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AFTER DINNER, ROSITA said, “Let’s sit inside tonight.” It was stuffy inside, cooler out, so Ramón knew she wanted to discuss a topic not for the neighbors’ big ears. He was tired after another day of fighting the inertia of unhappy workers and worrying about his brother’s loyalty, but he stayed up until all their girls had gone to bed. He, too, had sensitive thoughts to voice. He followed his wife into the kitchen. Most of the house was furnished with the history and tastes of the Monteros, but the Formica-topped kitchen table where they now sat had been his mother’s. Rosita bent over to sweep up two small barrettes from the tile floor and dropped them on the table beside the day’s newspaper. No matter how much she scolded the girls, the small things still escaped her control. Her skin glowed with perspiration. She wiped a drop away from her cheek with the back of her thumb.
“Our children will go without us for now,” she said.
Quique was gone. What could she be thinking? “How? Why now?”
“The Sisters Montero have pledged to get all of our children off the island.” Rosita lifted her dark, wavy hair from her neck and let it fall again.
Ramón felt a familiar stir, despite the serious conversation, or maybe because of it. He folded the newspaper and pushed it aside. “What happened?”
Rosita settled her elbows on the table. “Lola saw missiles, the worst ones. With her own eyes. She was coming home after cooking for the Soviet soldiers and was asleep when the Russian driver took a wrong turn. Such a little mistake. But then the Russian captain . . .” She covered her mouth with both hands, as if she were praying into her fingers.
“What happened?” Ramón said again, softer. He reached across the table and spread his slender hands flat in front of his wife.
She spoke from behind her steepled fingers, her eyes wide and brimming. “They shot him—the boy—the driver—just like that. He was just a boy, Lola said.”
Ramón shook his head slowly. He turned his palms up and Rosita clasped his fingers.
“If they have so little regard for Russians,” Rosita said. She squeezed harder. “They’ll think nothing of taking Cuban lives.” She sniffed. Her nose had reddened with her tears.
He loved her at that moment, not the he didn’t love her most of the time. But this. If he were dying far from home while defending a cause he wasn’t sure of, he would want some unknown local woman to mourn him simply because he was a mother’s son. For this he could almost forgive the flirtations on the beach and at the club, the new shoes instead of meat from the black market, the insane loyalty to her sisters.
“The Sisters have a plan?”
She drew her chair closer. “I’m not supposed to tell. Even you.”
He sat back and threw his hands into the air. Those goddamn Sisters, thick as thieves. His moment with Rosita was ruined. “Then don’t.” Maybe he shouldn’t say anything about his brother. And he certainly couldn’t say anything about her brother’s disappearance.
“Ramón, no.”
He went to the cupboard and took down a red juice glass and a bottle of rum. He poured himself three fingers’ worth.
“Mami!” Margo’s voice floated down the hall. She was their youngest, sensitive to the appearance of saints and the psychic noise of arguments.
“You see? You’re upsetting her,” Rosita said, rising from the table.
“How do you know? Maybe it’s the Madonna again. She seems to like your family.”
Rosita skirted the table and strode out, leaving Ramón to his rum. He sipped the warm drink and thought for the first time what their evenings would be like without that small voice to interrupt them. He wanted to wait until the whole family could leave together, he, Rosita, Virginia, Alma, and Margo, moving as one. But it was not to be. He had gotten used to the idea of movement, but not of separation. Well, he would have to see exactly what the plan was. Rosita returned and sank into her seat. He slid his glass across to her and she took a sip.
“Which boat?” he asked.
“Carlos—”
“Figueroa? Never.”
“He’s family.” A distant cousin on her mother’s side.
A whole other clan he had to deal with. “So what? That lizard takes advantage of young girls whose parents pay good money for safe passage. Then he gets sloshed at the Bohio and brags about it. No, I’m not letting Virginia near him.”
“How do you know this? You don’t go to the Bohio, do you?”
“Of course not, but I have it on good authority.” Guillermo was a regular at the rowdy bar.
“But surely he wouldn’t take advantage of family.” Rosita wrapped her arms around herself. “They’ll be okay,” she said, perhaps more for herself than for him.
If he wanted to go alone, he would stow away on one of the big freighters that left port for Mexico or Brazil. He knew a few dock workers who would look the other way for a reasonable price, but he couldn’t bear the thought of freedom without his girls, or them without him on this island of uncertainty.
“There must be some other way,” he said.
Rosita tilted her head, jutted out her chin, and threw a mocking glare that he had seen more frequently in recent weeks. “Name one. Oh yes. Big-shot Quique. Where is he now? In the belly of a shark?”
Ramón’s mouth went dry. Sweet Rosita had learned to be nasty. He couldn’t say anything about his suspicions about his brother, and now she was mocking his lost savior. It was too much. He swiped his drink off the table with the back of his hand. The glass hit the wall. Shards of red and golden drops of rum rained down on the clean tiles. The sting of her and Guillermo’s mockeries gathered in his hands. His brother was out range, but his wife wasn’t. He shoved the table hard into her and followed with another backhand, this time across her cheek.
“Ay!” she yelped.
He had never hit his wife before. It felt so good he didn’t want to stop.
“Mami!” Margo shrieked from the bedroom, loud enough, it seemed, to wake the whole country. Their old mutt stuttered out barks from the front room, starting a chorus of strays and outside dogs.
Rosita’s fists trembled on the table. His mother’s hands had clenched the same way on this yellow Formica. He had wanted those hands to caress his face, to let him know that everything was all right. Now he wanted to pound them flat. He raised his arm again.
“Ramón.” Rosita’s high, fierce voice rang out in a tone he’d never heard before.
He paused in his back swing.
She was trapped behind the table, but her eyes glittered as she lifted her chin into that haughty Montero pose. “You think this will make you a man?”
He landed another blow to her face. Just then he noticed Virginia’s tousled head in the doorway. Did she see? Her lithe teenaged body tensed under a pink night gown. Alma, their middle daughter, peered around her. A second later, Margo, her face wet with tears, crowded in on Virginia’s other side. The mutt’s grizzled snout poked in between the two oldest girls.
Rosita eased the table away. She dipped her head and mustered a crumpled smile. Her multiple dimples had been known to disarm the most skeptical of government officials, even the female ones.
“We’ve had a little accident,” she said. “The drink fell off the table.”
Virginia followed the long arc the glass would have to travel to make the mess across the room, then stared at her mother’s swelling face. Ramón saw his wife’s lie register in his daughter’s eyes. Virginia left him at that moment. Nothing would ever be the same with her.
“Mother,” she said, choosing a formality she almost never used. “Help me put Margo back to bed.”
“Of course, hija.” Rosita winced as she stood but didn’t stop moving before joining her girls in the doorway. They all turned their backs on Ramón.
“Rosita,” he said.
She gathered in her girls but didn’t turn around. A man from work had said to always punch them where the bruises wouldn’t show in church. He saw the man’s black teeth and the boils on the finger he used to punctuate this bit of wisdom. Ramón could dismiss this mofeta whose stink rivaled that of a rotten hide, but he had finally joined the brotherhood that nodded and laughed along with him. It defeated him, this country, with its secrecy and betrayals and violence.
“Rosita, my life,” he said.
She looked over one shoulder. Virginia peered over her other. The twin set of dark eyes, so alike in the gloom of the hall, decided him.
“Do what you must,” he said.
Rosita nodded once and turned away. Virginia held his gaze until her eyes were lost in the shadows.
