Chapter Seventeen

ELLIE LET HERSELF into her parents’ house, closed the door behind her, and threw the locks gingerly. She toed off her shoes next to her father’s tattered boots. As she passed the stairs, she rubbed the worn newel post the same way she had when she was a child sneaking to her grandmother’s room. A faint yellow strip glowed under the door, and she smiled. Abuela slept fitfully. If the light was on, she was happy to have visitors. Ellie visited like this often, keeping the old woman company in the dark, close hours before dawn. Occasionally, she would come across one of her brothers doing the same.

She opened the door to find Abuela propped up in bed, humming along with a Spanish music station while a veladora burned low on her nightstand. Its weak flame cast more shadow than light on the dozens of frames on the walls, crowded tight like three-dimensional wallpaper. Every new photo sent from Mexico got added, Abuela wanting her family close despite the distance. The black-and-white images were Ellie’s favorite. She’d spent hours of her childhood in this room, hovering her finger over one face and then another while Abuela recounted their history. Their names sometimes slipped Ellie’s mind, but their stories didn’t. The mustached man on a horse was the cousin-who-fell-down-the-well. The dour woman making tortillas was the aunt-who-might-have-killed-her-fourth-husband.

Abuela’s creased, wrinkled face burst into a smile. “Mi solito!” My little sun. She’d used the nickname the first time she saw Ellie smile as a baby.

“Hola, Abuela.” She gave her a kiss on both papery cheeks, then held up a DVD case. “Guess what I found?”

“El Bolero de Raquel! I love Cantinflas in this one. The way his hips move…” Her own hips shimmied under the blankets, resurrecting the memory of a thousand dances.

Once, Ellie had been small enough to stand on Abuela’s feet as they moved around the kitchen together, the rhythms sinking into her body. “I know how disappointed you were the last DVD got scratched.”

“Will you put it in the player for me? To be ready for later.”

“We can watch it if you want.” She loaded the disc into the tray.

“No, no. Now is time for talking. It has been so long since your last night visit.”

Abuela’s gentle rebuke stung more than any scold from her mother. The dates with Olivia had absorbed her, and too much time had passed. “Perdona. I should’ve come sooner.” Ellie climbed onto the bed, careful not to jostle her. Her petite grandmother held a wiry strength long into old age, but the last few years had whittled her to skin and bones. “How are you feeling?”

“Old. The same way I feel every day.” The raspy chuckle made Ellie’s heart ache. Abuela’s laugh used to be loud and long.

Resting her head on one bony shoulder, Ellie stretched her legs well past the small lump where Abuela’s feet rested. She remembered, at ten, realizing she was taller than Abuela, how her excitement had turned to unease. Her grandmother had seemed ageless until that day, when Ellie’s body signaled the passing of time for both of them.

“She must be special to have stolen your voice, mi solito.”

Ellie snorted. She never needed to start a conversation with Abuela. Somehow, she just knew. “She is special. Very special.”

“Is she as chatty as the last one?”

A loud cackle erupted, and Ellie clapped her hand over her mouth to avoid waking her parents. Abuela hadn’t cared for Angie, the only time they’d met. It was right before the worst of their problems, and her grandmother’s dislike signaled the end more clearly than anything else. “No. She’s quiet. Much quieter than anyone I’ve dated.”

“Good. You talk enough for two people anyway. What is her name?”

“Olivia.”

“A gringa?”

“Yes. She’s blonde, very striking, and tall.”

“Striking?”

She’d taught Abuela English as a child, doing her school worksheets together, but certain words still stymied her. “It’s like beautiful, but different. She has these sharp features. You notice her immediately because she strikes your eye in a specific way.”

Abuela mused on the word as she rubbed her rosary. The click of the wooden beads blended with the maracas on the radio. “How tall?”

“An inch more than me.”

“It will be like talking to a tree! You cannot find a shorter woman?”

“Angie was short.” She arched an eyebrow at her grandmother. “Which would you rather have, short and chatty, or tall and quiet?”

Abuela pouted for a second, then grinned. “Tall and quiet.”

“Good, because I already made my pick.”

“Is she kind to you?” Abuela’s tiny hand, peppered with age spots, was swallowed by her own.

“She’s kind and thoughtful. And serious. You’ll like her.”

“Is she serious in her heart, or serious because of life?”

“Both. But life has been particularly cruel to her.”

“Tell me.”

“She’s a widow.”

Abuela snatched her hand back and poked Ellie in the leg. “I told you when you were little not to sweep over your own feet. Now look!”

“Ow!” Ellie grinned at the old superstition. “I don’t think my broom habits got us here.”

“What happened?”

“Her wife died in a car accident, an accident that almost killed her and their son as well.”

Abuela tsked and painted a cross over her heart, kissing her rosary at the end. “She loved this woman very much?”

“Beyond words.”

“And you are not jealous of what was between them?”

“No, I’m not jealous.” She could say those words and mean it now. Her overreaction to the photograph still bothered her, but the envy had disappeared. “What Olivia had with Sophia… If she loved that way once, maybe she can again.”

“Good girl. You say she has a son?”

“Ben. He’s eleven and sweet. He’s also autistic.”

“Like the ones you work with? Who don’t have the words?”

“Some kids have trouble with words, especially in my first job, remember? But Ben speaks pretty well. It’s understanding emotions, his own and others’, that can be hard.”

“Emotions give everyone trouble! Why do you need a name for that?” Her grandmother lifted a misshapen mug from her side table and took a sip of water. “Abeula” was spelled out in lumpy letters. Ellie had made it in school the year Abuela came to live with them. Seeing it cradled in her hands, still intact after thirty years—a mix of love and guilt swelled in her throat.

“I’m sorry I haven’t visited lately. I shouldn’t be so thoughtless.”

“You are not thoughtless, cariño, but when you fall for someone, you fall with everything, and it is all you can see for a time. That’s how I know you love this woman. It is the longest I have gone without a night visit, the longest I have watched you fall. I worry though. Olivia’s story is not a simple one.”

Ellie stepped carefully around the word—love. If she used it internally or with others, it might slip out with Olivia too soon. “She’s an amazing woman. Her story, it’s just a part of her.”

“True, true, but her son is a child, not a story. How you feel about Olivia, it’s easy for you, sí?”

“Sí.” She shifted to meet her grandmother’s rheumy eyes.

“Loving a child is easier and harder than loving an adult.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think of your mother, and her love for you. You are simple to love, mi solito, but when you told her about your heart, the way it is drawn to women…”

The flame on the prayer candle guttered a fitful light through Our Lady of Guadalupe. Devout as Abuela was, she had accepted her granddaughter completely. It hurt, still, how her mother had to be scolded by her mother-in-law into following the same path.

“And Juan, he made it easy for your mother to love him when he was a child, but now, he makes it hard. He uses that easy love against her, knowing she cannot forget it.”

A large family photo dominated the space above the nightstand. Juan’s stony face glared back. She had no memory of her oldest brother as a happy boy. He’d been thirteen when they moved. By the time she was old enough to know him, he was an angry teenager, forever bitter about slights at school and the way his struggle to assimilate isolated him.

“It’s early. Nothing’s set in stone.”

“Which is why you must be careful with this boy. His heart is the most vulnerable. He lost a mother, the worst pain for a child. If you enter his life, you must stay there at all costs, even if he makes it hard. Remember this when Olivia fills your thoughts—always leave room for her son.”

Talking about Ben felt presumptuous, but Abuela was right. At some point, she would have to commit to him, as well as Olivia. “I will.”

“Good.” The radio switched to “Mi Gente,” and Abuela’s hips shifted minutely again, unable to resist the beat. “When do I meet this tree of a woman who steals mi nieta’s tongue?”

“It makes me happy you want to meet her.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Plenty of abuelas don’t want to meet their granddaughters’ girlfriends.”

“Plenty of abuelas son estúpidas.”

Two side-by-side photos from her high school and college graduations caught Ellie’s eye. In each, she and Abuela hugged, their identical, wide smiles beaming at the camera. The young woman in green robes hadn’t come out to her family. The woman in maroon had. Yet nothing about her grandmother was different; her fierce love radiated equally from both images.

“Why were you okay with me coming out?” Ellie hadn’t asked this before, and Mamá’s voice sounded in her head—never question good news, just grab it and run.

“If I were not okay, you would still be lesbiana, sí?”

“Yes, but—”

“My opinion cannot change who you are. It can only change how we are. So when you tell us, I must decide what is important—my opinion, or you? It is not hard when you think of it that way.”

“And the church?”

“Pfffft, the church is wrong about many things. They just drag their feet like a stubborn burro. Look how long it took them to apologize to Señor Galileo! They will admit this mistake one day too.” The radio changed again, energetic salsa giving way to “Por Fin” and its lovestruck lilt. “Oh, my favorite! Will you sing it with me?”

Vision blurry with tears, Ellie squeezed her grandmother’s hand. “Of course.”

Abuela’s thin, reedy voice picked up the lyric, and Ellie joined her as she had so many times before.