Chapter 24
24
Tostón let out a plaintive whine. It was his third in as many minutes.
They were snuggled in bed, where they’d been for who knew how long at this point. Sofi hadn’t left her bed unless it was to grab food from her mom’s front door where it was left by a delivery person or to take Tostón for a walk. She knew she couldn’t remain there for much longer, but she also wasn’t ready to face the world yet.
Sofi lifted her hand and patted him on the head. “I know. I miss him too.”
Tostón’s head popped up. He stared in the direction of her front door, his head tilted like he was listening for something. Sofi’s mom was picking up Abuela Fina after work to take her to the movies, so it wouldn’t be her. Something that became perfectly clear when whoever it was knocked loudly.
Sofi held her breath. She wanted it to be Leo, but she also didn’t. She wanted to see him, to ask about his arm, to hold him. At the same time she knew that it would only lead to more pain for them both. She needed to be strong no matter what.
Sofi hopped out of bed. She contemplated changing her clothes or at least brushing her teeth, but the knocking came harder, more insistent. She wrapped her blanket around herself, rushed to the door, and placed her hand on the knob. It started to turn. Sofi’s stomach began to cramp.
The door swung open revealing a man, but not the one Sofi wanted. Her father stood in the doorway decked out in one of his designer suits. “What is wrong with you?” he asked. “Are you sick?”
Tostón started barking. He’d never met her dad. Sofi ignored the disappointment and told her dog to hush. “I’m taking a mental health day,” she replied once Tostón quieted down.
“A mental health day? Qué ridiculez Americana es esa?”
Of course caring for her mental health was ridiculous to him. She stood straight. “I’m going through a lot right now and needed some time to myself.”
“You haven’t come to work in a week,” he said, walking into her mom’s house without her permission much like he always walked into her office. “You have important meetings coming up next week. We don’t have time for you to be sitting in bed taking naps with a dog.”
What the hell was he talking about? She didn’t have anything coming up. She’d quit. Did he not know that? “Didn’t Malorie tell you—”
He cut her off with a wave of his hand. “She said you told her that you quit, but I knew better. You were just mad and needed to cool off. You wouldn’t really quit because some old guy made a pass at you. That’s not how we do things. That’s not the Rosario way.”
“Papi, I did mean it. I really quit. I—”
“You think I want to work until I die? You’re supposed to be learning how to run the company, but you always put what you want first. France, moving your abuela to Chicago, and then your friend’s wedding. Everything comes before me.”
That was it. The straw that snapped the camel straight in half, tore it into pieces, then set it on fire. Sofi stood, completely unconcerned that she was in a bralette and boy shorts. If he wanted her fully dressed he shouldn’t have just shown up like he owned the place. “ I put myself first? Are you joking? You must be joking. There’s no way you’re serious.”
“Of course I’m serious. You think I came over here to waste my time?”
“You really have the audacity to sit there and tell me that when you’re literally the most selfish person I have ever known?” She scoffed. “I don’t know why I asked that. Of course you do. I don’t think there is anyone less capable of self-reflection.”
“Now wait a minute. You can’t talk to me like that. I’m your father.”
Sofi started laughing incredulously. “Oh, now you want to call yourself a father. This is rich.”
“I am your father.”
Sofi shook her head. “No. Fathers care about their children. You don’t really give a shit about me. You only use me to make yourself look good.”
He looked ready to respond, but Sofi didn’t want to hear it. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me? I’m fucking broken because of you. I don’t trust anyone because of you. I’m miserable with my life because of you.”
“That’s not fair,” he said.
“I don’t give a fuck about fair. I care about truth and the truth is that I don’t believe anyone can truly love me or accept me, because you never did . How can I ever think that someone would put me first, protect me, want me despite my flaws, when you didn’t? You were supposed to love me, to protect me, to be there for me when I needed you and even when I didn’t, but you couldn’t be bothered. You ripped my heart out of my chest the moment I was born and replaced it with a cracked shell of one. Every day another jagged piece of glass breaks off and digs into that wound.”
“I know I screwed up when you were young, but I’ve apologized.”
“I don’t care that you apologized, because you didn’t change. When you’re really sorry for what you’ve done you learn from it and do better, be better. You didn’t care until you needed my forgiveness to feel good about yourself, to make your parents not be ashamed of the way you treated me. That was why you apologized and even then it was lukewarm at best.” She shook her head, tears dripping from her jaw to her chest.
“Lukewarm? I helped you go to school, I put you in a position of power, I’m trying to hand this company over to you.”
“I don’t want it! I never did! You forced it on me as a condition the one and only time I ever asked you for help. Because everything with you comes with strings. You are so fucking self-centered that you can’t even help your only kid without getting something in return.”
“And you are an ungrateful brat! What do you want from me? You want me to baby you? To hold your hand? That’s not who I am. That’s not the kind of man I am. I’m never going to sit there and coddle you. I’m busy. I have things to do. To accomplish. I thought you understood that.”
“I know very well that I can’t expect that from you, even if I wanted it, which I don’t. All I’ve ever wanted from you is love and support. Why do you think I’ve stayed for as long as I have? Because I know that your love, attention, and support is conditional. I knew that if I’d told you that I never wanted to work at the company, you would’ve just brushed me off. You would’ve continued to ignore me. At least working at the company gave me some of your attention.”
“Don’t you dare try to blame me for everything! Your mother—”
Sofi cut that off before he could even finish. “Do not bring my mother into this.”
“No. Let him talk,” her mother’s voice said from behind them.
Sofi spun to see Mami and Abuela Fina standing there with bags of takeout in their hands.
Mami wasn’t looking at Sofi. She was looking at her dad. “Let him finish explaining how I’m the one to blame for any of this. I would love to see the gymnastics that will require.”
“It’ll be like watching the Olympics,” Abuela Fina added.
Her mom shot Abuela Fina a look. “Mami, por favor.”
“Fine, I’ll just sit here quietly.” Abuela Fina walked over to the kitchen and placed the bags on the counter before sitting on a stool. She crossed her legs and placed her hands on her knee, overlaid like a classy lady.
“I’m not here to fight with you, Alicia,” her dad said. “I came to find out what is going on with our daughter since she hasn’t come to work for days.”
“Because I quit,” Sofi said, but she was ignored. Her parents were busy glaring at each other.
Mami held a finger up as if to say, Well, actually . “See, now, that’s where you’re wrong.” She used her finger to point at Sofi. “That smart, strong, fierce, and loyal woman standing there is my daughter. I raised her.” She turned her finger to poke at her own chest as she continued, “I was the one to wake up in the middle of the night when she cried. I was the one who worried whenever she was sick or sad. I was the one who took her to school and helped her with her homework. I was the one who braided her hair and held her hand to cross the street. I was the one who hugged her when she cried every time you failed to show up. I was the one who broke my own heart in half so I could give it to the girl whose heart you broke. Sofia is my daughter and just like her mother, she doesn’t need to jump through hoops for your attention. She deserves better than that.”
“You never asked me for anything,” he said. “So I didn’t know what to do! I came when you let me and when she came to me for help, I gave it!”
“Ay, Jose, please. I never asked for anything because you made it very clear that I was on my own. But I never once prevented you from seeing her. All you had to do was show up, but you couldn’t even do that unless your parents forced you to.”
Abuela Fina scoffed and then muttered loudly in Spanish, “I can’t believe this asshole is in his sixties and his balls still haven’t dropped.”
“Mami!” Sofi’s mom turned back to her dad. “You have had her working with you every day for over ten years and yet she’s still here brokenhearted and crying over your neglect. Do you have any idea how pathetic that is on your part? That in all that time you haven’t managed to build a relationship with your only kid despite her showing up and busting her ass for you? You have failed her as a father, but she wanted you in her life anyway. Do fucking better, Jose.”
“I was only doing what I thought best for her.” He tried to defend himself.
“?Ay ya!” Abuela Fina exclaimed. “Nos tienes hasta acá con tantas zanganerías.” She waved a hand above her head as if saluting the sky. “Avanza y lárgate. Mira, mejor vaya pal carajo con todo y el trabajo.”
There wasn’t much to say after Abuela told him to go to hell and take his job with him.
Her father looked at her as if waiting for her to ask him to stay. Sofi kept her mouth shut. Mostly because she was doing her best to hold in her sobs, but also because she too wanted him to leave.
“That’s what you want?” he asked.
Sofi nodded. “Maybe one day, I’ll want to talk to you again, but not today.”
He swallowed. “Well, you know where to find me.” With that he left.
As soon as the door closed behind him, Sofi dropped to her knees. She buried her face in her hands and began bawling. She felt strong arms wrap around her and knew immediately who they belonged to, because they were as familiar to her as her own face.
Mami squeezed her tight and let her cry. At some point, Abuela Fina joined them. Her arms less strong, but no less comforting than her mother’s.
“I’m still mad at you for working with Leo to manipulate me,” she told Abuela Fina in between bouts of tears.
“I know, negrita. But I’m here for you anyway.”
After a while Sofi ran out of tears to cry. She lifted her hands to wipe her face.
“Better?” Mami asked.
Sofi shook her head. “No, but I will be.”
“There’s my guerrera.” Mami patted her on the back before standing and helping up Abuela Fina. “Now I have something for you and I want to make it clear that I’m giving it to you with no strings attached, so don’t start freaking out on me.” She walked over to her purse and pulled out a rectangle piece of paper. She handed it to Sofi.
Sofi looked at the paper and realized it was a check—for three hundred thousand dollars. She looked at the names and gasped when she saw her mother’s name in the corner and her own name in the payee section. “What the hell is this?” Sofi asked.
“It’s a check,” Mami said helpfully.
“I can see that, but what are you doing?”
“I want you to use it to start your own business. The one you said.”
“Mami, you don’t have this kind of money.”
Abuela Fina laughed. “Quien te dijo eso? Si tu mama es millonaría.”
Sofi’s jaw dropped. No way. Then she laughed. “Yeah okay. Mami’s a millionaire and so are you.”
“I am,” Abuela Fina said.
“What?” Sofi exclaimed. “There’s no way!”
Abuela looked at her like she was a poor little idiot. “Nena, what do you think happened to all of your tío’s baseball money?”
“I don’t know. I figured he’d spent most of it and the rest went to his and Abuelo’s funerals.”
Mami shook her head. “Half went to your abuela and the other half went to me.”
“If you’re rich then why did we always live paycheck to paycheck?” Sofi asked.
“It wasn’t a lot at first, a few hundred thousand, because Manny was reckless with his spending. I kept it in case of emergencies and for your school. But when you didn’t need it, I invested it and it’s been growing ever since.”
“But you work so hard,” Sofi said. “You cut coupons and only get the generic brand of stuff.”
“Claro, I work hard because I love my job. It’s important, and just because I have money doesn’t mean I need to flaunt it.”
“You’re really telling me that I used to eat the same meal for days on end and learned to sew up the holes in my clothes for nothing?”
“You should’ve told me that you didn’t want it or that you needed new clothes,” Mami said.
Sofi gasped in outrage. “You should’ve told me that we weren’t poor!”
“Vez, this is what happens when you close yourself off and try to do everything alone,” Abuela Fina said. “You two are so much alike—stubborn and uncommunicative.” She shook her head. “If you’d both just stop trying to be so damn independent, trying to not burden each other, you’d realize that you’re only holding yourselves back.”
“She’s right,” Mami said. “I’ve been trying for so long to keep you out of everything, to just handle all the difficult stuff so that you can live your life without worry. It never occurred to me that you’d draw your own conclusions and try to be the one protecting me instead.”
“Of course, I’m going to want to protect you too. You’re my mother. You’re the most important person in my life. I want you to not worry about me and to be able to live your life too. That’s why I try to do everything myself. I know that my childhood was hard for you because you were by yourself doing everything, so I want you to be able to live your life freely now. Why do you think I’m always trying to get you to take off work and do something fun? And you better believe that now that I know you two are loaded, I’m going to be badgering you to take more vacations.”
“You don’t have to badger me,” Abuela Fina said. “I’ll go on a cruise in a heartbeat.”
“See? Look at that. You two can go on a nice long cruise to Hawaii or something. Maybe even a singles cruise!”
Mami grimaced. “I am not going on a singles cruise, especially with my mother. Besides, she’s not even single anymore.”
“Alicia!” Abuela Fina exclaimed, smacking Mami on the arm. “Why would you say such things?”
Sofi rolled her eyes. “If you think everyone doesn’t already know about you and Papo Vega, you’re delusional.”
Abuela Fina actually blushed. It was adorable. “We are friends. Good friends.”
Mami snorted. “Good friends who kiss.”
“What?” Sofi exclaimed.
Mami smiled. “Yep. She didn’t think I saw them in the arts and crafts room, but I did. They were Frenching like two teenagers under the bleachers.”
Abuela swatted Mami again. “Que falta de respeto hacia tu madre, muchacha malcriada.”
Mami laughed. “You’re the one who raised me, so if I was raised wrong that’s on you.”
Abuela Fina stuck her tongue out at Mami. “Bye, Alicia,” she said with a sassy neck roll and hand flip.
Sofi laughed. “It’s ‘bye, Felicia’ and no one says that anymore. Besides, don’t be mad at Mami when you’re the one out here kissing boys in public, you light-skirt.”
Abuela Fina gasped in outrage. “?Mira, muchacha del diablo, como hablas así a tu abuela? You need to worry about yourself. I’m not the one locked in my room, crying, and smelling like dog.”
“I knew it was only a matter of time before you brought that up!” Sofi exclaimed. “But since you did, let’s talk about it. How dare you join forces with Leo and Papo to manipulate me like that?”
“If you think I’m going to tell you that I’m sorry I did it, I’m not. I know you. If we hadn’t found ways to push you together you would’ve kept stubbornly pushing him away. Except for sex, talk about light-skirts, and then lying to your best friend about it all.”
“You don’t know that,” Sofi said.
Abuela laughed as if that were the funniest thing Sofi had ever said. “I know that because I know you. I know you even more now that I witnessed that fight with your sperm donor.”
“Eww. Don’t call him a sperm donor. That’s gross.”
“Well, I refuse to call him your father. He doesn’t deserve that title. But that’s not what we’re talking about so don’t try to distract me.” She shook her finger at Sofi. “We’re talking about you trying so hard to be strong and independent that you push everyone away. You’re scared, negrita. You don’t want to let anyone in because you think they will hurt you. I don’t blame you for feeling that way, people have hurt you. They’ve left you. But you can’t let that stop you from loving and being loved.”
“You’re an amazing daughter and amazing woman,” Mami jumped in. “You have so much love inside you, Sofi. You’d walk through fire for the people you love, but you don’t trust that they’d do the same for you. You think you’re not worth it. That there is something wrong with you and you’re broken.” Mami grabbed her chin like she had done when Sofi was little and being scolded. “We are all broken in some way, Sofi. That is what makes us human. And what makes us beautiful is that we keep hoping and loving despite that. We all deserve love. You deserve love. You have love. You just need to let it in.”
“I don’t think I can, Mami,” Sofi whispered. “I think I’ll always be waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“And if it does?” she asked. “What then?”
Sofi blinked. “What do you mean ‘what then’? I’ll get hurt.”
“And?”
“I don’t want to be hurt.”
Abuela Fina snorted. “Nobody wants to be hurt, boba.”
“Be nice,” Mami scolded her mother. Then she looked back at Sofi. “You’ve been hurt before. And you’ll be hurt again. When your abuela dies, when I die, hell when this dog dies. Are you going to cut us out of your life now, so that you don’t have to feel the pain, so that it will be less?”
“Of course not,” Sofi said.
“Then why are you doing that to Leo? Do you love him more than you love us and so if he hurts you, you will die?”
“No,” Sofi grumbled.
“Then what is stopping you, bebé? You know you will get hurt again. That’s life. But that doesn’t mean that you just give up, because then you miss out on the positive moments too.”
“We do not let fear stop us,” Abuela Fina decreed in Spanish. “We are Santanas and we look that fear in the eyes and tell it to fuck off. We’re going to do what we want and we’re going to have a great time doing it.”
Sofi sat with the knowledge that had just been dropped on her. She appreciated that they hadn’t tried to negate her fears or make it seem like they were unreasonable. However, she still wondered if they were right. Did she really just have to accept the future pain as something inevitable but survivable and that was that? It seemed too simple. But what was the alternative, to forever keep hiding from happiness out of fear of losing it? That was nonsense. “Leo told me that I look for things to go wrong to justify never giving them a chance.”
Mami nodded. “A self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“But I feel like everyone does that,” Sofi said.
“True, but we aren’t talking about everyone,” Abuela Fina pointed out. “We’re talking about you and how you want to live the rest of your life.”
“What do you want, negrita? What does your future look like?”
Her future, if she let herself envision the perfect version, was something similar to what she’d experienced the last month—her, Leo, and Tostón enjoying their life together surrounded by their loved ones. In her ideal future she had a thriving event planning business and they maybe even had a couple of kids who’d grow up playing with all of their cousins, like Leo had. They’d take trips all over and explore the world. They’d all be together surrounded by love.
“That sounds achievable,” Mami said, causing Sofi to realize she’d been speaking out loud.
“All you have to do is go grab it and work to hold on to it,” Abuela Fina said.
Sofi voiced the question that replayed in her mind. “But what if I can’t hold on? What if I lose it?”
“I did,” Abuela Fina said. “And I’m not going to lie and tell you that it wasn’t the worst pain I ever felt. I’m also not going to tell you that it still doesn’t hurt. It does. Every day. But if you ask me if I’d do it all over again, knowing what I would lose, I wouldn’t even have to think about it. My answer will always be yes.”
Sofi tried to put herself in Abuela Fina’s shoes. If she’d been the one to lose her husband and her son, would she have cursed the day she’d met the love of her life and wish it had never happened? No, of course not. She didn’t regret being with Leo, not any of the times they were together. Her regret was that they weren’t together now. She wanted to be with him even though it was hard and sometimes it hurt. “You’re right. I’d rather have it all and lose it than to let it go without giving it a chance.”
“Good,” Mami said. “Now you have a lot of work to do, because I’m sick of holding down all the wedding stuff for you these last couple of days. Event planning is your thing, not mine.”
Right. Sofi still had a wedding to pull off in a week. But after that, she’d figure out how to make sure Leo knew that this time, she was ready.