After the Hurricane(29)
She writes both possibilities down, her hand shaking slightly.
“Then he say he got some friend in Rincón he want to see, too. I say, you make up your mind, man!” Gloria laughs then, at her own wit. She has finished the onions now, and she walks over to the sink to wash her hands, stretching her back with her wet fingers pushing just above her buttocks. “My friend teach me this stretch. You ever try it? Opens up the heart.” Gloria puffs up her substantial bust as she leans her head back, her hands imprinting her shirt with water. Elena stands, and tries, but her heart is pounding too hard to be stretched. Where is her grandmother’s hometown? Has he gone there, or Rincón? Rincón is famous for its surfing, something her father has never done in his life, at least, not to her knowledge, limited as it is. Would he go there? Or some other place entirely? What friend does he even have in Rincón? Is that Diego? She tries to remember the map.
“He say he will. He just gotta think it through. I tell him fill his stomach, even if it not as good as my cooking, and whatever he do, be safe, the storm make a lotta these roads dangerous. He nods, he tells me he probably won’t go anywhere at all, and he goes on down the plaza. And then I don’t see him, a few days, even arroz con pollo day, and that strange because he always like that. Fridays I make it. You come back then, I put some aside for you.”
Elena nods, absently. Gloria is cutting peppers now, fat red ones and long skinny buttercup-yellow ones, and little crimson ones that look like rose heads.
“But when he don’t show up for a week, I think, what happened? So when I talk to your mama, I tell her I not seen him. Usually I see him pretty often. Still, he gets funny sometimes, he go to Bayamon, see his sister, the good one. Which one is she?”
“Maria,” Elena admits. Her other aunt, Beatriz, has been married three times already, most recently to a man half her age who she met in an ex-convict reform program at which she was teaching adult literacy. Beatriz is a warm, kind woman, with a specific ability to attract horrible people no matter where she goes and a terrifying loyalty to them that transcends logic or loyalty to her own family members. Anyone who comes near her ends up the poorer for it, a contributor to Beatriz’s husband’s empty pockets, no matter the husband. Maria, on the other hand, is easily driven to screaming, laughter, and tears, and has been married to the same man since she was twenty-two years old, Elena’s infinitely patient uncle Javier, Javi. Maria sells Belleza Por Siempre, BPS, a Latin American Mary Kay—style product, and uses her twin daughters, Mercedes and Innocenta, as models for the brand. They are far younger than Elena, fourteen, and Elena winces whenever she sees them in full contouring makeup on Maria’s Instagram page. Nevertheless, by virtue of Beatriz’s track record, Maria is, indeed, the good sister.
“But then after two weeks, Maria came by, asking about him,” Gloria says, reaching up, another little hop, for a medium-size heavy pan. She sets it on the stove, swirling oil onto its dark cast-iron bottom, and then throws the chopped onions and a spoonful of something from a jar into the pan. The jar, when she sets it down, says paté de ajo, “garlic paste.”
“Tía Maria came here?” Elena asks, writing it down, the pencil trembling in her grasp. Gloria had not told her mother about this on the phone, perhaps she didn’t want to worry Rosalind. And it would have, deeply.
For most of his life, her father has financially supported his family in one way or another. He has been their protector, their benefactor. The idea that they, now, would be worried about him meant something might be actually, well, wrong. He had sent money to her uncle Juanito to study to be an electrician, and helped Beatriz find a teaching course in Miami. He had supported Maria in her initial steps into BPS; although she had repaid his investment in full, the only one of his siblings to do so, Rosalind had fumed to Elena. Elena doesn’t know if that is still true. Like her father, she has not seen her aunts and uncles in a long time, other than digitally. The last she heard about her uncle Jorge, the second youngest of her father’s siblings, he was trying to be a bodybuilder in Tampa, something else her father had funded for his family.
“She was looking for your father. He tell her he maybe going to see his friend in Rincón, but she don’t know if he did it or not. So I figure, so many people don’t know where he be, your mama might. But she don’t know either.”
“Did Maria tell you their name, this friend? Where they lived? Anything?”
“Sorry, baby. No. Your father, he tell her he’ll be back soon. But when she try calling back, the phone is off. And when she come here, Monday maybe, I still not seen him. So that’s when I think, I should call your mama. We talk every so often anyway, she probably wanna know if he gone somewhere. And maybe she know where he is.”
Elena fights the urge to laugh, bitterly. Her mother does not know where her father is. It causes her mother a great deal of pain that she still cares where Santiago is. But love is not something you can turn off just because you don’t want it to exist anymore. Rosalind, like Elena, does not get to decide how she feels, only how she will act.
Gloria shrugs. Worry is not something Gloria concerns herself with. Things will be, or they will not be, and she knows she can do little to change anything. Except her food—that she controls like a general. Elena watches her cook for a long moment, thinking.
“Okay,” Elena says. She should, she knows, venture to Bayamon tomorrow, or the next day, to ask Maria a bit more about where he might be, and if they know this friend in Rincón, and if that’s Diego or not, and who the fuck Diego is. And perhaps they will know something more, too, something Gloria doesn’t, like where her father’s mother’s hometown is. Anything to explain his sudden disappearance, anything to explain him.