Vic: Nah my dad will take me
Me: I want to hang out with you before you leave for Miami.
Vic: I really don’t have much time . . .
I’m thinking. She’s thinking. I am about to dive back into practical suggestions of dates and times that we might be able to see each other, which we haven’t done in years. We haven’t needed to. I know her life, and she knows mine.
Vic: Maybe dinner tomorrow?? My mom is making cauliflower crust pizza
Me: Uhhh (deleted)
Me: Really? With your parents? (deleted)
Me: Wait, the crust is made of cauliflower? How does that even work? (deleted)
Me: [pizza emoji, trash can emoji, pigeon emoji] (deleted)
Me: Sure.
I turn off the lamp and lie on the bed with my hands behind my head. The house phone rings in the kitchen and I don’t move to answer it, figuring that Angela will run for it in a minute. Yep, off she goes. Her talking-to-Mom voice appears, but I can’t tell from what she’s saying if there’s any good or bad news. Abuela in the hospital in San Juan. Me in my bed here in the Moreno-McBride-Solis house of oddities. And Victoria in her room across town, probably getting ready to go to sleep in her big iron bed, underneath her Broadway posters and that one picture of a steely-eyed Martha Graham on her wall. I don’t know why, but I like the mental image of the three of our beds lined up in a row, and all of us asleep, breathing through our dreams in succession.
“There’s an email from Mom.” Angela is about ten steps ahead of me in the getting-ready-for-school dance. Her cereal is the bow to the morning, while my messily peanut-buttered toast is the creaky warm-up. The tingle of magic from last night is gone, and I don’t know how to will it back.
“Is she still annoyed at me?”
“If she is, she’ll remember it in a couple days. She just wanted to let me know that Tío Mario is getting ready to take over.”
“She’s coming home?”
“That’s her plan.”
“And that doesn’t piss you off? She’s supposed to be there. God.”
“I want her to come home, Mercy.” A couple of weeks ago, she would have been teary, or close to it, while saying this. Now, she is dry-eyed and direct. “She can’t stay on leave from work forever. And I miss her. I don’t like any of this anymore.”
Since we’re not picking up Victoria today, there are still fifteen minutes before we need to leave for school. Angela realizes this too, and shuts herself in her bedroom to finish her cereal. I can’t believe I didn’t see that Lilia was the latest in a line of people to brush off Angela after Angela has given so much of herself. A line of people that includes Dad, Hannah, and me.
I take one more bite of the peanut butter toast and march over to the front door. Maybe Lilia is home, maybe she isn’t. Maybe I’ll tell Rex everything I know about his tenant. Maybe I’ll inform Lilia that I’m not doing any more projects for her until she starts the piano lessons with Angela again. Maybe I’ll sit on the floor of Rex’s living room, among the pictures of dead redheaded folk, and I’ll wait until Lilia gives me an answer or I come up with one myself.
On the floor of the foyer, something white gleams up at me. The sketchbook Lilia gave me the other night, the one in which I drew the perfect picture of Abuela’s old house that could never have been drawn anywhere else.
I flip the cover open.
The house, the swaying palms, the little goat. They’ve all survived.
Somehow, Lilia kept the Estate’s magic intact. Somehow, she got this picture out.
I clutch the sketchbook to my chest. It’s clear Lilia knows what she’s doing.
It’s a beautiful morning, and I bet it’s the same or better in San Juan and I’m thankful that Abuela is living through it even if she doesn’t know she is. Angela throws her stuff in the backseat of the Ford, but I need an extra minute to be sure that my sketchbook has a comfortable place to sit. Every time I open it to look at the picture of the house, there’s a strange, sweet pressure in my chest. I can’t even talk about it—not yet. It’s a newly cut feeling that still needs sanding down.
One thing is that I’m glad I didn’t tell Angela about the impromptu Firing Squad concert. Talk about a way to make her never want to see the floral-dressed one again.
“Hey, you’ve been killing it at the piano lately, you know that?” I say to Angela over the music she keeps turning up on the Ford’s stereo. “You should come back to Lilia’s studio with me before Mom comes home. I feel like things are different now.”
The speakers crackle. Angela switches the stereo off.
“I don’t think anything’s different,” she says.
We pull into school and I grab a spot at the back of the lot. Some of the Smoking Corner citizens wave to me, and I smile back out of instinct, but I doubt any of them can see it. Angela falls into step with me on the walk to the front doors.
“Anyway,” she says, “I’m sure we won’t even have a piano in a few days. You think Mom’s going to let us keep it in the living room?”
“I guess we’ll see.”
When she returns, our mother is going to feel like a visitor in her own house. It’s our house now, isn’t it? Rex pays the mortgage, and Mom’s name is on the rental agreement, but it’s really mine and Angela’s and, in a way, Lilia’s. It’s our new habits, our new rules. It’s how we’ve reversed Mom’s cooking traditions and now we have enchilada sauce from the jar but homemade mac and cheese. It’s how I always fall asleep alone in Mom’s bed but sometimes find that Angela has crept in halfway through the night. It’s when a couple of Vic’s annoying shirts from Alabama popped up in our laundry. It’s Angela not asking a thing about Vic, but seeming to know enough. It’s all that, and the damned piano.
Mrs. Pagonis loves the house sketch. “You’re really coming along, Mercedes,” she says brightly, and I want to ask her if she’d like to go out to the parking lot and have a smoke and talk about this strange place I know, this studio where every beautiful and terrifying thing seems possible. But I won’t.
“It’s cool,” Gretchen says after Mrs. Pagonis has moved on to the Green Table. “Is that a real place?”
“It was my mom’s house when she was a kid.”
The story of the picture threatens to come out of me. But I push the drawing closer to Gretchen and let it tell her as much as it can.