Before I could make it to my bedroom (I had decided it was time to sleep in my own bed from now on and not the cot), I heard Señor Díaz’s voice from the kitchen.
“She will come around.”
“Will she?” asked Abuela. “Would you? I know I wouldn’t. And what if she’s like me?”
There was a pause and then a loud clang, as if Abuela had dropped something into the sink.
“Is that so bad?”
Abuela interrupted him, “So it will always be like this.”
“María, she’s not exactly like you,” he added. “She is her own person and still very young. This is a lot to deal with.”
“I can’t apologize for something I do not believe in apologizing for,” Abuela said.
“Even if it means her forgiving you?”
I waited. I waited. I waited some more. Answer already, Abuela!
“No. I cannot. It is not who I am.” More pots scraped and clanged.
“Then you must not apologize, if that is who you are. Martha just hasn’t discovered what’s bothering her.”
Abuela chuckled. “I feel like you’re actually saying I should apologize.”
He laughed too. “All I’m saying is that it’s hard for children like Martha to be confronted with the fact that their parents are not perfect.”
“She already knew that about her mother,” Abuela replied.
“I wasn’t talking about her mother. I was talking about you.”
I stopped listening and quietly shut my door.
For the next few hours I stayed in bed, hands behind my head and thought about things. At one point, I heard Señor Díaz leave. Mostly, I thought about my mother. My mother who had had so many secrets. It was as if getting pregnant with Marcela . . . that was weird to think about. But I had to. Marcela was my sister. My sister. I grimaced.
I wondered where she was. Gloria said that Marcela had run off and no one knew where.
“Probably doing bruja work for one of the cartels. Desgraciada,” were Gloria’s exact words. Being a witch for a cartel sounded far-fetched to me. If I was her, I’d go looking for my mother . . . our mother . . . whatever.
I laid there and wished I hadn’t started looking for my mother. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have discovered everything. But at the same time, it felt like . . . this was meant to have happened, one way or another.
Besides, this wasn’t my fault. It was Abuela’s. All of this led back to her.
Señor Díaz was wrong. She wasn’t my “mother.” I had a mother, and she was a piece of work. Granted, Abuela had done more for me than my mother ever had: she cooked, washed my clothes, helped me with my Spanish, taught me how to tap into my don, and . . . well, she saved my life. Maybe.
But that was the problem! If she hadn’t done all of that nice stuff, been good to me, I wouldn’t be so mad, so hurt. I didn’t deserve this!
I balled my hands into fists and threw them forward so they hit the bed. I just still couldn’t believe Abuela. She betrayed me! After all these months, teaching me how to be a curandera . . . and then she kept my mother and Marcela from me! She preached honesty and being good and praying to God . . . and she lied!
My mother lied about everything, too. She didn’t know any other way. But Abuela was supposed to be different. She was supposed to be better. Morals, ethics . . . that’s what all of these stupid Jesus and Mary statues were about, right?
I groaned and looked up. Bloody Jesus looked down at me with sad eyes. A drop of plastic blood dripped from the bottom of his heel. It hung in the air, attached to his foot, forever unable to fall on my pillow.
“Bloody Jesus,” I whispered. “What should I do?”
Three loud knocks on my door was my answer.
“Jesus!” I yelped and nearly fell off the bed.
The door opened and in walked Gloria. Her facial expression was one of suspicion. “Are you feeling bad again? That maleficio come back?”
“No, you just scared the . . . I mean, you scared me,” I said, getting to my feet.
She nodded and put her bony hands on her hips. “See, I thought I heard you take the son of God’s name in vain, but you would only do that if you were raving sick again, right?” Her eyes squinted at me waiting for an answer.
I fought not to roll my eyes. “Yeah. That’d be the only reason,” I said with a little too much sarcasm.
Gloria pursed her lips and raised her hand as if she wanted to say more, but she shook her head and motioned instead toward the door with her hand. “Vamos, dinner’s almost ready.”
Oh, no. I wasn’t going to sit in the dining room with Abuela and Gloria. I’d pass on all that awkwardness.
I wrapped my arms around my stomach and scrunched my face in slight pain. “You know what? I actually don’t feel so great. Think I’m going to just lay down tonight . . . skip dinner.”
I tried to move toward the bed, but Gloria, as old as she was, was quicker and slapped the bed with her open hand. “Ay, no! Get your little butt in that kitchen, chica. I didn’t nurse you for months . . . ”
“It was two weeks . . . .”
“ . . . for you to lie in bed and die. You’ve slept enough. Now, you eat,” Gloria finished.
She turned and started walking toward the hall, probably seeing on my face that I had lost the battle. I dragged my feet reluctantly after her.
When we got to the kitchen, Gloria pointed to the table and told me to sit. I thought about barking, but I didn’t think anyone would find it funny.
I tried not to look at Abuela at the stove top, stirring something in a pot. It smelled like browning rice . . . just a hint of something burning. She didn’t turn around to look at me either, which was fine. I didn’t have anything to say to her either way.
Which didn’t mean that Gloria didn’t have anything to talk about. She could have a conversation with a rock if she needed to.
“Like I was saying, I went to the base yesterday to get my hair done. The ladies up there do it best. I don’t know how they do it, but I walk away with most of my hair. These other places, they give you a girl who don’t know nothing about hair. Burn it right off your scalp.”
Abuela stopped stirring to pour a bowl of water in the pan. Steam hissed and crackled from the pot and enveloped the area around her face. She went over to a cutting board and grabbed a knife to start slicing tomatoes and peppers.
“Anyways, I see Lidia . . . the one married to Pablo—not Lalo—Pablo. Anyways, Pablo passed away a few days ago . . . Dios, may he rest in peace. She was there getting her hair done for the funeral. She tells me her husband was a good man, but he had a drinking problem.”
Abuela stopped chopping for a moment and looked down. After a few seconds, she started again.
“But a drinking problem he gave his son! See, Lidia, the poor soul, can’t find her son. Not since she told him that his father passed . . . something to do with his heart . . . I don’t remember. Maybe it was something else. But anyways . . . ”
Abuela stopped again. This time she switched the knife to her left hand and squeezed the right a few times, opening and closing her fingers. If I hadn’t slightly been paying attention, I wouldn’t have noticed that she sent part of her don to her hand.
“So she sends out her brothers to all the bars, this side and across the river, and nothing. Nothing at all. What kind of son abandons his mother, especially in this hard time? Was it the father who took care of his son? Lidia held the family together. I mean, as best a woman who smokes too much can, at least in my opinion.”
Abuela started chopping again, but after a few seconds the knife clattered to the counter and then to the floor.
“So as I’m sitting there . . . ” Gloria stopped.
I stood up without thinking and picked up the knife. As I did, I caught sight of Abuela’s hand. It was contorted and twitching. She quickly hid it behind her apron when she saw me. I picked up the knife, and she held out her left hand without looking at me.
I looked at
her left hand and noticed it looked fine. No twitching. I stood up and mumbled, “I’ll finish.”
Abuela stood there when I moved to the cutting board to finish cutting the tomatoes. She didn’t seem to know what to do. I could feel Gloria’s prying eyes watching us, trying to figure out what we would do. When I felt Abuela’s presence move away from me and her feet shuffle to the table, Gloria began talking again.
“You won’t believe it. While we were there in the salon, her daughter walks in and says they’ve found him—Lidia’s son. You won’t believe where he was at.”
As I chopped, I wondered about what I had seen. Was there something wrong with Abuela? I had never seen that before. Was it just arthritis or something more?
“He was at the cemetery!” Gloria cackled and slapped the table.
I picked up the cutting board and moved to the stove. As I did, I looked at Abuela. She was sitting at the table, not looking at me or at Gloria, just straight ahead. Her hands sat on the table in front of her. Fat fingers rubbed the swollen knuckles of each hand, back and forth.
“He’d been there for days . . . lying on the exact area his father would be buried in. Can you believe it? He wasn’t much of a son, but at least he made it to the funeral.”
I finished the arroz con pollo, the same meal Abuela had made me almost nine months or so ago when I first came to stay with her. I gave everyone a plate before sitting down myself.
During the entire meal, I watched Abuela, or tried to, without her knowing that I was watching. She didn’t look that old a few weeks ago. The age spots on her cheeks seemed to be spreading and her saggy cheeks looked parched for water. The skin on the front of her neck seemed to droop even more. Was her hand shaking as it carried pieces of chicken and rice to her mouth, or had I imagined it?
She wasn’t young like my mother. She wasn’t even as young as Gloria, though knowing Gloria, the crone would outlive us all anyway, even with her chain-smoking habit.
I was suddenly reminded of something Abuela had once said, that some healings could hurt a curandera, even kill them. Was that what had happened, what was happening? Had the curse done this to her?
“Oh, I forgot to tell you, María,” Gloria said. “Do you know what Lidia’s son said when they found him? ‘I won’t believe he’s dead. I won’t.’” She shook her head and ate a piece of chicken.
I couldn’t finish my meal. Before anyone could say anything, I stood up and cleaned my dish, putting the leftovers aside to be eaten the next day. I cleaned the dishes when Gloria and Abuela had finished eating.
Gloria left soon after that, telling me, “Glad you’re feeling better, m’ija.”
I couldn’t tell if it was sarcastic or sincere. The woman had moods like the Texas weather: calm and sunny one minute and pounding hail and pouring rain the next.
Abuela walked Gloria out of the house. I waited for her to come back in, but I didn’t hear the door. I stood in the kitchen with a towel in my hand, twisting and squeezing it. I thought about the year I had had: how Abuela had kept a huge secret from me. How I was abandoned. How I had lived through a curse of all things, and hadn’t died even though I remembered begging to for many days.
I thought about how Abuela had looked weeks ago when she had left for Mexico and how she looked now.
My chest felt tight all of a sudden and I walked to the front porch, telling myself I needed air. When I opened the front door, I saw Abuela sitting on the bench pushed up against the house, looking out at the street, at nothing really. Her hands sat in her lap, interlaced, knuckles round and shiny. A large strip of pink paint drooped off the house right next to her ear but she didn’t seem to notice.
I slowly walked to the bench and sat down next to her. I felt her body stiffen and heard her take a quick hard breath through her nose.
Following her gaze I saw a neighborhood that I had once been so scared of: brown children, lifeless lawns, colorful houses sighing with age and a shimmering wave of heat that weighed down on everything. I thought about the house that was behind us, how it stood out among the others but still sagged, peeled and grew older.
I glanced at Abuela out the corner of my eye. She was pursing her lips and then relaxing them as if she wanted to say something. But she never did. Instead, she pursed her lips some more, rubbed her knuckles in her lap and stared straight ahead. She didn’t notice the few flecks of Pepto-Bismol-colored paint that fell onto her shoulder and into her white hair.
Tentatively, I reached out and covered her hands with my left hand, sending a wave of my don to her knuckles, hoping to ease the pain of the secrets that we had suffered.
Secrets of the Casa Rosada Page 20