her in-laws that lingered to this day and colored all Delia’s interactions with Gabe and Wanda Ortiz.
He’s dying, Delia thought, but he is fine. With that, she clicked the “reply” button and typed:
Dear Lani,
Gabe is fine. No need for you to rush home. I’ll let you know if anything changes.
Delia Cachora Ortiz
She punched “send” without giving herself a chance to reconsider. With the e-mail off in the ethers, Delia found she was far too upset to concentrate. Abandoning her plan to spend the morning working in her office, she switched off her computer, turned off the lights, locked the door, and left.
Out in the parking lot, she climbed into her aging Saab 9000 and headed for the little chapel at Topawa several miles south of Sells. It was the place where her mother had gone seeking refuge and comfort more than thirty-five years earlier. It was where Delia went looking for relief from her ever-present burden of guilt.
Delia knew that being at war with Lani Walker would only worsen the difficult situation with her father-in-law. Fat Crack Ortiz wasn’t simply Leo’s father and the grandfather of the child Delia carried. He wasn’t just the man who had hired her and brought her back to the reservation in triumph years after she and her mother had fled Manny Chavez’s house in Sells in abject terror. Fat Crack was, in fact, the one person who had made their escape possible even way back then. Everything else that had happened to her, good and bad, flowed from that.
Everything else.
I’m scared,” seven-year-old Delia had told her mother. “Do we have to go? Couldn’t we just stay here?”
Ellie Chavez shook her head and kept on packing. “This is my chance to become a teacher,” she told her daughter determinedly, pretending a bravery she didn’t feel. “Sister Justine got me into this special program at Arizona State University. If I don’t do it now, I never will. I’ll be a teacher’s aide all my life-an aide but not a teacher.”
“But why do Eddie and I have to go?” Delia asked. “Couldn’t we stay here with Daddy or with Aunt Julia?”
“No,” Ellie said firmly. “It wouldn’t work. Your father wouldn’t-”
“Your father wouldn’t what?” Manuel Chavez demanded, appearing unexpectedly in the doorway. He stood with his wide body blocking the glare of the afternoon sun and throwing a giant shadow that spread like a dark cloud all the way across the room.
Delia, standing a few feet from her mother, felt a sharp twinge of fear rise in her throat. Even at seven, she knew the danger signs. She could see the half-consumed quart bottle of tequila Manny Chavez held at his side, strategically concealing it behind the outside wall of their government-built house. From Delia’s position, she could see the bottle plainly. Her mother could not.
“I was saying that it would be too hard on you to work and take care of Delia and Eddie all by yourself. And Aunt Julia already has her own grandkids to look after. That’s why Delia and Eddie have to go to Tempe with me.”
“No, they don’t,” Manny said. “Nobody’s going to Tempe.” Stepping forward, he brought the bottle into full view, raised it to his lips, and took a long swig.
Ellie sighed. She and Manny had discussed the ASU program earlier, and she had thought the matter settled. At the time they had reached what she assumed to be a final decision, Manny was on the wagon. Now he was off. That was another reason-the real reason-Ellie couldn’t risk leaving the children alone with their father. There were reasons beyond that as well-painfully secret reasons she had never discussed with anyone, including her beloved auntie-Ni-thahth Julia.
If Ellie’s parents had still been alive, she might have discussed her worries with her mother. No doubt Anthony and Guadalupe Francisco would have been thrilled to look after their grandchildren while Ellie went off to school. Unfortunately, Ellie’s parents were dead. They had died six years earlier in a Saturday-night car wreck as they returned home after buying groceries in Tucson. When it came to taking care of her children, Ellie Chavez was definitely on her own.
“Come on, Manny,” Ellie said reasonably, hoping to cajole her way around him as she had countless times before. “We’ve been over all this. You said I could go and let me sign up.”
“I changed my mind,” Manny said. “Now you’re staying here.”
“Too bad,” Ellie returned. “I’m going anyway, and that’s final. Sister Justine pulled all kinds of strings to make this work. She’s even arranged a place for us to stay.”
“A place for you to stay,” Manny Chavez said pointedly. “I don’t remember being invited.” He paused and took another long swig from the bottle. “I don’t care what Sister Justine did. She’s a troublemaker,” he added. “She’s trying to break us up.”
“Manny!” Ellie exclaimed. “Don’t say that in front of Delia. Sister Justine’s doing no such thing. She thinks I’ll be a good teacher, that’s all. She thinks so, and so do I.”
Manuel Chavez stepped farther into the room. “We were doing just fine with you as an aide and with me driving a bus. Why isn’t that good enough?”
“Because being an aide isn’t the same as being a real teacher,” Ellie insisted. “I want to be one of the first Tohono O’odham teachers here at Sells. It’ll set a good example for our kids and for other kids, too. It’s not right that all the teachers on the reservation are Mil-gahn.”
“You’ll set an example, all right,” Manny Chavez muttered, taking another step forward. “If you leave here, you’ll never come back, and you won’t get the kids, either. I won’t let you.”
“Yes, you will.”
To most of the world, Ellie Chavez included, those three small words, spoken quietly but resolutely, might have been considered a minor act of disobedience. With Manny they provoked outright war. He attacked her with the bottle and with his one free fist while Delia cowered in one corner and Eddie screamed from his crib. Ellie Chavez fought back. Although her husband outweighed her, he was also very drunk. In the end, that cost him.
He landed several telling blows. Delia watched in horror as her mother went down, blood spouting from her nose and lips. She landed on the floor and lay still. Manny staggered over to her. “I told you,” he muttered. “Nobody’s going to Tempe.”
With that, Manny raised his foot and aimed a vicious kick at his stricken wife. Seeing her father raise his foot, Delia knew what he was going to do. It was more than she could stand. With a screech of outrage, Delia rushed from her hiding place. She tackled her father from behind, hitting him just at knee level. Since he was already off balance, Delia’s unexpected blow was enough to send Manny crashing face-first into a corner of the coffee table. As he fell, the bottle was still gripped in his hand. When it smashed into the concrete floor it exploded, sending a spray of tequila and broken glass across the room.
Delia watched him fall and lie still. For several awful moments she expected he would rise and come after her mother again, but he didn’t. Slowly, covering her bleeding mouth with one hand, Ellie struggled to her feet. Bright red blood spewed from her nose and from cuts on her upper and lower lips. A long bloody scrape stretched from the tip of her nose to the top of her forehead, where she had fallen on the side of one of three matching suitcases the nuns at Topawa had given her as a going-away present.
For a moment, Ellie, too, stood over her husband as if expecting he would lumber to his feet and renew the attack. Instead, worn out with a combination of booze and physical exertion, his breathing settled into a drunken snore. Afraid Eddie’s screams might waken him, Ellie grabbed the baby from his crib and tried to quiet him. Once he settled, she examined both children to see if they had been cut or injured by that shower of broken glass, but the blood on the children had come from her own wounds.
Relieved, she passed Eddie to his sister. “Sit here and hold him,” she said. “I need to finish packing.”
Before Manny’s attack, Ellie had been carefully folding and sorting clothing prior to packing it. Now she threw in everything that would fit and then sat on the bulging cases to force the lids shut. Once they were closed she hurried outside with two of the suitcases, only to discover Manny’s pickup was nowhere to be found. Rather than bring it home, Manny had evidently hidden it. It was one more way of making sure his wife didn’t leave.
Had Ellie gone searching, she probably could have found the truck. It was most likely at Manny’s parents’ house or else at his brother’s, but there wasn’t time to play hide-and-seek. Praying Manny wouldn’t awaken before she returned, Ellie took the kids and trudged as far as the pay phone outside the trading post, where she placed a call to Sister Justine in Topawa.
Sister Justine came at once in the convent’s nine-passenger station wagon. She looked at Ellie’s bloodied face and shook her head. “You should go to the hospital,” she said.
