How will she be able to look at Fabian? How will she be able to look at herself? Yet, she doesn’t regret it. She can’t. And how can that be? How can shame exist without remorse?
She inches the car around to the carport, but the gate chain is loose, the wrought iron stuck a third of the way open. Before circling back to the front, Lore lowers her visor mirror and reaches for her purse to apply makeup. But the back door swings open. There he is, Fabian, grinning tiredly as the cuates push past him, sliding their baseball mitts on. Lore parks in the street, turns off the ignition.
“Mom!” Gabriel calls, surprised, as she steps out. “You’re home.”
Lore is grateful for the delay of pulling the cuates’ reluctant, distracted bodies close. When they were toddlers, they used to sit on her feet and she’d lug them around their small living room calling, “Mateo? Gabriel? Where are you? And why are my legs so heavy?” They would muffle their squeals against her knees, as if their laughter would give them away. Lore feels that way now, her attempts to hide unbearably obvious.
“Sorry for stealing your spot.” Fabian gestures at the loose chain. “Got to fix this gate—not very good advertising, is it?”
Lore laughs weakly, and in a few long steps, he crosses to meet her.
“Surprised?” Fabian asks softly, pulling her close.
Lore sits on one of their hard plastic lounge chairs, watching Fabian throw the baseball to Gabriel and Mateo. The grass is dry and patchy. She keeps forgetting to turn on the sprinklers. She’s embarrassed Fabian is seeing it this way. It feels like a failure. She almost laughs. The grass feels like a failure?
The fall sunlight is waning, the temperature cooling, when Gabriel shouts to her, “Pizza Hut?”
“Sure!” Lore is already standing, relieved to go inside, to let her expression settle without fear of what it might reveal. She makes their familiar order and is sorting laundry when Fabian comes into the small space fifteen minutes later, arms around her waist and chin on her shoulder. She tenses, then forces herself to relax.
“I missed you guys,” he says, warm lips to her neck.
She closes her eyes. “We missed you, too.”
That night, after pizza, Fabian lights a fire in the fireplace and the four of them toast marshmallows, the edges darkening, caramelizing, melting sticky and sweet in their mouths. In bed later, Lore and Fabian don’t talk about the store, Austin, or the recession. She expects not to want him, not the same day as Andres. But she’s happy Fabian is home, happy he missed them, and her desire to be close to him feels simple and animalistic. She straddles his waist, and her hair sweeps his face until he holds it behind her neck with one hand, and they come within moments of each other, the most in sync they’ve been in many long months.
The guilt rushes through her later, like an aftershock, her stomach heaving so violently she jolts from the bed and runs to the toilet. The nausea fades as suddenly as it came. Gripping the edge of the counter, she stares at herself in the mirror. “Who are you?” she hisses.
That first weekend, there are so many slivers of moments when the secret nearly slides wild from Lore’s throat before she swallows it back down. Then on Sunday night Fabian leaves for Austin again and the secret seems to curl and circle and settle in her belly, content to remain hidden. It’s over, she keeps telling herself. It’s over.
Her resolve lasts until Monday, when Andres calls her at the bank. Soon she’s like an addict, promising herself this is the last call, no, this one. Then Mr. de la Garza opens his jumbo CD and Lore is sent back to DF.
Once again, Marta and Sergio watch the cuates while both Lore and Fabian are gone. This time Lore is in DF for three days and two nights, neither of which she spends in her hotel bed.
Before her third trip, Andres asks if she’d like to meet his kids. “It’s my weekend with them,” he explains.
Lore’s house is midnight quiet. She thinks of the cuates, sleeping down the hall as she talks to Andres. Imagine the faith—the hope—it takes to bring someone new into your home, to introduce them to your kids knowing that person could break their hearts. Lore doesn’t want to be that person.
“You don’t think—it doesn’t feel soon?” she asks, wincing.
“Not for me,” he says. “But I understand if it does for you. I know it’s a lot. But, you know, we’re sort of a package deal.”
Lore exhales slowly. “Of course,” she says. “Of course.”
In DF, Lore goes straight to her lunch meeting before taking a cab to Tlatelolco. Her mouth is dry, and she unwraps a stick of Big Red before knocking on the door. Andres answers right away, as if he’s been standing there waiting, and pulls her into his arms. She can feel his pounding heart beneath his dark blue sweater. “They just got home from school,” he says in her ear. “I’ll get them.”
Lore doesn’t know what to do with herself, so she stands there until Andres leads the kids out. Penelope is fifteen and Lore’s height. She’s skinny, the way the cuates are when they’ve emerged from a growth spurt, and a red headband holds her thick black hair away from appraising dark eyes. Carlitos is exactly the kind of boy Gabriel picks on at school, nothing terrible, but Lore isn’t blind: if Mateo weren’t his twin, if he looked like Carlitos, with those glasses and unruly curls, Gabriel would probably pick on him, too.
“Penelope, Carlitos,” Andres says, smiling. “I want you to meet Lore. My . . . girlfriend.” He looks at Lore, uncertain and apologetic, as if realizing it’s the first time they’ve used a title out loud. It’s all happening so fast, but what can she do in this moment except smile and shake the kids’ hands? Andres’s relief is palpable as they decorate the tree, and at one point he slips an arm over her shoulders and dips his head to kiss her. “Novia,” he whispers. Lore catches Penelope staring, in a way that seems to see right through her, and she turns her face at the last minute.
The next day, they go see A Christmas Story, and Lore cries in the dark theater because she and Fabian had planned to take the cuates and somehow this, this, feels like cheating. It’s too much. A whole other family. But she can’t walk away, because soon she’s in love with them, too. She loves the way Penelope and Andres talk about books, cheeks flaming, arms waving, “No, no, ?escúchame!” Andres sneaking quick smiles at Lore as he teases Penelope into debate before laughing, admitting she was right, and did she know . . . There’s always more he knows, that curious, professorial mind, and Penelope listening eagerly, nodding, while Lore and Carlitos grin at each other, co-conspirators in their unspoken agreement to be the audience, to enjoy the Andres-and-Penelope show.
In the spring of 1984, the trips become more regular, scheduled: Lore in DF one week of the month, the cuates with Marta and Sergio during that time. Sometimes, after dinner, Penelope sprawls on the couch with her head in Lore’s lap, her feet in Andres’s. “Play with my hair?” she asks, smiling up at Lore, and Lore’s heart seizes—imagine, having a daughter, after all.
When Carlitos struggles with his math homework, she’s the one he asks for help, and she wants to laugh, thinking here she is, in a different country, with a different man and two different children, still solving for x, as if any choices she could make in this life would end with her at a kitchen table beside a twelve-year-old boy smelling newly of body odor beneath the childish scent of pencil shavings. Does she mind this? No, because she is not Penelope and Carlitos’s mother. She is free to enjoy them without being the one charged with maintaining the grinding gears of their days.