“Gracias.” The woman let the purse fall to her side. “Que Dios lo bendiga.”
After she left, the room was quiet, heavy. I thought of my childhood dog, Wags. He’d slipped under a gardenia bush one day to die. We’d had a funeral for him in the backyard. I’d written a eulogy in my Tweety Bird journal. There were afternoons I fell asleep draped over his mound of dirt.
“You must be Cassie,” Mateo said. He didn’t move toward me.
I stood. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That must have been difficult.”
“It always is.”
He led me to a small office stuffed with a desk, three chairs, and a mahogany bookshelf too large and baroque for the space. Among the glazed Mexican pottery, framed diplomas from Texas A&M University, and veterinary reference books was a framed black-and-white photo of a couple and five children. I recognized the clapboard siding behind them—Lore’s parents’ house.
“Your grandparents?” I asked Mateo, gesturing toward the photo. I wanted to pick it up, maybe take a picture with my phone.
Mateo slid behind his desk and nodded. “The bookshelf was theirs, too.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “What were they like?”
When he didn’t respond, I said, “You didn’t charge that couple for euthanasia.”
“No.” Mateo adjusted a slanting wall calendar. September was a bullmastiff puppy, lolling sleepily on a sheepskin rug. “People walk in here with a loved one alive in their arms and they leave with a body to bury or cremate. The last thing they need is to pay for the favor.”
“That’s very decent of you. I’m sure it’s appreciated.”
“We make up the cost elsewhere.” Mateo grinned. “Boarding is exorbitant.”
I laughed, startled, and for a moment he looked pleased by my reaction, unexpectedly boyish. His smile faded when I pulled out my digital recorder. “Do you mind?” I asked.
“Actually.” Mateo held up a hand, all business again. “I want to be straightforward. I think it’s a mistake, my mother talking to you. I don’t trust you or any other reporter to do right by our family.”
“Well.” I echoed his dry tone. “That was straightforward. You could have said that over the phone and saved me the trip.”
“This is a family.” Mateo leaned forward, an urgency to the curve of his body. “My family. How would you feel if strangers banged down your door, demanding to hear about the worst time in your life, then published it for the world to see?”
I thought of my mother’s funeral, friends and neighbors descending with wet rabid eyes, an emotional feasting on my family’s misfortune.
“I don’t get the sense that it was the worst time in your mother’s life,” I said gently. “At least not before Andres died.”
Mateo flinched at the mention of Andres’s name. “Well, it was for us. Or does that not matter to you, the fact that my brother and I don’t want this book written?”
“Dr. Rivera, I intend to treat your family’s story with respect. I—”
“But that’s just it.” Mateo shook his head, as if genuinely baffled. “It’s our story. What gives you the right to pick at it, scavenge it for your own gain?”
That word—scavenge. I saw myself as Mateo must see me—hunch-shouldered and long-beaked, scarlet neck like a question mark—and recoiled from the image. A moment later, I reconsidered. Maybe I was a vulture. After all, where most people see an end in death, crime writers see a beginning. I thought that was beautiful.
“I get that this is uncomfortable for you,” I said. “But if your mother wants to talk to me, that’s her right.”
Mateo opened the shallow center drawer of his desk and pulled out a checkbook. “What will it take for you to reconsider?”
I laughed, sharp and incredulous. “Are you . . . trying to bribe me?”
Mateo’s amber eyes held something of Lore in their unflustered directness. “You’ve never written a book before. You only have a few bylines aside from that”—his voice soured—“blog. This is a big swing for you.”
Heat crawled up my neck, where I knew it would stain my skin like marks from invisible fingers. “Good thing I’m not afraid to hold a bat.”
His mouth twitched, a surprised almost-smile. He rolled a pen between his palms—click rasp, click rasp, click rasp—and I couldn’t help it: I wanted to know how much he was willing to pay.
“I don’t mean to insult you,” he said. “I remember what it was like to be starting out, barely scraping by, student loans up to here. I’m just saying, I’d like to help you.”
Without breaking our stare, which made me prickly and hot, I turned on the recorder. “I don’t need financial assistance from you, Dr. Rivera. Tell me, does your mother know you’re making this ‘offer’?”
The corners of his eyes pinched.
“I didn’t think so,” I said. “She’s a grown woman. How would she feel to know her son doesn’t think she’s capable of making reasonable choices for herself?”
He drummed his fingers on the desk. There was a light square on his wrist where a fitness watch might usually sit. “I was hoping we could keep it between us.”
“If I said yes, you mean.” I laughed. “Trust me, your mother would know something was up if I suddenly decided to abandon this project. Which I’m not going to do. Not for any reason.”
Mateo closed his eyes and pressed his knuckles between his eyebrows. “So that’s a no, then.”
“That’s a no.”
“It almost destroyed us, you know.” Mateo’s jaw was sharp, clenched. “It did destroy us. But we managed to move on with our lives. To come back together. And now here we are again, because you think it’s a good story.”
It sounded damning. But his objections ignored the fact that Lore wanted me to write this book. He and Gabriel were the ones trying to silence her. Who was more wrong here?
“My mother died before I got to ask her anything real about her choices in life,” I said quietly. “You don’t know how much I wish she’d left behind journals or letters, anything that would help me understand her better.”
Mateo considered me, a lingering, open gaze. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
I nodded. Then I asked, “Do you think you’ve forgiven her?”
I expected him to shut me down. Instead, he set his checkbook back in the drawer and closed it. “Most of the time.”
“It must have been hard, though.”
His gaze was distant and fractured, as if trying to look at too many things at once. “We moved in with my aunt and uncle after everything. Then we both left Laredo for college.” He focused on me with that unnerving directness. “Sometimes you just have to leave.”
My mouth went dry, and for a moment I wondered if, for some reason, Lore had told him about Andrew; if my secrets were actually safe with her. But no. Mateo simply understood. He, too, had been harmed by his parents’ secret selves.
“But?” I held my breath, ready for him to remember who I was and why I was here. Though maybe he saw something of himself in me, as well.
He shrugged. “She’s my mother.”
The tangled glittering history in those words—the generosity of his heart—made the veins throb at my wrists.
“How about Gabriel?” I asked. “Was he able to maintain a relationship with your mom?”
“Not until the kids came.” Mateo turned a frame on his desk to face me: Joseph and Michael, I knew from Gabriel’s Facebook. Squinting up at the camera, noses white with sunscreen, swim trunks drooping with water and sand.
I smiled. “Adorable. And you? No kids?”
Mateo turned the frame back around and held it, staring at his nephews’ windblown hair and sparkling baby teeth. “No.”
“What about your father? What’s your relationship like with him?”
He didn’t look up from the photo. “He’s in there, I’m out here. It’s hard to find . . . points of connection.”