“I don’t want you to hide anything from me, Dee, especially worries about me. I’ll ask around about a good therapist and get us in there in January, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And in the meantime, you’re going to help with the Nochebuena preparations tomorrow while I do my thing at the hospital.”
“No, I want to go with you.”
He kisses the words right off my lips. “You’re going to be with your family like you are on Christmas Eve every year. There’s nothing you can do for me but lose an entire day sitting in waiting rooms. You won’t even get to see me.”
“But I’ll be near you.”
“There’s nothing you can do, sweetheart, but shiver in overly chilled waiting rooms. You’re already cold all the time. That’ll make for a miserable day for you when you could be having fun with your girls. I promise I’ll come straight to Abuela’s the second I get out of there.”
I think about that for a second. “You’re sure there’s nothing I can do if I go with you?”
“One thousand percent positive.”
“All right, then,” I say on a long sigh. “I’ll do it your way, but I’d better be the first to know if there’s anything wrong.”
“There won’t be anything wrong, and you’ll always be the first to know everything.”
“I guess I can live with that if it means I get to live with you.”
“That’s my girl,” he says with another sweet kiss as he gathers me in close to him. “Now get some sleep. You’ve got a pig to roast tomorrow.”
Carmen
The smell of the roasting pig is making me want to vomit, but that’s not surprising since every smell makes me sick lately, or so it seems. I’m constantly swallowing bile as my stomach churns relentlessly. No one told me pregnancy was going to be this difficult. Sure, I’ve heard stories about morning sickness, but it’s the all-day sickness that’s killing me. And after a miscarriage earlier in the year that no one knows I had, I’ve held off on telling people about this pregnancy for fear of having to take it all back if this one doesn’t take either.
“What’s wrong with you?” my mom, Vivian, asks me when we’re in Abuela’s hot, crowded kitchen with the other women in our family, less my cousin Maria, who’s stuck in LA.
“What? Nothing.”
She raises a dark brow that lets me know she sees right through my bullshit. As the only child of a woman who suffered nine miscarriages before she had me, trust me when I tell you that not only does she see through my bullshit, sometimes I feel like she can also read my mind. “Are you fighting with your sexy neurosurgeon?”
“No, I’m not fighting with Jason.”
“Well, then, what is it? This is your favorite day of the year, and you look like you’d rather be anywhere else.”
Before I can come up with a reply she’ll accept, she takes me by the arm and all but perp-walks me outside, thankfully to the front of the house and not the back where the pig is roasting in the above-ground Caja China that Abuela bought years ago for Nochebuena. It replaced the hole in the ground where the pig used to be roasted.
My cousins Nico, Milo and Dom, all of whom are actually from the Italian side of the family, were recruited yesterday to go with Abuela to choose the pig. They were also in charge of cleaning and preparing it for roasting. I can’t think about that process, or I’ll lose the meager contents of my stomach. “Tell me what’s wrong so whatever it is won’t ruin both our days.”
“Nothing is wrong, Mami. It’s actually something good.”
Again with the eyebrow.
“We were waiting to tell you—”
She lets out a shriek that the entire neighborhood probably hears and wraps me in a hug so tight she nearly squeezes the puke right out of me.
“Mami! Stop your screaming before someone calls the cops!”
“A woman is allowed to scream when she finds out she’s going to be a grandmother, and why in the world didn’t you tell me before now?” With her hands on my shoulders, she holds me back so she can give me a full inspection. “What’s the problem?”
“No problem other than feeling like I’m going to die every minute of every day.”
She winces. “I was like that with you, too, but not with any of the others. That’s how I knew you were going to stick.”