We Are Okay(32)

“Yes,” I say, but I don’t need to. My name is still on everything.

“I vote chili,” she says.

“There’s corn bread to go with it. And butter and honey.”

“Oh my God, that sounds good.”

We open and shut all the drawers and cabinets until we’ve found a pot for the chili, a grater for the cheese, a baking pan for the corn bread, and plates and silverware.

As I’m pouring the chili into the pot, Mabel says, “I have some news. Good news. I’ve been waiting for the right moment.”

“Tell me.”

“Carlos is having a baby.”

“What?”

“Griselda’s five months pregnant.”

I shake my head in wonder. Her brother, Carlos, was away at college before the time Mabel and I became friends, so I’ve only met him a few times but . . . “You’re going to be an aunt,” I say.

“Tía Mabel,” she says.

“Amazing.”

“Right?”

“Yeah.”

“They made us do this video conference call, my parents in the city, me at school, them in Uruguay—”

“Is that where they’re living now?”

“Yeah, until Griselda finishes her doctorate. I was annoyed, it took forever to get the call to work, and then when they finally showed up on my screen all I saw was her little belly. I started bawling. My parents were both bawling. It was awesome. And it came at a perfect time, because they were all emotional about clearing Carlos’s stuff out of his room. Not that they didn’t want to. They were just, like, Our son is all grown up and he’ll never be our little boy again! And then they were, like, Grandchild!”

“They’ll be the best grandparents.”

“They’re already buying stuff for the baby. Everything is gender neutral because it’s going to be a surprise.”

I think of Mabel and her little niece or nephew. About her traveling to Uruguay to meet this new life. And watching a person grow, from inside a round belly, to a baby, to a kid who can tell her things. I think of Ana and Javier, so excited, remembering who they were when Carlos was young.

I almost gasp.

I don’t know if I’ve ever thought this way about the expansiveness of a life. I think about it as it is in the wider world—in nature and time, in centuries and galaxies—but to think of Ana and Javier being young and in love, having their first baby, and watching him grow up, get married, move across the world. Knowing that they’ll soon have another descendant to love. Knowing that they’ll grow older as time passes, they’ll become old the way Gramps was, with gray hair and a tremble in his step, so much love still in their hearts—this astonishes me. I am capsized.

Despite the sweetness of the news, loneliness, bottomless and black, rushes in.

I want to know what Gramps felt when he learned my mom was pregnant. She was young, and the boy wasn’t in the picture, but surely, Gramps must have felt some gladness in spite of it. I wonder if, once the shock passed, he whooped and danced at the thought of me.

She tells me more about Carlos and Griselda’s plans, what the due date is, what names she likes.

“I’m making lists,” she says. “I’ll read them to you. I mean, I’m sure they’ll come up with their own but what if I find the perfect name?”

I’m trying to stay here with her in her happiness.

“I’d love to hear them,” I say.

“Oh no!” she says, pointing.

The chili got too hot—it’s bubbling and spilling over. We turn it down to a simmer. The corn bread still has twenty minutes to go.

I listen to her ideas about nurseries and what she’ll do in lieu of a baby shower since she won’t be able to travel that far during the spring semester. I last as long as I can, I do, I just can’t shake the loneliness.

So when there’s a break in the conversation, when it seems like the topic of her niece or nephew has passed, I sit at the table and she sits across from me.

“You said he was cute,” I say. “Gramps was.”

Her brow furrows. “I apologized for that.”

“No,” I say. “I’m sorry. Tell me again.”

She looks at me.

“Please.”

She shrugs.

“He was just . . . always doing these adorable things. Like polishing those candlesticks. Who does that?”

He would sit at the round table in the kitchen, humming along with the radio, shining the brass until it shone.

“And playing cards with his friends all day, like it was their job or something, saying it kept his mind sharp when really it was about drinking whiskey and having company, right? And winning money?”

I nodded. “He won more often than the others. I think that’s how he sent me here. A couple decades of winning at small-stakes poker.”

She smiles.

“All of those sweets he made. How he loved when I spoke Spanish, and the songs he sang, and the lectures he gave us. I wish we had listened better. I feel like there was so much more we could have learned from him.” She shoots me a quick glance and says, “At least I could have learned so much more. I don’t want to speak for you.”

“No,” I say. “I’ve thought of that, too. It was impossible to know what the subject of the lecture would be until he started it. And some of them felt so random at the time, but maybe they weren’t. Once, he did a three-day series on stain removal.”