The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (10)

From there, Annette, the driver, gave her a room for the night and a job opportunity. All she had to do, for a small fee, was sign up to sell internet services for a company called DigiNet. Tatinelly, who’d never shown interest in much of anything, was really very good at it, and after days, her downline of coworkers was becoming an extensive network of men aged eighteen to forty-five. She’d even recouped her start-up fee and enough to rent her own studio apartment. Then one day, Annette and DigiNet vanished. No weekly meeting in Annette’s kitchen, no car in her driveway, no internet connection. Tatinelly had to go all the way to the mall to get her service switched back, and there, she noticed a Help Wanted sign at a phone accessories counter. She was offered the job instantly.

A few weeks later, she met Michael Sullivan, who was visiting from Portland on a business trip. He didn’t need three phone cases and a battery charger that lit up when he plugged it into his car, but he bought them anyway. He’d been taken in by her smile, sweeter than anything he’d ever tasted. Her eyes were large with a slight tilt to the edges. Her light brown hair fell in long tangled waves down her slim figure. She had the effect of a doe trying to get across the I-10 and he wanted nothing more than to protect her, guide her to the other side.

It was the most impulsive thing Mike had ever done, but he asked her on a date. They went across the parking lot to an Italian restaurant that had never-ending bowls of pasta. By the fifth hour of slurping up fettuccini Alfredo, Mike excused himself, walked across the street to the pawnshop, emptied his savings account on an emerald ring, and returned to Mezzaluna.

Tatinelly said yes, of course. Her family didn’t understand why they couldn’t wait a few years, but most of them had come to the small wedding in the Oregon woods where Tatinelly Montoya became the first of her cousins, aunts, and uncles to take up a new last name. Tatinelly Sullivan.

The Sullivans didn’t believe in ghosts or family curses. They only used salt in food, sometimes. They never got speeding tickets and always read the Terms & Conditions. They never fought or yelled or wore colors brighter than pastels. They loved their son and they loved Tatinelly, too, even if they were young for marriage; it just meant they had more time to be together.

Her grandmother couldn’t be at the wedding, but Tatinelly had known, even as a little girl, that Orquídea Divina did not leave Four Rivers. She wondered if perhaps she couldn’t.

Now, pregnant and enduring unseasonable heat, Tatinelly wasn’t sure why she was thinking of her grandmother, whom she hadn’t seen in the two years since she’d left Four Rivers. It wasn’t that her family didn’t get along. But Tatinelly had always felt apart, distant. It was like loving something from far away and not needing to be part of it. She kept Four Rivers in her heart and the Montoyas with it.

As Tatinelly Sullivan, she had a good house surrounded by trees and flowers. She’d been married for six months, though as far as her mother knew she was also that much pregnant. She had everything she had wished for. A selfish part of herself, one that Tatinelly didn’t know was there, wanted one more thing—her grandmother. Tatinelly wanted her child to have the wondrous, strange, magical Orquídea Divina in their life. Her life. Tatinelly was almost positive, though Mike wanted to be surprised.

It was then that she felt a kick so strong, that the bowl, perfectly balanced on her belly, tipped over, and she wasn’t fast enough to catch it.

The front door opened and in came the earthy, sweat-drenched scent of her husband in his black and neon bike gear and helmet.

“Honey?” He kicked off his shoes at the door and walked to her with a stack of mail in hand. “You’ve got a letter from your grandma. That’s weird. It’s not stamped.”

“How about that,” she said wistfully, even as pain seized her belly. Tatinelly grinned and breathed through the roundhouse kicks from within. “You’re going to be strong, aren’t you, my little one?”

Mike took in his perfect wife with her perfect belly in their perfect home. Then, the ice cream bowl on the floor.

“What’s going on?” he asked, picking up the mess so she wouldn’t have to stand.

Tatinelly guided his hand to her belly where he felt the thump of their child’s foot, anxious and ready to be in the world.

“We’re going to see Orquídea Divina,” Tatinelly said. She knew it. Somehow, as ordinary and plain as she was, she knew in her bones what that letter said.

Mike frowned but chuckled. “We are?”

She smoothed her belly right where the kick was the strongest. She spoke to her child directly now. “You know, Orquídea Divina was a fierce little girl, too.”





3

THE GIRL WHO GREW ON AIR




Isabela Montoya needed a name for her newborn daughter. Names were important, even if she couldn’t stay within her family’s tradition. Before her father interceded, Isabela had almost been named Matilde, after Matilde Hidalgo, an illustrious suffragette who was the first woman to graduate high school in Ecuador, the first woman to cast a vote in Latin America, first to receive a bachelor’s degree, and on and on. A woman of so many firsts, the patriarch of the Montoyas thought the name too revolutionary. Instead, Isabela Belén Montoya Urbano was named after an aunt, whose mild temper and skill at the piano had won her a successful marriage.

The new mother rifled through her mental catalog of family names. Cousin Daniela was too ugly. Berta was too prim. Caridad was a gossip. There was her aunt Piedad, who was the kindest of all her provincial relatives. But naming her bastard daughter something that meant piety was too ironic for her taste.