by Olga Vilella

​It happened sin darse cuenta apenas. One minute, Josefina Corrada was the exceptional mujer she had always been. A responsible professional. Puntal of the eight o'clock Mass de San Aloishús, even in the worst snowstorm in February. A mother who never disappointed. And the next day, she consigned everybody to hell.
 
“Se me van a hacer puñetas, todos. Y el que me esconda las llaves, me va a oír.”
 
Which is how she came to be waiting for Dr. Haddad, that day. Maybe she should send la familia that funny meme of the cat. Pa’l carajo…a mí nadie me manda. Even Joey, the only among her relatives she could stand these days. But el guaifi seemed to be down.
 
Certainly not to Josie, there was no reasoning with Josie lately. When Josefina thought of her eldest, she had to ask los cielos what sin was she paying for in this life, to have been saddled with such an ingrate of a daughter. Who never called, unless she needed something. Trite, trite, and verging on the caricature, but oh-so-true.
 
A flash of memory sparked in Josefina's mind. She blinked then, assaulted by a draught of icy air and un recuerdo. The pinkie finger in Josie’s left hand, curved slightly inward. The dedo that was a replica of her own. And then she closed the screen pa'quick. No thinking of la Josie. La que me va a armar cuándo se entere.
 
Swipe screen left. Not for anything Josefina was the only one among her friends that Twittered and Instagrammed and Facebooked and TikToked. A brief smile lifted the corner of her perfectly drawn mouth!--Cherris-in-de-esnow de Reblon—with the next image popping up in her head. A circle of silvery heads, jostling around, whenever she showed las amigas how to get on? in?—maldito inglés—social media. Yet again.
 
A small whoosh brought her back to her surroundings. Another blast of frigid air fell on her shoulders from above, like a shower at Varadero Beach Club, on a morning in August. Dios mío, ese aire acondicionado me va a matar de pulmonía. Y esta camilla.
 
A little face, all eyes, peered then from around the curtain of the cubicle. An orangey tube—¡cómo el presidente!—was poised firmly between his lips and a bag dangled from a grubby paw. ¡Un Chito! Food from the gods. Now forbidden by Josie. The sight made her stomach rumble, not for the first time. Josefina tried her nicest smile. Kids usually responded to her abuela charm, but this one was not parting with one curly bit.
 
El niñito left quickly, but the curtain of the cubicle had parted long enough for Mrs. Cou-rra-dah to catch a glimpse of a group in scrubs planted around the nurses’ station. Call me “mom” one more time, anda. See what’s going to happen to you, mija. Will you look at the size of those culos? People are really unattractive these days.
 
“Body shaming, grandma.” “Don’t call her china, grandma, she’s Korean.” The list of her many social sins clacked like dominoes in her memory. Swipe definitely left.
 
But Joey’s gently reproachful face, a caramel Mater Admirablilis, refused to budge, once invoked. “Grandma, be nice. I love you, but be nice. Te quiero mucho,” repeated to signal no bad intent, pronounced in that cute gringuita accent of hers.
 
Joey, tan bella, mi niña. Joey qué no salió a su mamá, that’s for sure. “If those people are Italian, I’m china. Coreana,” Josefina spurted out loud, almost choking, on a breathy yelp.
 
Look at the time, caballero. Deja, que estos van a trinar cuando yo termine con el presidente del hospital. ¡A mí! Qué me hagan esperar a mí, Josefina Corrada, la primera doctora hispana de Jersi Sity.
 
But the memory of her granddaughter’s brown eyes still hovered, stubbornly, before her. It was getting late. And Josefina was so tired. And more shook up than she had thought when the car stopped spinning. Tired, hungry, in need of reviving. “Latte with an extra shot,” she heard Joey order in that papery hoarse voice of hers. Even Joey, even her.
 
“Un café con leche, mijo. Cargadito.” These days, saying those words, en español, felt like an act of resistance. En español, like it or not. Café con leche. Y tu MAGA que te la metes por dónde no te da el sol. Besides, calling out for a café con leche at el Estarboc also conveyed, loudly she hoped, what she thought of people willing to pay más de cinco pesos for a latte. Café con leche, guanajos.
 
“Well, dear heart. It is a fallen world,” as Catalina always repeated, while dusting her bolster of a chest. She knew las niñas would worry about her when she didn’t show up. But she was also sure they went ahead and ate. At this point in their lives, not one of her friends was going to delay ordering lunch because one of them didn’t show up. They would never eat.
 
Maldita vejez. ¿Quién te prepara para esto? ¡Nadie! As if there were any medical textbooks that could prepare you for the indignities of old age.
 
The carefully calibrated contempt in the voice of los jóvenes at the cellphone store. The looks of disdain when you don't put away your wallet fast enough. As if they were never getting old. As if. As if. That movie with la rubita de Beberli Jills. How they had laughed, she and Joey, escapadas, both of them. “No PG-13 movies for her until she's old enough, mom.” As if Joey didn't hear worse every day in school, so guanaja.
 
I wonder what's taking Dr. Haddad so long. Had she been in her right mind, she would have refused the ride to the ER. What had she done instead? Let them wheel her, in while making un chistesito. And not even a good one. “What happened to la ambulancia de los guapitos?” At least, one of them—dominicano by the looks of him—had laughed. “Lady, that's the next crew. And they won't be here for a while.”
 
“You think you’re really funny, don't you, abuela?” As a matter of fact, yes, she thought she was pretty funny. Even Joey turned on her these days.
 
For nearly seventy years, she had been a good girl. Not anymore. ¡Se acabó! She was now primed for war. Ready a dar guerra like the warrior she had once been. The buena hija who told her father she was going to medical school during that lunch, so, so many years ago. Dios mío, cómo se puso, loco furioso.
 
Contrarian, contrarian, cómo eres, Enrique used to say. The faces from other days of conflict crowded the small space around the gurney. Her father hitting the lunch table with a fist, the afternoon she told him Enrique was coming to talk to him. Certainly, she was marrying him. And she was moving to La Habana con él. Y mamá, llora que llora. Why couldn't she understand? She left México con papá.
 
Igualitica, igualitica que tu padre, Enrique used to say. David Juño, cerrado cómo un puño. The man who refused to ever go to el paseo once the war was finally over. “Cara al sol/con la camisa abieeeertaaaaa.” Somebody would intone the anthem of the Nacionales in the middle of la Alameda and the crowd would pause, as if paralyzed. Shifty eyes taking note. Black shirts and a sea of raised hands, saluting. An arm lifted, stiff like a gravestone, like el Caudillo's, meeting Hitler in Hendaya.
 
Not that don David had any use for the other side. Not after what they had written on the doors of the apartment building in Madrid. “Muerte al dueño de este edificio.” And Lelia's daughter dying during the siege. She died of a pneumonia, they said. We knew it was hunger.
 
“Recuerda, Pepiña. En este pared, unos españoles asesinaron a otros españoles.” Y el hambre por todos lados. As many maids as any house would want, to be had for a pair of alpargatas and their keep, during those years of darkness. Niñas, niñas todas. And then the years of that other war. Grey uniforms, all over the city. The whole of the province, all of Galicia, was overrun by them. On leave from the German submarine base in El Ferrol, la tata Rosalía would whisper, moving away from their Nordic raptor eyes. And Amelia, all blonde trenzas and blue eyes, pretending she was a refugee. “Kinder, kinder, schokolade.” After all these years, those words remained fresh in her memory, as bittersweet as the taste of that chocolate long gone.
 
Better make sure next time Joey took her to el Cosco she bought enough garbanzos. And a big bag of those small Esniqers.
 
“My dear colleague, what is this I hear about you still driving?” El doctorcito Haddad. Here we go....

A native of Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Olga Vilella is currently at work revising Los que llegaron, a historical novel based on the unsuccessful attack by the English to San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1797, a work that seeks to upend Caribbean notions of race, religion, and ethnicity. 

​Old Simeón’s right hand was permanently clawed. His curled, yellowing nails converged towards each other in a longing gesture, as if he were trying to grasp the last strands of something long gone. Sometimes Vanessa wondered why such a particular fate had infested Old Simeón’s phalanges. She hypothesized that the clawing probably happened gradually, like the shrinking of a flower’s petals as water breathes itself out. But another, much more grim possibility had come to her one night as she was falling asleep on her unshared bunk bed. She envisioned that fatal agglomeration of blood obstructing Old Simeón’s left brain, and his extremities instantly recoiling at the evaporation of half a life.
 
Every morning, when Vanessa took it upon herself to massage Old Simeón’s wrinkly fingers, she felt a piercing worry that her body would betray her in that same way. She thought of all the inexcusable curses she had directed at her limited limbs when her feet couldn’t bear two days of walking after crossing the Venezuelan border. At the time, driven by impatience, she had collapsed on the side of a jungle-ridden highway, where only blades of dried grass had pierced her back into consciousness. She had asked God why none of the passing cars acknowledged her stretched out thumb, and jerking her damp sneakers out of her feet, she asked why her throbbing toes wouldn’t allow her to reach a couple kilometers further, where maybe she would find a hospitable town. 
 
After many years, Vanessa found herself able to take pride in some things again. Small things. For instance, she claimed all credit for the slight tremble of Old Simeón’s fingers whenever his wife took his stiff hand in between hers. She took pride now, in his ability to juggle up a pair of dice and throw them on a parqués board, with the help of his left hand, which was spared by some impossible bifurcation of the brain’s connections.
 
The dice clinked against the glass board and showed a pair of six dots protruding from the white cubes.
 
“How much is that, Don Simeón?” Vanessa said, lifting his arm from the table to prevent him from accidentally pushing the pawn-shaped pieces off.
 
Old Simeón let out a brief growl and stared at the blank air behind Vanessa’s curls.
 
“Twelve,” she answered herself. She took Old Simeón’s red pawn and hopped through the boxed trail. “One, two, three, four…” Vanessa then took advantage of her turn and threw the dice on the board. They spun around until the odds settled for two and four dots.
 
A prolonged sigh coming from the other side of the room stopped Vanessa from killing one of Old Simeón’s red pieces. Doña Rosario’s glasses reflected the blue light coming from a box-shaped TV. The bulging screen showed footage of flooded streets and fallen palm trees, brown heads peering out of hills of roof tiles and window frames.
 
“Not one house is still standing, can you believe it?” Doña Rosario said, noticing Vanessa’s shared interest in the news report on hurricane Iota.
 
“The island will need a full reconstruction, they say,” Vanessa had been following the case from a blue radio that she kept in her room. The numbers were most astonishing. 1600 families, 98% of infrastructure. Still, she found it hard to sympathize with the victims. She couldn’t help but think that her people had probably gone through worse, just nobody had bothered to quantify it. 
 
“Providence Island is a beautiful place,” Doña Rosario said, in her unusually high-pitched tone. “You know where my last name comes from? Abraham Robinson, my grandfather, immigrated from Britain to Providence Island.” The way Doña Rosario pronounced every one of those words with utmost pride kept Vanessa from coming up with any reasonable response.
 
Doña Rosario had a way of talking. When she had given Vanessa the keys to her recondite bedroom, Doña Rosario made it clear that she came from a long tradition of landowners who knew how to manage helpers in the household. “Your nursing title does not make a difference,” Doña Rosario had said. “I still expect obedience and respect in your care for my husband.” Throughout the many months that Vanessa had worked for Doña Rosario, she had come to realize that behind her harsh words stood her unconditional love for Old Simeón, but also her self-remorse for having married a man 15 years older in age. The old man’s life was coming to an end, and he was swallowing Doña Rosario’s own life along the way.
 
From beneath the open windows, not only moonlight leaked through the iron bars, but also the flickering lights coming from a neighbor’s balcony. Behind linen curtains, dark silhouettes danced to the congas in Rodolfo Aicardi’s La Colegiala. It was only late November, but the people of Acacías were already playing New Year songs over indecently loud speakers. At least in that respect, Acacías wasn’t all that different from back home, Vanessa thought. She had also noticed they had the same tradition of making a dummy filled with gunpowder and setting it on fire just as the clock struck midnight. Old Simeón and Doña Rosario never engaged in such activities though, because no matter what day of the year it was, they always went to sleep promptly at 8 p.m.
 
Old Simeón tapped Vanessa’s shoulder with a poignancy that disoriented her. He pointed at the color-lit balcony.
 
“They must be having a party, Don Simeón,” Vanessa said, assuming that was the information that Old Simeón was requesting.
 
“And you?” Old Simeón responded, his words as clear as they ever got, carrying the rasp of an underused voice.
 
Vanessa was not entirely sure what Old Simeón meant. Perhaps he found it strange that someone of her age was playing parqués with an old man instead of curling her hips to tropical beats, or he was wondering why the neighbors had not invited her. Vanessa smiled at the thought of these possibilities.
 
“None of us are supposed to be partying,” she said. “There’s a very bad virus out there, so we have to stay home.”
 
In some corner of the world inside Old Simeón’s mind, he knew it was the pandemic that had insulated his days so much. But Vanessa was not aware of this. She was rather excusing her situation, considering that maybe once it was all over, things would be different for her.
 
“You heard that, Simeón?” Doña Rosario said, projecting her voice to make herself audible to Old Simeón’s almost deaf ears. “Our last years of life, at home.”
 
By the time the news broadcast was over, Old Simeón had already fallen asleep on his wheelchair. His nightly routine consisted of Vanessa and Doña Rosario collaborating to strip him of his clothes and tie his diaper around his waist. The diaper was rather an ornament, since Old Simeón would wet his bed sheets every night, and every day Doña Rosario would replace them with a new set. 

***

​Vanessa had little to complain about. Her salary, although less than legal minimum wage, was enough for her personal expenses. Since Doña Rosario and Old Simeón provided her with a place to sleep and three meals a day, she also had enough money to send to her family in Venezuela every month. She planned to keep saving up to bring her mother with her too, away from a dictator’s injustices and a husband’s infidelities.
 
There was a catch to her living arrangement, though. Some days, Doña Rosario would wake her up particularly early and ask her to make breakfast. Vanessa could tell that Doña Rosario did not like her cooking, as she always complained that she put too much salt on the eggs, or not enough cheese in the arepas. Therefore, Doña Rosario’s request took place only when strictly essential, like when she had to go get fresh milk at the plaza on Saturday morning, or when she attended early morning mass.
 
This time, Doña Rosario had woken her up with a phone pressed against her ear. Doña Rosario had learned to pick up calls, but never to make them, so when some relative or friend called her, she made sure to catch up with them for at least an hour. However, when Doña Rosario had tapped on Vanessa’s door, her furrowed eyebrows and trembling lips suggested that this was not one of her usual bubbly phone calls. Instead, she was quiet, while a female voice at the other end of the line spoke in mechanical shudders.
 
As Vanessa walked up to the kitchen, Doña Rosario took a seat on the adjacent dining table. Old Simeón, his eyelids still struggling to stay open, sat on his wheelchair in front of the TV at the end of the room. In between the whisking of eggs and the patting of arepa dough, Vanessa managed to catch some slivers of Doña Rosario’s conversation—“What do you mean?”, “Hmph,” “God Bless,” “Why don’t you come over?”
 
Judging by Doña Rosario’s choice of the pronoun Tú instead of Usted, the person at the other end of the line could only be her daughter, Nadia. She was Old Simeón’s and Doña Rosario’s only daughter, even after 60 years of marriage. Less often than Doña Rosario would’ve liked, she took her Chevrolet Swift down the narrow road between Villavicencio and Acacías to visit them. When Old Simeón’s pension fell short, her teaching paychecks would pay for the house bills, as well as Old Simeón’s medicine.
 
Vanessa knew rather little about Nadia, but what she’d heard pushed her to garner utmost respect. She heard that Nadia had been in the house when Old Simeón had gotten his first thrombosis attack. He’d fallen on the floor, shaking and salivating as if being possessed by an evil spirit. Doña Rosario had stood frozen, covering her eyes away from the sight of her convulsing husband. But Nadia had been the one to pick her father up from the floor and place him on a chair, before calling every relative in town in search for an after-hours doctor. She was the reason he was still alive.
 
Once Vanessa was done helping Old Simeón eat his breakfast, Doña Rosario gestured for her to sit at the dining table.
 
“Nadia is coming later this afternoon,” Doña Rosario said, but she wouldn’t meet Vanessa’s gaze. “Vanessa, I need your full discretion on what I am about to tell you.”
 
Before making breakfast, Vanessa had tied her black curls into the shape of an onion. The pull of the low-hanging bun tugged at her hair as she nodded.
 
“Simeón’s brother Alberto passed away last night,” Doña Rosario said in a soft voice. “He caught that damned virus.”
 
Even though Vanessa had never heard of said brother, she made sure to state her condolences as politely as possible.
 
“You know he can’t know, right?” Doña Rosario briefly glanced at Old Simeón. “He’s not in the proper state to hear this.”
 
In spite of the prolonged coexistence of the three members of that household, Vanessa was the only one who made an effort to converse with Old Simeón. Sometime after Old Simeón had become speech impaired, Doña Rosario had lost all her patience, seeing that her only companion could no longer reciprocate her interactions. Now she limited herself to short words, and the warmth of touch. Vanessa, instead, would talk to him about the warm weather, the dogs barking outside; anything that crossed her mind. His answers consisted of low groans, unintelligible mumblings, and the occasional phrase that one could judge as either gibberish, or the enigmatic findings of a mind sorting through an extensive past. Vanessa liked to think it was the latter. 

***

​Whenever Vanessa heard Nadia and Doña Rosario talking to each other, she couldn’t help but wonder how it was possible that she sounded so different from them. She was puzzled by their ability to give every syllable a distinct tonality. They seemed to have every unit of sound recorded in a dictionary, that they would parse through in every uttering. They took no shortcuts, unlike Vanessa, who could not find the time to bring her tongue to the roof of her mouth swiftly enough to whistle her words—her ‘s’ sounds would descend into brief sighs. However, she had learned to minimize her vocal sloth during her time in Acacías. Doña Rosario had told her that not everyone in that town would be as kind to her people as she was. 
 
Nadia and Doña Rosario sat on the dining table, their short coffee cups steaming next to their fidgeting hands. Vanessa glanced at them intermittently through the windows, as she pushed Old Simeón’s wheelchair around the house. She could tell that at one point Old Simeón had made a habit of walking around the house, because he seemed to have picked favorite spots to glance at throughout the perimeter. At the back of the house, he liked to look at one of the columns that held up the clay roof where the white paint had peeled off in a shape resembling a trail of mucus left by a slug. At the right side of the house, the edge that faced a living fence which separated their neighbor’s house from theirs, he liked to look at a patch of red ground where grass had refused to grow. From the turning of the soil, Vanessa could only assume that a tree had once stood there, and she imagined it to be as high as the neighbor’s balcony.
 
At the front of the house, Old Simeón usually stared at the plastic bowls filled with brown cat food that sat next to the front door. They owned three cats who spent more time on the streets than at home and would only let themselves be petted by Old Simeón. Today, there were no cats to be seen, and Old Simeón was instead looking through the window, towards where Nadia and Doña Rosario were sitting. Vanessa could tell by the disparity between Nadia’s age and the number of wrinkles that crisped around her eyes that she had a tough disposition. Her downturned lips were unphased by both the taste of black coffee and Doña Rosario’s slow tears.
 
“You must’ve been a really good man, Don Simeón,” Vanessa said, pushing the wheelchair into motion away from the window. “You raised a very strong daughter.”
 
The feeble white hairs on Old Simeón’s scalp trembled with the gush of the wind. Otherwise, he remained motionless to Vanessa’s words. She continued.
 
“I think that’s what matters. Knowing that you’re leaving this world having created something good,” Vanessa said. “Is that more or less right, Don Simeón?”
 
This time, Old Simeón let out a deep mumble and twitched his head in a manner that could’ve been a nod, or an attempt to shake away a mosquito’s itch. Vanessa noticed that Old Simeón seemed particularly light on the wheelchair today. One of the reasons why Doña Rosario had hired her was because of her big arms and thighs. She could manage the weight of pushing Old Simeón’s chair down Acacías’ unpaved roads and steep bridges.
 
“I’ve got a lot to learn from you, believe it or not,” Vanessa continued, ignorant to Old Simeón’s droopy eyelids. “I’ve been thinking about what comes next. For me, you know. I’ve been thinking that maybe after all of this virus thing is over, I could move to the city. Work for a retirement home, maybe? And meet some people. Build something of my own. Wouldn’t that be good?”
 
Old Simeón’s clawed hand suddenly stiffened around the wheelchair’s armrest. He sat with his spine straightened out, fighting against a decade-old hunch.
 
When the clock struck 2 p.m., the designated time for Old Simeón’s daily stroll was over. Doña Rosario and Nadia were still sitting at the dining table, but their urgent whispering had stopped and transformed into vociferous complaining about why the chicken delivery had not arrived yet. Doña Rosario instructed Vanessa to heat up some of the leftover rice from the day before, so she wheeled Old Simeón’s chair to the dining table and secured the brakes before walking up to the kitchen.
 
She had just struck a match alight when the squeak of sliding wooden chairs called her back into the dining room. Back there, Old Simeón was still sitting in his wheelchair, and Nadia and Doña Rosario were kneeling at each of his sides. His expression was twisted so that every one of the creases that time had encroached on his skin were sunken in, and dense tears were running down the labyrinth of his face.
 
“You told him.” Doña Rosario said, turning towards Vanessa’s newcomer presence. She took a step back and kneeled to Doña Rosario’s height.
 
“I swear I didn’t. It must be something else that’s troubling him,” Vanessa said, the sighs in her speech as heavy as ever.
 
Doña Rosario stood up and the folds on her long skirt swirled wind at Vanessa’s face. “He fought in the military, for God’s sake. He doesn’t just cry.”
 
Vanessa continued to excuse herself while she picked herself up from her kneeling trance. Behind Doña Rosario, Nadia took a pack of Kleenex out of her bag and handed it to Old Simeón. He folded his once clawed hand around the tissue and groaned into the white cotton. But all Vanessa could notice was the tightness of the tendons on Doña Rosario’s neck, which pulled her entire face into a murderous stare.
 
“You Venezuelans can’t keep your mouth shut,” she said.
 
That night, Nadia left without saying goodbye to Vanessa, but she found a funeral invitation wrapped in violet ribbons sitting on her lower bunk bed. After writing down an event reminder on her phone, Vanessa turned on her blue radio and pulled out the long antenna to tune in to the nighttime news broadcast. She fell asleep to the sound of a clinical female voice announcing the hopes for a successful vaccine against COVID-19 in early December.  

Laurisa Sastoque is a student of Creative Writing and History at Northwestern University. She was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and currently resides in Evanston, Illinois. Her poetry work has been previously published in Somos en Escrito and the Helicon Literary & Arts Magazine. She is the winner of the Mary Kinzie Prize in Nonfiction for her essay "Contradicting Home; Anecdotes and Aphorisms." She is excited to make her short fiction debut with "To Grow Young," a piece about complicated family dynamics in rural Colombia. In addition to writing and reading, Laurisa likes to spend her time researching Latinx and Latin American history, and taking pictures of her favorite cities. 

 Ernesto había nacido en un pequeño pueblo del estado de Illinois, donde su familia era la única de origen latinoamericano. Él y sus hermanos se habían adaptado muy bien a la cultura dominante, quizás porque durante su infancia eran inconscientes de las diferencias sociales, económicas, raciales o de separaciones que hacen los seres humanos desde que existen sobre la faz de la tierra. Los anglosajones constituían el 99% de la población de ese pueblo, mientras que el resto estaba conformado por negros, a excepción de algunos provenientes de la India que trabajaban para Caterpillar y ADM, las dos corporaciones más grandes de esa región. La familia de Ernesto no estaba incluida en ninguna estadística, pues nunca había participado del censo de la población. De manera que para las autoridades ellos no existían o más bien permanecían invisibles. Ernesto había nacido con oído absoluto, una cualidad musical que le posibilitaba reproducir sonidos sin haber tenido ningún tipo de entrenamiento. Para sorpresa de sus padres, había logrado desarrollar muy sólidas habilidades como músico, llegando a tocar piano, violín y saxofón. Sin embargo, en la escuela nunca le habían dado la oportunidad de tocar en ninguna banda ni en la orquesta. La directora de la orquesta les había explicado muy claramente a los padres de Ernesto que no era conveniente exponer a su hijo al ridículo, pues carecía de la compostura y de la circunspección necesarias y requeridas para representar a la escuela, en caso de que fuera seleccionado para competir contra otras instituciones, y ni pensarlo para viajar a otros estados. Como los padres no tenían ninguna experiencia en cuestiones relacionadas con bandas, orquestas, y mucho menos competencias intercolegiales, tomaron la evaluación de la directora como una apreciación sincera. Lejos estaban ellos de intentar cuestionar a ninguna autoridad.
      Un día cualquiera en la rutinaria vida de la familia de Ernesto, su padre llegó a casa con una novedad que les cayó a todos como un balde de agua helada: tenían que mudarse a otro estado. Debido a la gran crisis económica por la que atravesaba el país, a Máximo, el padre de Ernesto, le habían ordenado trasladarse a Los Ángeles. Las grandes empresas estaban eliminando muchas posiciones, cerrando filiales, y trasladando la mayoría de sus trabajos a México y a otras ciudades de los Estados Unidos. Se trataba de corporaciones a las que no les interesaba la pérdida de fuentes de trabajo para el país ni los efectos negativos en la sociedad. Su único objetivo era incrementar sus ganancias económicas.
      Ernesto y su familia vivieron la mudanza a Los Ángeles con una mezcla de fuertes sentimientos positivos y negativos. Por un lado, lo más importante era que Máximo había logrado mantener su trabajo, lo cual era, dadas las circunstancias, por demás significativo. Muchos de sus compañeros habían perdido sus trabajos y habían quedado literalmente en la calle. Pero por otra parte la mudanza significaba la pérdida de algunas amistades y tener que adaptarse al ritmo de vida de una gran ciudad y de la región del sur de California. Sin embargo, para Ernesto y sus dos hermanos el cambio de ciudad era un rotundo motivo de celebración. Sus padres no comprendieron la reacción tan positiva, pues pensaban que estarían más apegados a sus compañeros de escuela y a sus amigos del barrio. Ernesto, el mayor de los hijos, les aclaró a sus padres que el motivo principal de tanta alegría era el hecho de que pensaba que en Los Ángeles tendrían muchas más posibilidades de desarrollarse como músicos. Luis y Felipe habían seguido los pasos de su hermano mayor en cuanto a la dedicación a la música. Además, tal vez en la nueva escuela les darían la oportunidad de formar parte de una banda o de una orquesta.
      La mudanza se llevó a cabo durante las vacaciones de verano. Los muchachos estaban ansiosos por comenzar el ciclo escolar y conocer a sus nuevos compañeros. Entre ellos habían estado comentando lo bueno que sería asistir a una escuela con muchos estudiantes latinos como ellos. Ya no serían los “raros” de la escuela, sino que serían como la mayoría. ¡Qué alegría tan grande estar rodeado de chicos como ellos! Para las vacaciones Máximo planeó una serie de actividades destinadas a posibilitar la mejor adaptación de su familia al nuevo lugar en que les había tocado vivir. Como la familia de Ernesto practicaba la religión católica, Máximo decidió averiguar cuál era la iglesia más cercana a su nueva casa. La suerte estaba de su parte, pues encontró una iglesia a solo 3 cuadras. Ya frente a la iglesia Máximo trató de calmar los nervios que le producía la nueva situación, respiró profundamente, y se encaminó a la puerta principal. Para su sorpresa, la puerta estaba cerrada con llave, algo que no se acostumbraba a hacer en su pueblo. No podía irse de ahí sin ninguna información, pues deseaba contarle a Gertrudis, su esposa, algo que pudiera alegrarla. Máximo se sentía culpable por la repentina mudanza, y quería hacer todo lo posible para complacer a su familia. El bienestar y la felicidad de todos dependían de él. Luego de pensar durante algunos minutos que le parecieron eternos, Máximo decidió golpear la enorme e imponente puerta de la iglesia. Una mujer de unos sesenta años abrió toscamente la puerta y, con cara de pocos amigos, lo recibió con un monosílabo: “¿Si?”
      Máximo sintió que todo el cuerpo se le había congelado. Fue como si le hubieran echado encima un balde de agua fría. Con voz temblorosa le explicó a la poco amable señora que él y su familia se acababan de mudar, y que lo primero que hizo fue buscar una iglesia.
-La iglesia está cerrada –contestó la mujer al mismo tiempo que cerraba la puerta apresuradamente. Una inmensa tristeza invadió el alma del pobre hombre. Inmediatamente pensó que no podía decirles a su esposa e hijos lo que acababa de suceder. No quería causarles semejante desilusión. Decidió entonces averiguar el horario de la misa dominical de alguna otra iglesia católica. El encargado de la casa que alquilaba le informó a Máximo que había una misa el domingo a las once de la mañana en una iglesia que quedaba a una milla de ahí. Inmediatamente compartió las buenas noticias con su familia; todos estuvieron de acuerdo en asistir a misa el primer domingo en su nueva ciudad. Sería una gran oportunidad para comenzar a establecerse en la nueva comunidad y de hacer nuevos amigos. Ernesto y sus hermanos no estaban muy entusiasmados con la idea de practicar una religión, pero había una compensación: la posibilidad de tocar algún instrumento durante la misa en la banda musical de la iglesia.
      Por fin llegó aquel domingo tan especial. Para esa primera misa en Los Ángeles, Ernesto se puso un hermoso smoking que su madre le había comprado en una tienda de objetos de segunda. Sus hermanos fueron prolijamente vestidos con saco azul y corbata. La misa fue completamente en español; Máximo y su esposa no tuvieron ninguna dificultad en comprender la palabra sagrada ni el sermón del sacerdote. Pero sus hijos, que no estaban acostumbrados a escuchar hablar en español durante tanto tiempo, no entendieron casi nada. El coro de la iglesia cantaba de forma bastante entonada; pero la banda de músicos, a juicio de Ernesto, desafinaba de una manera atroz. A pesar de lo mucho que tuvo que sufrir al escuchar a tan malos músicos, Ernesto sintió un dejo de esperanza, pues aumentaban las posibilidades de que él y sus hermanos fueran aceptados en la banda.
      Al finalizar la misa, Gertrudis, la orgullosa madre, saludó al sacerdote y apresuradamente se acercó al director de la banda musical. Luego de felicitarlo, le habló sobre los antecedentes musicales de sus hijos y le preguntó sobre la posibilidad de que ellos integraran su banda. Mr. Pérez, director de la banda, le dijo que los dos menores eran demasiado chicos, y que a Ernesto podría darle la oportunidad si estuviera dispuesto a asistir a todos los ensayos que se realizaban a diario a partir de las 8 de la noche. Gertrudis le respondió que tendría que consultarlo con su esposo, y que le respondería la semana próxima.
      La discusión en que todos los miembros de la familia participaron giró en torno a la participación de Ernesto en la banda musical de la iglesia. A la tristeza de Luis y Felipe por no poder participar, se sumaba la negativa de Máximo a que Ernesto formara parte de la banda. Según el padre, ensayar durante todas las noches afectaría el rendimiento académico de Ernesto. Además, consideraba que era demasiado exigente, y exagerado, pretender que se ensaye todos los días para una banda musical de una iglesia. Gertrudis luchó con todas las armas disponibles en defensa de Ernesto, hablando de sus sueños como músico, su futuro, y su gran dedicación durante tantos años. Y no dudó en echarle en cara a Máximo su responsabilidad y hasta su culpa por haberse mudado. El pobre hombre, agobiado por tantos ataques de parte de todos los miembros de su familia, no tuvo más remedio que acceder a ese pedido, aunque lo consideraba absurdo.
      La segunda misa dominical a la que la familia de Ernesto asistió, les pareció eterna, no ya por la dificultad del idioma sino por la ansiedad por volver a hablar con el director de la banda. Gertrudis y Ernesto se movieron lentamente a través de la iglesia, dando tiempo a que los músicos de la banda guardaran sus instrumentos y comenzaran a abandonar el lugar. Ya frente a Mr. Pérez, Gertrudis le presentó a Ernesto y le transmitió la decisión positiva de la familia. El director, manifiestamente perturbado, le respondió:
-Su hijo no asistió a ningún ensayo durante toda la semana.
      Gertrudis, muy sorprendida, le recordó que el domingo anterior habían acordado que ella hablaría con su esposo y que recién entonces le diría la decisión de permitirle o no a Ernesto formar parte de la banda. Mr. Pérez, de manera condescendiente, reconoció tal acuerdo, y le dijo que tendría que hablar a solas con Ernesto. Gertrudis los dejó conversando y esperó con el resto de su familia afuera de la iglesia.
      Habría pasado escasamente unos quince minutos, cuando Mr. Pérez y Ernesto se encaminaron rápidamente hacia la salida y se reencontraron con Gertrudis. El serio director, ignorando a los otros miembros de la familia, se dirigió a la ansiosa madre con unas escasas pero rotundas palabras:
-Hay un problemita con su hijo, señora. Su español no es muy bueno. Acá todos los miembros de la banda, además de tocar un instrumento, cantan. Y su hijo tiene un acento demasiado fuerte.
      Gertrudis, al borde del llanto, trató de contrarrestar esos argumentos que consideraba ridículos. Pensó en recordarle los estudios musicales de Ernesto, su oído absoluto, su experiencia, y hasta pensó en hablarle de racismo y discriminación. Pero se sintió mareada, creyó que su garganta se le cerraba, y que estaba a punto de desmayarse. Cuando estuvo a punto de iniciar la batalla, el director la frenó con un duro ademán y agregó:
-Lo siento mucho. Queremos incorporar nuevos músicos, pero tienen que estar preparados y disponibles para los ensayos. Si todavía le interesa, vuelva a hablarme el año que viene.
      Máximo, que se había mantenido todo ese tiempo callado, alzó su voz:
-Un momento. Quiero hablar con usted sobre esta situación.
-Lo siento –dijo Mr. Pérez - se me ha hecho tarde y mi esposa me está esperando para almorzar.
      Los últimos días de vacaciones transcurrieron sin mayores novedades, simplemente tratando de conocer el nuevo barrio y su gente. Los muchachos pasaban las mañanas viendo televisión, y durante las tardes jugaban a la pelota en el jardín de su casa.
      El primer día de clase pasó más lentamente para los padres que para los muchachos, pues aquellos estaban ansiosos por saber cómo había sido la experiencia de cada uno de sus hijos. El primero en contar cómo le había ido fue Felipe, el menor. Con llantos en los ojos dijo que, si bien había entendido todo el material estudiado en sus clases, no le había ido tan bien en los recreos.
-¿Cómo en los recreos? –Se apuró en preguntar Máximo.
-Primero, nadie quiso sentarse a almorzar conmigo durante la hora del lunch. Y luego, en los recreos, nadie quiso conversar ni jugar conmigo. Ni siquiera se me acercaban.
      Gertrudis quiso minimizar la engorrosa situación que había experimentado su hijo:
-Bueno, Felipe, seguramente tus compañeros se conocen desde años anteriores. Tienes que tener paciencia. Ustedes son nuevos en esa escuela. Ya verás cómo poco a poco te van a ir hablando y muchos van a querer jugar contigo.
      Luis, que estaba ansioso por hacer su propio reporte, interrumpió a su madre:
-A mí no me gusta esta escuela. Quiero que nos volvamos a Illinois.
Máximo lo miró con una expresión adusta, como exigiendo más explicación. Luis comprendió el mensaje y agregó:
-¡Un chico me llamó Mexican!  Y por más que le repetí mil veces que yo no soy mexicano, que yo nací en Illinois, me seguía diciendo Mexican, Mexican.
      Gertrudis volvió a intervenir pidiéndoles que se calmaran, que mañana todo iría mucho mejor. Y que no quería volver a escuchar que nadie se quiere regresar a Illinois. Que ya eran suficientemente grandes como para comprender que tenían que vivir donde su padre tuviera trabajo. Que hay momentos en la vida que uno debe tomar decisiones que, aunque no le gusten, son necesarias para el bienestar de la familia.
-Entonces –se apresuró a decir Luis- mañana quiero llevar mi partida de nacimiento. Tengo que demostrarles a mis compañeros que no soy mexicano, que yo nací en Illinois.
      Máximo le dijo que no habría ningún problema con eso, e inmediatamente le pidió a Ernesto que cuente su experiencia. El hijo mayor, supuestamente, podría establecer un tono más maduro en la conversación familiar. Sin embargo, Ernesto también había tenido su propio problema: durante los recreos todos sus compañeros hablaban en español; él no hablaba tan fluidamente en esa lengua y, por lo tanto, no se sentía tan confiado en su poder de comunicación. Incluso un compañero se burló de su marcado acento.
Nuevamente Gertrudis fue la encargada de minimizar la situación:
-De ahora en más todos vamos a ver programas de televisión en español.
      En ese momento la queja se volvió generalizada entre los tres hijos. Ya no solo tendrían que sufrir en la escuela sino también en su propia casa.
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      Era un día tan soleado, como nunca antes Ernesto había visto en su vida. Tal vez por eso tuvo la sensación de que algo extraño habría de pasar. Fue precisamente ese día que una nueva estudiante llegó a la escuela. Su nombre era Leticia; acababa de llegar de Texas. La maestra les había anticipado el día anterior que llegaría una alumna nueva, y que todos tenían que darle la bienvenida y hacerla sentir bien. Ernesto fue el primero en hablarle. Como no sabía si debía hablarle en inglés o en español, sin pensarlo, mezcló los dos idiomas de tal manera que él mismo se sorprendió:
-Welcome to tu nueva escuela –le dijo nerviosamente.
      La muchacha, sorprendida, le agradeció la bienvenida y le correspondió el gesto con una generosa sonrisa que resaltaba sus grandes ojos verdes. No intercambiaron muchas más palabras, sin embargo pasaron toda la jornada escolar juntos. Con el correr del tiempo Ernesto comprendería que aquella construcción lingüística que había emitido de manera completamente accidental, constituiría el elemento con el cual Leticia se había identificado; los latinos del pueblo texano del que ella provenía, hablaban en espanglish, tanto a nivel privado como también en público. Ernesto nunca se había imaginado que tal forma de comunicación sería legitimada por la sociedad. Sus padres siempre le habían dicho que debía hablar correctamente, lo cual implicaba hacerlo en español o en inglés, pero nunca mezclando las dos lenguas.
      En casa, la comunicación entre los miembros de la familia se vio dificultada al tratar de aplicar la regla de que el idioma de uso en el espacio común debía ser solo el español. A pesar de las continuadas quejas de los tres muchachos, no tuvieron más remedio que adaptarse a la cultura impuesta por los padres. Sin embargo, a Ernesto se lo podía ver siempre con buen humor, algo que les llamó la atención a todos en su hogar. Una de las cosas más llamativas era que, cuando estaban los tres hermanos juntos, Ernesto ya no hablaba solo en inglés como lo hacía en el pasado. Paulatinamente fue incorporando un léxico no solo más amplio en la lengua de sus padres sino también mucho más sofisticado. Incluso durante las prácticas musicales que los muchachos hacían en la casa, lo cual a veces creaba algunos problemas de comunicación debido a lo complicado que era aplicar un vocabulario más bien técnico en los ensayos. Pero ni Luis ni Felipe intentaron preguntarle a su hermano mayor sobre el motivo de un cambio tan radical en su actitud pues, además de respetarlo mucho, estaban verdaderamente confundidos.
      No solo a Ernesto se lo veía más contento, sino que se mostraba mucho más seguro, como si hubiera madurado de golpe; hasta su postura corporal había cambiado, llegando a ser mucho más erguida.
      Al siguiente domingo, Ernesto fue el primero en levantarse. Preparó el desayuno para toda la familia, y apuró a sus hermanos para que no llegaran tarde a la iglesia. El primogénito sintió que la misa había durado un santiamén.  Al salir del templo, Máximo advirtió que Ernesto se había quedado atrás. Gertrudis regresó en búsqueda de su hijo y lo encontró conversando con el sacerdote. No se animó a interrumpirlos, y volvió a reunirse con el resto de su familia.
      Ya de regreso en la casa, Máximo le preguntó a Ernesto cuál había sido el motivo de su charla con el cura. El muchacho se aseguró de que todos escucharan de qué se trataba: se había quejado por la decisión del director de la banda musical de no querer incorporarlo. En esa seria conversación le habló de su preparación como músico y también le dijo que se había sentido discriminado por su forma de hablar. Y le reconoció que tiene un fuerte acento:
-¿Acaso no todos tienen un acento? En inglés o en español, cada ser humano tiene un acento. No importa la lengua que se use, una persona de California habla en forma muy diferente a una de Nueva York u otra de Kentucky. ¿No es verdad, padre? E incluso el vocabulario es diferente. ¿No es cierto?
      El sacerdote se había quedado atónito frente a tanta seguridad en un adolescente.
-Pero es que tú mezclas las palabras, hijo –le recriminó el cura.
      De repente, Ernesto sintió que una fuerza interior le llenaba el espíritu.
-¿Usted estuvo alguna vez en otro estado, padre?
-¿En otro estado? ¿Por qué?
-¿Sabe cómo habla la gente en otro estado?
-Tengo parientes en Minnesota. Muchos familiares.
-¿Y ellos no hablan en forma distinta que la gente de California?
-Es verdad, pero todos hablan en inglés. Es cierto que usan un vocabulario distinto, pero siempre dentro del inglés.
-Pero el vocabulario, en cualquier lengua, va evolucionando con el tiempo. ¿No es así? Y esa evolución muchas veces tiene que ver con los movimientos migratorios. ¿No es así, padre?
      El viejo sacerdote limpió con un pañuelo el sudor de su frente. No podía creer lo que estaba viviendo. Hacía unas pocas horas nomás había estado preparando un sermón con el máximo cuidado posible; había basado sus conceptos en años de estudio y de experiencia. Y ahora un jovencito le estaba tratando de dar una lección… Sin pensarlo, le dijo a Ernesto con voz temblorosa:
-Hoy mismo voy a hablar con el director de la banda.
      Ernesto sintió una gran emoción; él mismo no podía creer lo que había logrado. Sus hermanos estaban orgullosos. Su madre también, aunque preocupada por la posible reacción negativa de su esposo. Máximo, tan confundido como el sacerdote, prefirió no emitir ningún juicio de valor. Le dijo a Gertrudis que se sentía mal y que tenía que acostarse un rato.    
      Al día siguiente Ernesto fue a la escuela cargado de nueva energía. Durante todo el camino pensó en Leticia. Ahora era él quien estaba en deuda con su nueva compañera, pues su corta relación le había hecho entender no solamente cosas importantes de la vida sino también de él mismo. El reencuentro con la hermosa muchacha fue tan natural que Ernesto sintió que era como si se conocieran desde hacía muchísimo tiempo. Ahora prestó más atención a cada uno de los detalles de su amiga: su largo cabello rubio, su estrecha cintura, sus delgadas piernas, su forma de hablar y su caminar cadencioso, y sus hermosos ojos verdes que le transmitían paz, confianza y un afecto que nunca antes había sentido en su vida. Nuevamente pasaron juntos toda la jornada escolar. Hablaron largamente sobre sus familias, y cómo se diferenciaban las costumbres de Texas e Illinois. Y también se entretuvieron charlando sobre las distintas formas de hablar en esos estados.  De repente, a Leticia se le ocurrió una idea que podría ser interesante para ambos:
-¿Qué te parece si tomamos una clase de español?
-¿Español? –reaccionó sorprendido Ernesto.
-Por supuesto. Podríamos mejorar nuestra forma de escribir y de hablar.
-Tienes razón. No se me había ocurrido…
-Necesitamos obtener información.
-Hoy mismo voy a hablar con la profesora Méndez –agregó Ernesto, con entusiasmo.
      Efectivamente esa misma tarde Ernesto habló con esa docente quien no solo le dio información sino que lo motivó a tomar una clase de literatura con ella.
-¿Literatura en español? Yo no estoy preparado para eso. Es una clase demasiado avanzada –le dijo, preocupado, a la profesora.
      Sin embargo, ella le dijo que su nivel de español era lo suficientemente bueno como para tomar esa clase.
      Al regresar a la casa, Ernesto les dio la buena noticia a sus padres. Gertrudis se manifestó orgullosa de su hijo. Y Máximo, sin salir de su sorpresa por los grandes cambios que estaba viendo en la actitud de su hijo hacia diversos aspectos de la vida, le preguntó si sabía algo sobre el contenido de una clase de literatura en español. Ernesto les contó que la profesora Méndez le había dado bastante información al respecto, y que no solo iban a estudiar sobre la literatura y la cultura de varios países latinoamericanos sino también de la de los latinos en los Estados Unidos. Por fin iba a poder estudiar sobre temas con los que se podría identificar.
-¿Y son obras literarias escritas en español o en inglés? –le preguntó su padre intrigado.
La respuesta de Ernesto los dejó a todos pasmados:
-Estudiaremos obras en inglés, en español y…
-¿Y…?
-¡Y en espanglish! –agregó Ernesto casi gritando.
-¿Qué…? ¿Estás bromeando, no? –preguntó incrédulo Máximo.
      Toda la tarde tuvo que pasar Ernesto explicándoles a sus padres la nueva realidad lingüística de un grupo importante de latinos que viven en los Estados Unidos, incluyendo la realidad de sus propios hijos.
      Ese domingo Ernesto decidió ir a la iglesia un rato antes de la misa, para poder conversar con el sacerdote. El cura lo recibió muy amablemente y lo hizo pasar a una pequeña biblioteca sobriamente decorada con objetos religiosos, pero evidentemente poco utilizada. El joven le preguntó si ya le había hablado al director de la banda musical sobre su posible incorporación.
-Hijo: hay veces en la vida en que no todo sale como uno se lo propone –señaló el cura a manera de consuelo.
      Ernesto lo interrumpió y con una muestra de fuerte personalidad y seguras convicciones le dijo hablando rápidamente:
-¡Gracias, padre! Estaba seguro de que usted lo iba a poder convencer. Yo sabía que finalmente iban a valorar mi sólida preparación musical, mi dedicación y entusiasmo. Y yo sabía que usted no iba a permitir que se me discrimine por mi cultura diferente. ¿Cuándo puedo empezar a ensayar, padre?
      El sacerdote, sin poder salir de su aturdimiento, le dijo, tartamudeando:
-Vamos, vamos a hablar con Mr. Pérez.
Ambos salieron apresuradamente al encuentro del director. El cura, tratando de imitar la energía y seguridad de Ernesto, le dijo a Mr. Pérez que a partir de ese momento el joven era un nuevo integrante de la banda musical de la iglesia. Y le ordenó que le diera los datos sobre el horario y el lugar de los ensayos.
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      Pasaron varios años desde aquella extraña conversación. Hoy, Ernesto es el director de la banda de la iglesia, y sus hermanos son los dos violinistas principales. La directora del coro es una hermosa rubia de ojos verdes. Los feligreses están contentos con los músicos, y sobre todo se complacen en cantar una nueva canción escrita por el director… en espanglish.-
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​Cabrera has a Ph.D in Spanish with a specialization in Latin American Theatre at the University of California, Irvine. At Millikin University, he was named John C. Griswold Distinguished Professorship for Modern Language (2016-2018). He has published a number of articles about literature, theatre, culture and politics in professional journals in Europe, Latin America and the U.S. and also has five books on theatre, several of his own plays, and two collections of short stories. 9 Cuentos de inmigrantes en los Estados Unidos won First Place in the 2018 International Latino Book Awards, as Best Latino Focused Fiction Book - Spanish.

By Rodolfo Alvarado

From my place in line, I could see my brothers and sisters acting silly in the back of our station wagon, La Blanca. I could also see my amá. She was sitting in the front seat staring straight ahead. She was probably praying. She always prayed until she knew, for sure, we had the job that would get us through the rest of the year.
Seeing me looking at her, she waved and smiled. I didn’t act silly anymore, but to make her feel better, I hid behind my apá and then peeked at her before hiding again. As I kept hiding and peeking, her smile got bigger and bigger.
We were playing Peek-a-Boo. I’d played the game with her ever since I was a baby, and to make her happy, since the first year I’d waited in line. I was eight then, thirteen now, about to be fourteen.
I guess we were having fun, but before she could take her turn, my apá asked me to go and get the letter from the American Government showing he had permission to work in El Norte. He’d forgotten it in the glovebox.
Running up to my amá, I explained what had happened. She found the letter right away and as she handed it to me, she said, “Standing in line, Junior, you look like a big boy.”
Hearing her, my brothers and sisters made funny faces at me behind her back. It didn’t bother me because they still acted like babies, and I was becoming a man, like my apá.
Walking back, I think some of the campesinos thought I was cutting in line because they started looking at me kind of funny. To remind some, and to show others, that I’d already been in line, when I got closer, I waved the letter, yelling, “¡Apá, apá, encontré la carta!” Some stopped staring, but others kept looking at me until they saw me hand the letter to my apá, and then take my place in line behind him.
It took close to thirty minutes for me and my apá to reach the front of the line, and when we did, my apá gave the letter to the foreman. The foreman looked it over, asking, “You, Emilio Rodriguez, Sr.?”
Knowing the foreman was always in a hurry, my apá answered his questions as fast as he could.
“Yes,” my apá answered.
“From Piedras Negras, Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“Speak-ah la English?”
“Yes.”
“How many to work?”
“Seven.”
“That includes you and your wife, right?”
“Yes, and our children.”
“How old are they?”
“Junior’s thirteen, Lala’s twelve, Juan Daniel’s….”
“I don’t need their names, damn it, just their ages. How old are they?”
“Thirteen, twelve, eleven, nine and eight.”
“The eight-year-old? Is that a boy or a girl?”
“A girl.”
“This her first time?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You think she’s ready? We got us a big crop this year. We’re gonna need everybody workin’ every minute of every hour of every day. We don’t need her slowing you or your wife down, ¿comprende?”
“No, señor, she will do a good job; all of them will do a good job. Four of them were here last year.”
Leaning forward on his desk, and his eyes getting mean, the foreman said, “She better, or you’ll find yourselves out of a job quicker than you can say Speedy Gonzales.”
​

​“Sí, cómo no.”
The foreman wrote my apá’s name in the red book with the blue lines. Next to his name, in the place for men, he wrote a one. In the place for women, he wrote a one, and in the place for children, he wrote a five, then he told my apá how much we were getting paid.
Since I’d waited in line, the most my apá had ever made was a dollar fifty an hour, my amá one dollar and me and my brothers and sister, fifty cents. So, when the foreman told my apá he’d be making three dollars an hour, my amá two dollars, me and my older brother and sister a dollar, and the two youngest fifty cents, my apá turned and looked at me. I could tell he was wondering if I had heard the same thing.
I had.
I was thinking the foreman had gone loco, and I knew my apá was thinking the same thing, too.
The foreman wrote how much we were getting paid on a yellow card that looked the same as the one he gave us every year, then he asked if we wanted to rent a camp house.
“Yes,” my apá answered.
The farmers we worked for rented us campesinos, these little houses, what we called, casitas, and they called camp houses. The cost to rent a casita changed from year to year. If you were paid a lot, a casita cost a lot, and if you were paid a little, a casita still cost a lot, but not as much as if you were making a lot of money. If you wanted, you could rent a place in town, but it cost more than a casita, and you had to drive to work every morning, so most campesinos rented a casita. Most of the time casitas were rented to families, but on my first trip I saw at least fifteen men staying in one casita. When I asked my apá why, he said that, “Sometimes, a man had to do, what a man had to do.”
“It’ll cost you thirty-five dollars a week,” the foreman said. “You still want it?”
“Yes,” my apá answered. “Please.”
We worked close to ten hours a day, so I knew there’d be no problem paying the rent.
The foreman wrote the number C-11 on the yellow card. The letter C stood for the camp and the number 11 for the casita we’d be renting. There were eight camps in all and each camp had fifteen casitas. So far, I’d stayed in H-2, E-4, B-7, and in C-8, two times.
The foreman handed my apá the yellow card, saying, “We'll expect you all ready by six tomorrow morning and since we have a bumper crop, we’ll be working seven days a week, ¿comprende?”
“Seven days?” my apá asked.
“Seven days,” the foreman said, “you gotta problem with that, there’s the door.”
“No, señor,” my apá said, “no problem.”
Finished with us, the foreman yelled, “Next!”
My apá thanked him and as we walked out of the office and past the other campesinos in line my apá’s walk was tall and proud, and mine, mine was almost the same.
When we reached La Blanca, my apá handed the yellow card to my amá. As she read it, her eyes got big. “Is this for real, Emilio, three dollars?”
Shaking his head up and down, my apá said, “And you, you and the children, did you see how much you make?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did. I did.”
My amá smiled really big, held the card against her heart and closed her eyes. She prayed and when she finished, crossed herself.
I knew my apá had more to say because he hadn’t started La Blanca. “We’ll be working seven days a week.”
“Seven days?” my amá asked.
“Seven days,” my apá echoed, quietly.
I didn’t know if my apá or amá had ever worked seven days a week, but I knew me and my brothers and sisters never had. Working six days a week was hard, and I knew seven was going to be harder, especially for my little sister.
“What about church,” my amá asked, “and going to the store? What are we going to do?”
Starting La Blanca, my apá said with a smile, “Don’t worry, we’ll find a way. We always do.”
My brothers and sisters didn’t hear what they were saying because they were too busy talking about whether or not we were stopping at Pete’s and then the park.
We didn’t go to Pete’s, and the park across the street from Pete’s, every year. We only went when our parents knew we’d make enough money to help us through the rest of the year. Since I’d made my first trip to El Norte, five years ago, I’d been to Pete’s, and then the park, two times, so when my apá said we were going to Pete’s and then to the park, my brothers and sisters went crazy, but nobody went crazier than my little sister, Esmeralda. She let out a grito.
I’d gone to Pete’s and the park my first year, too, so I understood why she was so happy. In the years before, she, like me and my brothers and sister, had stayed with our amá’s parents, Abuelito Louis and Abuelita Cruz, until we were old enough to work.
In the two times I’d been to Pete’s, we always got our own cheeseburger and Coke, but all of us, even my apá and amá, shared french fries, but this time, we all listened as apá ordered cheeseburgers, Cokes, and an order of french fries for each of us! Hearing this, my brothers and sisters really went crazy. My amá told them to behave, and most of the time they did, but this time they didn’t listen, not until amá said there’d be no going to the park unless they settled down.
No’mbre, they turned into little angels until we got to the park and they finished eating. After that, you couldn’t stop them. They were ready for some fun, and to be honest, I was too, because I knew that after today there’d be nothing but seven days a week of hard work.
My apá and amá always played with us right after we ate, but this time they told us to go ahead, that they’d join us after they were done talking. From the top of the slide, I could see them sitting on the blanket where we ate. I wondered what they were talking about and the words they used, and, as I wondered if I’d ever fall in love, get married and have children, they smiled at each other, and my apá put his hand on my amá’s cheek and kissed her.
Amá always gave him a quick kiss when they were outside or me and my brothers and sisters could see them, but this time, I think she forgot they were outside and we were around, because she kissed him for a long time.
When they finished kissing, they came and played with us. They rode and pushed us on the swings, went down the slide, and played freeze tag. They played Duck-Duck, Red-Rover, Red-Rover, and hide-and-seek. Everyone had such a good time that it was hard for me to tell who was having more fun, my apá and amá, or my brothers and sisters.
When the sun started going down and the mosquitoes got to be too much, we drove to El Gallo to pick up things like bologna, flour, eggs, milk, coffee, ice, and toilet paper. My apá and amá were the only ones who ever went into the store. Being the oldest, it was my job to take care of my brothers and sisters. I never liked babysitting them because I never knew if they were going to listen to me or not, but this time, I got lucky because my littlest brother and sister fell asleep and my brother, Juan Daniel, read a book, while my sister, Lala, worked on a word search puzzle.
By the time my apá and amá were done at El Gallo, and we got to Camp C, the other campesinos and their families were already having their dinner. Most ate burritos they made before leaving home. We were no different. It made the first night at the camp easy on everybody, especially mothers.
Inside, las casitas were the same. You walked into a big room. Part of it served as a living room and the other part a kitchen. The only door inside went to the restroom. We only had cold water and the floors were made of cement. The living room had a small table, two chairs, a coffee table, and a small bed. My sisters slept in the bed and the rest of us on the floor.
The kitchen had a small refrigerator, a small stove, and a sink. A cabinet hung above the sink. Inside there were different colored plates, glasses, and bowls made from metal and under the sink were some pots, pans and a box of forks and spoons—big and small—for eating and cooking. My amá never used any of those things, she brought her own.
The restroom had a toilet, a small shower and one hook to hang towels. Our amá made us take a shower every day after work. I didn’t mind because I was the oldest, which meant I got to go first, after my amá and apá.
There were only two windows: One beside the front door and a smaller one in the restroom. From the restroom window I could see the cotton fields and the clothes lines where we hung our wet towels and our amá the clothes she washed every Wednesday and Sunday.
I liked looking out the restroom window. I’d think about those who’d worked the fields before us, and then, I’d whisper a prayer for them, a prayer that all their dreams would come true.
After praying, I used my pocket knife to scratch a small cross under the window. To see it, someone would have to be looking for it. I thought of it as a gift, un regalo, for anyone special enough to find it.
The next morning, and every morning after that, we woke up at five. We ate a bowl of atole with a slice of butter on top, and while we got dressed, our amá made our lunch.
Walking outside she gave each of us a sack and a gallon of water. Inside each sack were two bologna sandwiches, a small bag of Fritos, an apple, and in each gallon of water, there were always a few pieces of ice.
We thanked our amá and as we waited for the truck to take us to work, our apá told us not to eat until the foreman gave us permission, and to drink our water slowly, or we’d get sick. Then, he’d tell us to make him and our amá proud. My brothers and sisters knew this meant the time for acting silly was over.
The mornings were cold, and when the sun came up, the day was hot. We wore gloves and bandages on our fingers, but they still bled. We filled burlap sacks with cotton, and when they were full emptied them into a trailer. You had to work fast and keep going, no matter what.
When I was eight, and I picked cotton for the first time, I cried and told my apá and amá I didn’t want to work, that it was too hard. They asked me to stop crying; to stop before the foreman heard me. They told me I was doing a good job and then took cotton from my sack and put it in theirs, and when they saw it wasn’t enough to make me stop crying, they told me to pray to la Virgen de Guadalupe for strength. I did, and when I finished praying, my apá said, “Aguántate, mijo, aguántate.”
I’d never heard the word aguántate before, so I asked my apá what the word meant. He told me that it could mean a lot of things, but to him and my amá, it meant to use what life gives you to make you stronger. Some men, women, and children, like me and my older brothers and sisters, understood what the word meant, but others did not. They were the ones, as our apá and amá taught us, who complained about the hot sun, the low pay, the foreman’s watchful eye, or ran away in the middle of the night before all the cotton was picked.
I did as my apá and amá taught me, and as I grew up, I never told anyone about being hot, thirsty, or hungry, but that was me. I wish it could’ve been that way for my little sister, Esmeralda, too, because on the first day of work, she started crying, and even after our parents talked to her, she couldn’t stop, and the harder she tried, the harder it became for her to work. Our apá and amá tried and tried to get her to stop, but she wouldn’t. When the foreman saw and heard how she was acting, he pulled his horse around. As he rode closer, my amá told me and my brothers and sister to keep working.
Riding up to my apá and Esmeralda, the foreman yelled, “What’s going on?!”
“No,” my apá said, as he got up and stood between Esmeralda and the foreman. “She’s okay. She’s okay.”
“She’s yours!?” the foreman yelled.
“Sí, señor,” my apá said.
 “Well, if she’s yours,” the foreman yelled, “you better get her back to work before I have to do it for you! You understand me, boy?”
“Sí, señor,” my apá said—said as he quickly turned around, and, in a voice I’d never heard coming out of his mouth, yelled, “Esmeralda get to work and stop crying, stop crying, now!”
My little sister had never heard him talk that way, too. It scared her—scared her so much that she stopped crying and went to work, right away.
“What’d I tell you, Paco,” the foreman yelled at my apá, “your kids keep you from working and you’ll find yourselves out of a job faster than you can say Speedy Gonzales!”
Thinking my apá needed help, I cried out in a voice—a voice just loud enough so the foreman wouldn’t think I was being disrespectful, “I’ll help her!”
“Junior!” my apá yelled.
Riding his horse right up to me, the foreman asked, “What did you say?”
“I said, I can help her.”
“Help her?” the foreman asked. “Help her what?”
“Work,” I said, as my apá called to me again, “Junior!”
“You think,” the foreman yelled, as he got off his horse, walked up and put his face right in front of mine, “that we’re paying you a dollar, a goddamn dollar an hour, to help someone else do their fuckin’ job?!”
I didn’t know... didn’t know what to say.
The foreman leaned his face closer to mine, yelling, “I asked you a question, boy!”
I looked at my apá, and he looked at me. There was a distance, a distance between us—a distance where a boy—a boy suddenly found himself becoming a man—a man who could no longer turn to his apá to correct a mistake he’d made on his way to growing up. But, there was also the look in a father’s eyes, a look that said, “No, no, my son, my little boy, I am not yet ready to let you carry the load of this world on your shoulders.”
 My apá pulled off the strap to his burlap sack and ran as fast as he could to me and the foreman. In the same voice he used with Esmeralda, he yelled, “Get to work, Junior, now!”
I did as he ordered, and then he started talking to the foreman in a voice loud enough for only the foreman to hear.
Seeing this, my amá told me and my brothers and sisters to work faster. She said it in a shaky voice I’d never heard coming out of her mouth. The sound of it scared me, and as I looked around at my brothers and sisters, I could tell it scared them, too. All of us started working as fast as we could, and when I peeked at my apá, I saw the foreman staring at him with a look in his eyes that I understood right away to mean that the work and the money that would see us through the rest of the year were in his hands. In his, and no one else's.
With a final word and a small bow, my apá ran back and got to work.
Behind me, I could feel the foreman staring down at us from the top of his horse. He wanted us to slow down; for Esmeralda to make a sound; for me to open my mouth; for my apá or amá to check on how we were doing—anything, so he could yell at us again or tell us, as I’d heard him tell others, “What did you wetbacks think this was gonna be, a mother fuckin’ siesta?!”
I was afraid, so afraid that I wanted to cry out to my apá and amá to keep me safe, and if I felt this way, I wondered how Esmeralda must feel, and how my apá and amá must feel, too.
 I’m not sure how long the foreman watched over me and my family. I only know it was long enough that I forgot about him and of being afraid.
For the rest of the day I didn’t talk to my apá and amá, and they never talked to me. But after work, when we were riding in the back of the truck, going to the camp, I apologized to my apá for what I’d done.
He didn’t say anything for a long time, and I knew it was because he couldn’t find the words to tell me how much I’d almost cost my family, but when he finally spoke, he said one word, and one word only, the Spanish word for look. “Mira,” he said, as he lifted a finger and pointed at our family. My amá held Esmeralda in her arms. They were both asleep and my brothers and sister rode on the other side of them with their heads between their raised knees. I couldn’t tell if they were asleep or just resting.
As the truck drove on, I lowered my head between my raised knees, too. I thought about what I’d done; of what my apá must’ve said to the foreman to keep him from firing us; of Esmeralda crying; of my father yelling; of the fear in my amá’s voice; of the look in the foreman’s eyes; of my apá bowing and running back to his burlap sack; his getting back to work as fast as he could, and when it all became too much, I said a prayer to La Virgen de Guadalupe, and when I remembered that there’d be no going to church until we got back home, I began to cry, to cry quietly to myself.
The next day, and for all the days after that, it didn’t matter if the foreman was watching me or not, I worked harder than everybody else. I never said a word to my apá or amá unless they spoke to me first, and, I said a prayer to La Virgen de Guadalupe every night as we drove back to camp.
Doing all of this made me feel better, but when Sundays came I couldn’t keep myself from thinking about what I’d done and feeling sad about not being able to go to church. I missed our Sundays off from work; missed the smell of my amá’s tortillas and the chorizo burritos she made for breakfast; us dressing in the clothes our amá ironed the night before, and then driving to church, where Father Felipe waited to say, “Buenos días.”
I also missed the men talking by themselves after Mass. I watched them from La Blanca, wondering what they talked about, and when I’d be old enough to join them. Yes, I missed all of that, but most of all I missed getting to do whatever we wanted when we got back to the camp and changed out of our Sunday Best.
Sundays were the only days everyone got to do what they wanted. The youngest ran through clothes hanging on the line, played chase, or freeze tag. Those a bit older flew kites, played marbles, or pitched pennies. The oldest, those of us who, like our fathers and mothers, had grown up playing all the games that came before, now played baseball or kick ball. All the while our fathers and mothers sat around campfires talking to each other; the men in one group, the women in another, and when the day was done, families said their good nights and then drifted inside their casitas. My amá would make tortillas and cook us a special dinner. On some Sundays enchiladas, on others burritos y tacos, and still others carne asada, and always, always with a side of arroz, frijoles, chile verde, and to drink, a glass full of ice and orange Hi-C.
After we were done eating, we’d listen to Spanish music on the radio. My apá and amá played cards and dominos, while the rest of us spent time doing whatever we wanted; the only rule—the only unspoken rule—was that whatever we did, we had to do it quietly, and not because our apá and amá needed a break from all the noise, but out of respect for the suffering Christ had endured on the cross for our sins.
The next morning, the men, women and children, who the night before had been the best of friends, treated each other like strangers. It’s funny, but that’s the way our world worked: There was a time to play and a time to work.
For the rest of the time that we were there all of us worked hard, and by the time we were finished picking all the cotton, Esmeralda not only worked harder than me, her pay went from twenty-five cents back to fifty cents an hour. She never said anything bad about anything and when lunch time came she never opened her sack until the foreman said we could, but on the last day, as all the campesinos and their families waited for the foreman to show up so we could get paid, I was reminded that Esmeralda was a little girl when she cried saying adios to her new best friend, Manuelita.
By the time the foreman arrived, the men, and only the men, were already standing in a line in front of Casita #1. It was there where the foreman always set up his table to get everyone paid. This time was no different. The foreman parked his shiny Ford truck in front of Casita #2. The first two men in line helped him set up his table and chair, while the foreman took the metal box with all the money inside and sat down at the table.

​Sitting in La Blanca, I watched as the foreman handed the men an envelope with all the money they were owed, and if they had a family, the money owed to them too. No one counted their money. You were paid what you were paid. If you didn’t like it, don’t come back. As they were paid, and they turned away from the foreman, their walk was tall and proud, and their smiles grew bigger and bigger until they hugged their wives and handed them the envelopes with enough money inside to see them through the rest of the year.
Watching my apá move up in line, I wondered what he was thinking and if he’d truly forgiven me for what I’d done, but above all, I wondered when I’d be able to stand in the line with him.
With his pay in hand, my father turned away from the foreman. His walk was also tall and proud, and his smile grew bigger and bigger until he sat in La Blanca and handed our amá the envelope. My amá gave him a quick kiss and a hug and then led us in a prayer of thanks. After that, the both of them thanked me and my brothers and sisters for our hard work.
It’s funny, but I never once wondered why they got to keep all the money we’d earned. Thinking back on it now, I know it was because my apá and amá didn’t raise me to think that way. No, I always prayed and gave thanks for my family, and when I thought about how much I had almost cost them I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I didn’t because I knew a man would never do such a thing.
As always, I fell asleep on the way home, and as always, since my first year of making the trip to El Norte, I did nothing but dream of picking cotton. Sometimes, I dreamed about a row of cotton that never ended or about a bag of cotton so full I couldn’t move it no matter how hard I tried, but this time I dreamed that the foreman was seated on top of his horse yelling at me, while Esmeralda cried behind me. His eyes glowed brighter and brighter and just when he was about to destroy our world with his eyes, my apá and amá ran and stood in front of me and Esmeralda, and the foreman, seeing his power lost, turned his horse around and quickly rode him away.
I had these dreams for the longest time, and it always seemed that just when I started dreaming about something else, the time to go back had arrived.
This time was no different. Summer was almost here and with it my dreams about cotton were coming to an end. I was fourteen now, about to be fifteen. I was eager, not only to go and work, but to show my apá that I had learned my lesson from the year before.
Yes, I was ready, but this time something happened, something I did not expect. When we got home from church, my apá and amá called me and my brothers and sisters into the living room. I didn’t know what they wanted, but I knew it must be important, because it was the only time they ever talked to all of us at once.
Me and my brothers and sisters stood quietly until my apá finally spoke. “When we were little, me and your amá, we had to work the cotton fields with our families every summer. Not one time did we ever get to stay in school or have a summer to do nothing but run and play.
“It has always been our dream for our children to stay in school, and when it ended, have the whole summer to do nothing but run and play.
“Our mothers and fathers shared the same dream, but for them the dream never came true, but thanks to the money we earned as a family last year, it is a dream that has come true for me and your amá.
“This year, I will be the only one going to El Norte. All of you will stay in school and when school is over, you will have nothing to do all summer but run and play.”
Hearing this, my brothers and sisters went crazy, and Esmeralda kissed our apá and amá on the cheeks and said, "¡Gracias, apá! ¡Gracias, amá!" and then she and the rest of my brothers and sisters ran outside to play. But me? I stayed inside. I didn’t move or say anything.
My amá asked if I was okay, and when I didn’t answer, my apá said if I had something to say, to say it.
I didn’t say anything right away, but when I did, I said I didn’t want to stay home, that I wanted to go and work, that I needed to work for our family. “I want to be a man, apá, a man like you and the other campesinos.”
Finished talking, I didn’t cry, feel sad, or act silly, because I knew a man wouldn’t act that way.
When the evening before our trip arrived, I washed La Blanca and the next morning me and my apá loaded what we needed for the trip before the sun came up. We gave amá a kiss goodbye and then we got into La Blanca. A sack full of burritos rode between us and at my feet were two gallons of water with pieces of ice floating inside. My apá said a prayer for our safe travels, and as we drove away, he slowed down, and looking into the rearview mirror, said, “Mira.”
I turned and looked. My amá stood at the screen door and my brothers and sisters were outside waving goodbye. They had grown a year older, but as I turned and faced forward, I prayed, prayed that they’d remain children for as long as they could.
It took me and my apá less than six hours to drive to the office where campesinos were hired. We stopped once to use the restroom, so the line was short—as short as I’d ever seen it. Standing behind my apá, I pretended my amá was sitting in La Blanca and that we were playing Peek-a-Boo. I took a turn, and she took a turn and when we were finished, I stared straight ahead, like my apá.
When our turn came, my apá handed the foreman the letter showing he had permission to work in El Norte. After looking it over, and writing down my apá’s name, the foreman asked, “Speak-ah la English?”
As my apá said, yes, that yes, he spoke English, I wondered if the foreman ever remembered any of the campesinos he saw year after year, or even those who’d grown from boys to men right in front of his eyes, and as the foreman asked, “How many to work?” I smiled, as my apá said, “Two, only two.”
Hearing him, and with his eyes getting bigger, the foreman looked at me, not my apá, and asked, “Did he say two?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, sir, two.”
Looking like he’d just woke up from a dream, a bad dream, about cotton, the foreman stood up and looked down the line. He leaned to one side and then the other, and then he looked out the window to where the cars and trucks were parked. There were no wives or children to be seen. He lifted his cowboy hat, scratched his head, put his hat back on, and as he sat back down, he said, “What is it with you lazy Mescans, you make some good money one year and the next don't one of you show up to work.”
Me and my apá listened, but we didn’t say anything.
“One dollar and seventy-five cents,” the foreman said, as in the red book with the blue lines, he wrote the number two next to my apá’s name under the place for men.
“A camp house is twenty dollars a week. You want one?”
“Yes,” my apá answered.
There’d be no stopping at Pete’s and the park, but I didn’t let it bother me, because I knew a man never spent money he didn’t have.
The foreman wrote G-8 on the yellow card, and as he handed it to my apá, he said, “We'll expect both of you ready by six in the morning. We’ll be working Monday through Saturday. Sunday’s off. Next!”
I’d never stayed in Camp G before, but I knew it didn’t matter, because the restroom had a window—a window where I’d be able to look out on the clothes lines and the cotton fields and say a prayer of thanks for having Sundays off and for my parent’s dream coming true, and when I was finished, scratch my mark of the cross under the window.
As me and my apá walked out of the office, and past the other campesinos in line, his walk was tall and proud, and now, so was mine.
I wanted to ask him if he’d seen where the foreman had written the number two, but I didn’t, because I knew a man didn’t need anyone telling him—or showing him that he was a man. He knew he was a man and that was it, the end of the story.
Once inside La Blanca, my apá didn’t start her up right away. I knew—knew then, that he had something to say, but instead of talking, he looked away from me, and then, he made a sound, a sound I had never heard coming from him before. He started crying—crying like a man, then a young man, then a teenager, then a boy, then a baby.
I didn’t say anything, because I knew it was what a man would do. Instead, I did what I knew a son would do. I held my apá, closed my eyes, and listened, listened to time floating by. I thought about him, my amá, my brothers and my sisters, then I prayed that one day I’d be able to give them all their summers off, so they could do nothing more than run and play.

​Rodolfo Alvarado is a native of Lubbock, Texas, now living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This story is based on experiences gained while working the cotton fields of West Texas as a boy with his family. His fiction and non-fiction have been published by Arte Público Press, the University of Michigan Press, Texas AandM University Press, El Central, El Editor, and Alpha Books of New York. Noted publications include,Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Michigan for Michigan State University Press and The Untold Story of Joe Hernandez: The Voice of Santa Anita. This biography won the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award and was a finalist for an International Latino Book Award. He holds a Fine Arts PhD from Texas Tech University and has taught at the University of Michigan, Ave Maria University, and Eastern Michigan University, where he was a Parks/King/Chavez Fellow and a University Fellow. This is his first story for Somos en escrito.

​By Sofia Resendiz

After two full days of driving, I can finally see the sign.

As we drive into my dad’s hometown, I’m actually surprised at how normal it looks. I had been listening to my dad go on and on about growing up in Mexico my whole life, and this was not the dying, poverty-struck place he told me about.
The cobblestone roads and tall palm trees are like something off the front of a postcard. The churches are tall and accented with large bell towers. All of the houses we pass are either made from brick or adobe, and the adobe houses are painted crazy colors like yellow or pink or orange. This place isn't dying out. It's colorful, like something out of my old books from kindergarten. I’m just about to tell dad this, but then he pulls the van over by a little orange house that looks like it’s made out of clay.
“We’re here,” he says shortly.
I actually have to hold in a cringe. My dad never talks in short, simple sentences like that unless something’s up. If this were a normal day, I’d get a goofy, “All right, m’ija, the bus is letting off now.” or something cheesy about how he and his brothers built this house “with our bare hands.” But this is not a normal day. This is the day before my grandma’s funeral, and my dad is understandably off. The entire drive from Texas, I think he said ten words to me in total. “Hey, you want to take the next rest stop, or no?”
 Part of me gets that he just lost his mom, but the other part just really wants my normal dad back. I was trying to feel sad about what was going on, I really was. I just didn’t have it in me. I never got to meet Abuela. While she was alive, she never even sent so much as a birthday card or anything, so to me, she wasn’t really more than a wallet-sized photo hanging on our refrigerator. It’s kind of hard to grieve a picture.
I hop out of the van and help unload our stuff from the back while Dad sort of stands and stares at the house. Then I realize he hasn’t been back here in over 15 years. I try and imagine how it would feel if I left our town in Texas, and came back 15 years later. Would it even feel like home anymore?
     The front door of the house opens and a petite, dark-skinned lady steps out, sees us, then walks over and hugs my dad. They look enough alike that I can tell this is my aunt, Tía Paulina. She and my dad talk for a minute, then she comes my way.
“Anna-Rosa,” she smiles. “Mi sobrina nueva.” My new niece. Then she breaks into rapid Spanish I can’t catch. I look at dad for help.
“She says you’re tall and beautiful, like your mom was,” he translates, locking the trunk of the van.
“Oh,” I say. “Um…gracias.”
“Pásenle,” she says, pointing towards the front door. And I know that’s an invite to come in, because my dad says it to everybody who comes over to our house. “Pásenle, pásenle…”
I head into the house, suitcase in hand, and it’s a lot roomier than it looks from the outside. From the front door, we walk right into the kitchen, the floor covered with large, green tiles. A hallway leads to four bedrooms. I know they’re all bedrooms, because they have no doors, just open arches covered with blankets. A girl walks out of one of them, says something in Spanish to my dad, then they hug.
“Anna-Rosa,” dad says. “This is your cousin Lupita. She just turned 16, like you.”
“Hallo,” Lupita says, flashing a pretty smile. Then she stutters through accented English. “I’m so happy to finally put a face on the mysterious American cousin.”
“Hey, that’s pretty good! Did you take English in school or something?”
“Oh, yes. Around here, we start English lessons in laprimaria.”
“That’s elementary school,” dad says.
A few minutes later, Lupita shows me her room, and tells me to leave my stuff there. Since she has a bunkbed, I’ll be staying with her the next two weeks. Then she shows me around the rest of the house.
“This is my parent’s room,” she says. “And this one is my brother Mario’s room, but he’s not home. He works in Mexico City. You meet him at the funeral.”
“Is the bathroom over by the family room or something?” I ask, realizing that I haven’t seen one anywhere in the house.
Lupita grins and points out a window that looks out into the backyard.
“You see that little thing out there that looks like a tool shed?”
“Um…yea?”
“That is the bathroom.”
“Oh.”
“Any more questions?”
“Yea,” I point to the empty bedroom at the end of the hall. “Whose room is that?”
Lupita’s face falls as she suddenly gets really interested in a spot on the tile floor.
“That was Abuela’s room,” she says.
     She looks so sad, I feel like I should apologize and say something like “Sorry for your loss”, but that wouldn’t make any sense. I’m just as much Abuela’s granddaughter as she is. Technically, it’s my loss, too. But when I try to match Lupita’s grief, I come up empty. The next few seconds are long and silent, until they’re interrupted by yelling from the kitchen. It’s my dad and Tía Paulina screaming at full volume in rapid Spanish. I haven’t heard dad like that since the time Bryan from across the street pushed me off the monkey bars in second grade. Lupita’s eyes go big as two grapefruits before she grabs hold of my arm. 

     “Vamonos. Let’s go out the back.” And in one swift move, she rushes us out of the house.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I ask once we’re outside. “What are my dad and your mom arguing about?”
She throws me a confused look.
“You dun’t know? They be arguing on the phone like that for two weeks. Ever since Abuela got sick.”
I think back and it hits me how lately dad’s been hanging up the phone just as I walk into the room.
“Whatever it is, my dad must be hiding it from me. What’s the problem?”
“Your father forgot us, that’s what’s the problem,” Lupita says. “He bought that ticket to America and never looked back. Not even when his own mother was on her death bed.”
“Now hold on just a minute. We wanted to come back sooner, but my dad has a job. If we had come down while Abuela was sick and stayed for the funeral, that would have come out to a month away from work, and we couldn’t afford that! Plus, I had finals at school. We do have lives up there in Texas, you know.”
“Well, I understand,” Lupita says. “But my mother migh' need to be a little more convince before she forgives your father for missing his last chance to say goodbye to Abuela.”
     I’ve barely met Tía Paulina, and already she was already rubbing me the wrong way. What did she expect? For us to just drop everything and−
“May I ask one question?” Lupita asks suddenly.
“What?”
“Texas really isn’t so far away. How come you and your father never come to visit?”
“And what about you guys down here?” I ask. “The phone works both ways. You guys don’t exactly call us up every Christmas. You guys never write. My mom’s mom calls me on my birthday every single year. I never got so much as a birthday card from Abuela!”
I regret that last part as soon as I say it. My dad’s voice rings through my head. “Anna-Rosa, you should never speak ill of the dead.”
“Birthday cards?” Lupita asks. She thinks for a long minute then says: “Wait right here.”
She ducks back into the house, and as I stand there by myself I think--Great. Dad and I haven’t even unpacked our bags yet and we’ve already pissed off two family members. But when Lupita comes back, she doesn’t look mad. Just…tired. She walks out of the house holding a stack of envelopes, all different sizes and colors.
“Here,” she says, putting them in my hand. “For you.”
“What are these?”
“Birthday cards. Abuela went down to the market and bought you one every year.”
I open the top envelope and out comes a glittery little card that says: HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY, 2002. My heart drops into my stomach.
“She would go all the way to San Miguel de Allende,”Lupita goes on. “Just to find you cards in English. That’s a one-hour trip, you know.”
“But I don’t get it. If she went through all that trouble, why did she never send any of these?”
“Because,” Lupita says. “Every year, your father would call, saying he was bringing you to meet the family, but every year something would come up. Abuela was waiting. She was waiting to give you these cards in person.”
​

​Sofia Resendiz is an English student at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California. Two of her short stories, “A Term of Respect” and “Tick Tock,” were selected for publication in the college’s literary magazine, Artifact Nouveau. Upon completing her studies, she plans to continue writing as well as teach literature at the middle or high school levels. She lives in the Stockton, California, area.