this was unfit for children. Then he picked up a rock and threw it at the dogs.
I knocked on the door of my grandmother’s bedroom. I was always the one who had to get her to come to dinner. It was never easy. I opened the door slowly. She was sitting in her rocking chair, facing the open window, a Superman blanket over her lap. “Abuela?”
“Yes, mijo?”
“Mamá told me to come get you. Jesusa’s serving dinner.”
“I’m not hungry. Gracias.”
“Come on.”
“Thank you, but I’m not hungry.”
“Ay, Abuela. You know she’s just going to tell me to come back and tell you that you have to come.”
She was rail thin. Her white blouse hung on her bony frame like a blanket. She had small dark eyes and thin lips. Her translucent skin was crisscrossed with wrinkles like cracks on dry earth. She wore her long gray hair pulled back into a bun set with a big ivory comb.
“Abuela, por favor.”
This was how it was. She didn’t like coming to the table. She didn’t eat. She just sat in that rocking chair all day, staring out the window, dreaming of who knows what because the window looked out to the small patio where there were just a few plants in pots and cans and a few rows of laundry line where our maid Jesusa hung our clothes to dry.
“Abuela?”
She nodded slowly and raised a delicate hand. “Be an angel and help me up then.”
We walked into the dining room together. Jesusa came out of the kitchen. She was a small, dark Indian woman from the sierra in Oaxaca. She’d been with us since before I was born. She was quiet and rigid and didn’t let me get away with much. Somewhere, though, in all that toughness, there was a little soft spot. She went around the table and served soup and quesadillas and green salsa.
No one spoke. Even Gaby didn’t say a word and she was a chatterbox. She brought home all the gossip and always went into painful detail about everyone and everything.
Something was going on.
I thought my parents were angry. I thought maybe if someone said the wrong thing, they would lash out. It was so quiet I could hear our spoons touch the bottom of the plates, my father’s slurps. They were the same sounds we made at every meal, but they were amplified by the silence—the chewing and swallowing. Even the fabric of my father’s sleeve as he reached across the table for a tortilla made a soft noise like a sigh. I closed my eyes. For a minute, I thought I even heard my mother’s heartbeat.
“She was jealous,” Abuela said suddenly. “She was jealous about my date with Carlitos. That’s what started it.”
My father glanced at my mother.
“But it was not my fault. Father arranged the whole thing,” Abuela went on, “because Carlitos is the son of Jorge Tizapa. He runs the terminal at the end of the port. It’s true, they are very wealthy. But I do not care for him.” She pouted. Then she nodded and whispered, “He’s a dandy.”
“Mamá,” my mother interrupted. “Please, not tonight.”
Abuela ignored her and looked at me as if I were someone else. “My father thinks he can control me.”
“Esperanza,” my father said. “Por favor.”
“What?” She stared at my father. “What ever happened to that boy from Xalapa, what was his name?”
My mother tapped her fingers against the table real slow like the second hand on a clock: tap, tap, tap, tap. I guess she’d had enough. But I don’t think my abuela had any clue of the tension in the room. She went right on with the tale of her sister’s unchaperoned adventure in Veracruz in the 1950’s. We’d all heard the story a dozen times. When she finished, she placed her hand on mine and smiled. “How is it at the university?”
She was crazy. Ever since my grandfather died, she’d been forgetting things and talking of the old days as if they were happening right now. That’s why we ended up moving into her house. We used to live in a big house near the highway, but she refused to move in with us so my father sold it and we moved in with her. Her house was just like a lot of the other houses near the plaza: old with thick walls and small rooms, a patio in the center and iron bars on the windows. It wasn’t bad. Gaby and I had our own bedrooms, but we had to share the bathroom with Abuela. The living room and dining room were connected through a big archway where all the family stuff like pictures of my first communion, Gaby’s quinceañera, my parent’s wedding photos, and an old black and white picture of my grandfather with his big mustache were displayed with my grandmother’s collection of porcelain saints and a big pink conch shell sculpture my mother bought as a souvenir from one of our vacation trips to Acapulco.
Abuela always refused to eat. She only drank coffee with milk and sugar. Most of the time she asked to be excused so she could return to her room. And the only time she ever left the house was on Sundays when we went to church. I liked her because she laughed. In her old age she’d discovered a secret joke that made her happy. I hoped that when I got old, I’d find the same joke because most of the old people I knew were always cranky and mean.
“I didn’t tell Papá that I had already met Dorian,” Abuela went on. “He was taking photographs on the malecón.”
Dorian was my grandfather. He started the bakery, Panadería La Esperanza, which now belonged to my parents, and where Gaby and I worked whenever we weren’t in school.
My mother sighed and rolled her eyes. She tapped her fingers against the table: Tap. Tap. Tap.
“I was with Isis,” Abuela went on. “We had just had a nice café at La Parroquia and were taking a stroll along the Plaza de Armas. It was a beautiful afternoon. The military band was playing in the gazebo. When we came to the malecón we saw Dorian with his big camera on a wooden tripod. The boy who was helping him was someone Isis knew. His sister worked as a maid at her house.”
“Mamá,” my mother complained. “Please, your food.”
Abuela stared at her plate. “But I’m not hungry.”
“Not again.” Tap. Tap.
Abuela shrugged and turned to Gaby. “I would just like a coffee with a little milk, please.”
“You have to eat something, Mamá. You’re skin and bones. Please.”
“But I am not hungry. A nice little coffee would do me well.”
Tap. Tap. “Jesusa!”
Jesusa came into the dining room. “¿Sí señora?”
“Bring Doña Esperanza a coffee with milk.”
“Liberio,” my father said. “I need you at the panadería for the next couple of days.”
“But I have to—”
“You
