Chapter Nineteen
St. Louis, Missouri
1981
On the morning of Rafaela’s thirty-fifth birthday, she awoke to the sound of the telephone ringing. She heard her husband talking to someone in the kitchen, and before she could wonder who was calling so early, Benny and Ruth appeared in her bedroom doorway, singing. Benny carried a tray with toast and coffee, and Ruth carried a single yellow rose in a bud vase. They sang loudly while Rafaela stretched and sat up in bed, fluffed the pillows behind her. She felt none of her usual irritation at being awakened.
“Happy birthday, Mama,” Benny said, settling the breakfast tray onto her lap.
“Oh, thank you, my two little bonbons!” she said. “Come here, all I really want for my birthday is a kiss.”
They both came in for a hug, and Rafaela held her coffee safely to one side while she kissed them. Benny was all limbs at this age, clumsier than he’d been when he was a baby learning to walk. His spatial awareness couldn’t catch up with how quickly his arms and legs were sprouting from the trunk of his body, filling the space around him. He was always stubbing a toe on a corner or knocking a glass off a table with an errant elbow. At thirteen, her son was already taller than her, and quickly gaining on Peter. It had all happened so fast.
“And where’s your breakfast?” Rafaela asked, taking a bite of her toast.
“We ate already.” Ruth climbed into Peter’s side of the bed and flung the comforter across her knees.
“Open the cards, Mama!” she said.
Benny sat on the end by their feet.
“How’s the toast?” he asked.
“Perfect,” she said. “Buttery.”
“The trick is to butter it all the way to the edge,” Benny said. “None of this slop-it-in-the-middle laziness.”
“The cards, Mama!” Ruth said again.
“Yes!” Rafaela set her toast down and picked up the cards from the tray. One purple envelope in Ruth’s tidy handwriting, one yellow in Benny’s hurried scrawl. Two cards only.
Peter came into the room then and opened the curtains. “There you go,” he said. “Bit of sunshine for the birthday girl. Ready, kids? Gotta get you to the bus!”
Rafaela glanced over at the digital alarm clock on her nightstand.
“We have to wait for Mama to open her cards,” Ruth said.
“Don’t want you to miss it!” Peter called from the hallway.
Rafaela lowered her voice. “You have at least four more minutes before you have to go.”
Peter popped his head back inside the doorway. “Almost forgot,” he said. “Your parents called. I told them you were sleeping in for your birthday, so they said they’d call back in a little while.”
Rafaela nodded but didn’t answer. She was busy peeling open the seal on her first card. Ruth’s had a baby wearing big googly glasses and some headband antennae. Benny’s was in the shape of a dachshund, and it unfolded four times so the dog got longer and longer. I hope you’re birthday’s a real wiener! it said.
“Oh!” She tipped her head back against the pillow. “I wish you could both stay home for my birthday.”
“Can we, Mama?” Ruth asked.
Benny was already standing. He leaned over and kissed Rafaela on the cheek.
“Kids, let’s go! You’re going to miss it!” Peter called from the kitchen.
“I love you, Mama,” Ruth said, sitting up on her knees and kissing Rafaela once more on the cheek. “Happy birthday.” She climbed out of bed and padded across the carpet in her tights.
Rafaela listened to the attendant cloud of noise as her children rumbled down the hallway, scrambled for their backpacks, scraped kitchen chairs, slammed the refrigerator door.
“I can’t find my shoes!” Ruth whined.
“They’re right here.”
And then the louder slam of the back door that signaled the beginning of her daily solitude. She lifted her coffee cup from the tray and looked down at the two sweet cards. Two cards.
Peter would’ve driven the kids to the store to pick them out. He’d have paid for them, and for the yellow rose as well. Had the flower been his idea or Ruth’s? He’d have helped Ruth retrieve the little bud vase from the hutch, made sure she didn’t overfill it with water. So her husband hadn’t forgotten her birthday. He’d participated just enough so that she felt the slight exactly the way he had intended it: he had chosen not to get her a card. He had chosen not to kiss her cheek that morning, not to say the words Happy Birthday to her. He had perfectly dismantled her capacity to complain.
You didn’t get me a card would seem petty.
“The cards were from all three of us,” he’d say. “Who do you think bought that rose?” he would say.
In fact, she couldn’t blame him. Hadn’t she done the same on Father’s Day? Their marriage had become a battleground of minimal effort, littered with the corpses of their better selves. The blast of the phone ringing startled her from her thoughts, and she scampered out of bed, grabbed her robe, and ran to the phone in the kitchen.
The heavy not-quite-silence indicated Puerto Rico even before Papamío began to sing down the line, first in English, then in Spanish. She stood by the back door and watched a cardinal alight on the dogwood tree while her father sang. She held the phone in the crook of her neck while she tied the satin belt at her waist, and when the cardinal took off again, she closed her eyes so that, past the soft distance of the phone line, she could almost feel like she was there—a whoosh and a tumble—and just like that, she could be standing in her parents’ kitchen in Puerto Rico instead of here in St. Louis, where she’d wear a sweater in the house all day and still wouldn’t manage to feel warm. It was November 16.
“Ah, thank you, Papi,” she said, smiling into the phone. “It’s good to hear that nothing has changed. You still can’t carry a tune!”
“Only in a good, strong basket!” He laughed.
“Is that Rafa?” Mamamía’s voice behind him. “Why didn’t you wait for me!”
“I couldn’t wait, I couldn’t wait, Rafaela, listen,” Papamío said. “We have a big surprise for you. We need you to come down.”
“Down where?” Rafaela said.
Papamío laughed. “Down where! Down to Puerto Rico, what do you think? Down to Hades? You need to come down to Puerto Rico right away!”
“Oh, Papi.” Rafaela ran a hand over her curls, twisting the blanket frizz out of them. “I wish I could.”
“You can! You have to come,” he said. “It’s important.”
She moved across the kitchen to look at the calendar stuck to the wall beside the fridge. It was Tuesday today, and Thanksgiving was early this year. Next week she’d have to undertake all that dreadful cooking. Oh, she didn’t want to think about this on her birthday.
“Is she coming?” This was Mamamía again.
“She’s coming!” Papamío said. “She has to come!”
A flutter of noise while her mother wrested the phone from her father.
“You’re coming, Rafa?”
“Hi, Mamamía!”
“Did your father explain everything to you already? You know Peter has to come, too, he has to be there to sign the papers with you.”
“Don’t tell her, you crazy woman, stop talking, you’re going to ruin the surprise!”
A struggle and then the loud hum of their competing voices behind the muffled barrier of someone’s hand across the mouthpiece. Then Papamío’s voice returned, bright and cheerful and crisp.
“So when are you coming?” he said.
Rafaela shook her head. “I guess maybe we could come down on the kids’ Christmas break? Before New Year’s,” she said. “I’ll have to talk to Peter and see—”
“No, Rafaela, you don’t understand.”
She arrested her reasoning because she could hear it in his voice now, the urgency. She frowned into her calendar, flipped the leaf up to December, and then let it fall back again.
“Next week is Thanksgiving,” she said, but really she was only thinking out loud.
“Ah,” he tutted at her, and in her mind she could see Papamío waving her off with one hand, dismissing her concerns. In her youth, that gesture had driven her batty. Now she found it endearing. “So come this week, then. Come tomorrow!”
She went. Since her decision to marry Peter (from which her parents had tried only gently to dissuade her), Mamamía and Papamío had almost never made any insistence upon Rafaela’s person. So when they told her to come, the way they told her to come, she felt compelled to go. Peter made some reluctant noises at first—his job, the kids—but when it came to visiting Puerto Rico, he was easy. It was true that Peter had been the one to insist that the family leave San Juan and move back to St. Louis, but his reasons had been mostly pragmatic: there were better jobs for him in the States and, he believed, better opportunities for the children. But Rafaela knew that her husband missed the lifestyle in San Juan nearly as much as she did. So she dropped a scattering of verbal reminders about sunshine, food, and rum, and although Peter never voiced his compliance, he did open a suitcase on his side of the bed.
Rafaela went down to the travel agents the next morning and booked the tickets, Peter’s cousin came from Jefferson City to stay with the kids for three days, and by noon on Thursday, she and Peter were sitting at Mamamía’s kitchen table with a plate of coconut shortbread cookies in front of them.
“But what’s this all about, Rafael?” Peter asked his father-in-law.
Papamío sat back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach. A smile spread beneath the gray broom of his moustache. “All will be revealed in due time!” he said.
“Due time will be tomorrow at nine in the morning,” Mamamía said, pouring lemon water from a pitcher into glasses of ice.
“What happens tomorrow at nine?” Rafaela asked.
They had an appointment with Don Julio Dorado y Beltrán, as it turned out, at his law offices in Hato Rey. Papamío drove, and there was something strange and satisfying about Peter sitting in the back seat with Mamamía, who insisted Rafaela sit in front. Rafaela knew it would annoy Peter to sit in the back while his wife reposed in front, that he’d consider the arrangement to be a mild affront to his masculine pride, and because it was not a real indignity (not like the kind Rafaela endured without complaint almost every day in St. Louis), it caused in her a spreading gladness. And yet, she knew it wouldn’t help him to understand how she felt when people heard her accent and responded by shouting slowly at her like she was an idiot. Or how it felt when the teller at the bank asked if her house down in Porta Rico had a toilet. Or how it felt when she attended her one and only PTA meeting, to find there were no empty seats at any of the tables because they were all being saved for a friend. Peter would never know, because he didn’t care to fathom how it felt Every. Single. Time. she walked through the members-only door into the Short Hills Babylon Country Club and descended the carpeted stairs to the staff locker room.
Don Julio’s office was on the third floor of a large glass building, where a receptionist showed them straight to a gleaming conference room. Another receptionist delivered coffees to the long wooden table before Don Julio appeared with a large file jammed with papers. He wore an expensive gray suit and his moustache was as ample as Papamío’s. Rafaela turned to look at the naked top lip of her husband sitting beside her, clean-shaven. His hair was still wavy, thick and black, his eyes blue as the ocean. She didn’t look at him very often anymore, she realized. He was still so handsome. And then a flash of belated insight: how little that mattered in the end.
“Rafael!” Don Julio said, sticking his hand out to Papamío. “So great to see you! You look good.”
Papamío half stood from his seat for the greeting, clapping Don Julio on the shoulder. Don Julio turned to Mamamía then and performed a small bow.
“María Teresa,” he said, kissing her on both cheeks. “How is it that he’s aged and you haven’t? More beautiful than ever!”
Mamamía waved him off, unimpressed by the flattery.
“You must be Rafaela,” he said then, training his attention on her. “How lovely to meet you after all this time.”
Rafaela offered her hand and he shook it.
“And you.” Don Julio stuck his hand out toward Peter. The indignities mounted. “Must be the lucky husband?”
“He is indeed!” Papamío said.
Peter shook the man’s hand. “Peter Brennan,” he asserted his name.
Don Julio plopped into one of the red leather chairs and landed his substantial file folder on the table with a thump, a small whoosh of air.
“I suppose your father has told you why we’re here today?” Don Julio smiled, leaning back in his chair, one arm draped across the matching chair beside him. “Congratulations are in order!”
Rafaela shook her head and opened her mouth to respond, but Papamío beat her to it.
“We haven’t told her yet,” he said, clapping his hands and sitting forward. “Today’s the day.”
“Oh wow.” Don Julio leaned forward, too, elbows on the table, gold watch winking out from beneath the cuff of his shirt, his delight rising to match Papamío’s. “Big day! Big surprise then, right?” He opened the folder in front of him, drew a gold pen out from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Well, are you ready?” he said to Papamío. “You want to do the honors?”
Papamío held out his hand, palm up. “Please. You.”
“María Teresa?”
Mamamía shook her head.
“Okay!” Don Julio took a deep breath, lifted three copies of a contract out from inside the folder, and slid them across the table. “You’ll see here from these documents that your father locked a considerable sum of money into a trust for you on the day of your first birthday.”
Rafaela had been staring at the paper, but now she whipped her head up to look at Papamío beside her.
“Papi?” she said.
He could barely contain himself, his nostrils flaring like he couldn’t get enough air. He nodded. “Yes, mija. When we still had money, we locked some of it away for you and some for Lola.”
“It was untouchable all these years,” Mamamía said beside her. “Just locked into those trusts and growing. Until now.”
“But why…” Rafaela began to tremble.
“The way the trust was structured, we weren’t allowed to touch it,” Papamío said.
“Good thing, too,” Don Julio said. “Because that meant the creditors couldn’t touch it either. Your dad is a smart man, putting this aside for you the way he did.”
“We may have locked it up too tightly in fact,” Papamío said then. “Back when you were still in school, we tried to draw payments just so you could stay in Las Madres, but the trust wasn’t structured to allow for that. It was bulletproof!”
Beneath the table, Rafaela reached for her mother’s hand, returning her attention to the papers in front of her.
Don Julio continued, “The initial sum is… here.” The lawyer leaned across the table and tapped at a figure about halfway down the page.
Rafaela gasped, brought a hand briefly to her mouth, returned it to her lap, cleared her throat.
“That initial sum was exceedingly well invested over the course of the years,” Don Julio said.
Rafaela lifted the stapled papers, flipped to the second page, placed it flat in front of her. She was aware of Peter’s hovering presence, but he was vague and blurry.
“The ultimate term of the trust was to be thirty-four years, and here,” said Don Julio, pointing to a staggering number near the bottom of page two, “is what can either be paid out to you in a lump now, or transferred, to remain within the investment strategy, as you wish, once we sign these documents today.”
Mamamía was squeezing Rafaela’s hand now, and Rafaela felt tears prick the corners of her eyes. Papamío’s tears had come loose already and were streaming down his face unchecked. They gathered into his dampening moustache.
“Papamío?” she said.
“Happy birthday, my beautiful girl.”
Her body felt rigid with confusion. Rafaela had never actively wished for a moment like this, because it seemed impossible. But now here it was, and mostly she just couldn’t believe it was true. How could it be true?
“But you…” Rafaela didn’t know how to catch one of the many questions swarming through her brain, to pin it down and then force it out through her mouth. “What about Lola?”
“Lola got her share already,” Papamío said. “Almost two years ago, on her thirty-fifth birthday.”
Rafaela shook her head, her empty mouth standing open. It was unthinkable that her sister had been able to keep something like this from her. And then almost immediately, it wasn’t. Of course Lola would just carry on as if the money meant nothing.
“But then what about you?” Rafaela said.
“What about us?” Mamamía said. “We are old. And we are happy.”
“You’re not even sixty!” Rafaela said.
“This year!” Mamamía shrugged. “But anyway, we have done well in our second act. We have everything we need.”
“But this is your money,” Rafaela said. She turned to her father. “It’s yours.”
“It was never mine.” Papamío shook his head. “Not since 1947.”
“But—”
“It’s yours, Rafa,” Mamamía said, and then, “ only yours. Do you understand? It belongs to no one else. Just you.”
Rafaela had nearly forgotten Peter was here, but now she heard him making some rackety breaths in his chair nearby. Hyperventilating, maybe.
“Breathe, Peter!” Mamamía instructed.
Don Julio then whipped out a second folder, much slimmer, with a loose collection of asset protection documents inside, the gist of which seemed to be that, now that Rafaela’s secret irrevocable trust had reached maturity, now that the money contained therein belonged to Rafaela alone and was no longer protected by the trust, Peter was to agree that this account would be kept separate from their combined marital assets. He would make no personal claim on Rafaela’s money. Perhaps it was only the pressure, the weight of expectation and propriety, and the sense of overwhelm that led him to do it. Or maybe Peter didn’t fully understand the Spanish documents he was signing, was too flummoxed to resist. Whatever the case, Rafaela was flabbergasted when, without any hesitation whatsoever, her husband uncapped the pen Papamío placed in his hand. And he signed.
After the initial jolt of this day passed, Rafaela would come to a more robust understanding of the money, of what it could and could not do for her. The sum would one day cease to amaze her the way it had on that first impossible day in Don Julio’s office. It was a good sum, a large sum, yes. But eventually she would come to understand that it was not a return to the heady opulence of her youth, but rather a sum that would provide her freedom. If she was careful and managed it properly, it could last the rest of her life.
But that first day, as she sat at the long wooden table in that glass office building in Hato Rey, counting the digits on the contracts in front of her, Rafaela was astounded. Inexplicably, one of her first thoughts was of Candido. She remembered the two of them sitting side by side at the dining room table, their math books spread out in front of them, Candido leaning close, bumping his shoulder against hers. They were perhaps nine years old, and the pages of their math notebooks were covered in digits like these. Big, sturdy, challenging numbers. They swapped problems and strategies, raced to see who could come to the answer quickest. And then she was dumped from that memory immediately into another, a few years later. She was sitting in the front seat of the Buick Roadmaster, Candido driving her to Ponce to say goodbye.
She had begged her parents and Lola not to come. “It will be too hard to get on that ship if you’re all there,” she explained. So Papamío had loaned Candido the car, its last outing before they would sell it, and they loaded Rafa’s trunk and two suitcases into the back. In those days, it was a six- or seven-hour drive to Ponce from San Juan. She wore a pale yellow linen dress, and they barely spoke, but Candido held her hand the whole way.
And now her life was shifting unexpectedly yet again. A blink and a gust, and her fortunes had entirely changed.
“You’re happy, mija?” Papamío leaned over to whisper in her ear. “I know this doesn’t make up for anything, but—”
Now it was her turn to interrupt, to intercept his misplaced feelings. “Don’t be silly, you gave me the most beautiful life. There is nothing to make up for,” she said. “There never was.” She loved her father so much, she even believed it.
She stood from her chair then, and Papamío struggled to move the other chairs out of the way so he could wrap his arms around her. She could smell the sweet spice of his cologne as he hugged her, all her childhood rushing back. All the loneliness and sorrow of the intervening years extinguished, like they had never happened.
And just like that, she was rich again.
And just like that, she could leave him.