Mario dug into his pocket again and pulled out a prescription bottle.
“I knew it!” Carmen screamed.
Mario handed the bottle to her and Carmen looked at the label. Prilosec. Her late husband had taken the same prescription antacid. He had suffered from terrible heartburn. When they walked back to the house, Mario didn’t mention the growl again. They didn’t speak at all.
Inside, Carmen began to clear plates loudly though Rosalinda still picked at the congrí. Her guests quieted in her presence. Diana’s eight-year-old daughter—or was she Susana’s daughter? there were too many children to keep track of—followed her into the kitchen. Carmen could hear laughter in the dining room.
“Hi,” the someone’s daughter said. “My mom said guests should bring their plates to the kitchen.”
“Oh,” Carmen said, annoyed. She didn’t want to speak to anyone. “That is very nice of you, Ana.”
“That’s not my name,” the girl whose name wasn’t Ana said.
Carmen snapped off her rubber gloves. She leaned against the counter and considered the child.
“My name is Lila,” Lila said.
Ana, Ana. It came to her, why she’d called her that.
Lila squinted up at her.
Nowadays, it was all over the Spanish-language news: the ICE raids, the young people in graduation caps handcuffed to congressional desks, saying this is my home, let me stay. Red-faced men on TV shows snarling alien, snarling jobs, snarling it’s about time we take back our country. Our country. Take back. She didn’t agree with some of the other Cubans her age who said things like we’re not like them, we belong here, we’re political refugees. Carmen had lost a parent, her father. And she knew that rip, that tear, that hollow feeling like a tooth pulled, forever something off, forever a space. Jeanette thought her so old-fashioned, so backward in her opinions. But no, she was fair. She wanted families together. Shouldn’t that count for something?
“I’m going to Cuba in three weeks,” Lila Not-Ana said.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Carmen said.
If she could go back in time, maybe she would have helped the girl, Ana, though she had no idea how. But police. She’d thought police. She wondered where that girl could be now. Hopefully, here. Hopefully, home. Some of those same Cubans said, these new Cubans, coming now, they get here and turn right back around and go back to Cuba, and they want the government to give them everything, they are not like us. They also said immigrants from other countries weren’t like them. Like us. As if she were like anyone. She was more fair-minded, she thought, she didn’t even mind the New Cubans, Jeanette didn’t understand.
“My mom says you won’t go to Cuba. That you won’t even talk to your own mother because of politics,” Not-Ana said. “And she doesn’t think it’s very nice and she says family is what’s most important and she says thank God we know how important family is and how we all need to be together and she…”
Carmen stared, astounded. Had Jeanette blurted her business this way as a little girl? She couldn’t imagine it. Did she do that now?
“Well, tell your mom—”
“Lila!” Jeanette carried a pile of plates balanced on her forearm into the kitchen as if she were an actual waitress. “Pero how big you are.”
“You’re not big,” Lila said with a shrug. She fake-curtsied and walked off, giant bow on her red velvet dress bouncing up and down.
“I don’t like her,” Carmen said, taking the plates from Jeanette.
“She’s literally a child, Mom.”
“Some children talk too much. You never talked so much.”
“Oookay, Mom,” Jeanette said. “Anyways, I think me and Mario should go.” She held the dishwasher open.
“What? We haven’t even had dessert yet. Vivian made pumpkin pie, Mercedes brought a flan.”
“I feel like everyone is judging me, you most of all.” Jeanette ran a hand over the marble countertop. Carmen tried to decipher a code in her eyes—were they red? Was she just tired? Were everyone’s eyes always somewhat red? She wondered if her daughter was the kind of woman who would leave a trail of blood without even noticing.
“Honey, nobody even knows about your … problems.”
Jeanette leaned back. She let the dishwasher door dangle open. “That’s just the thing,” she said. “I feel like all you care about is how people see you. How they see me. I feel like I’m constantly pretending, constantly afraid to say the wrong thing.”
Carmen wondered if Mario felt strange at the dinner table without Jeanette, whether he talked with other guests or felt like she would, counting the seconds until Jeanette returned. Carmen wondered if Mario would tell Jeanette about their encounter.
“You still don’t even tell the truth about Dad,” Jeanette said. “Every therapist I’ve spoken with says that’s unhealthy.”
Carmen’s hands shook as she rinsed each plate and placed it in its slot in the dishwasher. Of course it always came back to this, and each time it felt like an accusation, like Jeanette faulted her for what had happened even if she’d never say that. Carmen placed a rinsed spoon in its receptacle, and she felt the bile rise. To be around Jeanette was too painful. Was that the real reason she’d banned her? Had she just forgotten?
Of course Carmen hadn’t known about the abuse. For God’s sake, she’d stayed with Julio because she’d thought he had a level of love and affection for Jeanette that would dissipate under the weight of separate homes. Because she, Carmen, knew better than anyone what it was to lose a father. She’d never understand why Jeanette had waited until Julio died to tell her. Why she had let Carmen mourn this man, live with him all those years, sleep in a bed beside him. This man who was now an infection eating through her. She would have killed him had she known. She would have called
