a word. She closed the door and quickly stripped off the confining navy linen dress and the sweaty, dark nylons, sighing mightily when her skin breathed openly again. She hated to wear constrictive clothing; it felt as though she were wrapped in a vise. But today especially, standing in the stifling, thick humidity of the crowded church, holding back her tears and agonizing for her friend, Eve, and those poor, fatherless, bebés… It was all she could do not to weep out loud, like that crazy redhead. After the mass she soundly kissed her husband and each one of her four children and made them promise never, ever, to die before her.
She pulled back her long, thick black hair with a clasp, then sat in the cool porcelain of her tub. As she sponged down her round, softening body, her pent-up sadness trickled down into the drain with the rivulets of cool water. No, she sighed, closing her eyes as a worried frown creased her brow, she didn’t need any bad thoughts to hover over her. She didn’t want any of the sadness of the funeral to infiltrate her home. She wasn’t superstitious…but things were going too good lately. Just too, too good.
Oh God, why did she even have the thought? It tempted fate to think of one’s good fortune. Whenever things went too well, something always happened to clobber her. Gabriella abruptly turned off the water, wrapped herself in a soft cotton towel and quickly dressed in a flowing, bright-yellow sundress.
“Mami, I’m hungry.” Her youngest was still dressed in his summer best, leaning against the kitchen counter watching television and nibbling Gummi Bears.
“First you change your clothes, eh? And hang them up, too,” she said, rubbing his hair as he ducked away. “I’ll make lunch. Go on now, put down that candy and no more TV.”
Gabriella began pulling out the pots and pans to prepare a quick lunch for her family. Weekends were always hectic, but she loved being at the center of it all. The mother was the heart of the family, no? Her eldest two boys had soccer games at the high school and she never let them leave without a substantial meal in their bellies. Her sixteen-year-old daughter, however, was always dieting and it was a constant battle to get her to eat anything. What to make, she wondered, rummaging through the stuffed refrigerator. She turned to look over her shoulder when she heard her husband’s step.
Fernando was a bear of a man, broad with dark hair all over his body and a soft rounded belly that protruded over his belt. He often scratched or patted it when he was lost in thought. He was scratching his belly now, Gabriella noticed as she followed his path into the kitchen, and her brow knitted when she caught sight of the pensive expression on his face. They’d been married for twenty-five years and she could pick up signs of a quake better than any Richter scale. And right now, her alarms were going off.
“Are you okay?” she asked him as he stepped beside her to grab a beer from the fridge. “Did the funeral get you down or something?”
Fernando flipped off the cap and took a long swallow. “Yeah, I guess so,” he replied in a distracted manner. “Tom Porter was about my age, you know.”
“Your heart is fine,” she replied too quickly, dismissing the notion. Gabriella was a nurse and knew well that heart attacks struck men of Fernando’s age with little warning. Her eyes narrowed as she studied his face, and when she saw the pallor there, blood rushed to her own. “You just saw the doctor for your physical. Your cholesterol was normal. Why?” she asked, feeling a sudden alarm. “Do you have chest pains or something?”
He shook his head and took another long draft from his bottle. Gabriella’s hands stilled on the counter and she waited quietly for the quake. His lips pinched, the only movement on his face, but his eyes were restless.
“Remember I told you that there was a memo circulated around the office about a merger? They said there were going to be large-scale layoffs.” He didn’t look at her but spoke to the wall.
Gabriella did indeed remember that. They’d talked for hours about the possibility that Fernando’s job as district manager of the electronics firm would be in jeopardy. Then Fernando had pointed out how he never missed a day of work, how he often stayed late to solve problems, and how he’d worked for the firm for over a decade. He’d seemed so confident and she slept easy at night believing he would be the last one any company would let go. But now, seeing the heartache in his eyes, she feared the worst. Her earlier premonition played in her mind and she silently cried out, No, no, don’t let him lose his job. Madre de Dios, please don’t make us go through this. Gabriella knew poverty and feared it.
She didn’t say any of this to Fernando but took his large hand into her small one.
“They canned me,” he said with brutal honesty. “Gave me my notice. In six weeks, I’ll be out of a job.”
He looked at her with both wariness and anger, as though he expected her to explode, to blame him for his failure as he surely blamed himself. For a moment she felt frozen by the shock of the words. This wasn’t an it-could-happen scenario. This was the real thing. He was fired, let go, laid off, whatever words they used to stop his career—and his paycheck.
Her head lowered as she tried to make sense of it. “I…I don’t understand,” she ventured in a small voice. “You said you thought they’d keep you. That it wouldn’t…How could they let you go?”
“Not just me. Fifteen hundred got the pink slip, most of them in middle management. It’s happening all over.” His hand plowed through his cropped black hair. “That’s what worries me. There’ll be a lot of competition out on the street for my level of position.” His face creased and his hand left his hair to rub his brow, shielding his eyes.
She heard the worry in his voice, worry not for himself but for his family. As a young man he had worked his way through college while still managing to give his parents a portion of each paycheck. They’d married young, had children early and he’d never stopped working hard for his family. Gabriella looked at her husband’s face and saw the defeat that would kill him more surely than any cholesterol.
What did she have to be afraid of if he lost his job, she wondered? She loved him. He was her husband, the father of her children. She’d seen in Eve’s eyes the depth of a woman’s desolation when her husband died. What did the loss of a job matter when compared to that loss? She moved to wrap her short, plump arms around him, her head barely reaching his shoulders.
“We’ll be fine,” she said, and was relieved to feel his arms wrap around her in a bear hug. Laying her cheek against his chest, she relished his scent on his clothes and the warmth of his arms. “You’re alive and well and we have four wonderful bebes. And I have a job, so we know we’ll make do until you find another one. And you will, too. Soon. You just wait and see. We’ll be fine,” she repeated. “We just have to keep the faith.”
Three
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day’s occupations, That is known as the Children’s Hour.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
The Children’s Hour
For mothers of school-age children, the first signs of fall are not the yellowing of leaves or a nip in the night air. They are the back-to-school sales, the purchase of book bags, binders and pens, and the mix of panic and excitement on the faces of their children.
Doris Bridges sat back on her heels on the floor of her library and fingered the old, worn copy of Dr. Seuss’s children’s book. She was feeling a wave of melancholy, having just said goodbye to her eldest son, Bobby Jr., on his way
