PROLOGUE
IZZY MAY, 1995
“Isabella Monroe, do not make me ask you again! Bring me the suitcase from under your bed, and do it now!”
Izzy sighed and dropped her sketchpad on the deep purple comforter. Three was her mother’s limit. Three times of asking and being ignored by her thirteen-year-old daughter, and then she’d storm in and let her Latina temper flare. And Izzy usually ended up grounded in that case.
Not that it mattered. Where did Izzy have to be? Who did she have to hang out with? All her non-school hours were spent hiding out in her room with her sketch pad and worn-down charcoal pencils, doodling as her mother called it.
With another sigh, Izzy flopped onto her paper-thin pillow and stared at the cracked white ceiling while she counted to five. Then she rolled over and dangled off the edge of the bed while searching for the giant suitcase her mom had stashed there a few months ago.
Their two-bedroom Bronx apartment didn’t offer much in the way of storage space. Or living space for that matter. Her room was smaller than some rich lady’s closet.
“Got it, Mom. I’m coming.” Izzy towed the empty suitcase down the short hallway and into the master bedroom that was only about two square feet bigger than her own shoebox. “What do you need it f—”
She stopped dead in her tracks and blinked her mother into focus as though the scene before her could change if her eyelids shut and opened again.
Izzy’s heart sank to her toes. “He’s leaving?” she asked, barely above a whisper.
“Don’t you sound sad for that pendejo, Isabella. You do not know what he did, mija.”
“What did he do, Mama?” Izzy asked because Catalina expected it. Izzy knew the routine by now. Her stepfather had committed some heinous offense in her mother’s eyes, though Izzy never quite saw things from her mother’s hysterical perspective. Catalina would rant and rave in a frenzied tantrum until she ran out of steam. Afterward, she’d sleep for two or three days straight.
Izzy asking for details usually got the ball rolling, and the faster Catalina got it out, the quicker the theatrical process would be over.
But the packing of the suitcases was a bad sign. This was the third time in Izzy’s memory that the suitcase packing took place. And each time, it resulted in divorce. Three divorces in less than thirteen years, although really, Izzy didn’t remember much before age five. Actually, her Mom packing a bag and running Izzy out of a house without her beloved teddy bear was her first foggy memory.
She’d never bothered to ask her mother if she had been married to Izzy’s father. Part of Izzy was afraid to find out.
“What did he do? What did he do?” Catalina stopped haphazardly flinging socks and tighty-whities into the luggage and faced Izzy. Her dark, nearly black eyes, the eyes she’d passed on to Izzy, were wild, as was her ink-black hair, currently frizzing out of its messy bun in every which way. “He stuck his dick in that fucking teenager next door. That’s what the bastardo did.”
“Mama, Juliet isn’t a teenager. She’s twenty-two,” she said, like that would somehow make a difference.
“And this makes it okay?” Her mother shrieked as she shook her head and stomped her foot like a petulant child. “We took vows, Isabella!”
Always with the vows.
Giant tears filled her mother’s eyes then spilled over unchecked.
Here we go again.
Izzy bit her tongue to keep from blurting out that she was pretty confident there was no way in hell Juliet would have sex with a balding fifty-year-old toll-taker who was lumpier than a bowl of cold oatmeal. Juliet worked her ass off at a minimum wage job while taking night classes online and raising her two younger siblings. She had no time for a fling with a past-his-prime married man.
But those words would send Catalina into a further tizzy. So, another approach it was.
“Mama,” she said softly. Izzy had learned over the years to approach with a soothing tone and delicate step when her mom had one of these irrational episodes. “Can I make you a cup of tea? Maybe, if you sit and relax for a while, you’ll feel better, and you can talk it out with Len after he gets home. How does that sound?”
“Tea? My marriage is falling apart, and you want me to have tea? Isabella, don’t act like a child. Hand me that suitcase and start filling it with everything in that drawer,” Catalina said, pointing to the drawer where Len kept his shirts.
A lump formed in Izzy’s throat. Len might be fifteen years older than her mother and not the most attractive of men, but he was kind and worked hard to provide for them. Best of all, he loved Izzy like she was his own flesh and blood, and she felt the same about him. So many nights she’d fallen asleep watching reruns of Friends with her head on his shoulder. He hated the show, though he pretended to love it and suffered through countless hours just for her. Her absolute favorite thing about Len was his support of her art. He’d never called it doodling, never rolled his eyes like her mother did or told her that artists spent their whole lives begging for money. He praised her and bought her supplies with the few remaining dollars his meager paycheck afforded.