“Gee, thanks.”
“It’s true.”
“He said he was giving me space because that’s what he thought I wanted. Because Lilly lied.”
“Oh, please. I’m so not going there with you.” He sighed and opened his e-mail account.
“God,Vince! Would it kill you to be there for me just this once?”
“Stop being so melodramatic. It’s a stupid chick fight,” he mumbled as he typed.
“A chick fight? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re being retarded and I’m not about to get involved in some stupid fight over nothing.”
I gripped the sides of my laptop. If it didn’t cost a thousand dollars, I would have flung it at his head like a Frisbee. I couldn’t comprehend why guys felt it necessary to deem all arguments between girls as stupid or catty. Guys were allowed to fight. Two guys fighting was considered masculine, dangerous, even cool. But just because they solved their problems by beating the crap out of each other, didn’t mean our way of handling things was any less painful. Not that I would expect my brother to understand this.
I stood up, shoved my laptop in my bag and stormed out without saying good-bye.Vince probably didn’t even notice.
Chapter 44
The hotel bar was filled with its evening regulars. Two old men playing dominos were seated on the front porch; three tan, wrinkled men in white, brimmed hats sat in their usual seats in the far left booth; and at the bar, sat Tomás and Ricardo. The two men, about my father’s age, sipped dark rum several evenings a week while arguing over the TV news. Once, Tomás grabbed my butt while I was leaving the hotel for the evening and my uncle screamed at him with such fury I thought flames were going to shoot from his nose like a blowtorch.
I glanced around the establishment hoping to find Lilly. She wasn’t at home (I had already checked) and I had run out of places to look. I could already sense that she wasn’t there. I spotted my Aunt Carmen and Uncle Miguel seated at a table near Tomás and Ricardo. I needed the company. Even if they couldn’t help with my current problems, at least I was no longer alone.
“Buenas noches, Mariana!” yelled my Uncle Miguel from across the room. My aunt immediately waved.
I walked over and plopped down on a wooden chair.
“¿Cerveza?” my uncle asked, pointing to his beer.
I hated beer, but at this point, I figured nothing could make me feel any worse.
“Sí.” I nodded.
Ricardo, who was seated at the bar not far from me, awkwardly grabbed a can of Medalla Light from the bartender. His torso swayed slightly on his stool as he turned around to hand me the beer.
“Gracias,” I said.
He continued to hold the can after I took hold of it, touching my skin to savor the moment. His eyes were glassy and his nose red, and I could smell alcohol floating off him in waves. The perverted curve of his smile made my stomach lurch, and I scrunched my nose in disgust. Finally, he released the can.
It was damp and cold, and part of me wanted to rest it on my forehead to relax but I didn’t want to concern my aunt and uncle with the gesture. I took a small sip and winced, the flavor rank and bitter.
My uncle looked at me, tilted his head and asked if I was tired. I thought of lying, of telling him that I was tired, but I realized that there really was no point. We all lived in the same house; he’d figure out Lilly and I were fighting, eventually. So out of a sheer desire to have an audience to listen to my problems, I unloaded everything that had happened the best I could, given the language barrier. They nodded their heads at the appropriate times, looked shocked and horrified at others, and then quite sad after I discussed the big blow-up I’d had with their granddaughter earlier that afternoon.
“¡Ay Dios mío!” cried my aunt, placing her hand over her heart.
“Mariana Ruíz,” said my uncle sternly. “Esto es un problema.”
Hearing him state that I had a problem seemed like the most obvious observation in the world, but it still made me sad, like I had disappointed him somehow. And all this was happening right before my parents were set to arrive, which was just perfect.
“Dad’s gonna be pissed,” I mumbled to myself. “The great Lorenzo Ruíz sends his kid off to get cultured and I cause a scene.”
Ricardo suddenly swung his fat, drunken body around to face us, the leathery skin on his forehead wrinkled with confusion.
“¿Lorenzo Ruíz?” he asked in a raspy voice.
I glared at him from my chair a few feet away from his bar stool and cocked my head without saying a word.
“¿Americana, verdad?” he asked, hiccupping slightly as he stared down at me.
“Yes,” I replied in English, hoping to deter further conversation.
“¿Tu papa . . . es Lorenzo?” he asked slowly. His head rocked above his shoulders like a palm tree in the wind.
“Yes, Lorenzo Ruíz,” I stated again, continuing in English to discourage him. “He grew up here. Why? Did you know him?”
My great aunt and great uncle loudly adjusted their weight in their seats at the sound of my father’s name, and I turned and saw them both staring in opposite directions. They weren’t catching my gaze.
“Yup, yup. Ah knew ya papa,” Ricardo slurred, but in English this time. “Ah went to sh-chool wit ’lil Lorenzo. Fun, fun we had! And, yah know whah? Ah still see his sidder from tim to tim.”
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” I asked, shaking my head at him.
“Lorenzo’s sidder,” he repeated.
“Sidder? What the heck’s a ‘sidder?’ ”
“His sissster,” he moaned slowly.
“Like, ‘hermana?’ ”
“Yeah, sidder. Dat’s wha Ah said.” He glared at me like I was an idiot who couldn’t understand my own language.
“I think you’ve got the wrong guy, mister. My dad doesn’t have a sister. He’s got two brothers who live in Jersey.”
“Ah know!” he shouted. “Roberto and Diego Ruíz.”
My breath caught in my throat. Those were my uncles’ names.
“Your granfadder, Arturo, he had a dahter, Teresa.”
I blinked at the man. Teresa.
A flash of the woman from the church flickered in my head. The woman with the small toddler, the woman who spoke English, the woman with red hair, the woman who sat next to me at the Quinceañera reception, the woman who wanted to know about my family in the States.
I swiveled my head to look at my aunt and uncle. Their faces were as white as clouds, even their lips. Realizing they couldn’t have possibly understood our conversation in English, I knew that the mention of her name must have triggered this reaction.
“What’s he talking about?” I yelled in English. My aunt and uncle stared back, saying nothing. “What the hell is this guy talking about?” I screamed again.
If I had been more rational, I would have attempted to communicate with my aunt and uncle in Spanish. But I could barely form a clear thought let alone translate those thoughts into Spanish.
“Who’s Teresa? Teresa!” I shouted, all the blood rushing to my face. “¿Quien es Teresa?”
“Teresa, Teresa,” the old man sang to himself as he swayed.
My uncle slowly put down his beer and stared directly into my brown eyes. I could feel the air thicken between us. I knew whatever was about to happen wasn’t going to be good. I almost wanted to stop him from saying it.
“Teresa es tu tía,” he stated softly.
She was my aunt.
Chapter 45
It took nearly thirty minutes, which included Ricardo standing in as a drunken English translator, for my aunt and uncle to explain to me exactly what was going on or, more accurately, exactly what had happened more than three decades ago.
Apparently my grandfather was no saint, no noble man who’d moved his family from Puerto Rico in search of better opportunities. He was an adulterer, a womanizer, a deadbeat dad. He cheated on my grandmother (they wouldn’t say wit
h how many women, but I got the impression that the list was rather lengthy) and one liaison had resulted in pregnancy. The woman, who my uncle referred to in several colorful Spanish curse words rather than by name, made sure the entire town knew who the father was. That’s how my grandmother found out about her husband’s infidelity—from neighborhood gossip. She was the last to know.
According to my Uncle Miguel, my grandparents may have survived the ordeal if the “otra mujer,” or “other woman,” wasn’t so “loca.” He told stories of the woman screaming on their front lawn, stripping her clothes off until she was completely nude and demanding my grandfather take responsibility for the baby in her stomach; she ambushed my grandmother in the center of town and hollered that her husband didn’t love her and that she wasn’t enough to keep him. My uncle called it “los días oscuros,” the dark days.
Being human, my grandmother could only take so much; but being Catholic, she couldn’t accept a divorce. She demanded the entire family leave not just Utuado, but Puerto Rico. She wanted no reminders of what her husband did and my grandfather, who was in no position to argue, complied with her demands. They left Utuado before the baby was born and never came back. My father was ten at the time.
According to Uncle Miguel, to the best of his knowledge, my father had no idea what was going on but his older brothers, my uncles Roberto and Diego, may have figured it out. Even if they had, my uncle was certain Roberto and Diego would not have told my father. He was the baby of the family, five years younger than Roberto and seven years younger than Diego. He said those boys spent their lives protecting my father from bullies, from teachers, from all things negative. Once, when my dad came home from school with a swollen black eye, my uncles tracked down the kid who slugged him and dangled him over a rushing river by his ankles. The kid was so petrified, he peed his pants. It was the last time anyone in Utuado messed with my father.
But, of course, Uncle Miguel couldn’t be certain who knew what, because the entire family cut off contact with everyone from Puerto Rico the day they left. That’s why my uncle didn’t attend my grandfather’s funeral, that’s why none of them did.
He paused as he told that part of the story. His voice was low and sad, but not bitter, just defeated. He said he didn’t think my parents chose not to invite him; he suspected my grandfather had asked them not to out of respect for my grandmother. They had spent their lifetimes hiding this secret from their children and their grandchildren, and my uncle knew that neither would have wanted the truth to come out during their funerals.
I don’t know how long I had been crying. The tears dripped from my eyes like a leaky faucet, slow and steady but not fitfully. It all just didn’t seem real. I was sitting in a dilapidated shack of a bar on a rural mountain in Puerto Rico with relatives I had known for less than two months, listening to a story that made my family sound like the cast of a bad movie. My grandfather, the villain; my grandmother, the victim; my uncles, the co-conspirators; and my father, the innocent. Things like this just didn’t happen to my family. We didn’t have dark secrets or skeletons in our closets; we were far too boring. I was certain of it. Or at least I had been, up until an hour ago.
But now everything was different. They were telling the truth. I could see it in their eyes.
My grandfather had another child, a girl, named Teresa. She was thirty-five years old and she had a child. I had already met her.
Chapter 46
There’s not much a great aunt and great uncle can do to comfort a girl who’s just found out her whole family is a lie. As soon as the story was finished and reality sank in, I bolted from the bar and ignored their calls. They didn’t come after me and I wasn’t surprised.
Standing on the road surrounded by palm leaves, banana trees, tropical flowers, exotic birds—the setting just added to the foreign feeling raging inside me. It seemed unnatural for a teenager to be disappointed in her grandparents, but I was. I doubted everything they had ever told me. All those stories about wanting to provide a better life for their children, about how proud they were of the accomplishments that stemmed from their “struggles”—they were all lies.
And that woman from the church. She knew who I was. She knew she was talking to her niece.Yet she didn’t say anything. I felt like I had been played or manipulated, but I didn’t know by whom. I didn’t know who to blame.
I ran down the road, my thin white sneakers pounding the dirt, my lungs gulping thick, hot bursts of air. I saw visions of my grandparents seated around the dining room table on Christmas, smiling like a happy couple on the eve of their golden anniversary. I saw my uncles sitting silently in the family room watching football on Thanksgiving (one of the three times they visited their parents each year), drinking beers and ignoring their family. It was obvious they knew. I could always sense the tension in the air when my grandfather was around them, only I mistook it for disinterest or bad manners on my uncles’ parts when it was actually resentment. I remembered thinking that my grandparents died so close together because they were so much in love, that my grandmother died of a broken heart. The thought seemed so ridiculous now, so naïve.
My strides lengthened as I continued to run down the dusty road. I was not a jogger; actually I hated it. I despised the mile run requirement for gym class—with every lap, I would silently curse my teacher more and by the end of it, my stomach would be cramped in knots and my lungs raw from panting. But today, I could have kept running forever. If I was tired, I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything.
I saw my aunt and uncle’s house in view before I even realized that’s where I was headed. I knew my brother could be inside, quietly oblivious. I didn’t know if I should tell him. Well, I knew I should tell him, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be the person to break this story to my family.
I charged across the front lawn, staring at the blades of bright green grass the same way I did the day I had arrived. I wished I could go back to that day, or even better yet, I wished I could have found a way to convince my father not to send us here, so then I would never know the truth. I wished I could forget everything.
I swung open the front door and it crashed loudly on the wall from the weight of my throw. The house was dim, and it was hard for my eyes to adjust. I couldn’t see if anyone was home.
“You’re slamming doors now? Real mature. Why don’t you revert to a full-out temper tantrum, start pounding your fists on the floor,” mocked Lilly as she stepped into the living room where I was standing.
She stopped in her tracks the moment she saw me. I could feel the beads of sweat pouring down my forehead and mixing with my tears. My breathing was staggered and my nose was running.
“Whoa,” she mumbled, her head jerking back. “Mariana, really, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d get this upset. I am so sorry. It was an awful thing for me to do.”
I started sobbing harder. I wished that was what I was upset about. Actually, I would do just about anything to make Lilly’s minor betrayal my biggest problem again.
“Is, is Vince here?” I stammered, gasping for air, my hand on my chest.
“No.” She shook her head, slowly walking toward me.
I covered my face with my hands and tried to catch my breath.
“What happened?” she asked softly.
My head was pounding.
“I was at the bar, and there was this guy, and the woman from the Quinceañera . . . and Uncle Miguel had to tell me the truth, but I didn’t believe him, but he was telling the truth and . . .”
“Mariana, you’re not making any sense. Slow down. What happened?”
I pulled my hands from my face and looked at her through teary eyes.
“My grandfather, he slept with some woman and he got her pregnant,” I mumbled, the air finally flowing back into my lungs at a manageable rate.
“Your grandfather? I thought he was dead.”
“He is,” I huffed. “Before he died. Before he left Puerto Rico. He cheated on my grand
mother with some slut and she got pregnant and my grandparents just left. They went to the States to avoid it all, like it never happened. Only it did, and the woman had the baby—”
“Holy shit,” Lilly interjected, shaking her head.
“And now the baby’s, like, thirty-five and you invited her to your Quinceañera!”
“What? I did! Who?”
“That woman,Teresa. She had that screaming toddler. . . .”
“Teresa! Holy shit!” Lilly yelled a second time, her jaw dropping.
“How do you know her?”
“I don’t. My grandfather does. He said she used to work at the hotel.”
“Yeah, well he lied. Figures.”
“Hey, don’t go there. This is a bad situation all around. I mean, do you think your dad knows?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But who knows anymore? Can you believe it? My father’s sister sat next to me at your Quinceañera asking questions about my family, which is also her family, and I had no idea. I’m such an idiot. My grandparents let everyone believe they moved to the States to ‘find a better life,’ ” I mocked in a deep, newscaster tone. “It was all bullshit! And now I have to tell my whole family the truth! I don’t want to, but I don’t want to be a liar like the rest of them, either.”
I exhaled quickly and stared at Lilly.We stood there silently for several moments with just empty space between us.
“Are you waiting for me to say something? Because I don’t know what to say, but wow, this sucks. I’m sorry.” Her tone was more shocked than sad.
I couldn’t blame her for being at a loss for words. Even Dr. Phil would have a hard time tackling this one. I rested my fingers on my forehead and breathed slowly for a while.
Finally, Lilly hissed out a puff of air, breaking the silence. “Well, I guess this makes our fight look kinda petty, huh? I got a free pass on that one. . . .” She chuckled slightly.
Despite everything, I laughed. I had to. There was nothing else to do.
Amor and Summer Secrets Page 20