She nudged a stick away with the toe of her worn green Nike, then reconsidered and picked it up.
“We used sticks like this and pretended we were Colonel Santos Benavides, holding the Union Army at bay during the Battle of Laredo.” She laughed. Then she caught my blank stare and rolled her eyes. “The Confederate States used to export cotton to Mexico through here. During the Civil War, the Union deployed two hundred men from Brownsville to destroy five thousand bales of cotton in the San Agustín Plaza. But Colonel Santos held them off with only forty-two men of his own.”
“I didn’t know about that,” I said.
“Surprise, surprise.” Lore’s hair stuck to her temples and neck. A rivulet of sweat puddled in the fleshy hollow of her clavicle.
I remembered what my mother had once told our class: History is written by those who have power and want to keep it. So when you read your textbooks, ask yourself who is telling the story—and what they have to gain by your believing it.
“Lore,” I said impulsively, “why did Andres come to Laredo that day?”
Lore’s face closed. She tossed the stick in the creek, where it briefly submerged before bobbing up again, dark and slick as an eel. “?Ya? You’re already breaking your promise? Maybe Gabriel was right. Maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
I resented the threat, implicit and effective. Lore seemed to think I would write only what she wanted me to write. But that hadn’t exactly been my promise. I hadn’t exactly promised her anything at all.
Lore, 1983
Fabian was right about one thing: Marta is a godsend.
Unlike Lore, Marta loves to cook, and she comes over every other afternoon to make huge batches of flautas, chiles rellenos, and encilantrada. Lore loiters until Marta waves her away with a plastic spatula. “Go!” she says. “Help the cuates with their homework, do whatever.” After dinner, she cleans with the same organized fervor, leaving the kitchen smelling like Fabuloso, leftovers neatly packaged in the fridge.
Tonight, after the cuates are in bed, Lore pours herself and Marta a hearty glass of wine each, and they retreat to the velour sectional in the living room.
“I feel like I’m stealing you from Sergio,” Lore says, curling her legs beneath her.
Marta rolls her warm brown eyes. “Ay, he heats up leftovers and watches football. He’s in hog heaven.”
Lore laughs.
At thirty-four, Marta is a part-time physician’s assistant who has longed for children since her early twenties. She and Sergio started trying right before Lore found out she was pregnant, and the sisters were thrilled, imagining themselves draped in ugly muumuus, complaining about their swollen ankles together. They talked about how close their kids would be, more like siblings than cousins. They’d go to the same schools, vacation together in San Antonio and Port Aransas. At carne asadas, Sergio and Fabian would stand at the barbecue pit and joke, “Do they even need us?” God, they were so young. Lore twenty and Marta twenty-two, newlyweds both, never once considering that life might not go as they’d planned.
The day Lore received her blood test results, the four of them celebrated in Lore and Fabian’s tiny kitchen. She and Marta primly sipped Sprite while the guys downed cold Micheladas. They were sure, so damn sure, that Marta’s positive test was right around the corner.
But as Lore’s belly ballooned, Marta’s remained stubbornly flat. Then, during Lore’s first ultrasound at thirteen weeks, Dr. Sosa had said, “Well, look at this—double trouble!” Two babies, the way it should have been, except Lore was hoarding them both. Though there was no way of knowing the months would stretch to years, Lore sobbed in Fabian’s steaming-hot truck. “It’s not fair—it’s like I’ve taken her baby.” Fabian laughed, kindly, rubbing her sweaty back as she dripped snot onto his shoulder. “It’ll happen for them soon,” he said. “Just you wait.”
Marta was stoically supportive throughout Lore’s pregnancy. When Lore was violently sick in the first trimester, Marta made gallons of her special tortilla soup, the only thing Lore could stomach. In the sixth month, Marta threw Lore’s baby shower, fifty of their tías and primas eating shrimp cocktails at Pelican’s Wharf, playing baby-themed Lotería and gasping in delight every time Lore laid a new onesie across the lavish, obscene globe of her belly.
After the boys were born, Lore stopped asking Marta for monthly updates. They only talked about it when Marta brought it up, in her matter-of-fact way. “Another year,” she’d say to Lore on New Year’s Eve. “Thirty-four,” she said on her most recent birthday, meeting Sergio’s eyes over the chocolate frosting of her Holloway’s cake. “Make a wish,” he said back. She closed her eyes, and everyone looked away, embarrassed by the clarity of her longing. Afterward, Lore squeezed Marta’s hand. “Plenty of time,” she whispered, and Marta’s eyes flashed with something complicated and painful before she smiled and squeezed Lore’s hand in return.
Lore is careful, even in her most trying days with the cuates, never to complain to Marta. And when, four years ago, Fabian started talking about having more kids, Lore only shook her head. “The cuates are more than enough,” she said, gesturing at the expansive mess of their living room. The truth was, she would have loved a daughter. But she couldn’t present her sister with another grainy sonogram, watching the tiny muscles of Marta’s jaw twitch with the effort to smile instead of cry.
Now the idea of more children is unthinkable. Lore lost herself in those early years with Gabriel and Mateo. If you’d asked her then what her favorite meal was, her favorite movie, her favorite hobby, she wouldn’t have known. It was as if Lore—the person, the woman—had disappeared, consumed by Lore the mother. The idea of taking maternity leave again, molding her life around a baby’s insatiable need while also making sure the cuates were fed and clean, their homework done, chauffeured on time to school and sports—and the house livable, groceries bought, bills paid, her marriage nurtured: quicksand. By the time she clawed her way out, she wouldn’t recognize herself.
Motherhood is the thief you invite into your home.
“So how’s it going in Austin?” Marta asks.
Lore shrugs, playing with her gold locket. A gift from Fabian on their tenth anniversary, a miniature gap-toothed picture of the boys on one side, a wedding photo on the other. “He’s working on a bid right now for a big house on Lake Travis, you know, one of those casotas with thirteen balconies and a boat ramp.” They laugh, because in fact, they don’t know such houses. “So he’s bidding everything: doors, stair railings, fences, driveway gates—even if we get a partial, it’ll be the biggest sale we’ve seen in months.”
“Ay, ojalá que sí.” Marta makes a quick sign of the cross. “And the store?”
“Super triste.” Lore surreptitiously glances at her watch as she swirls her wine. “It’s like a funeral home in there. Or no—an ICU, where everyone’s waiting to see who will die next.”
“You’re so morbid,” Marta says, and they laugh. “You must miss him,” Marta adds, and for a disorienting moment, Lore thinks she’s talking about someone else.
“Of course,” she says. Then, after a beat, “You’d miss Sergio, wouldn’t you?”
Marta grins, swirls her wine with a lazy wrist. “Not for the first week. Maybe two.”