both of them and their never-ending battle. This was the first time she’d ever been home for this
day.
Mom looked confused for a moment, like she was trying to find where she was in time and place. It clicked together with a look of anguish.
My mother’s birthday was complicated. Her father had died to save her. Mimi had become a mother and widow in her bid for freedom. And eighteen years ago—on the day before her birthday—my father hurriedly set out to finish a day of work, so he could buy her a gift. Make new memories on a difficult day. But he never returned, and now her life was bookmarked by two tragedies.
“I forgot,” she murmured. She paced in front of the wall for an agitated moment. Her gaze jumped from the colors at her feet to the blank space in front of her. “I’ve never forgotten before.”
Surprise swallowed whatever I was about to say. Mom remembered everything down to the tiniest detail. When she gave you a gift it was always spun from a memory you’d half-forgotten, and the rush of remembering again meant as much as the gift itself. She looked skittish now, like she was one spook away from taking off again.
“His boat slip is still his,” I said, and she finally looked at me. I knew something too now. It was selfishly gratifying to carry coveted information.
“How do you know?”
“You never asked?” She said nothing. “Mrs. Aquino told me.”
How could you love someone so much and never talk about the important things? The silent question felt so loud, it practically bounced off the wall beside us. Time was supposed to make grief easier, but it seemed to work the opposite way in my family. The more distance we had from a tragedy, the deeper we buried it, and the harder it haunted us.
Mom considered the blank wall in front of her. She bent down to pack up her paint, and sun glare spilled into the alley behind her, blinding me for a second. “I have to go.”
Panic and frustration struck. “Already?”
“I’ll be back tonight.”
“Where are you going?”
Instead of answering, she said, “We’ll have dinner tomorrow for my birthday. As a family.”
If only she sounded happy about coming back.
“I just feel really caught between them all of a sudden,” I confessed, clutching my notebook to my chest. “But where is all this guilt coming from? It’s because I’m keeping a secret, isn’t it?”
Oscar and Mike waited, both of them holding up pieces of lumber. The hardware store was busy around us.
Mike looked between the wood and me. “Caught between these two?”
We’d been here for the past half hour, Mike rushing from school, but I was so distracted, I was totally wasting their time.
“Sorry. You’re both just really easy to talk to,” I said, and Oscar grunted like I’d accused him of something terrible.
“Which one did you want, Rosa?” he asked, gruff but patient.
I glanced at the page my journal was open to and noted my doodle of Clara and Jonas’s wooden arch. “The lighter wood, I think. And maybe we could add some driftwood to it? What do you think, Mike?”
“I think you bit off way more than you can chew, but, sure, the birch is nice.”
I flipped to the next page and my secret project for Clara. “Am I good for the lighting, you think?” I asked Oscar and handed him my notebook.
He checked over the sketch I’d drawn of my plans again. “Yeah, let me go double-check with Mr. Cordova, but this should work.”
The whine of an electric saw rang out, and the sharp, almost sweet scent of fresh-cut lumber was heavy in the air. Mike and I went to search through tiny drawers of bolts and hinges. He rolled his sleeves up his forearms and stuck a pencil behind his ear. I didn’t know what I was meant to be helping him look for, despite him explaining it seven times, so I just sat on a box and took out my phone to check my e-mails.
“What’s with the hyper-distraction?” he asked after a moment.
“I still haven’t told Mimi I’m going to Charleston.”
“What?” He looked shocked. “You better do it soon. Damn, if my grandma found out she was the last to know something…I don’t even want to think about it. Everything I said from the time I found out and didn’t tell her would be considered a lie. Grandmas are too much.”
“I’m not lying, though. I’m just not telling her about it yet.”
He gave me a look that said, Yeah, sure.
“I just want to go to Cuba—it should not be this difficult. It’s not like I’m skipping college or running away with a sailor from Argentina.”
“Why Argentina?”
“I don’t know, Mimi always roots against them in soccer.” I sighed. “This is all my mother’s fault. She went and fell in love with a boy with a boat, and now she’s this wandering vagabond, constantly upsetting her mother and making me too scared to do anything to rock the boat.” I frowned. “Bad analogy.”
“Terrible. But I doubt she fell in love with your dad to piss off Mimi.”
“Out of everyone, she just had to fall for him? Seems fake.”
He smiled at my weary sarcasm. “Let’s see, change of topic. What’s new with your buddy Mike? Oh! You have to see this boat I’m working on.” He glowed with excitement. “The spruce Oscar found for me is straight out of my dreams. I mean, right now it’s basically a canoe, but it’s gonna sail, baby.”
“You too?” I whined. “Why am I suddenly surrounded by boys with boats?”
Mike paused his digging through the brass bolts. “Riiiiight. You and Alex planning your wedding.” I scowled and Mike grinned. “Wait, are you running away with an Argentinian sailor?”
“Would you date me?”
“What?” he burst out. Honestly, the question was a surprise to me, too, but the panic on his face was a little much.
“I didn’t ask you out, Michael,” I protested. “I was just curious if you’d ever thought about me like that.”
“Why? Are you thinking about me like that?”
First Paula’s and Frankie’s laughter and awkward pity at the bodega, and now Mike’s shock. Was I still in middle school? “Forget it.” I got to my feet. I wasn’t even sure what I was asking. “I’ve got to—Oh my god.” I spun back to Mike. Alex was behind me at the very end of the aisle searching through the other baskets. I moved in super close to Mike and lowered my voice. “Talk to me normal.”
“You first,” he shot back, then glanced behind me. “Ah, your fiancé.”
“Don’t,” I gritted out.
Mike continued to watch Alex, despite all the screaming in my head for him to stop. He looked at me with sudden understanding. I didn’t like it one bit. “This is why you’re all hyper and guilty. You have a crush.”
“What? No.” I shook my head. “I do not.”
“You do. Dude is your type: mysterious and brooding.”
“I do not have a type or a crush. Having a crush on him would be a terrible idea.”
“And yet here we are,” he said, grinning.
“No, we are not. We are not there.”
“Excuse me.”
Mike and I snapped our heads to the right. Alex stood, waiting. He gestured to the shelf behind us. Without a word, we slid out of his way. He stepped forward and grabbed a box of screws. The silence was so sharp it nearly whistled.
“Hey, Alex,” I said, too brightly. “Good to see you.”
Mike offered a hand to Alex, and they shook in greeting while I slowly died in the hardware store.
“This is super fun, but I need to finish helping Oscar. See y’all around.” Mike patted my shoulder twice, and then just left me there, drowning.
I could not get a read on Alex, because where I expected him to rush off like before, he instead stayed where he was. The moment grew tense with expectation. He brushed a hand down his dusty blue shirt, which looked soft. “Are you buying something?” he asked.
Relieved to have something to say, I told him, “No, I came to plan out the pergola for Jonas and Clara. Oscar is building it for me.”
“Nice.” He didn’t move.
Silence
stretched. “Did you have any questions about the cake or anything?”
He looked at me strangely. “Uh, no. I’m good.”
“Cool, cool. Well, I have to go ask Mr. Cordova about a light situation.”
“I’m headed that way, too.” He tapped the box in his hand. “I need to pay.”
“Right, of course.” I tried not to wail from embarrassment as we made our way to the register. Alex slipped a worn leather wallet out of his back pocket and paid for his stuff. Mr. Cordova, the owner of the hardware store, looked at us curiously as he took Alex’s money and bagged his purchase. Mr. Cordova had also been my fifth grade math teacher.
“Did Oscar show you what I needed?”
Mr. Cordova smiled. “The order’s already in, should be here early next week.” His smile fell as he passed a searching gaze between Alex and me. I tried leaning up on my toes a little.
“You’re both working on the wedding?” he asked, looking at Alex.
“Yes,” I replied. “Different parts of it.”
Mr. Cordova grunted. “Good.”
Alex said nothing. He grabbed his bag and went to the door. He held it open and glanced back at me. I followed him outside into the bright sunshine.
Alone on the sidewalk, I blurted, “I saw you in the bookshop.”
He looked confused. “Today?”
“No, yesterday…before the meeting. You picked up a book and then put it back.” Oh my god, why was I telling him this? I sounded like a tiny stalker. “I love that shop.”
“I was looking at a book about knot work.”
“Knot work?”
He hesitated for a beat. “Boat stuff,” he explained. The scent of burnt caramel and vanilla hit me, and I wondered what kind of coffee he drank.
“I’m sorry for calling your idea for the festival a party.” The surprising apology was given with swift but grave determination. “I should have already apologized for that.”
“If you knew me, you’d know I take projects very seriously.”
“But I do….” He stopped and finally looked at me. “You don’t remember me. From before.”