“And?” Grandmother Anabela asked again. What more could there be?
He turned, his eyes searching the crowd until his gaze fell on me. Everyone else looked my way as well.
“She said you are to pack whatever su nieta has, everything that is…” He paused and added, “That isn’t full of lice, and prepare her for the trip. She has decided to take her into her home.”
Someone clicked her lips, but no one spoke. Everyone’s eyes remained on me for a moment before turning to my grandmother to see her response.
Grandmother Anabela looked up and whispered something to God. It looked to me as if she was giving thanks. She was always having private conversations with the Almighty. Until now, I believed that her special conversations with him had protected us. What had we done for him to turn a deaf ear even to mi abuela Anabela, who was to me truly what a saint should be?
Slowly, she lowered her head, and then her eyes locked on me.
She didn’t have to say anything. I could read it in her face.
Delia, I cannot take care of you. I am on death’s doorway myself. Your uncles and aunt in Mexico have their own overwhelming burdens. This is the best solution and your best hope.
In less than a day, you lost us all, your parents and me. You will pack a small bag, but in your heart, you will carry the heavy burden of great sadness and loneliness. You might carry it for the rest of your life.
I shook my head. It was raining sorrow too hard and too quickly. Yes, I was drowning in this sea of sadness. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I had done something. Maybe I had opened the evil eye to look our way.
My terrified eyes fell on Señora Morales, and suddenly, all I could think of was that chocolate-dipped churro that she had slipped past her lips.
I turned and ran from that image as much as from anything else that haunted me this terrible day.
2
Good-bye
Any memories I had of my aunt Isabela were as vague and indistinct as the faded old sepia pictures in our chest of family photographs, the images evaporating with time. Mi tía Isabela drifted in and out of my thoughts so rarely, I often forgot my mother had an older sister. We had a few snapshots that were still quite good, but they were taken of her and my mother when they were little more than children. There were no photographs of her children or her husband, who I knew had died. He was much older than Tía Isabela, actually close to twenty years older. I had seen her only once, now more than ten years ago, when my maternal grandmother passed away. She hadn’t come for her father’s funeral, but she had come for her mother’s. When she had defied my grandfather and married her much older American husband, he had disowned her.
To me, the story was almost a fairy tale or our own family soap opera. I couldn’t help but be curious about every detail, but I always would hesitate to ask too many questions, because I could see it saddened my mother to talk about her sister and what had happened. Nevertheless, the whole story had trickled out over time until I now understood this much.
Tía Isabela had matured into a beautiful young woman early in her life, and by the time she was twelve, she was attracting the interest of men twice her age and older, because she looked twice her age. No one, not my father or my mother, would come right out and say it, but from what I heard in their voices and saw in their faces, I could see they believed Aunt Isabela was quite a flirtatious muchacha.
“She had a way of looking a man up and down that stirred his blood,” mi madre told me once, when she was more relaxed about discussing her sister. “I’m not even sure she was fully aware of what she was doing, but I’m sure to most men, it looked like she was sending some kind of invitation.”
My mother paused and looked at me. I was only ten myself when she was telling me this.
“Entiendes, Delia?”
I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure I fully understood. What sort of invitation was it? To a party? To a dinner? How could you send an invitation with your eyes?
“Men,” she told me, leaning down to speak more softly and more privately so neither mi abuela nor mi padre could hear her, “are too quick to read what they want to read, see what they want to see. Recuerda eso, Delia.”
She didn’t have to say it. I wouldn’t forget anything she told me in such confidence with her eyes so big and dark. She so rarely talked about the relations between men and women that whenever she did, I was mesmerized.
According to what my mother had described, no matter what Tía Isabela did, it displeased my grandfather. She was rebellious, disobeying him almost from the moment she awoke every morning. He didn’t like the way she dressed for school or her putting on lipstick before she was eleven. He did all he could to stop her from doing these things, even when he caught her in the village and wiped her lips with the sleeve of his shirt. The second he was gone, her lips were red again.
“The more your grandfather punished Isabela, the more defiant she became. She was a wild thing, una cosa salvaje, no tamer than a coyote.”
“A coyote in heat,” my father added, overhearing our discussion as he passed by.
My mother glared at him, and he turned away quickly. For a reason I would come to understand, talking about Tía Isabela was not something they would do in each other’s presence.
My mother was very upset about all of it and somehow blamed herself for what happened between mi tía Isabela and their father later on. It was a family mystery, why she would blame herself, a skeleton in one of our closets, but I sensed now that it wouldn’t be much longer before I opened that closet, saw those dangling old white bones, and found out why. Was I better off never knowing?
“Tu abuelo thought tu tía was headed for lots of trouble,” my mother said. “They were always at each other. I did what I could to help her, make excuses for her, protect her, but nothing I would do or tu abuela would do mattered. If your grandfather confined her to the house, she snuck out. If he dragged her home kicking and screaming, she would turn and run off. He was at wits’ end and finally gave up trying. At one point, both he and my mother were considering sending her to a nunnery, but they decided not to put such a burden on the sisters.
“She quit school at your age and went to work at a hotel on the beach, first as a housekeeper, and then she was trained to be a waitress in the restaurant. Two years later, she met Señor Dallas. We did not know she was seeing him romantically. He returned to the hotel many times for vacations. We didn’t know he returned solely because of her, but then, one day, she announced he had proposed to her and she wanted to marry him. We knew nothing about him, of course,” my mother told me.