Aunt Mia dropped something—a coffee cup, something like that. There was clattering and I heard her curse and scrabble around with a paper towel. Then she said: “To you? He said something weird to you?”
“Yeah. How’s your objectivity?”
Aunt Mia said: “Fine, I guess. Why? What did he say?”
“He said that Mom’s evil.”
I repeated myself after a couple of seconds because Aunt Mia didn’t say a word. I wasn’t sure she was still there. I’m not always sure about Mom, but Aunt Mia is definitely not evil, and in a way she’s my proof that Mom is morally okay. It would’ve helped if Aunt Mia had laughed or seemed shocked, but she was just quiet. I began to whisper it a third time but she stopped me: “Can you put your mom on the line?”
“I thought you’d never ask. She’s sleeping, though. Do I try to wake her up?”
“No. No, let her rest. Just . . . tell her to call me.”
“But you’re okay, right?”
She called me a sweetheart for asking. It was hard to tell whether or not Mom and Aunt Mia had fallen out. Mom didn’t seem to think so, but maybe she’d done something that Aunt Mia was holding a grudge over. I know she went to Aunt Mia’s place twice, but both times Aunt Mia wasn’t home.
Dad asked if we should be worried about Mia, and Mom got irritated. “Why should we be worried about Mia, Arturo? Because she’s not married? Because she works hard at a job she likes?”
Dad let a few seconds go by and then said: “The Mia we know makes a little time for her friends no matter what, that’s all.”
“‘The Mia we know,’ eh? So what are you saying . . . that there’s this whole other Mia we don’t know?”
There was quite a long discussion about it and Mom didn’t realize she’d been tricked out of being irritated until Dad had made some rough sketches to show us which one of Aunt Mia’s bookcases could be a door that revolved into a hidden room.
I did what I could to smoke Aunt Mia out . . . I mailed her a copy of the notes I’d taken at the diner. She’d have called if she’d read them, no doubt about it. They must have gotten lost in the mail.