Chapter 45

It took nearly thirty minutes, which included Ricardo standing in as a drunken English translator, for my aunt and uncle to explain to me exactly what was going on or, more accurately, exactly what had happened more than three decades ago.

Apparently my grandfather was no saint, no noble man who’d moved his family from Puerto Rico in search of better opportunities. He was an adulterer, a womanizer, a deadbeat dad. He cheated on my grandmother (they wouldn’t say with how many women, but I got the impression that the list was rather lengthy) and one liaison had resulted in pregnancy. The woman, who my uncle referred to in several colorful Spanish curse words rather than by name, made sure the entire town knew who the father was. That’s how my grandmother found out about her husband’s infidelity—from neighborhood gossip. She was the last to know.

According to my Uncle Miguel, my grandparents may have survived the ordeal if the “otra mujer,” or “other woman,” wasn’t so “loca.” He told stories of the woman screaming on their front lawn, stripping her clothes off until she was completely nude and demanding my grandfather take responsibility for the baby in her stomach; she ambushed my grandmother in the center of town and hollered that her husband didn’t love her and that she wasn’t enough to keep him. My uncle called it “los días oscuros,” the dark days.

Being human, my grandmother could only take so much; but being Catholic, she couldn’t accept a divorce. She demanded the entire family leave not just Utuado, but Puerto Rico. She wanted no reminders of what her husband did and my grandfather, who was in no position to argue, complied with her demands. They left Utuado before the baby was born and never came back. My father was ten at the time.

According to Uncle Miguel, to the best of his knowledge, my father had no idea what was going on but his older brothers, my uncles Roberto and Diego, may have figured it out. Even if they had, my uncle was certain Roberto and Diego would not have told my father. He was the baby of the family, five years younger than Roberto and seven years younger than Diego. He said those boys spent their lives protecting my father from bullies, from teachers, from all things negative. Once, when my dad came home from school with a swollen black eye, my uncles tracked down the kid who slugged him and dangled him over a rushing river by his ankles. The kid was so petrified, he peed his pants. It was the last time anyone in Utuado messed with my father.

But, of course, Uncle Miguel couldn’t be certain who knew what, because the entire family cut off contact with everyone from Puerto Rico the day they left. That’s why my uncle didn’t attend my grandfather’s funeral, that’s why none of them did.

He paused as he told that part of the story. His voice was low and sad, but not bitter, just defeated. He said he didn’t think my parents chose not to invite him; he suspected my grandfather had asked them not to out of respect for my grandmother. They had spent their lifetimes hiding this secret from their children and their grandchildren, and my uncle knew that neither would have wanted the truth to come out during their funerals.

I don’t know how long I had been crying. The tears dripped from my eyes like a leaky faucet, slow and steady but not fitfully. It all just didn’t seem real. I was sitting in a dilapidated shack of a bar on a rural mountain in Puerto Rico with relatives I had known for less than two months, listening to a story that made my family sound like the cast of a bad movie. My grandfather, the villain; my grandmother, the victim; my uncles, the co-conspirators; and my father, the innocent. Things like this just didn’t happen to my family. We didn’t have dark secrets or skeletons in our closets; we were far too boring. I was certain of it. Or at least I had been, up until an hour ago.

But now everything was different. They were telling the truth. I could see it in their eyes.

My grandfather had another child, a girl, named Teresa. She was thirty-five years old and she had a child. I had already met her.