Now that you’re here, Nate, sweetie, you should know. Your abuela is hallucinating.” Sonia reaches for a yogurt tub. “And she’s very confused, like, loosely associating.”

From the cookie dough, I look up.

“What?”

“Imagining little girls in her bedroom, mumbling about some hija.” Sonia shrugs. “Accusing your grandfather of running off with Adela.”

“Who the hell is Adela?”

“The caretaker,” Sonia says like I should know this, but then we wouldn’t be having this conversation at a South Miami Publix. “I say, Mami, Esteban has been dead for thirty-eight years, and Adela is a nice lady!”

 I abandon the roll of ready-to-bake chocolate chip. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Driving from the airport?”

“No, Jesus. Before before. When I was in California. How long has it been?”

Sonia tells me two weeks, max three. Cerebral infarcts, the doctors think, but the other problem, Sonia thinks, is that my abuela Lourdes isn’t listening. “I tell her, Mami, cálmate. Don’t try to walk or shower unless Adela is there to help, because you’re going to fall and break your hip.” Sonia swings the yogurt; Greek, two-percent. “But she won’t even let Adela come close, convinced she’s Esteban’s otra mujer.”

“Do you think it could be? I mean, that your dad had a mistress.”

Sonia cuts her eyes at me. “No, obviously.”

Obviously, I’m not buying this, but I resist my professionally-honed instincts to dig. Sonia refuses to talk about most matters Velasquez, especially her padre, Esteban. When Sons was seventeen, he died in San Salvador. Hit by a bus crossing the street. That’s about all I know, but it doesn’t take an EQ-genius to connect premature-father-death with my mom’s caginess. Sonia keeping secret Lourdes’s illness simply being another means to protect me, her only progeny, from analogous personal tragedy.

“Anyway,” Sons goes, “I would’ve told you sooner about Lourdes, but you had already decided to leave the Post and come home for the whole, um, writing-on-your-own thing.”

I correct, “Freelance journalism.”

Sonia half-grimaces. “And before that, you broke it off with Ally. Which still couldn’t have been easy and it would’ve been too much, all at once.” She turns to me, her voice is worried. “Is it too much?”

“Sort of,” I want to say, but then again, I’m not suffering from an ischemic obstruction to the brain that causes me to hallucinate. And can I really blame Sonia for withholding Lourdes’s condition? What’s a little lie, anyway? About Ally, for instance, who ripped my heart from my chest and essentially ate it by ditching me for some culturally insensitive prick with a puka shell necklace, an accessory he insists on wearing even now, in 2013, the year he became the Bay Area’s newest young millionaire thanks to his online pet food retailer, or whatever. Dude doesn’t even own a dog, I checked. Don’t ask me how I got his address because that’s what we call protecting your goddamn sources. Or at least that’s what my editor at the Menlo Park Post screamed as he fired me for (very accidentally) botching our relationship with the whistleblower from California’s Dental Hygiene Committee.

And so what if I also lied to Sonia about my termination? So what if I told her I’d resigned, fallaciously talked shit about my two-year beat covering tech bros behaving badly and tenured boomers protesting affordable housing? The more important truth, the dispositive fact, is that I’m now fully available for my white whale. My banger, my piece de résistance, my Tom Wolfe Right Stuff, and where better to make my name than here in my hometown, Miami. O City of Coked-Out Dreams. City of Al Capone and Elián and Burger King. City where the heat is on, all night on the beach, ‘till the break of dawn, in the words of our poet laureate, Will Smith. I’ll admit, I didn’t come here with an “assignment,” or a plan, or much of a goal beyond sitting down with the real Terry Gross instead of talk-whispering to the tender interior voice I have fashioned in her likeness. But I know enough to know what’s important, and what’s important right now is hitting the pavement.

Candidly, Lourdes getting sick complicates all this. I had hoped to spend days if not weeks sniffing out leads—not buying Lourdes groceries. On the other hand, she is my abuela, and I likewise lack the firmest grip on reality. So, instead, I say:

“Don’t you ever feel like you’re falling through the fabric of your own existence?”

Sonia opens her mouth, then closes it.

“I’m kidding.”

Her smile says, I’ll kill you, but only because I love you. “Are you still talk-whispering to yourself?”

“Sometimes,” I confide. “And sometimes I actually do feel unhinged.”

“Why don’t you see someone?”

“Why outsource what I love?”

“Pathologizing your behavior?”

“Exactly.”

We peer into the gelatin offerings.

“But seriously, Sons, I’m fine. I mean, that’s awful, about Lourdes. But I’m glad to help. While working.”

In reply, Sonia jabs me with a hot pink Post-it. The jab means, work on this. It is a list dictated by Adela, who I will meet in thirty minutes, maybe less, Sonia says, if I “get with the program.” The program looks like a victory on Supermarket Sweep without the exuberant hugging.

First entry: queso para tortitas.

Okay, interesting. Presumably, the -ita denotes a smaller form of tortilla and para implies a functional niche cheese, of which I see at least twelve in bilingual packaging. All assert absolute claims to authenticity and invoke a descriptor-plus-national-origin formula that feels unabashedly tribalist and vaguely porny in a way you don’t usually see. Crumbled Mexican. Hard Venezuelan. Sweet Salvadoran cream.

For inclusivity and sabor auténtico, I go with El Latino Queso Fresco. Sonia, meanwhile, picks over the cottage varieties, chili-red blouse aglow in the fluorescent lighting, a departure from her usual weekend wardrobe of tank-tops and leggings, the unofficial uniform of the running group she coleads, her Saturday routine ever since my dad left, the year I started rolling first names with both my parents, which I applaud as some pretty advanced passive aggression for eleven.

But like most schemes fueled by childhood resentments, my spite plan had the opposite intended effect, forcing me to internalize, far earlier than I would have otherwise, that the adults formerly known as mom and dad had been primarily that: unremarkably fucked-up grownups, giving me all they could without flinging themselves from the sawtoothed cliffs of day-in, day-out.

Still, Sonia (sometimes Sons, rhymes with Jones) stuck. And though Dick keeps on globetrotting for his job with the UN Development Program, he’s not the classic Bad Dad. More like... antsy and selfish. At least when it comes to his nuclear family, which he consistently neglects to relieve a massive hard-on for ecologically sustainable growth in developing countries.

We steer into frozens. I tell Sonia she looks nice.

“Thanks. I thought dressing up might please Lourdes. But I’m not optimistic...” she trails off, perusing the Häagen-Dazs. “I promise to stop eating in my eighties, so you don’t have to deal with my repressed rages.”

I pluck a DiGiorno Pizzeria! Margherita. “Are you talking about starving yourself?”

“Yes,” she says decidedly.

“Could you really go like that, though?”

Sonia pauses to think. “No, I can’t go two hours without cheese.”

“You could OD.”

“On cheese?” she sounds hopeful. “Anyway, let’s talk about happier things.”

We never stick with happier things. Conversationally we try family friends, until Sons says, the elder Rojas? Dead. She snaps her fingers. “Glioblastoma.” I raise plans for the week, she informs me of a stabbing on Miami Beach. Invariably our talk drifts back to the macabre, which doesn’t surprise me. The inherited Velasquez gene gravitates toward suffering. A fascination with death’s ragged coincidence being one attribute I can directly trace to my maternal line. A voyeuristic streak indulged while I’m reporting. As Sonia hurls into the cart three ice-coated Pierogi packs, she tells me what she’s seen recently as emergency room chief. Diabetic ketoacidosis, geriatric sexual assaults, pedestrian death due to jacked-up truckers, trucker death due to being jacked-up, painkiller-induced pool suicides.

By the time Sonia recalls our intent, happier things, she’s summarizing cardiac angiosarcomas in the candy aisle. She pivots abruptly, “And your flight? Was your flight okay?”

“Terrific, apart from the unexplained plummeting.” I’ve always envisioned my life ending in flames, probably a plane; probably a delusion of grandeur, given the aviation accident statistics. “Have you ever explored an emergency exit door? I mean, closely?”

Sonia shakes her head. “Last time I flew, a man talked to me for two uninterrupted hours. His fourteen-year-old? Semi-autistic, he tells me, pointing to the window seat where his daughter is sleeping. They’d just seen a highly reputed child psychiatrist in Raleigh. Guess the psychiatrist’s first question, first visit.”

“How old are you?”

“What are your masturbatory fantasies. Awful. But why would he tell me of all people. Could he have been so lonely?”

“Maybe he was on Ativan. Or maybe he was hitting on you,” I say for a cheap laugh, because deep down, I do know the reason people tell Sonia things. Her eyes. Big crescent lids hooding keen irises, simultaneously black and bright, conveying an abiding concert with misfortune. The same eyes she rolls at my joke, the same eyeroll she deploys against expressions of romantic interest.

I volunteer to find item three, huevos, and meander until I stumble upon an end-aisle chiller. Pictures of fat free-roaming chickens capture my attention; the labels declaim pasture-raised. Pulling a dozen, I feel valiant, indefatigable, which is, I decide, the way I will confront my inevitable death in a fiery aerial accident and seeing Lourdes delusional. This being, after all, my first personal brush with ancestral decrepitude, senility seeming like another one of God’s major dick moves.

In cans, I hand Sonia the carton. “Is there anything specific I can do to help calm down Lourdes?”

“Not really,” she says with a sigh. “We used to have this saying in El Salvador, ‘Genio y figura hasta la sepultura.’”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means people don’t change.”

“Exact translation?”

“Genius and figure to the grave.”

“Better in Spanish,” I say sourly.

Sonia squints at the hens. “These are ten dollars.”

I trudge back for standard browns, but my bitter gait isn’t about the eggs. It’s about the language. My lack of Spanish really only gets to me when I’m in Miami, where pretty much everyone else seamlessly tosses off dale’s and vale’s and olvídate’s. For the past six years in Palo Alto, not so. Especially if you present as gringo as I do, most Bay Areans look at you funny qué tal’ing on the street. So while I was in college, I went along. To this day, I go along. I go along with what most everyone else assumes me to be: a standard white boy, an Anglobro. Because it’s easier. Easier to be confused for any other badly-behaving tech millionaire. Easier to say, “Yes, thank you!” when cashier Montana curtly asks if I’ve found everything I needed before shooting the shit in Spanish with the construction regulars, who barely look in my direction despite it being a tiny-ass 7-Eleven. Easier not to attend the student meeting of Latinos Unidos because when I walk in forty eyebrows shoot up like, No Fucking Way, and that sucks in a way I can’t say—probably shouldn’t say, because, you know, of my privilege.

But here, going along, next to Sonia? Not so seamless. I’m cashew-hued, she’s pecan, and that’s confusing for pretty much everyone. That’s why, here, people ask me if I am “friends” with my biological mother. Here people ask how long I’ve “known” the woman who raised me. Here people ask how I landed “such a pretty babysitter,” and by people I mean that one creepy douche at Blockbuster when I was twelve and we drove home laughing and shouting, then crying quietly for different reasons. Here I am frequently called out as el Gringuito, el Blancuzco, el Chele, el Súper Pálido, decoded instantly as descending from some OG, an Original Gringo, the Missing Dick, missing in all respects except for those conspicuous natural bequeathments, color and crest thanks to patrilineal naming conventions dating to when women were considered property by men like me, men like me who got everything from history, men like me being the reason I typically shut the fuck up.

The ease of going along with my perceived ethnoracial identity. I guess that’s why I waited until my last visit, this past Christmas, to ask Sonia why she never taught me Spanish. Suddenly our conversation careened, and I got giddy, thinking, here comes the epic yet well-reasoned justification for my white(r)-washing. Finally Sonia said, “When you were a kid, a second language wasn’t high on my list of priorities.” A letdown, for obvious reasons, the same reasons I thought it true. The abstract frankness, plus the realities I knew: Sonia’s busy schedule rounding at Mount Sinai Medical, Dick’s busy schedule indulging his white savior complex, Sonia’s actual lists of priorities, of which she keeps three, concurrently. But, baffling me with her sentimentality, she continued, “Back then, Nathan, you wanted to be just like your dad, English and accent and everything. You idolized him, you would run around the house, shrieking about britches and chips and taking the piss.”

This is an important fact about Dick. He’s British.

When I find Sonia, she’s in the deli, evaluating lunch meats. “To make matters worse,” she greets me, “this past week, Lourdes is demanding Adela leave, and when Adela doesn’t, Lourdes threatens to call the police. Which would be a total disaster, because the last thing anyone needs is an ICE detention.”

“Adela is undocumented?”

Sonia looks at me with both pity and incredulity.

“Of course she’s undocumented.”

“Oh.”

“It’s fine. I unplugged the landline but that’s only a temporary solution.” Abstractedly Sonia grabs a honeybaked ham. “As for Adela, technically she’s here on a tourist visa, only slightly longer than she’s supposed to be. Really it’s a very sad story.”

Boom. That’s when Sonia’s potential hits me. My mother, treasure trove of tips. Gold mine of splashy headlines. Adela, a lead. A potential human-interest piece. Tearjerking. We stride into cereals and with practiced subtlety, I ask, “Soooo, what’s Adela’s story?”

Sonia hunts for a box of Cheerios. You wanna hear Adela’s story? Okay. She grew up in Honduras with a good-for-nothing-alcoholic father who abandoned their family to booze. Twice Adela’s good-for-nothing-alcoholic father threatened to put his hand in a meat grinder if Adela’s hardworking mother refused to fork over more booze money. She said no both times, and, flacata, good-for-nothing dad grinds up his own hand. No, Nate, I’m not sure if it was the same hand both times. Flash forward forty years and a failed cosmetics venture, Adela winds up in Miami taking care of another older lady, and that older lady had Crohn’s disease, which is a horrible way to go, by the way, these anal fistulas that fill with poopoo so, she was, literally, going poopoo all day—

“¡Buenas!” shouts an employee restocking Grape Nuts.

“¡Buenas!” Sonia responds in sing-song.

“They’re very friendly here,” I whisper.

“Okay so she dies.”

“Who?”

“The other older lady. Like a month ago, which is when Lourdes starts going downhill. Timing, perfect. And they were perfect, chatting art and literature and poetry. Until Lourdes became iracunda, they were reading fucking Gabriel García Márquez.” Sonia brandishes a tube of instant oats. “Do you know what iracunda means?”

“Can you spell it?”

“Before this, I had never, not once, heard Lourdes say a bad word. Okay, maybe once, but it was, like, mierda. Now, you wouldn’t believe how she’s cursing out Adela,” Sonia drops her voice, “hija de mil putas, putona, all Salvadoran caliche. Do you have any idea what she would’ve done to me if I ever called anyone a daughter of a thousand whores?” Sonia lunges for a value pack of breakfast biscuits. “I am sweating like a pig. Like a pig. Are you hot? What’s next?”

I read, “Maestro Clean.”

“What the hell is Maestro Clean?”

A quiet grips us.

“Could it mean, like, Mr. Clean? The all-purpose antibacterial?”

Sonia looks at me, wonderstruck.

We hit home products, then veer into produce. She asks, “Can you get two huisquiles and the avocados?”

“Huisquiles?”

Sonia’s hand flutters toward what can only be depicted as a small mountain of traumatized pears. I approach them tepidly, and, after squeezing a few uniformly impliable fruits/vegetables/squashes, must admit I am out of my element. Like, from where in Central America did these come? Tree or shrub? How am I only now at twenty-five confronting occult tropical crops of which Lourdes is apparently fond?

Again the answer lies partly in language. The reason I don’t know much about my own abuela. “Improve mangled halfie vocabulary” wasn’t high on my list of priorities in high school, when I last lived in Miami. And Lourdes doesn’t speak English. I’ve never heard my abuela utter more than a canned albeit technically perfect, “Good day [insert name], how are you?” And I insist, in every other instance, go Lourdes. Because why should she—an indomitable matriarch in a longstanding tradition of indomitable Latin American matriarchs—subject herself to semantic infancy when the Colorado-based burrito chain Chipotle is the only place you really need English in Miami?

But, as these rockhard green enigmas remind me, also to blame is Sonia’s mysterious yet palpable beef with Lourdes. The reason my mother insists on speaking English at all holiday celebrations, despite or perhaps because Lourdes can’t engage. The type of decades-long disagreement the Olds suppress so they can avoid shelling out for child psychiatrists. The sort of mother-daughter feud that manifests as silence during a monthly family lunch at Panera Bread. The same brand of polite passive-aggression that leaves three generations of Velasquez conversationally bereft after, “A mi me encantan los Napa Almond Chicken Salad Sandwiches.” The reason, I suspect, Sonia has never returned to El Salvador. Maybe even the reason she married a white dude with dual British-American citizenship. All one grand guess because Sonia has never explained the origin of their interminable argument.

Though this obscurity, I realize, clutching the huisquil to my chest, this is the sign of a capital-S story. The whiff of an irresistible pitch. Something longform, grounded in personal experience. Forget Adela, my investigatory instincts now scream, and pursue Lourdes. Due, perhaps, to their suppressed grievances, Sonia has regaled me with only commendable Lourdes lore: Growing up in poverty. Studying her way to a middle-class existence. Earning a doctorate in education from El Salvador’s National University. Surviving the country’s civil war and raising two children and teaching Spanish literature at la Escuela Americana, the prep school to which she received a tuition subsidy, which is how Sonia and my tío Martín came to attend and thereat befriend the children of San Salvador’s elite: emissaries, politicians, and the so-called Fourteen Families, who ran the country with fortunes made in sugar, cotton, coffee.

And, sure, the accomplishments are a start. But I’ll need way more from Lourdes as my primary source. Mostly, the salacious bits of paramount importance. Literal war stories. Dirt on her students, the kin of CIA operatives and café barons. The tragic death of Esteban, beloved husband notwithstanding that beloved husband’s possible paramour. In sum, the suffering. Because no one clicks for happier things. People don’t move past the paywall for achieving the American Dream. Scandal. Heartbreak. Weird sex. That’s why we retweet.

The problem. To interview Lourdes, I will need Sonia to translate for me. And Sons, though well-meaning, is not entirely trustworthy, particularly when it comes to family.

I find Sonia sorting through the Honeycrisps.

Her eyes: kind, curious.

“There’s something I’m going to need your help with.”

— 

Absolutely not, Nathan. You are not interviewing Lourdes, not now.”

Sonia turns up NPR. I turn it down.

“Please please please Sons. If you don’t translate for me, I can’t ask her about El Salvador.”

Sonia revs the Mazda3. We fly past a kaleidoscopic sprawl of strip malls. The sundries of equatorial living. Bail bonds, check cashing, smattering of Pan-Latin fast-casual.

“You’re only going to agitate her further. The psychiatrist just changed her antipsychotic. On top of that, she’s taking a milligram of Xanax. Shouting names I haven’t heard in three decades.”

“Like who? Which names.”

Sonia glares at me sideways. “Don’t do your reporter thing.”

Her phone buzzes in the cupholder.

“Can you see who’s texting me?”

“Alejandra,” I say flatly.

“Message her, please, that I’ll call her later. Want a story? Alejandra is a pulmonologist. For eight years, her husband has been active in Alcoholics Anonymous. Last Saturday, she opens his laptop—bam. Turns out, he’s been shacking up with a Chilean stewardess during meeting times.”

I send the text. “But tell me about Lourdes.”

“He met the stewardess online.”

We clip the curb.

Coral Reef Condos looks exactly as I remember it, as it will look after my death by fiery aerial accident. Shell-pink, modest in its low-slung two stories, a scribble of banana palms lining the property. Sonia circles to Lourdes’s parking spot. Apropos, suspiciously, of nothing, she says, “Tell me about your writing. More on what you’re tackling for your next story.”

Right as I’m about to describe my soon-to-be-Pulitzer-Prize-nominated Lourdes piece, I pause. I figure I’ve got to be sneaky. Fight misdirection, naturally, with more misdirection. So I gesture a marquee-headline, “Anti-noble striving. Latin American oligarchs here in Miami. Narratively immigrants are usually impoverished, usually enlightened, usually struggling to improve the lives of their offspring. I’m thinking, children of Venezuelan oil barons. Hispanic aristocrats voting Republican for tax reasons.”

Sonia fashions a grim expression. “Hm.”

We spill from the hatchback. The automatic rear door inches skyward. Reggaetón blares from a distant car radio. Heat lines squirm from the asphalt. From a leopard-print purse, Sonia pulls a hot pink pad of priorities. She is preparing to multitask. Her perpetually split focus annoys me. Then my annoyance annoys me.

“Alternatively,” I tap my Birkenstocked foot, “Hispanic sex cults.”

She flicks the Post-its.

“Like a Jewban Eyes Wide Shut. On a yacht.”

“No offense, sweetie, but I’m not sure that’s what readers want.”

“Everyone loves sex cults.”

“I’m talking more about the entitlement.” She fishes sunglasses out of the leopard-print purse. “You see, immigrant stories are typically sad because typically they’re true, and typically they start with a series of unfair and violent circumstances. I mean, why do you think people leave their birth countries?”

“Climate apocalypse, if Publix keeps single bagging like this.”

Sonia laments forgetting the reusable totes while I stuff my arms with single-use plastics. Groceries in tow, we teeter toward a stucco breezeway. A doormat reads, Wine O’Clock. Sonia’s voice echoes, “We stay an hour tops. Don’t feel bad—we have to come back tomorrow, and the day after that.”

She shoulders open the door. “¿Ellllooo?”

“Soñita Linda, hoooola.”

Further away, Lourdes shouts, “¿Quién es?”

The smell punches me like epiphany. The previously confounding fragrance now known to be Maestro Clean. Our shoes squeal on the white tile. Ahead lies a small dining-slash-living room occupied by two mango-colored couches and a glass-topped coffee table festooned with framed photographs of baptisms and weddings. We kiss cheeks and exchange mucho gustos with Adela, sporting skinny jeans and a mauve V-neck, both of which accentuate a curvaceousness that, I suspect, contributed to Lourdes’s charge of temptress.

As is my custom, I introduce myself as Nahtan, modifying my Anglo-inflected hard vowel and digraph. As is also my custom, I apologize for my error-prone spoken Spanish while vastly overstating my auditory comprehension.

Adela regards me. “Ah.” On her wedges, she swivels to Sonia, “¡Qué guapo es tu hijo!”

“Sííí,” Sonia coos from the floor, where she is crouched, shoving a cabbage into the refrigerator. I am skeptical but don’t protest, and accelerate putting random cans into random cabinets.

Adela presses a finger to her chin. “Que raro que no hablaba con él en español.”

Yes, I want to say, thank you Adela. It is weird Sonia didn’t speak Spanish to me. But instead I squeeze an extra-large bag of adult diapers and contemplate the manifold humiliations of mortality.

Sonia recounts, young Nahtan wanting to be just like Dick speaking British English. They both take the piss while I appraise the cabinets. As the snickering subsides, Adela’s eyes lock on me. “Y por eso, él es bastante blanco.”

Yes, Adela, I agree soundlessly, Dick does explain why I’m Anglokhaki, a minimalist designer’s wetdream, my father’s son, in pretty much pigment only.

I shove the empty plastic bags into one sad superbag. I’m going to see Lourdes, I say. Adela mentions that I’m fortunate, that Lourdes is having a good day. I side-eye Sonia, but she is preoccupied, hunching over the hot pink pad, counting a handful of white tablets. Good. I don’t want her help. Who needs help?

Not Bill Buford. Not Joan Didion.

In five steps, I sweep the kitchen and a corner of the living room.

“¿Alo?” I call from the hallway.

“Hooooola, mi Natito,” Lourdes replies from her bedroom.

Unlocker of secrets. Sharer of ancient truths. She will show me who I am.

Unless I find her as I do; fuck. Lourdes in repose and propped up on three pillows. Boxcutter for a collarbone. Shoulders sagging under a paltry purple nightie. Unfamiliar facial bloat obscuring normally patrician cheekbones. What of her gently sloped nose? What of her consistently luminous bronze skin? What of these death rails on the bed? Did Sonia mention death rails?

“Dammit Sons,” lodges like a huisquil in my throat.

“¿Como estás, Abuelita?’ I ask at last, bending down to peck her cheek.

Absolutamente fine, feeling muy bien, says Lourdes. I peek at her arms, a tapestry of violet-cobalt lesions. I suspect she is underplaying her degree of pain, and yet, who am I to contradict these optimistic updates? So, I abort my deep dive. I implore her to tell me: Recent meals. What she’s been watching on TV. News from my tío Martín in D.C. She carries our conversation, knowing, perhaps, that I am inadequate. Inadequate yet thankful for this, even more for her coherence and high spirits.

After a few minutes of, Jesus Christ, happier things, Lourdes asks me about my career. Per usual I lie, because Sonia has also taught me this, that we hide worrisome truths from people we love. With both thumbs up, I explain that, definitivamente, I’m still at the Post, still relishing my hundred-thousand-dollar salary. I point to my molars; stellar dientes insurance. I trot out my phone to show her an article I wrote months ago, when, with SWAT-team speed, everything spilling from my lips strikes me as complete bullshit, and not only because I’m actively fabricating. Maybe it’s the curdled face of terminal illness, or realizing my total dependence on charades and false cognates, but I stammer. I stutter. I grow frustrated. And whether Lourdes senses my exasperation or it’s simply that wicked prodigious event we call coincidence, her eyes flicker and dim as she shoots off the pillows and grabs my arm with a force so startling it’s only her voice that keeps me from gasping. “Rómulo Prudencio Reyes me abandonó con esta hija malcriada, esta hija desagradecida. Y ahora Esteban me engañó también, jodiendo con la mujer, esa marihuanera. ¿Qué están diciendo de mí?”

“What’s she saying about me?” Sonia yells from the kitchen.

“Nothing!”

Diplomatically, with caution, I attempt to defend Sonia to Lourdes, who, I intimate, is not badly behaved or ungrateful but actually crushing it simultaneously caretaking and ER directing, accomplishments I pantomime by self-strangling and swaddling an invisible baby. And Adela, I gesticulate, is muy simpática, neither stoner nor husband stealer, kindly reading aloud to her from an old favorite by Señor García Márquez. See the eye-flash in which Lourdes’s gaze transmutes once more, this time from indignation to something I discern only later, which is now, typing furiously in a small boarding room in San Salvador—okay, fine, honestly it’s the lobby of a Sheraton, but still, it is in San Salvador, where I am recording all that I have seen so I do not forget the crushing distress on Lourdes’s face, the incomparable misery of immutable mistake, a regret that pincers your heart through your ribs, a sorrow that shuts you up in reverence of the sobering circumstance that sometimes we are too late. Because what Lourdes whispers then, she whispers so thinly, so barely audibly, I would think she mumbled it to herself if she did not utter it in flawless English, “There is a man named Rómulo Prudencio Reyes, and the truth is, I loved him.”

She releases my wrist.

Then there is Sonia. She lopes into the room and scoots me from my seat at the death rails. In shock and veneration I dart to the wall, wedge my body between an iguana-green oxygen tank and a bookcase crammed with worn volumes.

La metamorfosis. Ficciones.

“¿Qué, Mami, qué estás diciendo?”

Lourdes repeats, What are you talking about?

I’m talking with Adela. About your pills.

I don’t need pills or your help.

“¿Ay sí?” Sonia says, voice crackling acerbically. With conspiratorial speed, she spins to face me. “Let’s test her memory. Maybe an F will convince her to show gratitude.”

I freeze.

Sonia asks, “¿Quién es el protagonista de Cien años de soledad?”

“José Arcadio Buendía,” Lourdes answers.

“¿Y cómo se llama el pueblo donde él vive?”

Contemplation slices Lourdes’s forehead.

“Macondo.”

“Damn,” I chime in, “that’s pretty—”

Sonia’s eyebrows say, “Stop talking.” She folds her arms over her ribs.

“¿Y cómo se llama… la esposa de José Arcadio Buendía?”

“Okay c’mon that’s just—”

“Úrsula,” Lourdes interrupts.

“Let’s all agree that’s impressive.”

Sonia waves me off. “Remember she taught this stuff. Plus, Úrsula is only the most important character.”

Lourdes declares that now she will be testing Sonia’s memory.

“FYI,” I poke Sonia’s cocked hip, “she understands everything.”

Where—Lourdes asks, lifting the technicolor blankets—did I get these?

Sonia tents her fingers as if praying for reprieve. “Mami, no tengo ni idea. ¿T.J. Maxx?”

“Guatemala,” Lourdes says smugly.

Sonia grunts. “I guess she’s fine as long as she’s fighting with me.”

Lourdes asks us to please discuss the themes of Don Quijote.

Sonia heaves an, “Ay, por favor,” pointed flats cursing each tile to the door. A white-flag retreat, until, in one winning sweep, she whips around triumphantly. 

“¿Quién dijo, ‘Toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son’?”

Lourdes slits her eyes, concentration pooling at her feet. Then without warning her gape swings wildly, cheeks paling, draining, the color of pudín, hands aquiver, not with sadness, it dawns on me, but consummate fury and though I am desperate for this to end, to call a draw, a double victory, I cannot speak, for I cannot speak in a literal or a knowing way as Lourdes claws for the name, terror-shame gape of demented oblivion ripping across her face.

Get out, she snaps.

“Pero Mami—”

“Vete.”

“Fine.”

“Ahora.”

“Nathan, she wants me out. Let’s go.”

My mind races for a parallel-text apology, a nuanced multilingual peace offering, but all I extend is a heavy-handed lo siento before Sonia marches through the hall, telling Adela we’ll be back tomorrow.

I look at Lourdes. She looks away.

I ask if she’s okay.

Yes, she says. Go with your mother.

So I say goodbye like this, like a solid kiss on the crown of her head, and she squeezes my wrist, though faintly now, as if weakened by this seething show of wits, this agitated proof of competence, revealing itself to us both, at once, as both easier and more oppressive than letting go.

— 

I jog back through the breezeway.

Perhaps more than ever, it feels like Wine O’Clock. I spot Sonia in the hatchback, forehead pressed to the steering wheel.

Swing open the door, jerk it shut.

“Sons, what the fuck. Lourdes and I were actually talking until you interrupted.”

To the wheel, Sonia says, “It’s complicated.”

“No, I think it’s pretty simple. Lourdes is near death. You didn’t tell me it was that bad. In fact you didn’t tell me anything. Why didn’t you tell me before she was dying?”

To the windshield, Sonia says, “We’re all dying.”

“She’s in one of those beds. Why didn’t you tell me she has a death bed?”

“You were off living your life. And rightly so.”

“She’s on oxygen.”

“Exactly why this is nothing for you to see.”

“Well now I’m here. Now you can’t lie to me.”

“You decided to come back for your career. Which I’ve always supported.”

“This isn’t about work. If you’d told me the truth, I would have come back sooner.”

“Nathan, look at me. You think you want to help care for her, but that’s not what you want. Not really. My job is protecting you and caring for her, too, even if neither one of you appreciates it.”

The banana palms sway.

“Why didn’t you give me a Spanish name.”

Sonia purses her lips. “What are you talking about? Nahtan. Natito. Those are Spanish.”

“Those are different names entirely.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“You gave me a random-ass English name. Admit it. You gave me a random-ass Gringolandia name you can’t pronounce in Spanish. You purposefully wanted to alienate me from Lourdes. You wanted an ally. That’s why you never taught me Spanish. So I couldn’t talk to my grandmother, at least not about anything that matters.”

“That’s not it.”

“Bullshit. Just like the story about Dick’s accent. He’s bilingual, he rolls perfect fucking R’s, don’t try to pin it on him.”

Sonia cradles her head. “I’m not trying to blame your dad. Or minimize your pain, Nathan, but you have to admit you weren’t exactly proactive.”

“Don’t turn this on me.”

“Try taking some personal responsibility.”

I scoff theatrically. “You sound like a conservative.”

“Did you ask me to learn when you were a teenager? No. How about applying yourself in high school? No. How about taking a class at Stanford.” She intones, “Or does Stanford not offer Spanish?”

“You’re being a real bitch.”

She slaps me.

“I’m not sorry,” I hear myself say.

A deranged silence falls over us.

Sonia starts to apologize but I cut her off. “What do you want me to say? That it’s easier to pass? That I don’t even think it’s passing considering how fully fucking assimilated I am?” She tries to hug me but I raise my hand. “You want me to say I don’t try with Spanish because I’m too ashamed? Because I should already know?”

Her voice shrinks to an unsettling pitch, almost girlish. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I don’t understand. What is with this new interest in the language?”

“I thought I had time with Lourdes. I always thought I had time.” You entitled piece of blancuzco shit. Failure. Hypocrite. “And you never asked me if it was hard leaving the Post. You never asked me if I was alright.”

“Of course I asked you. We must have talked about it.” Sonia’s eyes search the dash like it’s a transcript. “But, these things are difficult to discuss over the phone.”

I double over, jam my palms into the moist sockets of my eyes. Yellow light explodes from a half-dozen blazing suns. Suns, sons, Sons, is that what I want? Mimicry. Eyes, skin, a line through. Proof.

Sonia shifts in her seat. “Sweetie—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Fine. Nate. I didn’t know you were upset about the Post, and I can’t read your mind. You have to tell me when something’s bothering you. You can’t just pretend you’re alright.”

A child screams. The sound carries.

“What can I say, Sonia. You taught me everything I know.”

— 

The door cracks.

“Can I?”

“Depends,” I say from my bed. “Are you going to slap me again?”

Sonia wedges herself past the jamb. Her mouth droops. My chest compresses. I move my legs. She sits at my feet. I stare at a random sentence of In Cold Blood. She clears her throat.

“Did you know García Márquez asked to be remembered first as a journalist?”

I mutter, “Is that so?”

“Nate, I’m sorry. I never meant to hit you.”

Faraway, thunder claps.

“Please forgive me?”

Out the window, water skitters through the ferns.

“I forgive you.”

She straightens. “Thank you.”

“And I’m sorry too.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“Yes, I do,” I draw a breath. “I’m sorry for lying to you.”

Sonia’s brow knits.

“I didn’t quit the Post. I got fired.”

“Oh—”

“It’s okay,” I interrupt. “The timing worked out. I got to see Lourdes. That’s what’s important.” I realize, after I say these words, I mean them. True. “And Ally broke up with me. I got dumped. But I don’t want to talk about the breakup, or leaving California, generally.”

Sonia pulls her legs to her chest. “I understand. I didn’t want to talk when I left El Salvador. I had so much anger. Toward your abuela, the country, the violence. I swore I’d never go back.” She embraces her knees. “I didn’t want to give Lourdes the satisfaction.”

“But she came, eventually.”

“When your father left, she came to help me. And she did. Picking you up from school, taking you for walks—”

“I remember. I was there. I’ve always been there.”

“Not always,” Sonia says, smoothing the navy bedspread. After a wince, she begins, “When I was fifteen, Lourdes saw me holding hands with my first boyfriend. At a basketball game, at the American School. Totally innocent. That Saturday, running errands, I remember sitting in the station wagon. We’d just eaten lunch. She grabbed me by the hair. She bashed my head against the window. She kept screaming, You will not practice with that boy.”

I want to say, “Holy shit.” Instead I ask, “What did you do?”

“I cried and cried. And she never apologized.”

“I didn’t, I mean—”

“Because I wanted you to enjoy your abuela, Nate. To have a different relationship with her than I did. Unburdened by my experiences.”

I nod. Sonia watches me slantwise. She says, “You want my take on why Lourdes refuses to speak English?”

“Absolutely,” I say more eagerly than I intend. 

“Because she can’t let herself make a mistake. She has to be perfect, especially when it comes to rhetoric, you know, grammar, after teaching Spanish literature.” Her eyes glaze with a melancholy I haven’t seen before. “Did I ever tell you about my graduation?”

I shake my head.

“I was the salutatorian of my high school class. Lourdes was so upset I didn’t make valedictorian”—Sonia throws up her hands—“she just didn’t show up.”

“And your dad?”

“He’d died months earlier. My brother was five. My tía and her kids were already living in the States. There was no one there for me.” Sons takes my shoulders. “And I never want you to know that loneliness.”

This is when I apologize again, and this time, my apology is genuine.

Sonia continues, “At the risk of minimizing, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. There were good moments with my parents, of course, in El Salvador.” She tells me then: of their visits to La Libertad, falling asleep to waves whooshing against black sand. Climbing the mango tree in her cousins’ front yard and counting to cien stars and reading library books to Martín. Stuffing their stomachs with tangy salpicón, letting the pupusa-cheese cascade onto their tongues like greedy baby birds, giggling like possessed ecstatic monsters, and later, napping in hammocks, sleeping under volcanoes, sipping crisp Pilseners, shimmying to the Bee Gees. The best day of her life, before she had me? Passing her certifying exams for medical residency.

Transfixed I sit. Happier things.

Sonia grips my shin. “And I have Lourdes to thank for my education. My drive and discipline, which you inherited, too, Nate. You will be a great journalist.”

My sightline drifts to my backpack, vomiting a laptop.

“When I was talking to Lourdes, it was, uh, actually pretty enlightening.”

Sonia grins. “What’d she say?”

“That she loved this guy.”

Her face falls. “Which guy?”

“Rómulo Prudencio Reyes.”

Sonia flinches. “She said the word ‘love’?”

“In a literal way. She spoke English, Sons—and there was more, too, in Spanish, about the daughter, la hija. Abandonment by this Rómulo dude. But accompanied by a lot of inaccurate insults, so I’d say veracity is probably, at best, fifty-fifty.”

Sonia, consumed, studies my suitcase. “Let’s eat,” she says at last. “And then I’ll tell you what I know about Rómulo.”

We stand and I pull her in for a hug. She squeezes back and it feels like a landing. Avoiding fiery aerial accident. Bone-tired sleep. Warm blanket in air-conditioning. Home.

She draws away, musses the thicket at my neck. “Your curls are like mine used to be. Te ves un poco mechudo.”

“Mechudo?”

“Hippie-ish,” Sonia says, leaning forward confidentially. “Tomorrow with Lourdes, Spanish practice starts for real.”

Into the kitchen with its checkerboard floor. From the stove, perfume blooms. Arroz con pollo. With heaping plates we sit at the counter. We eat with abandon. Without napkins. Lightning splits the sky in yellow-white stalactites. Heavy drops rattle the kumquats, the pink bougainvillea, the prehistoric banyan brooding by the street. The storm’s staccato clip intensifies to a steady thrum, and that’s how the Story comes. In an instant, a torrent, like the sky opening up.

— 

I am eighteen. It is 1975.

I am about to start my first year at the National University, then a home for progressives who oppose the governing military-oligarchy. I am still living with Lourdes. Your abuela wants nothing to do with the right or the left. And because she refuses politics, politics is exactly what I find interesting. And then a political allegiance becomes necessary.

What do I mean?

Unlike my American School friends, I can’t study in the States. So I stay in San Salvador, where my education is free. But when I arrive at the National University, I discover that my new classmates see me as the enemy. I am the bourgeoisie. I come from the imperialist institution. I’ll never forget, the first day of classes, I hear this guy asking, asking—Who’s the girl from the American School?

I know instantly that I have to redefine my identity. So I do small things, what I can. Give rides to students in the opposition. Tutor them. Treat classmates wounded at protests, apply the little medical training I have. They had holes in their heads. Hoyos, Nathan. In the hospitals, we tried to save them. Or at least, I did. These kids were my patients. By the end, some of them were my closest friends.

I am twenty. It is 1977. In April, a guerilla group called the FMLN kidnaps Borgonovo, the Foreign Minister. Three weeks later his body appears along the road southwest of San Salvador. The next day, in retribution, a rightist militia murders a Catholic priest. They kill him during a youth meeting. Same day, La Guardia seizes a center-left politician named Alfredo Acosta Días. They strip him, hook wires to his ears. With an electric rod they shock his feet and stomach. From the pain he chews his tongue. He cannot eat for days. For days the only thing he tastes is the pistol La Guardia shoves in his mouth.

What is his crime?

You think it’s impossible here?

Who do you think trained the Salvadoran security forces?

Protest days, Lourdes prohibits me from going to campus. But I sneak out anyway, with two girls my age. We wear our tennis shoes. That way, when the shooting starts, we can run. Race down the asphalt. Can you see us? The barbed wire backdrop? Adidas and flared jeans, stacked perms and bowed blouses. Feet slapping pavement. Bodies pumping adrenaline, coursing with fear and rebellion. Fighting Lourdes. Fighting the government. Fighting to fit in. Running from men with M-16s. Running from our mothers in pearl earrings. Running from the way people saw me. Imperialist. Enemy. Bourgeoisie. Girl from the American School. Imposter revolutionary.

I am twenty-two. It is 1979. Apocalypse Now premieres. I go to see it in the theatre. I think, Is that explosion in the movie, or out in the street? Eight bombs blew up around San Salvador that night. The TV flew up, your tío Martín said. He said dust snowed from the ceiling. It was the first snow he’d ever seen.

This is the year the capital air gets thick. Muggy with revolutionary spirit. I decide to protest, finally, to march in the streets. I go with my two girlfriends to an organizational meeting at the law school. Several hundred students are preparing for a big manifestación. We crowd into an auditorium. We speak in hushed tones. We stare into necks weeping sweat. We scan the room, but how will we know? We know the military has infiltrated the campus groups. We know there are spies. But how will we know?

A popular law professor takes the lectern. His damp skin glitters in the stage light. He introduces his union, ANDES 21 de Junio, a group of educator-activists. He speaks of labor rights. Land reform. The military’s repression. La Guardia will be armed, he says. They will have U.S. weapons. They will shoot at us. They will blame the left for violence. In 1932 they murdered thirty-thousand peasants. A life to them is worth nothing. These are things we know.

We know his name is Rómulo Prudencio.

After the speech, I cluster with friends outside. We smoke in a breezeway. My stomach sours. I want to go home. I am terrified of being shot at, and yet, impossibly, even more afraid to leave. When Rómulo taps my shoulder, I drop my cigarette. Maybe I am jumpy, or embarrassed, or assume I am in trouble. Probably all three. Because, after all, I’m not hardcore. I’m no cachimbóna with a machine gun. I am, and will always be, Sonia Maria, daughter of Lourdes Alina.

I am also surprised. Because I have never spoken to Rómulo and suddenly he is whispering. De repente he is saying, Óyeme. You have to stop this, right now. You can’t march. This isn’t your place. You are a smart girl. You need to focus on your studies.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking, this guy doesn’t even know me! This sexist prick is supposed to be a progressive leader! This rumored communist is just another chauvinist academic! And then, to make matters worse, he starts talking about my mom. He says, Doña Lourdes doesn’t want you here, you must respect her wishes. Doña Lourdes is right, he goes on, it is dangerous.

I’m thinking, ¿Me estás jodiendo?

I’m thinking, What the fuck?

So I say, with all due respect, Señor Reyes, I do know the risks. I am a member of the movement. You don’t need to educate me. And frankly, you should mind your own business.

He seizes my elbow then. My heart strains. I try to pull away. He holds on. He comes two inches from my face. He smells like sweat. He repulses me.

He says, Do you know who I am?

I say, Of course.

He says, Sonia, do you know who I am?

I say, Of course.

He drops my elbow.

He says, You have no idea. Do you?

What am I thinking?

That I didn’t tell him my name.

Very clearly, carefully, he says, Sonia, I am your father. I am your father and you need to stop this because I don’t want you to die.

I start to argue, but my vision clouds. The campus green swirls against the concrete. My chest tightens. I can’t breathe. He is telling me to breathe. Telling me I am panicking. I look for my friends. I don’t see them. I double forward, mind scrambling. I think, What incentive does Rómulo have to lie to me? So I plead for the truth. I beg. After swearing me to secrecy, Rómulo explains that, as grad students, at the same university, twenty-some years before, he and your abuela Lourdes, completely and somewhat illicitly, fell in love.

Holy shit is right.

Rómulo, you see, came from a very rich family. Not one of the so-called Fourteen, which is bullshit by the way, there were more like two dozen, now probably fifty. But the point is, he had money. So there is class dividing them, but there is also color. Rómulo is light-skinned, European. Lourdes is brown, indigenous. Before they called her Doña, they called her Negra.

This, too, is why Rómulo secretly courts her, all the while shifting left. He severs ties with his conservative parents. Grows more vocal within the campus community. Gradually, he and Lourdes start to fight—not because Lourdes is conservative, I don’t think. I think she was scared. Afraid that Rómulo would be arrested and tortured or forced into exile. Even killed. And honestly, she was right. The government could label anyone subversive. Those people disappeared.

There were actual death squads, Nathan.

One day, Lourdes tells Rómulo it’s over. Just like that. She was like that. No, he says, he’ll leave the movement. Okay. Next thing he knows, Lourdes has taken a leave of absence from the National University, back to San Miguel, in the eastern part of the country. For a decade, they don’t speak. By the time Lourdes re-enrolls to finish her degree, ten years later, she’s married to Esteban, and has me. She’s teaching full-time in San Salvador, and, at night, finishing her PhD.

I ask Rómulo how he can be sure. He says the timing, and Lourdes. They dated privately in the late fifties, when society ostracized pregnant single women. And if Lourdes valued two things back then, it was her career and appearances. Rómulo figured that Esteban, an old friend of Lourdes’s from San Miguel, must have agreed to marry her and take me as his child.

I tell Rómulo that Lourdes has never said anything. And later, as you’ve probably guessed, she won’t admit anything, and, eventually, Rómulo will stop writing me letters, he says, out of respect for her wishes, and her wishes are for silence, a secret, a lie I tend partly because I love my father Esteban and want to preserve his memory, a memory maintained until these last two weeks, when Lourdes started with the visions and the projections and whatever she told you lucidly.

The sound rang out then, crisp and clear as the cathedral bell. La balacera. El tiroteo. Un tatatatata on the street outside the law school. The bullets gave me a choice: stay and fight or run.

So I ran. I ran and ran in the opposite direction, and I never stopped.

A product of the Rio Grande Valley, Jose Adrian Pompa (adios, new media) is a community-taught artist, inspired by the seasonal flows of South Texas. His work digitally captures the endless undertaking of B A L A N C E with his use of bold movement and colors—capturing the evocative energy fueled by the diverse life sources in the 956.

This story was originally published in Salt Hill 47.