He laughs, that wonderful laughter that reminds me of my mother’s. What a gift, hearing that sound. “Moolah is a really funny word.”
“You’re right. It is.” I stand up. “I’ll go see if Alma is ready to make your lunch.”
On the way down the hallway in search of Alma, I pass the photograph of the mountain scene, of Rabbit Ears Pass. And suddenly, finally, I understand its significance: Lars proposed to me at that exact spot.
We’d been dating steadily for about six months. Our courtship was like nothing I’d ever experienced; it was as if we couldn’t get enough of each other, as if we had to make up for all the time we’d lost in trying to find each other. He’d call me several times a day at the shop; I’d take the calls in a breathless voice, like a schoolgirl. Frieda would roll her eyes at me, but she did turn away to give me privacy.
Lars and I spent nearly every evening together—dinner at his place or mine, movies, sometimes going out dancing.
“I never see you anymore, outside of work,” Frieda complained—a bit peevishly, I remember thinking, as if Lars and I had planned our blossoming romance for no better reason than to upset Frieda. “I miss you, sister,” she’d beseech me. “Make some time for me, would you?” I’d nod and tell her I was sorry; perhaps she and I could do something that week, some night after we closed. But then Lars would telephone or show up at Sisters’, and I’d forget my promise to Frieda.
The day Lars proposed was a beautiful late-spring Sunday. We’d gone for a drive with no particular destination in mind. We drove into the mountains on Highway 40, meandering through Winter Park, Grandby, Kremmling, gazing out the window at the vast mountain ranges and the tiny towns and the melting snow. At one point, after we’d been driving for several hours, I suggested that we ought to turn back. Lars simply shrugged. “What for?” he asked, and since I could give him no answer, we continued on.
At the summit of Rabbit Ears Pass he parked the car, and we walked to the top of a rise to admire the view. The late-afternoon sun was warm on my bare shoulders, but the breeze was cool. Lars took off his sweater and draped it around me. “Wait,” he said, reaching around me into his pocket. “Can’t hand over the sweater without handing over this first.” He’d bent onto one knee and opened a small jewelry box, holding it in front of me. “Will you marry me, Katharyn?” he’d asked. “Please say yes.”
I looked at the ring, and then into his blue, blue eyes. “How could I say no?” I replied. “Of course I’ll marry you.” I wrapped my arms around him. “Yes,” I’d whispered. “Forever—yes.”
Now, turning away from the photograph, I shake my head, smiling, and veer into our bedroom.
I find Alma in our bathroom, cleaning. I am suddenly guilt-ridden. I don’t mind watching Alma iron or wash the dishes—I did such things willingly in my other life, my made-up life, and I didn’t consider them taxing chores. But cleaning a bathroom? I can’t recall anyone, except for my mother when I was a child, ever cleaning a bathroom for me. But Alma doesn’t seem fazed; she is smiling and humming as she works. I am surprised that I recognize the tune: “De Colores.” It is a song that I don’t recall ever hearing in my other life, but one that I know for sure Alma has taught my children. It’s all about colors, about everything colorful in the world.
De colores, de colores . . . Se visten los campos en la primavera. De colores, de colores . . . Son los pajaritos que vienen de afuera.
And then I know all sorts of things about Alma that I haven’t remembered until now. I know that she is forty-seven years old. I know she and Rico grew up together in a small town in Sonora, the northwest part of Mexico, and that they married young. I remember how Alma’s eyes teared up, years ago, when she told me about their eldest children, a boy and a girl; as toddlers, the two were fatally trapped while staying with relatives whose house burned down one summer night. I know that although Alma and Rico grieved for this loss, they went on to have two more children. Not long afterward, Rico, with urging from his brothers, immigrated to Denver, where he joined those brothers working restaurant jobs. It took Rico four years to save enough money to send to Sonora for Alma and their daughters. The children were young when the family immigrated; they received most of their schooling here in the States. I know that Alma is fiercely proud of both girls—the elder, who is attending the University of Colorado-Denver with the intention of becoming a journalist, and the younger, who married right out of high school and recently gave Alma her first grandchild.
I think about the first time I saw Alma—the first time after I began going into the other world, the world where I was Kitty. I think about how, as Kitty, I did not really understand this system, this world in which darker-skinned people serve lighter-skinned people. I did not understand it because Kitty had not become accustomed to it gradually, over the course of many years, the way Katharyn did. As Kitty, I was thrust abruptly into this lifestyle, and—quite understandably—it jarred me.
But in truth, I have been Katharyn, not Kitty, for a long time now. So is the view of this world through Kitty’s eyes—a new awareness that, even as Katharyn, I need not treat someone working for my family as somehow less than me—another gift? Is it like the gift of imagining myself quietly conversing with my mother? I believe it is.
The fact is, I owe everything to Alma. If not for her intervention, when would I have realized how Jenny was treating Michael? How much longer would it have taken me to grasp that? How much more cruelty would my child have had to endure, were it not for this woman who today is washing my bathroom floor?
“Alma,” I say.
She stands and faces me.
“Thank you.” I look around, feeling suddenly foolish for interrupting her work. Hastily I go on, “Thank you for everything you do. For taking care of my family, when you have your own to take care of, too.”
She nods. “Sí, se?ora.”
“How is your family?” As soon as I ask this, my cheeks redden. In this context, with work to do, Alma will surely find my chitchat silly and distracting.
But she smiles, visibly pleased to be asked. “Bebé is getting so big,” she tells me. “He sits up now, all by himself.”
I find myself genuinely delighted to hear about her grandson’s development. “Oh, I love that stage,” I say. “When babies learn to sit up, when you can put them on the floor on a blanket with a few toys, and they stay there happy as clams.”
Alma nods. “Sí, I love that, too. And so does his mamá.”
“Alma,” I ask her, “when was the last time you had a raise?”
She looks thoughtful. “It is a year ago, maybe,” she recalls. “Se?or Andersson, he raise me from one dollar fifty an hour to one dollar seventy-five.”