Furia(30)

“Why?” Never before had she said so plainly that marrying my dad had been the biggest mistake of her life. What did this make Pablo and me?

“Because my father loved me, and he knew the kind of man your father would become.”

Or the man he’s always been, which you didn’t want to see.

I drank my café con leche.

“My father would’ve been disappointed that I had to drop out of school—the nuns wouldn’t let me finish.” Her eyes filled with tears, and her hands trembled as she wiped them with a kitchen towel. “But he wouldn’t have made things worse by shackling me to a boy who really didn’t—doesn’t—love me.”

While my father would jump at the chance to squeeze everything out of Diego’s love for me until all that was left was ruin and sorrow.

Whether I liked it not, I had to acknowledge that my mother and I had a lot in common. We weren’t as different as I liked to think. I wasn’t better than her.

Our family was stuck in a cosmic hamster wheel of toxic love, making the same mistakes, saying the same words, being hurt in the same ways generation after generation. I didn’t want to keep playing a role in this tragedy of errors.

I was la Furia, after all. I’d be the one to break the wheel.

But I didn’t know how to help my mom.

“Papá loves you, Mami.” I patted her hand, and she flinched.

I didn’t know if I had just lied to her or not. After all, my father had stayed with her. As far as I knew, he’d never even hinted at leaving. They pretended things were all right even when every sign pointed toward problems that would have sent normal people running in opposite directions.

She dried her eyes again. “I’m sorry for crying like this. I must be starting the menopause, you know?”

I couldn’t help it—I laughed. “In Hollywood, people your age are just starting to have babies. Look at Jennifer López. She’s older than you, Mami.”

She smiled sadly. “I don’t look anything like her. Look at me! Compared to her, I’m a cow.” She motioned to her body. She wore jeans and a black blouse. Her curves were impossible to hide, even with dark colors.

“If you put makeup on and had a personal stylist like she does, you’d look even better than J. Lo, Mama.”

She beamed at me, her eyes sparkly with tears, and didn’t even nag me for talking like a country girl. Then she asked, “How are the med school studies going?”

It took me a fraction of a second to get my bearings. She thought I was studying for the MIU, the college prep classes everyone took in February, but I recovered quickly. “Perfect. By the way, I’m going to Roxana’s to study after school. I’ll be late.”

“Why don’t you ever come study here, hija? You’re always at her house.”

“She has Wi-Fi, Mama.”

Her ears were trained to detect any kind of lie, but her heart was trained to ignore the things she couldn’t deal with. She nodded and patted my hand. “Be safe, please, hija. I’m so proud of you. The first one to graduate high school and go to the university. I wanted to be a doctor, too, you know, before . . . everything. Doctora Camila sounds good, doesn’t it? Pablo never had the chance to study, but you do.”

“Doctora Camila sounds good, Mami.” I kissed her cheek again, grabbed my things, and left.





At the bus stop, posters of missing girls watched me as I stood in line, shivering. As soon as the bus turned the corner and headed in our direction, the crowd waiting in various degrees of sleepiness perked up. The driver hit the brakes, and people scurried to secure seats.

“After you, se?orita.” A gruff masculine voice startled me.

A young guy dressed in blue factory clothes stepped to the side to let me through.

Miraculously, there were a few empty seats, including one in the single-person row on the right. I took one near the front, and the factory guy made his way to the back of the bus. Perfect—I didn’t want to have to talk to him just because of his chivalry. My unfinished accounting homework was burning in my backpack. I might not have been aiming to become a doctor like my mom believed, but I still needed to graduate. I was behind in several subjects.

By the time we left el barrio, I was immersed in numbers, and the bus was full way beyond capacity. Passengers pressed against one another, stepped on freshly polished office shoes, and hung from the door, defying several laws of physics.

“I don’t know what those nuns are teaching nowadays!” a woman said. “There she sits like a queen while this poor girl stands right in front of her, full of baby. In my days, the front-row seats were only for the disabled and the elderly, not for good-for-nothing, selfish teenagers. And that green handkerchief! The feminazis like her are murderers in the making . . .”

I saw the corner of Roxana’s green handkerchief peeking out of the backpack at my feet. I looked up at the pregnant woman. She glared at me. She was a girl, really, maybe even younger than me. She looked too thin to be growing a life inside her.

There was nothing else for me to do. I crammed my accounting homework into my backpack and stood up. The pregnant girl puffed at my attempt to switch places with her and didn’t meet my gaze when I told her how sorry I was for not noticing her.

I made my way through the throng of people all the way to the back door, where the factory guy reappeared.