? ? ?
“Tell me about your family,” Luis says.
We’ve migrated from the sea to the sand, lounging on a worn blanket he brought with him. My lips are swollen from his kisses. I pass the drink we’ve been sharing back to him and stare out at the water. It’s an innocent enough question on the surface, but so very complicated beneath it.
“Why?”
He smiles, his mouth brushing against my temple, his beard tickling my skin. The sight of his injuries makes my stomach clench.
“So I can know you,” he replies. “You’ve met my family—my mother, my grandmother, Cristina. I can’t help but be curious about yours. I grew up on stories about your grandmother, your great-aunts. They were like family to my grandmother.”
“My family’s complicated.”
His lips curve. “Aren’t they all?”
“True. Perhaps mine seems a bit more so than most because so many of our foibles have played out in gossip columns.”
I explain about the rubber heiress, the fact that my grandmother raised me. I’ve gotten so good at telling this story to people who’ve asked about my unorthodox family structure throughout the years—why my grandmother sat in the audience at school plays rather than my parents—that I can nearly get through it without a hitch.
“Do you miss your mother? Are you close now?” Luis asks.
I shrug, raising the bottle to my lips once more, the cool drink sliding down my throat. “I suppose I miss the idea of her—what society says the relationship should be—rather than the reality. I never knew her enough to miss her; even now we’re more polite strangers than anything else. I’ve seen her a handful of times in the last decade, usually when we both happen to be in the same place. We get along just fine.”
“Still—”
“I had my sisters, my father, my great-aunts. Everyone lived close to one another in Florida, so I didn’t lack for family. My father was busy with work a lot, but he still made an effort, was around as much as he could be. Besides, I had my grandmother; that was all I ever needed.”
“What was your grandmother like?” Luis asks, his hand drifting lazily across my hip.
Despite the heat, goose bumps rise over my skin.
“Fierce. Unapologetic. Proud. Loyal—to her country and to her family.” I pause. “I didn’t understand it until now, but there was a sadness in her. A longing. I always thought it was for Cuba, but now I wonder if those times when she grew silent, when she was with us, and wasn’t, if those were the times when she thought of him.”
“How is the search going? Have you learned anything else about him since last night? Did my grandmother have anything else to add when you spoke with her this morning?”
“No. I’m hoping Magda will have some answers.”
He’s quiet a moment. “Your grandmother—you said she was all you had. Is that why it’s so important to you to find him?”
I nod. “Losing her has been harder than I imagined. I should have realized it would be, but she was always so vibrant, seemed so much younger than her years, and I suppose I took for granted that she would be around a long time. Would see me get married, hold my child in her arms.” A tear trickles down my cheek and I bat it away. “I hate that she’s not going to be here for all of these moments. That she won’t be here to sing ‘Cielito Lindo’ to my child like she did to me when I was a little girl. There’s this giant hole in my heart. I miss her arms around me, the scent of her perfume, the smell of her cooking.” More tears well in my eyes, another spilling over onto my cheek. Then another.
Luis’s arm tightens around my waist, his lips brushing against my temple
“We had this connection,” I continue, the sound muffled against his bare chest. “I could talk to her in a way I couldn’t talk to anyone else. And now that she’s gone—”
I brush at my cheeks and pull back slightly.
“I have to find him. To try at least. Right now, their relationship is this giant unknown. It sounds like they loved each other, and he was a revolutionary, but beyond that, I have no clue what happened between them. She asked your grandmother to hold the letters for me. She wanted me to come here and spread her ashes. Wanted me to find this. My grandmother knew me better than anyone; she knew I’d have to see this through one way or another.”
“Are you worried that what you find will change the way you remember her relationship with your grandfather?” Luis asks, his voice kind.
“Maybe. I don’t know. I was so young when he died. My perspective of their relationship was a child’s perspective. Who knows what goes on behind closed doors?”
“Marriage is hard,” he agrees.
I can’t help it. Curiosity has filled me since he first mentioned he was divorced.
“What happened between the two of you—with Cristina?”
He turns his head to stare out at the water.
“It wasn’t one thing,” he finally answers, and I realize his silence is more a product of his attempt to answer my question as honestly as possible rather than discomfort. “It would be easier to explain if one of us cheated or we had some big fight, but it wasn’t like that at all. Each night we went to bed together, and the next morning we woke up and had drifted a little farther apart than the day before. One morning we woke up strangers.”
“That sounds painful.”
“It was, although, I suppose it could have been worse. Our lives simply diverged. She wanted children. When we married, I thought I did, too. But the more I thought about it, about the world I was bringing them into, the country I was handing off to them, I couldn’t do it. That was my fault. She married me expecting one thing and ended up with another. It wasn’t fair to her, I wasn’t fair to her, and that was my mistake. You learn the deepest truths about yourself when you fail at something. When I failed at marriage, I learned I couldn’t pretend to be someone I wasn’t in order to please another person.”
He rubs his jaw, his eyelashes sweeping downward.
“She thought I was too serious. Wanted me to stop holding on to things.” He gives a dry little laugh. “I’m not the easiest person to live with.”
His words are both confession and warning.
“And yet you both still do—live together. Work in the restaurant together. How do you handle it? How does she?”
“I wouldn’t say we live together, exactly. It’s not like we share a bedroom anymore. It’s different here in Cuba. There’s a massive housing shortage in Havana. Cristina wanted to move out, but there was nowhere for her to go. So she’s stuck. Thank you, Fidel.”
“I can’t even imagine how awkward that must be. The idea of living with one of my exes . . .”
“You’d think so, but it’s not so bad, really. We’ve become friends more than anything. Family, in a way. Her parents are both dead. She doesn’t have anyone else, and I’m fairly certain she’s as disinterested in me as anything other than platonic as I am her. Occasionally she’ll bring men home, but I make a point to be out those nights. It’s not a perfect solution, but you make do. If things don’t look the way you anticipated, you change your expectations. It’s an easy way to avoid being disappointed.”
“And you never—”
“Bring women home?” Luis grins. “I live with my grandmother and mother. What do you think?”
I laugh. “Fair enough.”
“What about you?” He takes the drink from my outstretched hand and raises it to his lips.
“What about me?”
“You never married?”
“No.”
“Did you come close?”
“I’ve never been engaged or anything like that. My longest relationship was in college. We were together for three years.”
“What happened?”
It feels so long ago; in the moment, the breakup had been all-consuming, but now I barely remember why we fell apart.
“Just life, I guess. We got to the point where we either had to be more serious or go our separate ways, and neither one of us cared enough to take it to the next level.”
“And since then?”
“I date, but I haven’t met anyone who’s made me want more.”