A Dream Called Home

by Reyna Grande

  “Thanks for taking the time to make this for me. It smells delicious,” Cory said. He and Nathan sat at the dining room table playing with Mega Bloks. I didn’t want to take so much pleasure in watching him play with my son, but I did. Cory seemed to truly enjoy it, and he was good at playing with children, which was something I was not.

  “Thanks for giving me a reason to make it,” I said as I inhaled the aroma of cinnamon, garlic, and raisins frying in the pan. “It’s too much effort to make it just for me, so I never do. But it’s my favorite dish.”

  “I can’t wait to try it. Any word from your agent yet?”

  “No. I think she’s tired of giving me bad news,” I said as I pureed all the ingredients in a blender. Jenoyne had been sending out my manuscript over the past few months but had received nothing but rejections. She felt so bad for me that eventually she stopped telling me about them. I hadn’t heard from her in weeks. We were now in our second round of submissions, but I had been so distracted by Cory, I hadn’t wallowed much in the rejections that kept coming in. She had warned me to prepare, and I had. Though rejection will always penetrate through the armor you put on to protect yourself—no matter how impervious you try to be.

  I looked at Cory and thought about the potential rejection I was facing with him. I needed to get ready for that one, too. I wondered which would hurt more—to be rejected in love or in art. Either one might undo me if I let it.

  “Don’t lose hope,” he said.

  I didn’t know if he was talking about him or the editors, so I decided he meant both.

  “I know these things take time,” I said. “And all I need is for one editor to say yes. Just one yes out of all the nos. That’s what I’m clinging to.”

  “That’s a good way to look at it,” he said.

  I strained all the ingredients and put them in the pot. As the mole simmered, I remembered that Cory had a sweet tooth, so I added extra chocolate to the sauce. The end result shocked me. My mole was the best I had ever tasted. It was perfectly sweet and, to my relief, it wasn’t too spicy. It was rich and smooth and had just the right kick.

  I presented him with a plate of chicken smothered in mole sauce with a side of rice.

  “This looks amazing,” he said.

  “Thanks. Want to hear a funny mole story?” I asked as I sat across from him. I told him that during my last quarter in Santa Cruz I had rented a room from an old white couple. “I wanted to do something nice for them, so in the morning I left a note saying I was going to make them mole for dinner. They didn’t know it was a Mexican dish pronounced mo-leh. They thought I was going to make them mole, you know, the rodent! They spent the whole day dreading dinnertime. Imagine? They thought Mexicans eat moles!”

  He laughed and dug into his food. “Wow. This is delicious.” He took a piece of tortilla and scooped up more sauce into his mouth.

  As I watched Cory eat his birthday meal with Nathan sitting next to him in his high chair eating his own rice and chicken, being silly and making a mess, the thought that came to mind was this: We could do this every night. He and I and Nathan, playing with toys, cooking dinner, eating together while talking about how our day went. Making plans for the future. We could be a family.

  But before I got carried away, I shook those thoughts away and remembered that Cory was with someone else. His was a “yes” I should not wait for, because as long as he had a girlfriend, the answer would always be “no.”

  After his birthday, spending time with Cory became painful. I knew that he liked hanging out with me, but he never hinted at wanting more than friendship. If he had been a woman or a gay man, we could have been the best of friends. But he was a straight man I was deeply attracted to, and every minute I spent with him was torture. Fighting against my desire for intimacy with him—sexual, emotional, psychological—was like swimming upriver. He never made a move on me, and as much as I wanted him to—and God knows I tried to tempt him—I also appreciated that he wasn’t taking advantage of me.

  After Francisco, I was finally ready to give nice guys a chance. I wanted someone who would truly love me, who didn’t want to play games with me (unless the game was Scrabble). I was ready for a man who was confident enough to treat me as an equal, who didn’t need to be saved, and who didn’t need to save me.

  With Cory, I wanted all or nothing.

  But he had never hinted at leaving his girlfriend, and I wasn’t going to push. If he wanted my friendship, I would give it, but perhaps we would need to see less of each other. Whoever said that men and women can’t be just friends was right. Sooner or later, one of them was going to fall in love. Unfortunately, it was me.

  One night, we did a movie marathon. Cory had me watch his favorite movie, Casablanca, and I had him watch my favorite, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre. We were lying on the floor side by side, and in a moment of weakness I started nibbling on his ear, pressing my body against his. He inhaled sharply, and he turned to face me, his arms reaching for me. But just as we were about to kiss, he pulled away and said, “I’m sorry, Reyna. I can’t do this.”

  “I know,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  I turned off the TV, and we sat in the darkness for a few minutes, not saying anything. Then Cory said, “I think I should go home.”

  “Okay,” I said. I walked him to the door, and we said good night. He left my house, and I watched him walk away, wondering if that was the end for us.

  I couldn’t sleep all night, admonishing myself for my behavior. I called Mago to ask for her advice. Because at times like these, I needed my sister.

  “It was bound to happen, Nena. Now what you have to do is give him an ultimatum.” Mago was as drastic as always, but I knew she was right. “You can’t spend all your free time with the guy just to be friends with him, especially because of how you feel for him. He’s lonely, so he’s using you. What’s going to happen when his girlfriend comes back? You’re the one who has the most to lose in this situation, Nena. Send him away and tell him to make his choice.”

  Following Mago’s advice, the next day when Cory called me, I said, “I’m sorry about what I did last night, but the truth is that I like you too much, and I’ve gotten attached to you. I need you to decide what you want, not just for my sake, but for my son’s. I value our friendship, I truly do, but I want more.”

  “I understand,” he said. “And you’re right. I know it’s not fair to you or Nathan.”

  We hung up. I told myself that if all he wanted was my friendship, I would have to accept that. I didn’t want to lose a good friend.

  The next day Cory asked if he could see me. We went to the Huntington Library for a walk in the botanical gardens. The gardens there were exquisite, transporting me to places I’d never been to: China, Australia, Africa. Spring was arriving and everything was verdant, lush, about to burst in bloom and splendor. This was the season of new beginnings, but the emerging beauty around me didn’t lift the heaviness in my heart. My head drooped, and my steps lacked the vigor I usually felt in the sunlight. I felt like a flower that, instead of blooming, was on the verge of withering.

  “I had a long talk with my girlfriend,” he said to me as we walked around, pushing Nathan in his stroller. I was too nervous to enjoy the beauty around me, the rich, earthy smell of the trees, the perfect sunny weather.

  “And?” I asked, bracing myself for what was to come. He was going to tell me we couldn’t even be friends. That we needed to put some distance between us.

  “We broke up,” he said. “I told her I was falling in love with you.”

  My legs grew weak, and if I hadn’t been holding on to Nathan’s stroller, I might have sunk to the ground. “Can we sit down?” I asked.

  We sat by the pond, where Nathan fed his Cheerios to the ducks, my thoughts swirling.

  “Are you sure about this?” I asked. He leaned over and kissed me, and as I felt his soft lips on my own, I got my answer.

  Reyna and Cory

 
36

  Natalio with his grandchildren

  WHEN MY FATHER called, I was completely taken by surprise. Not only that he had called me, but that he was asking for a favor. This was the man who had said he didn’t want us asking anyone for favors. Yet here he was.

  “Chata, I was wondering if I could stay at your house until I find a place of my own. Maybe for just a month.”

  Not long before, my father had made a bad investment. He sold his house in Highland Park and moved to Adelanto, a small town over an hour and a half east of L.A. My cousin’s husband had told him that houses were dirt cheap in Adelanto and he could have a nice big house with a big yard for half the price. He and my stepmother bought a house there, the nicest they had ever lived in. It was almost brand-new, zero repairs needed, unlike the run-down fixer-uppers they had always lived in. But my cousin had failed to mention that there were no jobs in Adelanto, and my father used some of the money he had made from the sale of his house on a risky venture—he opened a water store. The dream of having his own business quickly evaporated when he realized that selling clean drinking water at a few cents per gallon didn’t make much profit in a sparsely populated town. After months of struggling to figure out how else to make a living, my father had no choice but to ask for his former job back in Culver City. “It’s too long a drive,” he told me.

  That was an understatement. Without traffic, the drive from Adelanto to Culver City was almost 2.5 hours each way.

  “You can have Nathan’s room,” I said.

  “I’ll take the garage,” he replied.

  The garage was nothing but studs and stucco, barren and dark. It was not a finished room, not comfortable in the least, but he said he was used to worse. As a child, he had lived in shacks where he had slept on a straw mat over a dirt floor. In the U.S., he had never gotten used to beds. Often, through his years living with my stepmother, she would wake up to find him sleeping on the hard, unforgiving floor. It was one of the ways his childhood still haunted him.

  At my house, he kept mostly to himself, especially when Cory was around. He was polite and made small talk with Cory in his broken English, but only for a minute or two before he excused himself. I could clearly tell how uncomfortable he felt around us.

  Since he made a point to leave the house as early as possible, I rarely saw him, although at times I would wake up and hear the shower running at 5:00 a.m. That was the only way I knew he was actually here. He would come back late, entering through the patio door and wouldn’t come into the house. On Fridays, he would go home to Adelanto, and I wouldn’t see him again until Sunday night when he returned. It bothered me that he went out of his way to avoid me. I knew he did it so as not to inconvenience me. He thought that staying away would make things better, so that I wouldn’t think of him as a burden. Funny how much my father and I were alike. When I had lived with Diana, I had done the exact same thing. I had stayed away as much as I could, and then locked myself in my room so that she wouldn’t consider me a burden. But Diana would have none of that. She would knock on my door and say, “Why don’t you join me in the living room, Reynita?”

  I wished I had the guts to knock on the garage door and say the same thing to him. Why don’t you join me in the living room? I didn’t know how to tell him that I wanted his company, that I yearned for it. That I wanted to sit and have coffee with him in the mornings, and in the evenings, I wanted to make him dinner or sit with him out on the porch or on the patio and watch Nathan play with his toys while we talked about the future. It had always been my favorite topic of conversation with my father: the dreams that we dreamed.

  But he made no effort to connect with me or Nathan, and although it hurt, I let him be. I convinced myself it was better to keep our distance. If I didn’t see him, I could pretend he wasn’t there. I could keep living my life the way I had been living it ever since I left his house and had to take care of myself. I could continue to pretend that I didn’t need him.

  When a month turned into two months, and I wouldn’t accept money from him for rent, he started to come home straight from work to do things around the house. He unclogged the bathroom sink, fixed the leaky faucet, replaced a bad light, pruned my plants, watered the grass. Once, while he was tending to my rosebushes, I mentioned to him that I would like to have a pergola—but not knowing that it was the same word in Spanish, I called it a little house, “una casita,” over the brick patio.

  “I’ll build it for you,” he said.

  Just like when he built the fence, I would come out to watch him work. I didn’t know what to talk to him about, so I just sat and watched. He measured the wood, then cut it with an electric saw. Little by little the pergola began to take shape. I admired how skillful he was.

  “Where did you learn to build like that?” I asked him one day.

  He continued drilling, and I thought he hadn’t heard me, or that he didn’t care to answer. But after a minute he turned off the drill and said, “Mis papás me pegaban mucho. Todo el tiempo. Hasta que un día, me cansé.” He said that both his parents were so abusive with him, constantly beating him and insulting him, that one day, when he was seventeen, he couldn’t take it anymore and he ran away to Mexico City. I tried to picture that boy, and how much courage it must have taken to leave Iguala and go to the big city where he knew no one, where everything was different—the tall buildings, the wide paved streets, the cars, the metro, the millions of people. It must have been a scary place for a young country boy like him with a third-grade education, having known no life outside of Iguala’s dirt roads and fields and shacks. “I was lucky,” he said. “I found a job in construction and that was where I learned how to build, how to use my hands to lay brick and tile, to stir mortar, to measure and cut, to hammer and drill. To survive.”

  “How did you end up back in Iguala?” I asked.

  “My father came to look for me and take me home. So, I returned. But I told him that if he ever laid a hand on me again, that would be the last time he ever saw me.”

  He resumed the drilling, and I knew the conversation was over.

  I thought about the abuse he had grown up with, and the abuse my mother had experienced. This was our history, a history of violence where abused children turned into abusive parents. I was trying to break that cycle with my son, though I had come dangerously close to hitting him, and through the years there would be a few times when my upbringing got the better of me. This inherited violence was something I didn’t want and fought hard to crush.

  Grandfather and Father at the Capilla del Cerrito del Tepeyac (Mexico City)

  As the pergola took shape, I thought about that dream house my father had wanted to build for us in Iguala, the reason why he had gone north. If he had had the money to buy the material, he could have built us the house with his own hands and stayed. Maybe then I would have been able to talk to my father, ask him more about his life, about who he was, and not feel afraid to do it. I was so hungry to ask him for details of his past, the ghosts that haunted him, the reason for his rage, the source of his sorrows, his regrets. I wanted to ask him, If your own parents treated you so badly that you ran away, why did you do that to your own children? Where do you think that comes from? What can I do to not be like you, Papá?

  For several more days, he worked on my casita. He never told me any more stories about his past, and I didn’t have the courage to ask my questions. As the pergola continued to take shape, I pretended that he was building us a dream house, like the one in Mexico. I pretended that he was going to stay with me forever. That we could rebuild our relationship, erase the past, and this time he would finally stay.

  A few days later, he told me that he and my stepmother were moving back to L.A. “I’ll hurry up so I can finish the casita before I move out,” he said. True to his word, he finished the job, and then he was gone. If I didn’t have the pergola as proof, I would have felt that my father living with me had been a dream.

  In the afternoons, Cory and I would take Nat
han out to the patio and watch him ride his tricycle around and around, laughing with joy beneath our new pergola. And as I sat on the patio with my child and the man that I loved, the casita rising above us, I realized that for the second time in my life, my father had built me a house, but I was the one building myself a home.

  37

  “YOU READY FOR some good news?” Jenoyne finally said to me on the phone. I held my breath in anticipation, trying not to get too excited. It had been over five months that she had been sending the book out with no success. She said she had sent my manuscript to a Latino editor a few weeks ago and it looked promising.

  “He really likes your writing,” she said to me. “He’s thinking about making an offer.”

  I felt elated for the rest of the day. This editor worked for a big press in New York City. There were few Latinos working for mainstream publishers, and the fact that he liked my work was a big deal to me. Being a Latino himself, I knew he would understand my story and know why I wrote this book.

  A few days later, Jenoyne called me again to tell me that the editor had finished reading the book and wanted to move forward with an offer.

  “You serious?” I sat on the couch. Could it really be happening? It had been five months of rejections, and though it had felt like an eternity, the reality was that sometimes it can take years.

  “He likes your work, Reyna, but he wants you to make some changes to the story before he can make an offer.”