Ana Luisa, gray haired and dressed in a white top and a villager’s pale blue skirts, filled it. “What are you doing out here?”
“Inspecting the grounds,” I said, holding my chin high as I smoothed my skirts. I prayed she hadn’t witnessed my fall, nor had noticed the scrape on my cheek. “Why is this garden in such a state?” I added, hoping my question would distract her from my flustered state.
“I hadn’t noticed, Do?a Beatriz,” she said archly. Her tone was drier than the brown grass crunching beneath my shoes as I crossed to her. As I grew close, I noticed that a strong smell of incense rose from her clothing. “I have not been in this garden in months. Not since . . .” Something in her eyes grew distant, and I was sure she was changing the direction of her sentence mid-step. “Not since the patrón was here last. We stay in our houses and make use of the kitchen there, and Do?a Juana sees no use in living in the house alone.”
As head of the household, Ana Luisa held a high position among the people who worked on the hacienda, second only to the foreman José Mendoza. I knew from working with Tía Fernanda’s servants that such a place in a household’s hierarchy and the trust of the se?ora meant autonomy. Freedom. I knew the taste of that craving as keenly as a toothache, and I had learned to recognize it in other women: it was a flash of hot yearning in their eye when they thought no one was looking. The determined curl of a hand into a fist beneath a table. With so many brothers and husbands, fathers and patrones slain in the war, more and more women in the capital could unsheathe their knives and take what was now theirs. I was no different. And I doubted the women of the countryside were any different, be they the daughters or widows of hacendados or heads of household like Ana Luisa.
My arrival had supplanted Juana as natural authority, rattling the hierarchy of the hacienda. Perhaps Ana Luisa looked at me and saw a threat to the comfortable order of her world.
Perhaps she was right.
“I have plans to make this place habitable again, and the garden is no exception,” I said, lifting my chin as I had seen Tía Fernanda do a thousand times. “My mother will be joining us from the capital in a few weeks’ time, and I want everything perfect for her arrival.”
Ana Luisa’s dark brows had raised slightly at my tone; she nodded once, solemnly and without embellishment, then took a rag from a hook near the kitchen door and resumed cleaning. “As you say, Do?a Beatriz.”
The smell of copal incense grew stronger as she stepped into the doorway. My throat tightened. Not from the strength of the smell—which I found unusual, but not unpleasant—but from a sudden wash of shame.
I heard Tía Fernanda’s own voice within my command. All at once I was back in her house, taken by the arm and escorted to the kitchen in the midst of preparations for a dinner party.
A dinner party to which I was decidedly not invited.
Of course you understand you cannot be seen, my aunt had said, her nails carving half-moons into my upper arm. My cheeks—already too dark, in her esteem—flushed with heat. She had made her opinion on my father’s heritage well known. It did not bear repeating. In the meantime, you need to be useful, she said, the oily sweetness in her voice slipping down the nape of my neck. Maybe then you’ll be worth something.
No matter how I tried to ignore her, Tía Fernanda’s voice lingered, a faint smell of rot I could not banish. It echoed every time I put on my wide-brimmed hat and gloves, every time I checked my complexion in the mirror. Thanks to her, every time I took Rodolfo’s arm, a small, wounded part of me wanted to shrink away from him, from what I clearly did not deserve.
And I heard her in my voice as I gave an order to Ana Luisa.
Embarrassment stung the back of my throat.
With Rodolfo gone, I was the lady of the house. For weeks I had looked forward to this moment, but now that authority in the house was mine and mine alone, I had no idea how to enact it.
I turned my back on Ana Luisa and the kitchen and walked into the dark, clammy air of the hall toward the front garden. Once there, I set my hands on my hips and glowered at the wilting birds of paradise, the stray wild maguey, the weeds consuming the flower beds near the front door, a general surveying the battlefield.
I was afraid of how openly Ana Luisa disliked me. I was unsteady on my feet and lashed out. I should not speak that sharply again—cementing authority the way Tía Fernanda had, with haughtiness, with coldness, had sowed hate and hurt in me and most of her servants.
But then how would I establish my place as the head of the household? I did not have Rodolfo’s easy inborn authority as a man. Nor Juana’s as a criolla and an hacendado’s daughter.
I would have to find my own way. Somehow. I had to, before Mamá arrived.
If she ever answered my letters begging her to come. I could only hope that she would stomach the sight of Rodolfo.
I shoved the thought aside and pulled on my leather gloves, laying siege to the flower beds. I weeded violently, leaving piles of deadened flowers in my wake. With the exception of a break for lunch and a short siesta in the cool of the house, I continued until the shadows grew long in the courtyard.
“What on earth are you doing?”
I jumped.
Juana stood over me, eyes narrowed as she scanned the sweat-stained rim of my hat and the dirt on my dress. Her cheeks were pink from the sun; sweat darkened her blouse beneath her armpits and below her throat.
“My brother would say this is what we have servants for, Do?a Solórzano,” she drawled.
I jerked my hands out of the dirt, brushing off the gloves.
Was she mocking me? I could not parse her expression as I rose and shook out my skirts. It was evident from our one dinner together that Juana did not hold what Rodolfo thought in high esteem. Nor vice versa. Nor that she believed caring for the gardens was as important as tending the maguey. But why?
“My husband would say he admired women who understand the amount of work that goes into running a property.” I had heard him talk about women’s education and the importance of widows running haciendas in the country in the wake of the war with his colleagues and twisted his words to make them sound as if they were approving of my behavior.
Juana snorted softly. She surveyed the pockmarks my labor had left in the soil. “He may admire them, yes. But he doesn’t often marry them.”
I busied myself with taking off my gloves to hide the curiosity in my expression. So Juana had never caught María Catalina weeding the garden, that was for certain. What else did she know about my husband’s first wife? They had lived together on the hacienda for a time, hadn’t they?
“I’m joining you for dinner tonight,” Juana said abruptly.