B0061QB04W EBOK (15 page)

I would imagine those men’s wives and kids waiting for them at home. I pictured the women clapping balls of dough into tortillas and cooking them in the comal. I could smell the beans boiling, the meat frying, the chiles and tomatoes roasting before being turned into salsa
on the molcajete. I could see the fathers washing themselves before sitting down at the table to eat dinner with their wives, sons, and daughters. If Papi hadn’t left, that is how my evenings would have always been, I would tell myself.

While I made mud tortillas with my friends Meche and Cheli, Carlos and his friends would go wait for the evening train, and as soon as it came, they would run after it, grab ahold of it to climb on, and then ride it all the way to the train station, where they then would have to run back for our favorite part of the evening, when Doña Caro’s husband came home.

Don Lino was the only person on our street who owned a vehicle. All of us kids would stop what we were doing as soon as we heard the quiet hum of the motor in the distance.

“Come on, let’s go!” Don Lino’s son, Jimmy, yelled. “Here comes my papi!” We all ran down the road to meet Don Lino and climb on the back of his blue truck, which rocked side to side, groaning as it went. We pretended we were on a ship being tossed in a storm.

When Mami got home, Betty, as usual, ran to her wanting to be picked up.

“Only refried beans and a chunk of cheese?” Mami said. “That’s all we’re eating tonight?”

“There are people who won’t be eating dinner tonight, Juana. Let us be thankful,” Abuelita Chinta said as she scooped the beans into our bowls.

“I can’t believe your father doesn’t send any money for you kids,” Mami said to us. “He’s probably spending it on that woman!”

“Juana, we’ll be okay,” Abuelita Chinta said. “You’re here now with your children. I’m sure that’s enough for them.”

“You’re right, Amá. Things are going to get better really soon.”

I wanted to reach out and hold Mami. I wanted to tell her that I’d rather eat beans for the rest of my life as long as she was with me. But the look she gave me scared me. It was almost as if she hated me.

“You look just like him,” she said to me. I glanced at the Man Behind the Glass, and for the first time, I was not happy about having his features. I didn’t want Mami to look at me like that, a look full of pain, anger, hatred. I wanted to grab the Man Behind the Glass and toss him onto the railroad tracks so the train would shatter him. So
that Mami wouldn’t look at him, and look at me, and then think we were one and the same.

Abuelita Chinta set the bowl of beans on the table and ruffled my hair. “Why don’t you kids go buy some sodas for our meal? When you come back, the beans won’t be so hot.”

We took the money and left.

“So what’s the matter with you?” Mago asked Carlos as we were coming back from the store.

“You’re going to get mad if I tell you.”

“Just spit it out.”

We stopped walking. We were already near the house, and we didn’t want to go inside just yet because then we wouldn’t be able to talk.

“Mami has a boyfriend,” Carlos said.

“What?” Mago and I said at the same time.

“I saw her. I saw her with a man.” He told us that the previous night many combis had come and gone, but without Mami. Because he was afraid of standing there in the dark alone, putting himself in danger of getting beaten or killed by some crazy person, he climbed up the tree near the tortilla mill. Minutes later, a taxi pulled up right under the tree and Mami and a man got out. The taxi left, and as soon as it did the man pulled Mami into his arms and kissed her on the mouth.

“They kissed for a long time,” Carlos said. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want Mami to get mad at me. When they were done kissing and hugging each other, the man hailed a taxicab and left. Mami made her way to the bridge, and I wanted to run to her and walk with her, but instead I stayed up in the tree. I didn’t want her to know I had seen her.”

We continued on our way before Mami or Abuelita Chinta came looking for us. What did it mean that Mami had a boyfriend? I wondered.

At dinner, I could see how much Mago was struggling to keep from shouting that we knew Mami’s secret. She had a scowl on her face, and whenever Mami said something to her, Mago just grunted in response.

“¿Qué te pasa?” Mami asked again.

Then Mago couldn’t hold back anymore and said, “Mami, who was that man?”

“What man?”

“The man you were kissing by the main road.”

Since she was holding Betty on her lap, it was hard for me to see the expression on Mami’s face. She buried her face in Betty’s hair, as if hiding from our accusing eyes.

“Well, since you already know, I might as well tell you,” she said finally. “He sells car insurance next to the record shop. But at heart he’s a wrestler. He does Lucha Libre on the weekends and he’s very good—”

“Who cares? What is he to you?”

“Don’t talk like that to me, Mago,” Mami said, looking over Betty’s head. “Anyway, I might as well tell you now. I’m going away with him.”

“What?” we all yelled. Betty started to whimper at hearing our angry voices.

“Juana, what are you saying?” Abuelita Chinta said.

“Francisco has gotten a contract to fight in Acapulco, and he asked me to go with him. I’ve accepted.”

“But you can’t go!” Mago yelled. She got up so suddenly, her chair toppled over. “You can’t!”

“I won’t be gone for long. Now sit down and stop yelling at me.”

“You said that the last time,” Carlos said. “And you were gone two and a half years.”

“Mami, don’t leave us again,” I said as I rushed to her side.

“And what about us?” Mago said. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“You’ll stay with your abuelita. She’ll watch over you.”

“Juana, you can’t do this,” Abuelita Chinta said. “It isn’t right.”

“When Papi hears of this, that you’re leaving us again—” Mago said.

“Don’t you dare bring up your father. There’s nothing between us anymore. Don’t you kids understand that? He tried to
kill
me.”

“You’re making that up,” Mago said. “He wouldn’t have done that. And if he did, maybe, maybe it was all your fault!”

Mami stood up and headed over to Mago, ready to beat her.
Abuelita Chinta quickly got in between them. “Juana, you need to think things through.”

“I have, Amá,” Mami said. “And I’ve made my decision.”

When Mami left, she didn’t even have the courage to tell us. When we got home from school the next day, we found Betty in tears. Abuelita Chinta told us that our mother had just left with the wrestler. “They’ve gone to catch a taxi over by La Quinta Castrejón,” she said.

Betty’s sobs were deafening. Mago, who had always shown her dislike for Betty in many ways, was the one who picked her up and held her. Carlos and I bolted out the door, hoping that Mami and the wrestler might still be waiting by the main road. At seven years old, I found myself running to catch up to my mother and beg her not to leave me for the second time in my life. Carlos ran faster than I did, and by the time I got to the main road, he was bent over, crying. There was no sign of Mami anywhere.

13

A
FTER MY MOTHER
left, Carlos became terribly ill. Abuelita Chinta said he was suffering from sorrow. He had fever, headaches, nausea, and vomiting. He lost so much weight he really did look like a skeleton now. I thought about that song Élida liked to sing for him,
La calaca, tilica y flaca. La calaca tilica y flaca.

While Mago and I sat around his cot, watching him wither away, all I could think of was the empty road where my mother had vanished. I wondered if Carlos was thinking about it, too. I wondered if he was replaying that moment in his feverish mind, as I was.

“It’s all her fault,” Mago said as she reached to hold Carlos’s limp hand. “I hate her.”

“Mago, don’t say that,” I said, but a part of me felt she was right. I didn’t know what was wrong with my brother, but I also felt sick. Even though I wasn’t physically ill, inside I was burning. I felt as if I had a scorpion inside of me that was stinging my heart again and again. I wanted to reach inside my body and yank the scorpion out. Stomp on it. Or kill it with my bare hands.

When Carlos was in his thirties, we would finally learn the medical term for what he had—hepatitis. Even if we had known this back then, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Mago would still have blamed it on our mother, and Abuelita Chinta would still have said, “They can call it what they want, sadness in any other form is still sadness.”

My hot-blooded Scorpio sister would never succumb to something as silly as sadness. She reacted in the only way she knew how.

A few days before my mother left, Tío Crece’s dog had five puppies we were not allowed to touch. Tío Crece said he was planning to sell them and didn’t want us messing with them. I wondered why anyone would want to
buy
a dog, since there were so many homeless dogs out in the street you could take home with you for free.

Tío Crece made a little bed for them in a cardboard box. They were tiny and their eyes were still closed. When we tried to pick them up, the mother dog growled at us. We looked at the puppies snuggling with their mami, and I couldn’t believe that I actually felt jealous of them. Mago looked at the puppies and their mother with the same intense jealousy she had Doña Paula and her two sons. When I reached out to her, the look of yearning on her face was quickly replaced with a scowl.

After lunch, Tío Crece’s dog went out and didn’t come back right away. The puppies whimpered and cried from hunger.

“Do you think we can give them a tortilla soaked in bean juice?” I asked Mago as we washed the dishes on the washing stone.

“Let me see what I can find for them,” she said. She went into the house and left me to wash the dishes by myself. Then she came out and made her way to the back, where the puppies were. I couldn’t see what she had in her hands, but it didn’t look like tortillas to me.

I dried my hands and went to the back. “What are you doing?” I asked.