style="font-size:15px;"> Monday morning Celeste flew back to San Jose. Now it was over. Sylvia had taken the news about the money like the woman she was, calm and unruffled. Celeste could imagine her sitting at her immaculate kitchen counter, pouring herself another cup of coffee and planning her next step.
Sylvia and Jack had had a lot of money. Most of it was gone, and Celeste couldn’t find what Jack had done with it. In Celeste’s business, missing money meant addiction: drugs, sex, gambling. That’s the part she couldn’t tell Sylvia, because she had no proof of what Jack had done with hundreds of thousands of dollars—only that it was missing.
Celeste dug around in her bag. She opened her wallet and peered at that scrap of paper. Skye Amado Neidorf, it read. One brief, almost life, that changed everything. “This I do, in remembrance of you.”
Mercedes Amado arrived at Franklin Elementary in Santa Ana every morning at 6:30 a.m, even though school didn’t start until 8. Today she wore a softly woven linen suit, peach colored. She loved dressing up for her students. Most of her thirty-five sixth graders had mothers who were younger than her own daughters. When Mercy made phone calls home, she marveled at esas madrecitas who were often busy extricating themselves from boyfriends or in the process of pursuing new loves while leaving their sons and daughters to Mrs. Amado.
Sixty years old. She hardly believed it herself.
Each fall Mercy was happy to adopt those thirty-five sixth graders, inoculate them with her brand of philosophy and education and say good-bye at year’s end. Sometimes the infusion took, sometimes it didn’t. She had a certain reputation. Problem students were routinely transferred in and somehow became less problematic. Mercy once thought it might be interesting to follow the paths of some of her students and then changed her mind, certain that the results would only depress her. She had to focus on the class at hand, just love them for the time they were given to her.
Why couldn’t she transfer that skill to her daughters, giving them all she could for the time they were with her?
Each morning Mercy studied the photos on her desk as she prepared herself for the day. There was Celeste, her first born, graduating from Humboldt State. The cap obscured how short and spiky her hair had been, but you could see the delicate bones of her face and a small smile as she posed. That diploma had cost all of them so much, but most of all, Celeste. You could see the determination, the grimness, underneath the smile, even at twenty-two. Her sense of humor had evaporated with Skye.
There was Nataly, her baby, at her senior year’s gallery opening. Nataly’s lank brown hair straggled down to her shoulders, her face even paler in the excitement of the evening, those green eyes twinkling at the camera, at her mother.
In one, the brown heads and long braids of her granddaughters, Becky and Miriam, were capped by Mickey Mouse ears, marking the spring she had taken them to Disneyland. Miriam smiled behind Becky, her arms wrapped around her younger sister, as if protecting her from life’s unpredictability, even here at the Magic Kingdom. Becky smiled, her two front teeth missing, looking so much like Nataly at that age it always momentarily confused Mercy. “Whose little girl are you?” Mercy often asked her.
Mercy had looked forever for a photograph where Sylvia was the center of attention, not her children, where she wasn’t reaching protectively towards her husband. She settled for one in high school, where Sylvia’s full, frothy curls hit past her shoulders. As gorgeous as Cher in Moonstruck, Mercy thought.
At the far end of her desk was a picture of Celeste and Michael the weekend she visited them in Trinidad. The fog had been heavy that summer afternoon, so you really couldn’t see the craggy rocks behind them, but you got a sense of the damp air, the coast. Michael and Celeste were smiling like fools, young beautiful fools in love, Michael’s cool eyes twinkling into the camera, Celeste eight months and three weeks pregnant, breathlessly waiting, waiting, waiting.
And she’s still waiting, thought Mercy each time she saw the photograph. Celeste would die, or kill her, if she ever found this photo, which was why Mercy kept it safely on her school desk. Mercy continued to love Michael, because he had loved Celeste.
Currently there were no men in Mercy Amado’s life. At the end of the day, after organizing her desk for the next morning, then reapplying her lipstick, Mercy walked into her principal’s office. “John, I need to talk to you.” Mercy approved of her principal, John Wolfert. One, because he was attractive. And two, because he always wore a suit.
“Mercy, if it’s about the air conditioning, the district has sworn up and down it will be fixed this weekend.”
“No, John. It’s about me. I really admire you. You’ve got to know somebody.” John didn’t understand.
“Somebody, John, somebody you could fix me up with.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh.” He swiveled sideways in his chair. “Oh.”
“Just wanted to be sure you were thinking about that,” she said. Then she went back to her classroom.
Monday night. The minute Jack stepped into the house Miriam sang out, “Dad, Mom let Becky miss school again.”
His jaw tightened. He closed the front door, shook his head, kissed Miriam’s smug face and walked upstairs without another word. He was going to talk to Becky.
Right then, Sylvia hated Miriam. She hated the cheap door Jack had walked through, the creaking stairs as he trod upwards, the cold granite counter top island where Miriam sat. They had moved to Pasadena for Jack’s law practice. Instead of ending up in a rustic Spanish, a sweet bungalow, or an imposing craftsman, Jack insisted on a new home in a gated community. Gated, for God’s sake. Was it to protect her daughters from the kind of people she herself had grown up alongside or was it to keep all the bad things inside her home from spilling out into the community?
The thin veneer of brand-spanking newness of their home swiftly rubbed off, revealing underneath the cheap materials, the haphazard design and the shoddy construction. Brand-new light fixtures didn’t work due to brand-new faulty wiring. The carpet unraveled and the kitchen countertops stained. Jack had wanted a maintenance-free, turnkey house. They had paid a mountain of money for it.
After she put the girls to bed in their rooms, she hid in the office, catching up on her Russian Lit chat group. Jack walked in.
“Why did you let Becky stay home again?”
“Her back was bothering her.”
“It’s hard enough me getting ready to go on this business trip without you destroying any shred of confidence I may have left in your skill as a mother and a homemaker.”
“So don’t go,” Sylvia said. Her eyes were fixed on the slick monitor with its bold colors. Her chat group always valued her insight into Babel or Gogol or Bukanin.
“What?”
“I told you,” Sylvia said, turning around to face him. He wore blue silk boxers. His chest muscles were well-defined and lightly covered with brown hair. She didn’t remember the boxers, but he was as fastidious about his dress at night as he was in the day. She had found it rather charming after all the grungy guys she had dated, hung around, then slept with. Jack was different. Jack was crisp and clean and smooth. Look at him, she thought. Even his pajamas sing money.
“Don’t start,” Jack said.
“I told you, you want the kids raised a certain way, you stay
