Total pages in book: 143
Estimated words: 136743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 684(@200wpm)___ 547(@250wpm)___ 456(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 684(@200wpm)___ 547(@250wpm)___ 456(@300wpm)
“Wow. You had it all planned out, down to sending us to live with your mother, who can’t stand me.”
“Just lay low and don’t ruin this. We’ll come out richer than you can imagine if you just hold down what you know and leave what you don’t know alone. You and the girls mean everything to me.”
“Right. That’s why you bought one ticket to Bali that I didn’t even know about. I can tell how desperate you were to spend your remaining days with your family.”
“I love you,” he says, desperation leaking through his composure. “I did this for you.”
“Bullshit.” If I have to listen to one more word out of his lying mouth, I might fight my way through this phone and down his throat. “I gotta go.”
“Remember what I said,” he adds hurriedly. “Don’t tell them anything. Let this play out.”
I hang up without saying goodbye and flop back on the bed. Closing my eyes, I replay the call, fighting the urge to scream. There’s a little time before I have to get the girls from school. A little time here alone, where I don’t have to pretend everything is fine or that it’s all going to work out.
I used some of the cash I had on hand to get gas. I have the groceries Judah sent. Dr. Morgan has given me a little grace to figure out Lottie and Inez’s tuition, but the FBI will be back, and it will start applying more pressure the longer it takes to find the money Edward stole.
I need to be cautious, but I want to be bold. I want to be honest, but lying seems to be the thing that will protect us. I’m tossed in every direction and going nowhere. Hot tears leak from my eyes and slide into my hairline.
I miss Mami.
It’s not a constant ache anymore, the grief, the immeasurable loss of someone who is absolutely irreplaceable. Mami passed a few years after my father, and the compounded devastation was almost unbearable. Necessity compelled me to keep going. My daughters needed me. My husband needed me, though he seems to have forgotten that I played any significant role in his success. My mother was never Edward’s biggest fan, but when I got pregnant soon after I graduated from Cornell and we decided to marry, my parents supported the decision. She never spoke against him, but I would catch her watching him sometimes with a wariness usually reserved for strangers. I didn’t ask her then what she saw. Maybe I was afraid of the answer. Afraid the path I had chosen was the wrong one. That he was the wrong one.
“Mami, what do I do?” I whisper to the empty room.
There is no audible answer, of course, but a thought does occur to me, and I have to wonder if it’s a mystical nudge she managed from the other side. When Mami died, my sisters and I each took a few of her things we wanted for ourselves. I force myself to stand and walk into the closet. At the very back, in a cubby at the top, sits an old chest. Not too large and more than a little worn, it appears incongruous among my Hermès bags and shiny stilettos. I grab my step stool and reach up to pull the chest down.
I can’t hear Mami’s voice, but when I open this small chest of her things, I feel closer to her. It smells faintly of the Egyptian musk she used to wear from the beauty supply store. It was cheap, but I’d trade all my pricey fragrances just to hold her close now and bury my face in the crook of her neck. Let her stroke my hair and dry my tears.
But she’s not here, so I settle the chest on my closet floor and kneel, reverently opening it. Inside are treasures I haven’t looked at in years. Not because I’d forgotten they were here, but because it is bittersweet, the ache of missing her and the comfort of having her things.
The first is an old, dog-eared copy of bell hooks’s All About Love. I flip through the pages of the book, which is more than twenty years old, and note Mami’s annotations, little colorful flags poking from the pages, her highlights, like neon mile markers, and her neat handwriting in the margins, sloping in and out of English and Spanish.
Mami’s favorite pilón is also in the chest. I watched her use the mortar and pestle to mash garlic and peppers for her sofrito. I pull it out and set it on the floor so I can take it back down with me to the kitchen.
One of her journals is here, though there’s still a stack of them in the garage at the house where we grew up. I hesitated to read this after I saw the poetry she wrote to Bray, feeling like an intruder on a part of Mami’s life she had kept for herself.