I rang Dolores’s doorbell, laptop bag cutting into my shoulder. Rosebushes flanked the front door. Up close, the flowers looked wild and out of place in the tidy suburban neighborhood, a spiraling universe inside every bloom, the scalloped edge of each petal almost savage. Their fragrance hovered, thick, and I almost gagged. That smell—my mother’s funeral.
I was about to ring the bell again when the door opened. Dolores stepped out wearing another sleeveless white linen blouse, this one with tiny pink and green flowers embroidered on the collar. Her jeans were faded almost white at the knees. Her once long, curly black hair was mostly silver, cut to the collar and blow-dried straight. She wore gold studs on slightly elongated earlobes. So ordinary, so unassuming. Aging can be a kind of disguise.
“Hi,” I said, wishing I’d brought coffee or doughnuts instead of showing up empty-handed.
Dolores nodded. Though she had invited me here, she pulled off her gardening gloves slowly, deliberately, as if I had interrupted her without warning. “Pase,” she said, holding the door open.
Inside, the house was air-conditioner crisp. Dolores led me into a formal living room right off the foyer. White walls, red Persian rug, stiff antique furniture. A sterile, unused room, at odds with her garden-casual appearance, the verve in her coppery eyes.
“So how does this work?” She perched, arms crossed, on the edge of a velvet Victorian settee. “Do I need to sign anything?”
I sat across from her in a floral chair with curved wooden arms. “Not yet,” I said, as if I’d done this before. I pulled my phone and digital recorder from my laptop bag. “But I’d love a verbal commitment that you won’t talk to any other reporters.”
Dolores snorted. “Like if I want to talk to more than one of you.”
“Fair enough. For the record—” I gestured toward the digital recorder. “This agreement for exclusive rights was made on July fifteenth, 2017, between myself, Cassie Bowman, and Dolores Rivera.”
“Lore,” she said. “That pinche article kept calling me Dolores. No one calls me Dolores. He couldn’t even get that right.”
“Lore,” I said, the two syllables clumsy in my mouth. All that research and I had fumbled this most basic, crucial thing. “Sorry.”
“Also—” Lore leaned forward, businesslike. “For the record. Nothing about that day.” A minute shift in expression, an inward crumpling. “Everything else nomás.”
“It’s the everything else I’m interested in,” I assured her, thinking again of the case file in my car, how I’d pored over the crime scene photos so long last night that I’d dreamed of Andres—his eyes sewn shut, me picking at the threads, picking, picking, my fingers coming away stained with blood.
This seemed to satisfy Lore. She leaned back against the green tufted velvet, glanced at my sapphire ring. “So, when’s the big day?”
“Next May.” I gave a self-deprecating laugh. “In theory.”
“What does that mean?”
“We haven’t actually planned much. Weddings are expensive.”
A single spear of sunshine pierced through the taupe curtains beyond Lore’s head, bisecting her thigh. She kept moving her hand through it, playing with the light. “They don’t have to be,” she said, almost teasingly.
“You’re referring to yours?”
She raised her full brows. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
“We’ll get there,” I said. “Let’s start at the beginning. Were you born here? In Laredo, I mean,” I added, flustered, in case she thought I was asking if she was born in Mexico, though why should that be offensive? Jesus. Off to a good start.
Lore’s smile was amused, as if she could read my mind. “I was. Mami started having us young, at twenty-one. Five of us in seven years—imagine? By the time she got to me, there wasn’t even time for the hospital. She just squatted in the bath and lifted me out of the water herself. Papi apparently fainted, right at the end. Men. All he had to do was watch, and he couldn’t even do that.” She laughed, though it sounded brittle, painful. I made a note to come back to her father. “After that, she supposedly looked Papi in the eye and said, ‘Unless you push the next one out yourself, she’s the last.’”
I smiled. “What did your dad say?”
“Pues, what could he say?” She laughed again. “Mami was the boss.”
“Tell me more about your parents. What were they like?”
Lore ran one fingernail beneath another, wiped a smear of dirt on her jeans. “Papi was once-a-marine-always-a-marine. He woke up at dawn. Did his push-ups and pull-ups and then took Mami a cup of coffee in bed. Their room was right next to my sister’s and mine. We used to hear them turning pages of the newspaper in the morning, talking and laughing quietly.”
“So they were happily married?”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned,” Lore said dryly, “you can never say for certain what goes on in someone else’s marriage. But yes. I think so.” She paused. “Mami once told me it’s impossible to get everything from one person. That at best, we get eighty percent. The other twenty, ni modo, we have to find it somewhere else.”
“Like where?”
Lore shrugged. “Papi loved talking politics, not feelings, so Mami had her comadres. She’d pull up a chair to the phone in the hall and giggle like a teenager.”
“What did they talk about?”
“What do you talk about with your friends?” she snapped. I had the sense my questions were disappointing her. “Their husbands, their kids. The novelas they were watching, Sunday’s sermon at Mass. Whatever.”
“And that was enough?”
She rubbed at a smudge on the glass table with the hem of her shirt. She couldn’t seem to stop moving. “The way they looked at each other. The way Mami looked at him. Yes. I’d say it was enough. What about you?”
“What about me?” I asked, startled.
“What do you think of the eighty-twenty rule? With your fiancé.”
“I guess I’ve never thought about it like that.” Not that I believed in soul mates, but I didn’t love the idea of inevitable lack in a relationship, either. Had Andres fulfilled Lore’s twenty percent? Even if he did, why go so far as to marry him?
“Let’s start with the easy one,” Lore insisted. “What’s your eighty?”
“Okay.” I hoped she wouldn’t notice the heat rising to my cheeks as I considered. “Family.”
The first time I’d met Duke’s family, out at the farm, they’d asked me everything under the sun—except about my parents. Duke must have warned them in advance: mother dead, father out of the picture. I’d been grateful for his foresight, their consideration. I was happy to come to them as if I’d burst spontaneously into existence.
“Your dad,” I said, before Lore could press me to think about the remaining twenty percent. “Is he still alive?”
Lore shook her head. “Heart attack. In eighty-six. One of those they call ‘widow-makers.’”
“Eighty-six,” I repeated. “The year—”
“Yes.” Lore’s gaze was clear and strong, almost defiant. “A few months after . . . everything.”
The horror settled over me slowly, like drizzle darkening pavement. Lore had lost Andres, Fabian, and then her father. All practically at the same time.
“After Papi died, Mami never spoke to me again.”
Our eyes met, and I wondered who looked more stricken.
“What about your father?” Lore asked.
My breath caught. “What about him?”
“Did he ever hit you?”
“No.” The room felt smaller, hotter. No one had ever asked me that before. How could they? “But I knew to stay away when he was drinking.”
“So it was your mother’s fault?”
“Of course not!” What kind of feminist would I be if I blamed the victim? But my defensiveness gave me away. Because, yes, after a while, I had blamed her. For reaching for his glass—John, it’s getting late—as if she didn’t know what could happen. If she wasn’t going to take me and leave, how much of our pain might have been avoided if she’d just let him do what he was going to do anyway?