one hot summer (4 page)

A truck owned by one of the biggest private construction firms in Dade County had jumped a curb on Flagler Street—one of the busiest thoroughfares in Miami—and struck Señora Matos’s son. Alfredo Matos was a married father of five, and the accident had paralyzed him permanently from the neck down. This might have been considered a tragic but unavoidable accident, were it not for the fact that the driver of the truck was legally drunk with three prior offenses on his record. The construction company knew about the driver’s history, but he had kept his job because his brother-in-law was the home office dispatcher. Alfredo Matos was a pillar of his neighborhood, a bookkeeper for his church, and an active volunteer along with his wife, Esmeralda.

Ariel took the case like a dog takes to a bone, and in the end the jury couldn’t award the Matos family enough money to compensate for their loss. The award was the largest ever granted by a Dade County jury for a personal-injury case. A year later the ruling held up on appeal; Ariel, with his thirty percent of recovery, was set for life. He was twenty-seven years old, and he could have retired then and there.

The standard recovery for attorney’s fees was forty percent, but Ariel declined to take that much—he thought a lower figure was more fair, and said that the family needed the money more than he did. Imagine that—a lawyer refusing to collect his full fee. That gesture earned Ariel even more publicity than the case itself. After that, Ariel’s phone never stopped ringing. I sometimes wondered what his motivation for that had been, as Ariel had never been particularly altruistic. He had been born and raised poor, and every dollar to him had always been precious. It was not like him to give a poor mother a break, but, whatever his reason, it had helped propel him into the limelight of the Miami legal community. Ariel could be cold and calculating to reach his goals, and he was a master at cost/benefit analysis, characteristics I lacked. But then, I had to acknowledge that I was brought up in a wealthy family, so I had not faced what he had.

Marti stirred in his bed, sensing my presence. I carefully adjusted his blanket and crept out of the room. I lingered a little in the hallway, looking over the framed photographs that covered almost every inch of wall. I reached out and touched a couple of my favorites.

The oldest picture was of my parents in Miami, taken early in 1960—the year they left Cuba. They left in a hurry, with no time to pack any photos, so my family’s visual history started here. That void must have affected us pretty strongly, because we had shot pictures with a vengence in the forty years since—thousands and thousands of them. Sometimes I thought we did it because we had no visual evidence that we had, indeed, enjoyed a full and successful life in Cuba. So, damn it, we would prove we had one here in America. My two brothers and I were all avid picture-takers, so we had a thorough pictorial chronicle of the Santos clan. My walls, desks, and dressers were all packed with framed photos. Someday I was going to run out of room to display them.

I returned to the den to check out how serious Ariel was about his TV viewing. The moment he heard me come in, he switched off the set and stood up.

“The baby’s okay?” he asked, walking toward me. “I checked on him right before you got back.”

“Sleeping soundly,” I replied. “Sweet and innocent.”

Ariel put his arms around me. “I missed you tonight,” he said in his deep voice. “Jacinta fixed me a tray. I had dinner in front of the TV.”

He kissed me below my ear, one of my most sensitive areas. He knew all my shortcuts.

“You look sexy dressed all in black like that,” he purred, t
hen kissed me on the mouth. “Garlic. All in black, coming home from a funeral smelling like garlic. I feel like I have a Sicilian wife. Very sexy.”

He started working on the other ear. Soon we were in the bedroom. For all our differences, this was one area where we were always in tune with each other. And that was what was important.

“Margarita,
mi amor,
I know you’ve been avoiding the subject. But I’m here if you need to talk about it.”

Ariel carefully folded the
Miami Herald
and put it on the table.

“Time’s getting short,” he added. “You have to let them know.”

We were on the terrace behind our house, breakfast behind us, watching the waters of Biscayne Bay. The effects of last night’s lovemaking were still with me, making me relaxed and languorous. But now Ariel was jolting me back to a reality that I didn’t want to confront.

I fought off the impulse to groan. It was a beautiful morning, why should I deal with any pressure? It was eight in the morning, a perfect temperature, with no trace of humidity and just enough breeze to drive away thoughts of the stifling heat that would set in when the day progressed.

Ariel was looking good that morning, his hair still damp from the shower, his skin glowing after a close shave. He wasn’t storybook handsome; his features were rough and sort of meshed together. He looked a little tough; in jeans and a T-shirt he could be taken for a street fighter. The toughness was no act—without it, he wouldn’t be where he was. He also had a certain undefined charisma that, I had to admit, surfaced after he won the huge Matos award. It proved that money was indeed an aphrodisiac, and that large amounts of it were orgasmic.

That morning he was dressed in a white shirt and dark suit pants, his jacket and tie draped over a free chair at the table. From this point it would take him only a minute or so to get ready to leave for the office. Several months ago I would have also been wearing a suit, prepared to take on the world. This morning, though, I was still wearing my nightgown and a bathrobe.

From where I was sitting on the terrace, I could watch all the recreational and commercial fishing boats setting off to try their luck on the Atlantic. For some reason I felt jealous of them. I picked up the binoculars off the table and focused on a few sailboats anchored in the calm waters of the cove nearest our house. The people who lived out there on the boats seemed to hardly ever come ashore; at times they disappeared for a few days then reappeared one morning as though they had never left. One of the men who lived out there was a Robinson Crusoe look-alike, with wild sun-bleached hair and beard; he usually wore nothing more than a loincloth, and always had a beer in his hand. On another boat lived two stocky butch women with short spiky hair; these lovers demonstrated their ardent lust for each other in private, if the waves that they generated when they went below were any indication.

We lived on North Bay Road, a street along Biscayne Bay just north of South Beach. It was a long, winding, tree-lined street favored by the rich and famous; the houses were set back from the road in hopes of affording privacy from prying eyes.

We bought our seven-thousand-square-foot home the year we were married. The place used to belong to a salsa singer from Puerto Rico who hadn’t had a hit record in five years. It was built in the old colonial Spanish style, with enormous public rooms—the singer used to give wild, memorable parties there, we learned from our neighbors. The house was too big for us at first—a couple with no children—but the terrace in the back had sold us. Who wouldn’t want to have their morning coffee while taking in a sea breeze and watching the sun-kissed waves of the bay?

I had lived in Coral Gables all my life and never really considered living in Miami Beach, but Ariel was determined to make his home there. He specifically wanted one of the houses on North Bay Road. When he was a boy he delivered the
Miami Herald,
and his route had taken him there every morning at dawn. He used to promise himself that someday he would own one of those houses. I actually cried when he told me about his boyhood dream, and I immediately agreed to live there. Our only regret was that Ariel’s mother hadn’t lived long enough to see her boy make good in such a spectacular fashion.

Marti was playing on a little rug next to the table, occasionally sipping juice from his plastic cup, happy and oblivious to the scene around him. He shared his father’s ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else; just then he was concentrating on a wooden puzzle while Jacinta cleared away the morning’s dishes.

Ariel wasn’t pressing me to talk, but I could sense him closely watching me as I looked out over the water. He had learned the hard way that there was no use hurrying me to discuss things I didn’t want to talk about. However, I knew him well enough to know that unless I was careful he could maneuver me into where he wanted me to be. He had the ability to manipulate me in such a subtle way that I was unaware he had done it until it was too late. I had to be careful in this instance, as I knew what he wanted.

“I know I have to tell them what I’m going to do,” I finally said. “I know.”

My firm’s policy was that a leave of absence could last up to a year, but it wasn’t fair for me to keep withholding my plans from them. I was the only lawyer there who specialized in immigration, and I knew that some of my work had been farmed out to other firms. So far my partners had been supportive of me, but I knew it was only a matter of time before their attitude changed. Business was business, and personal goodwill was only going to take me so far.

Weber, Miranda, Blanco and Silverman, P.A., was the only place I had ever worked as a lawyer. They had hired me as a summer associate after my first year at Duke, then picked me up for a second summer a year later. After I graduated they offered me a job contingent on my passing the bar. I became their business immigration lawyer by default, really. During my second summer the firm got a commercial litigation case that involved a major immigration factor—not central to the case, but important enough that it needed to be thoroughly researched. The attorney to whom I had been assigned was given that aspect of the case, and I was told to work on it. That had been my first day on the job that summer, and I really wanted to prove my worth. So I threw myself completely into the task.

When I was through with my research I gave my boss a report that could have been submitted to the Supreme Court. Immigration law was interesting to me, which was a good thing—once I came on full time, all those kinds of cases were assigned to me. I must have done a good job, because I was made partner five years after graduation, the first woman at my firm to have done so.

Most of my Duke classmates had gone on to work for big firms in New York, but I returned to Miami. I had been away for seven years, including my undergrad period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and I felt like I was losing touch with my inner Cuban. There had been only a few Cuban students at Penn, and none at Duke Law, so my infusions of Cubaninity came via care packages of Cuban food that my tata sent me, and from the boxes of supplies I carried with me after vacations home. I had an off-campus apartment where I threw parties and served Cuban food, but I think I always knew I wouldn’t be able to stay away forever.

My parties were great. Food, music, and rum drinks—mojitos, Cuba libres, mango daiquiries. I was a professional Cuban in those years, with a framed poster of José Martí in the living room and a floor-to-ceiling Cuban flag next to my bed. I had Cuban books scattered everywhere, and usually a Gloria Estefan CD was playing in the background. I worked out in the gym wearing a T-shirt that said, “All this, and Cuban too.”

The men I dated in school were always American—not by design, but because they were the ones I came into contact with in class or through my sorority. My only serious entanglement was with Luther Simmonds, during my second year at Duke.

I used to think he was my soul mate. He told me he felt the same.

In the winter of our last year at Duke we started talking about marriage, discussing the different places we might live and practice law. But later something happened that I still don’t understand. The bond between us drifted away in a weird haze of expedience. After we graduated, Luther took a job at a major civil-law firm in New York when they made him a big money offer he felt he couldn’t refuse. Not wanting to live in New York just then, I went back to my firm in Miami. Our phone bills were outrageous. At first, we talked about how we were going to work things out, then a day passed without us talking. A week later, it was two. We were both so busy that it was almost six months before we actually managed to see each other again.

I hadn’t considered dating Ariel because of Luther, but soon he asked me out to dinner and I accepted. And that was that. I still thought about Luther. Part of my heart would always be his, especially in the early morning before dawn broke—that was always our best time together.

But some things weren’t meant to be.

I worked hard all my life. In school I took the hardest courses, and gave them my all. My parents had lost everything after the revolution in Cuba, where they owned and operated a nationwide chain of pharmacies. They told their kids again and again: The one thing they can’t take away from you is your education.

But I found out the truth later, that their advice was really directed at my brothers instead of me. The rules for sons and daughters in Latino families are very different. Unfortunately, the twenty-first century has yet to arrive for us.

I knew early on that I wanted to be a lawyer; order and precision appealed to me. My family was appalled when I told them my decision, figuring I would turn into a frump or a bitter career woman, and never get married as a result. I was bound to be an old spinster, a dried-up prune, unfulfilled and alone; most importantly, I would never produce grandchildren. They told me that no woman in my family had ever done a man’s job. Hell, the truth was that no woman in my family had ever graduated from college before, much less earned an advanced degree. For upper-class Cuban Miami, college was a waiting room where girls from good families spent a couple of years before they walked down the aisle.

My female cousins had all majored in the course of how to marry well. I had to admit, they were overachievers and made the dean’s list. Cuban girls of my class might graduate from college and even take jobs, but never anything serious that might cause them to look old and tired. It was understood that they would drop everything and raise the kids once their boyfriends were established enough to marry and buy a home. It wasn’t as restrictive as the fifties, but we really hadn’t left Havana too far back.

There was almost a sense of collective pity directed at Cuban women who were successful; the assumption was that success always came at the expense of a good personal life. And a personal life always, always, meant a husband and children—the only true road to happiness and fulfillment. The only reason for a woman to work was economic necessity, the thinking went. Beside the fact that I loved them, I think one of the reasons I was so close to Vivian and Anabel was because they, too, had rebelled against the fate that had been set out for them by the accident of their birth.

And now I had to decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had worked so damned hard to get where I was. At thirty-five, I was a partner in a successful firm with several national offices; however, I was also a wife and a mother, with a small child at home and a husband making noises about having another one soon.

Going back to work meant long days and major stress, but it was all mine: my satisfaction from making a major difference in my clients’ lives, my office, my own world. I liked the people I worked with; they were my friends. I liked meeting with clients, the intellectual work of analyzing their cases and plotting a strategy. I relished the euphoria when I did good work on a case; I got off on the feeling of doing well. I loved the fact that I had a reputation as a thorough, sharp attorney.

It had been ten months since I took my leave of absence. I loved all the time with Ariel and Marti, but the truth was that I also missed the office. About ten times during the day I glanced at my watch and wondered what I would be doing if I were at my desk instead of at home.

My job paid very well, but, honestly, we didn’t need my income, not with Ariel working and the investments we made after the Matos case, a fact that Ariel kept repeating to me, so often that it had almost become his mantra. I almost wished that wasn’t true, since it would have made my decision easier.

Don’t get me wrong—I knew that many women would have traded places with me in a heartbeat. I kept in mind all the women raising children on their own, with no money or, even worse, having to deal with some alcoholic battering scumbag for a spouse. I wanted to take a deep breath and count my blessings, but my personality just wouldn’t allow it. I had to obsess over this dilemma until I reached a resolution.

It was like a voice was repeating over and over:
Give in, leave the job, have more kids.
But what would that mean? That I never took my professional life seriously in the first place? All the time, effort, and money invested in me by the firm would go to nothing—and I knew what that would mean for the next young Latina lawyer. For better or worse, I represented an image in the legal community. And people were watching.

I loved Marti more than anything in the world. I treasured being able to watch his daily changes, going swimming with him, teaching him manners, and helping him make his way in the world. And as for Ariel, it was a nice change for us both to be home at the same time in the evening. I must have spent more time with him in the last ten months than in the previous eight years of our marriage.

In this, my family was no help. There was no use going to them for advice, because I knew in advance what they thought.
A woman’s place is at home, with her husband and children.
Mamá was already making noises about Marti needing a little brother or sister. This is the same woman who had been violently opposed to my relationship with Ariel in the beginning. He was from the wrong side of the tracks or, as was the case in Miami, from the other side of the causeway. The more they came to know him, though, the more they began to warm to him.