She touched my shoulder, so quickly I could have convinced myself I imagined it, if not for the warm impressions her fingertips left behind. “So you’re telling me . . . why?”
“Because I want you to know I understand what it means to lead a double life,” I said, surprised by the tears choking my throat, by how tempted I was to tell her the rest. But I stopped myself in time. Remembered what I was doing here. “I get why you’d be wary. But this is a chance to set the record straight. To tell your story.” I paused. “One secret-keeping woman to another.”
A glint in Dolores’s eye looked, for a moment, like excitement. As if she, too, could feel the possibilities. Then she looked over my shoulder and a veil slid over her face, subtle but impenetrable.
“Go home,” she said, though her voice was kind. “And take care of yourself, mija.”
Lore, 1983
Laredo always seems like it shrinks in Lore’s absence, reduced to forty-mile speed limits and hand-lettered signs for window tinting and elote desgranado. As always, she adjusts. She can feel it already, the return of her Laredo self, scheduled and regimented. Places can do that to us, can’t they? Trigger the brain into a kind of muscle memory, so that as Lore turns into Hillside she’s wondering whether the cuates have eaten supper and if Gabriel has done his homework—not Mateo, he always does his right after school, even on Fridays, while Gabriel waits till the last minute—trying to remember when she last went to H-E-B and when the electric bill is due, an onslaught of domestic responsibility that casts last night’s walk in Chapultepec Park in a surreal glow, the way dreams seem bizarre only after you’ve woken.
Outside her front door, Lore touches the decorative Florence grille Fabian made by hand. He’ll never know, she thinks, and it feels like a promise—to herself, to Fabian, to God. He’ll never know because she’ll spare him the pain of knowing, but there is something sad, too, about this piece of her, this piece of their lives, to which he’ll forever be blind.
“I’m home!” she calls, stepping inside.
She drops the keys to her little red Escort in the wooden bowl on the console table, catches sight of herself in the round, gold-framed mirror—hair pulled back into a low scrunchied ponytail, circles beneath her eyes from lack of sleep, a jittery liveliness to her face, a smile she keeps biting back.
Fabian calls, “In the kitchen!”
Lore takes another moment, flips through a teetering stack of bills, the mouths of the envelopes already jagged with opening. She can imagine Fabian’s rough fingers slitting the paper, pulling out the bills and stuffing them back in, helpless with rage. Power, water, health insurance, house insurance, car insurance, money funneled to companies to protect them if the worst happens when the worst is already happening. She wonders when Rivera Iron Works will join the grim ranks of failed businesses, then scolds herself. She needs to believe in Fabian. She does believe in Fabian.
The cuates are yelling and laughing from their game room, where they’re no doubt slumped on their plastic beanbag chairs playing Star Wars on the Atari. They emerge, arguing about something in the game, right as Lore is about to step through into the kitchen.
To the untrained eye, Gabriel and Mateo are identical down to the length of their dark lashes, the sharp Cupid’s bow of their lips, the way they stand with feet planted wide apart, naturally unafraid of taking up space in the world. She remembers holding them both to her breasts, these babies whose movements inside her she’d memorized, and sobbing to Fabian, “I can’t tell them apart! What kind of mother can’t tell her own children apart?” Fabian had laughed, helping to support one of their heads, and said, “Chinga, neither can I.” They searched for a birthmark or bump that would help differentiate the boys, eventually settling for painting Gabriel’s big toenail purple before snipping off their hospital bracelets. As the days passed, though, Lore began to notice differences, starting with the way they nursed: Gabriel with an impatient, shallow latch that shredded her nipples and made him spit up, and Mateo with a kitten’s lapping gentleness, never quite getting enough. Within weeks, Lore and Fabian no longer needed the toenail polish and wondered how they ever had. Now she feels a surge of relief at her sons’ limited understanding of her: To them, she is only a mother. Not a woman, capable of desire and deception.
Mateo lifts his full eyebrows. “Dad’s making you something special for supper.”
“Ooh,” Gabriel adds mockingly, as though Lore should be embarrassed.
Fabian is standing at the stove. Two rib eyes, freshly seasoned, glisten on the cutting board beside him. Steak is Fabian’s specialty, always crisp and salty on the outside, pink as a rose on the inside. The round glass kitchen table is set with their wedding china—glazed porcelain with a garland of blue flowers, rimmed in gold. The wineglasses are crystal, the ones they usually pull out only at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and there’s a bottle of red at the center of the table.
“Fabian!” Lore gives a startled laugh. “What’s all this?”
“I know, it’s a splurge, but . . .” Fabian gestures her closer as he settles steak to pan, and she hesitates. Then she goes to him, giving him a kiss while the boys ewww and gross and smoke hisses up toward the range hood.
“I’m sorry,” Fabian says quietly. His warm brown eyes meet hers and hold.
“For what?”
“The other night. Before you left. You know.”
“Oh.” Lore ducks her head into his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.”
“No, I was a D-I-C-K,” he says, with a glance at the boys, who are standing by the refrigerator like puppies waiting for scraps. Lore doesn’t remind him they’re twelve, not three.
“Dad said—” Gabriel starts, delighted.
Lore cuts him off with a pointed stare. She squeezes Fabian’s hand. “Seriously, don’t worry about it.”
Fabian smiles. “Okay, well, dinner will be ready in ten. Cuates have already eaten.”
“You know what that means,” Lore says to the boys. “Showers. Gabriel, you’re first tonight.”
“Mom,” Gabriel whines. “We’re in the middle of a game!”
“We were at the ranch all day,” Fabian says. “You guys stink.”
The cuates laugh. It’s one of those incomprehensible boy things: they love to stink.
“The ranch sounds fun,” Lore says, leaning against the counter as Fabian flips the steaks. “With tío Sergio?”
But the boys are already edging out of the room. One of their wordless communications, an attempt to sneak out before agreeing to take showers.
“Showers,” Lore says again. “And wash your hair! Then you can play your game, but only for thirty more minutes. Have you all done your homework?”
“Yes, Mom.” Gabriel rolls his eyes, and panic flashes across Mateo’s face. Seeing his brother’s expression, Gabriel says, “We both did. On Friday. Remember? Before we ordered pizza?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mateo says, with a relieved grin.
Fabian looks at Lore, grinning. “Miss us?”
She laughs, a crack of guilt opening in her chest.
The small kitchen heats up quickly; even the wood cabinets, when Lore opens them for water glasses, feel warm as skin. Sweat prickles beneath her arms, and she can smell the dingy remnants of air travel—the recycled plane air, the stale reek of cigarette smoke. Every so often, she thinks she catches a whiff of Andres’s cologne.
“Salad’s in the fridge,” Fabian says, turning off the stove, transferring the steaks onto a cutting board. She takes the salad and ranch dressing to the table while he wraps the meat in foil to seal in the juices before slicing.
At the table, Fabian pours the wine with a flourish, pausing for a moment over her glass. He grins. “How’s the cruda?”
Lore laughs. “Ay, please, I was one of the first to leave the party.” It was true, after all.