Delia's Crossing (Delia 1)

She sat back to watch me eat.

“How come you’re not fat like so many of the Mexican girls I know?” she asked. Then, to answer her own question, “You were very poor in Mexico, right? Poor?” she asked, pointing to me.

I shook my head. “I was not rich, but I was not…no tenía hambre.”

“Huh? In English, I told you!”

“Not no food.” The wine loosened my tongue. I leaned toward her. “You are not right. Most girls in Mexico are not fat. Girls are fatter here,” I said, and she twisted her mouth and looked away.

She thought a moment and then turned back, smiling again. “Maybe that’s because the food’s better here,” she said.

“No.”

She looked at me sharply. “What?” she asked, ready to laugh. “You think the food is better in Mexico?”

“My grandmother is a better cook,” I said, nodding toward the kitchen.

That struck her as funny, very funny. She laughed so hard and long that Inez came back in to see what was happening. I shrugged, and she returned to the kitchen. Sophia stopped laughing suddenly and stared at me.

“Your grandmother,” she said. “That’s not my mother’s mother, right?”

For a long moment, I did not reply. How could she ask such a question? Did my aunt Isabela not tell her children anything about her own parents, at least that they were both dead and gone?

I shook my head.

“I didn’t think so,” Sophia said. “C’mon,” she told me, rising. “Let’s go up to my room. I have something to show you.”

Just as I stood, Jesse came down the stairs and headed for the kitchen with the tray of dishes and glasses from his and Edward’s dinner. He glanced at me with scorn and continued walking.

“Well, look who’s here,” Sophia said. “Edward’s nurse. Is that what you want to be when you grow up, Jesse, a nurse, maybe a wet nurse?”

“I am grown-up,” he replied. “But you have plenty of time to decide what you want to be, since you have a long way to go to grow up.”

“Very funny. Isn’t he hilarious?” she asked me.

Jesse kept walking.

“C’mon,” she said, and walked quickly toward the stairway. For a moment, she had to seize hold of the banister, because she was so dizzy. She regained her balance and climbed the steps as quickly as she could. I followed slowly.

“Will you catch up?” she screamed back at me. Everything she was doing now was exaggerated, whether it was talking too loudly or making a face. I felt what the little wine I had drunk was doing to me and could see clearly how so much more of it was affecting her.

She stopped at Edward’s doorway to wait for me.

“We have to see how my brother’s doing,” she said with a wry smile.

I started to shake my head, but she seized the door-knob and opened the door. I could hear Jesse coming up the stairs quickly behind me. I paused, because Sophia stepped back instead of forward.

“Jesus,” she said.

I walked slowly toward her and got to the door just as Jesse came up the stairs. Sophia nodded, urging me to look into Edward’s room.

He was facedown on his bed, totally naked.

Jesse charged up to the doorway.

“You two are sick,” Sophia said.

“I’m just giving him a rubdown, stupid. He’s sore from being bedridden.”