But her daughter sat absorbed in conversation with her great-aunt Mercedes and Vanessa’s brother Tomás, who struggled to hold a hissing Linda in his arms as the cat’s eyes darted from face to face in fear.
“She clearly doesn’t like being held,” Aunt Mercy said to Tomás. Linda began to claw frantically.
“Fuck!” Tomás yelled. He let the cat go, and she darted into the hallway.
“Oh.” Jeanette placed her plate of hummus on a chair and examined the scratches blooming on Tomás’s arms. “Let me get you a bandage.”
“No!” Carmen yelled over the din. “I’ll get it!”
In the bathroom, Carmen closed her eyes. She visualized the cheerful, welcoming hostess she wanted her family to see. Martha Stewart, she told herself. Nitza Villapol. She opened her eyes. Carmen shuffled out with a bottle of rubbing alcohol in one hand and loose bandages in the other.
Mario stood in the middle of the living room with a bouquet of grocery-store carnations. He wore black pants and a thermal much too warm for Miami in November. Jeanette grabbed Mario’s hand and pulled him toward Carmen.
“Hasn’t it been forever since you saw Mario?” she called, her tone artificially cheerful, too nervous and fidgety.
Mario didn’t meet Carmen’s eyes, but he gave her a tepid hug. Carmen wanted to scream at him, blame him for something, anything, for everything, but she tried to remain composed, tried to remain Martha Stewart.
She looked after every detail. Appetizers restocked, toilet paper in the bathrooms, AC temperature right. She looked after every detail to avoid thinking about blood, to avoid looking at Jeanette, to avoid mixing the two.
The conversation, once everyone sat for dinner, was painstaking, fifteen people desperately waiting their turn to insert an opinion, nobody concerned with what anybody else thought about anything. Perhaps every conversation played out like this, and it was only now, aware of every move, every reaction, that Carmen realized it was a miracle human beings learned anything about each other at all.
“So what do you do, Mario?”
“Is there pork too? I always say it’s not a real feast without some puerco asado.”
“I’m in retail.”
“In Cuba, every party, there was pork. Every party, a pig killed.”
“That’s right! No pork, no party.”
“Retail?”
Jeanette barely spoke. As usual, she shriveled in Mario’s presence. Jeanette moved the food around her plate and looked from person to person and occasionally sighed and dabbed her lips with a corner of napkin. Carmen smiled politely when her second cousin Vivian’s husband complimented her truffled mashed potatoes. She laughed when her uncle, eighty-nine and still a chain smoker, told an unfunny political joke. She asked a question or two about her other second cousin Delia’s new job in real estate. But then Pepe got out of hand again.
“How is Dolores?” he said, turning to Carmen. He knew, like their entire family knew, that Carmen didn’t speak to her mother.
“You know, I spoke to Maydelis in Cuba, Jeanette,” he said, not even waiting for an answer. “She said Dolores won’t stop asking about you. She tells Maydelis constantly that you and her must work to reunite the family.”
“I love Maydelis,” Jeanette said. “We email all the time. I’d love to go to Cuba. Maydelis says—”
“Listen,” Carmen interrupted. “Dolores just means to make trouble—”
“You mean your mother—”
“I mean Dolores—”
“Hey, you know what I learned, Jeanette?” Pepe’s daughter said, staring him down and turning to Jeanette. “Our great-grandmother Cecilia worked at a tobacco factory that still makes cigars.” Jeanette looked uneasy, balling the napkin in her hand. “And our great-great-grandparents probably, our great-great-great-grandparents probably. Like, this whole legacy and you can just buy one of these cigars and like you feel like you’re holding all this history in your hand but you don’t really know what it means and—”
Mario stood, clearly sensing the tension, and said something like “Speaking of cigars, I need a cigarette break.”
Vanessa, always with her froufrou talk, always talking too much. Jeanette asked Mario if he wanted her to go with him. He told her to stay. Carmen excused herself a beat later.
Outside the street was empty, peaceful, her family’s cars packed in the driveway and spilling onto the curb, announcing that hers was a full home. She could hear the stream of conversation as she closed the door. Cuba this, Cuba that. Cuba Cuba Cuba. Why anyone left a place only to reminisce, to carry its streets into every conversation, to see every moment through the eyes of some imagined loss, was beyond her. Miami existed as such a hollow receptacle of memory, a shadow city, full of people who needed a place to put their past into perspective. Not her. She lived in the present.
Carmen was surprised to find that Mario had crossed the street, that he stood on the lawn of the neighbor’s house, the monster house. He faced away from her, so he couldn’t know that she was there, watching him. Mario shook a cigarette pack on the palm of his hand and pulled one out. He lit it with a hand cupped around the flame. Then he took something else out of his pocket, something orange, a small cylinder.
As if on cue, Carmen heard the growl from before, the shriek, as Mario flinched and dropped his cigarette.
“What was that?” she yelled, rushing to his side. “What was that?”
Mario turned to face her, his mouth agape. “I—don’t know,” he said. “It sounded like … a lion almost?”
“No!” Carmen yelled. “In your hand! What was that? A medicine bottle, wasn’t it? You’re trying to ruin her again, aren’t you?”
Mario’s mouth still hung open, and he looked at Carmen as if taking her in for the first time. She regretted the suit, felt ridiculous in her sensible heels, sweat rolling down her back. She wondered what Jeanette had told Mario. If she shared too much, if she talked too much.
