Delia's Crossing (Delia 1)

“What about him?”

“Aunt Isabela is not worried?”

“He’s got his private nurse, Jesse,” she said. “What do we care? We’ll have breakfast together tomorrow, and then we’ll go out on the lounges and get some sun. Later, I’ll help you get ready for your fiesta, help you with your hair, the makeup, everything. Come on, let’s get something to eat. I’m starving. I’ll diet tomorrow or next week.”

She reached into one of my boxes and took out the red hat. I watched her put it on and adjust it in front of the mirror.

“This looks good. I don’t have one like this, come to think of it. Mind if I borrow it? Borrow? You know borrow?”

“Sí,” I said.

She kept the hat on her head and went to the door. “Come on, already,” she said, and I put my workbook aside to follow her out.

Edward’s bedroom door was still shut. How I wished I could find the words to explain why I had done what I had done so that he wouldn’t be so angry at me. Nothing bothered me as much as losing his respect.

“Don’t worry about them,” Sophia said, seeing where my gaze had gone. “They’re having a private dinner, I’m sure,” she muttered as we went by. “Good riddance.”

When we entered the dining room, she took her mother’s chair. Señora Rosario made a face when she came in from the kitchen and saw her sitting there.

“What are you growling at, Mrs. Rosario? I’m in charge when my mother’s away,” Sophia announced. “In fact, I’ve decided that we’ll have some white wine with our dinner tonight. My mother’s and my favorite is in the wine cooler. Bring us a bottle and two wineglasses.”

“Your mother did not say such a thing to me,” Señora Rosario responded. “And you know she would not like you wearing a hat at the dinner table.”

Sophia threw her a look full of darts and jumped up, went into the kitchen, and returned with a bottle of white wine and the two wineglasses. She struggled a bit getting the cork out but then smiled at me and poured us each a full glass. Señora Rosario gave me a disapproving look, but I wasn’t about to throw Sophia into one of her tantrums.

“To cousins,” Sophia said, lifting her glass and nodding for me to lift mine.

Señora Rosario returned to the kitchen.

“Come on, don’t be afraid. You’re a member of this family, not a servant,” Sophia sai

d when I hesitated. “To cousins.”

I lifted my glass, we clinked, and then we drank. I sipped mine, but she seemed to gulp hers.

“It’s good, right? Bueno?”

“Sí, bueno.”

She drank some more and poured more into her glass and into mine, even though I had drunk very little. When Inez brought out our dinner, which was a delicious chicken in some sort of lemon sauce, Sophia attacked her food as if she had not eaten for a week. Tía Isabela was always criticizing her for eating too fast. She was finished before I had eaten less than half of mine. She drank two more glasses of the wine and urged me to finish mine so she could empty the bottle.

“This is fun, isn’t it?” she asked. “With my brother and his amigo locked away, we have no one to tell us what to do and not to do.”

She glared at Señora Rosario when she came in to check on things.

“What’s for dessert?”

“There is chocolate cake,” she replied.

“I want vanilla ice cream on mine, and so does my cousin.”

Señora Rosario asked me if I did, and I told her to give me a small piece and just a little ice cream. I knew that if I didn’t eat it, too, Sophia would be upset, and the wine was making her more irritable and nasty to both Señora Rosario and Inez. It was better just to go along with everything and then go to my room, finish my schoolwork so I would have nothing to worry over during the weekend, and then go to bed. However, Sophia had other plans for us.

She finished the last drop of her wine, insisted I finish mine, and devoured the dessert almost before I had one bite of my cake swallowed.

“You want more?” she asked me. “Más?”

“No, gracias.”