Chapter Thirty-Two
San Juan, Puerto Rico
2023
Benny will take Ruth to see the shop. He will park at a municipal lot two blocks away because it’s a busy, narrow street. It’s quiet in the early morning, and the whole street bears the unmistakable sticky-sweet smell of nightclubs and dance floors. Ruth will note bubbly graffiti on many of the walls and windows here, a flock of scooters on every corner. They will pass three nightclubs, a bar, a falafel joint, and a beauty supply store before arriving at a storefront with a wooden sign hanging from a wrought-iron post in front. It’s eye catching, brightly colored in Caribbean turquoise and orange. It says THE DOUBLE DOWN . And then in smaller letters underneath: VINTAGE CURIOSITIES, COMMODITIES, they are not gentle. They come at her with hooks and straps and carabiners, and they attach her to the unrelenting machinery of life, and they wrench and yank her upward, banging her against every step along the way, and directly into a wall of pain. She awakes with a gasp. There. That is the thing she could not do before. She could not gasp. She could not breathe. And now she breathes! She breathes.
Daisy doesn’t know what happened, or why she’s in a different room now, or where her family is, or who the new nurse is. But she is alive, and she remembers that, just before she passed out, just as she coughed, and a bright spurt of red blood erupted from her mouth and sprayed across the blanket, she thought she would not be alive any longer. There had been a panicky pounding in her ears that sounded like death. The second time she’s heard it in the last twenty-seven days.
Daisy will never be the same.
Mom comes into the recovery room and lays her cheek along Daisy’s forehead. Daisy feels as though she’s traveled back in time. All the progress she made over the last two weeks, gone. Daisy is set back like a haywire clock. She remembers the anesthesia dream and does not feel sure dream is the right word for it.
“Dad,” she says, and her mom pulls back far enough to examine Daisy’s face. Daisy registers her mother’s alarmed expression.
Mom holds her hand while she and the recovery room nurse discuss Daisy’s cognitive function, the possibility of brain damage, the timeline for determining impairment, best and worst case scenarios, elves, butterflies, demons, Daisy doesn’t know.
She sleeps.
Although consignments come in all the time, Tuesday is the day Daisy has earmarked for cataloging and pricing new inventory, so Rafaela and her daughter are both on hand to get the work done, but they are overwhelmed. Well, Ruth is overwhelmed. Rafaela sits on the red lounger with one leg up and watches contently. Her daughter stands with her hands on her hips and surveys the merchandise all around her.
“I don’t know where to start,” Ruth says.
“Well.” Rafaela leans forward and plants both feet on the floor. “Why don’t we start by looking for a ring?”
Ruth steps gingerly among the bags and cartons, bends down and loosens the flap of a cardboard box to peer inside. “What kind of ring?”
Rafaela extends her own arms and examines her hands. “An engagement ring,” she says.
Her daughter pivots on the balls of her feet to gape at her.
“I’ve decided to get married,” she says.
Ruth’s eyes pop wide, and a smile tiptoes onto her face. “Mama, that’s wonderful!”
Rafaela sidesteps the emotion of the moment, walking over to inspect the glass jewelry case that separates the shoe section from the racks of clothing. “Life is short, right?”
“Too short.” Her daughter steps over the stretch of bags on the floor to join her at the jewelry case.
“What about that one?” Rafaela points to a ruby with a halo of tiny diamonds around it, and a braided antique band.
Ruth unlocks the case, and Rafaela reaches in to lift the ring from its velvet pillow. She slips it onto the fourth finger of her left hand, a perfect fit.
“It’s beautiful, Mama. But…” The subject of Rafaela’s one true love is still new. Her daughter is shy in her words. “Candido didn’t pick out a ring for you himself?”
Rafaela looks from her hand to Ruth.
“Oh, no, dear. He doesn’t know about our engagement yet.” She grins. “I’m going to tell him tonight.”
Ruth laughs deeply, and it is exactly the sound Rafaela had been hoping to provoke. There were too many years without it. For her and her daughter both, there had been a dearth of laughter, lean years, a scarcity of joy. But now they are here and they are alive and they are together and they are home. Like a boomerang, Rafaela had sailed out into the world, out across Ponce and Trinidad and St. Louis and New York, across turmoil and strife and sorrow and growth, and she had tumbled and whipped and arced and flown, and there were times when she couldn’t have said which way was up. It was a topsy-turvy route she had taken, yes, but wasn’t this inevitable, in the end? Wasn’t Rafaela always going to make her way back to where she belonged?
Ruth loses many hours to the insurance company. She talks to dozens of people and all of their supervisors. They assign her a special case worker. She writes letters and appeals and scathing social media posts. She rallies the ire of her followers to no effect. She documents everything. She contacts her congressperson, expresses her incredulity, but maintains her composure throughout the whole process, because her primary sentiment is relief, gratitude—that her daughter is alive. Ruth feels annoyed and anxious, yes. But she doesn’t really feel angry.
By the time Daisy is discharged, her hospital bills total $578,432.63, and she is still in physical therapy. She got herself off the painkillers as soon as possible, but both Ruth and Daisy lost significant income, too, when their lives fell into the mouth of calamity. Nothing is the same now as it was before the accident, not their bodies or their souls or their bank accounts or the way they spend the hours of their days or the conversations they deem important or the relative locations of their bodies on the planet. Certainly not their priorities.
But when at last it becomes clear that Ruth will have to choose between selling the house or declaring bankruptcy, she no longer has difficulty accessing her rage. The feeling appears without her bidding and attends to her at night when she tries to sleep. It’s as unrelenting as the tide, and equally vast.
Unbeknown to Ruth, when Mama becomes aware of the fiasco, she talks to her advisers about paying Daisy’s medical bills. The advisers explain that her financial future will collapse wholesale if she tries to make a withdrawal like that from her long-term investment strategy. She will not have enough money to live on, they warn her. They tell her that the best way to provide a possible future inheritance for her daughter and grandchildren is to leave the money where it is, think about helping them on the back end instead. When Ruth finds out, she forbids Mama from touching the money anyway. She cannot abide the idea of a second insolvency. She cannot be responsible for that.
“We will find another way, Mama,” she says.
The anger grows, and soon it occurs to Ruth that its presence is a cancer, that it will eat her if she doesn’t find a way to evict it. She cannot hold it in her heart alongside the more important things she has learned. She spends one day screaming into the ocean, an exorcism. And then she sits down with the hospital administrator, who is kind, who has seen this nightmare before, who does everything in his power to help. Ruth negotiates the lowest possible rate, and a payment plan she thinks she can manage.
Then, she sells the house.
Ruth doesn’t think for very long before deciding to stay in Puerto Rico. Daisy will remain here because this is her home; Ruth will remain here because Daisy is hers. Her job, such as it is, is portable. The Widow’s Kitchen can become La cocina de la viuda without any translation at all. Maybe it’s time for a pivot anyway. There’s a rich world of new material here, a collaboration maybe, in the next chapter of her career. Ruth doesn’t yet know what they will be, but she can feel green shoots pushing through dark soil into sunshine.
She will find a little house close to Daisy, in the light-soaked neighborhood of her memory. Santurce will be both exactly as she remembers it and entirely new. It will delight and surprise her, to hear the variety of accents on her street as she pushes her little cart to the grocery store twice a week. Her Spanish will return, haltingly at first, and then she will clumsily improve. Ruth will become aware that her vocabulary is arrested to that of a young child, and then she will rejoice in learning new words, rolling them around her mouth, reaching for slang, jokes, idioms. Her timidity will fall away, along with other things she doesn’t need anymore. She will remember a laughter that’s been dormant so long she’d forgotten it ever existed. It will visit her often.
At night, Ruth will leave the windows open so the chorus of los coquís will sing into her dreams. She will hang yellow curtains in her kitchen and grow tomatoes in her courtyard. There will be hummingbirds in the garden.
Daisy and Mom are together in the Double Down.
With Benny’s and Candido’s help, they finally installed that enormous chandelier from the defunct hotel in Ponce. The new fixture sends a warm and fractured light all around the space. Daisy is a warm and fractured light herself. She still walks with a limp on her left side, and the scar that runs between her breasts will never fail to shock her. Sometimes the strap of her bra enflames it. Carlos and Vic have taken to calling her Frida Kahlo or sometimes Fri-Daisy Kahlo. But she is alive. She is alive.
In the evenings when they close the shop, sometimes Daisy walks with Mom over to Ocean Park. She’s slower in her gait than she used to be, but she’s getting faster week by week, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Mom has a patience Daisy has never seen before. San Juan suits her. The warm Caribbean air does beautiful things to Mom’s hair.
When they take off their shoes, Mom tucks them into a tote bag she carries for just that purpose, and then they make their way along the uneven sand toward the water. When Daisy feels unsteady, Mom puts a hand under her elbow. There is the surf rolling up toward their toes. There are some young people listening to bachata while they pop a volleyball back and forth over a net. Someday Daisy, too, will pop a volleyball over a net. Someday.
“Benny and I used to come to this beach with Dad when we were little,” Mom says. “I don’t know if Mama remembers.”
They are all beginning to make room for this fear, because this is what they do now. They talk about everything, acknowledge every worry, every hurt. This is how they honor one another, how they create their new home in the world.
Mom broached their worries with Candido, too, privately and carefully. They wanted him to know what he might be getting into before he said yes to a wedding. Grandma’s memory problems are unpredictable. They swell and retreat, but there is cause for real concern in the long term. His answer? A smile.
“I have waited a long time for the long term.” He nodded. “I can serve as her memory.”
Daisy tucks a strand of loose hair behind her ear. The tickle of that strand against her skin is a marvel. The sand beneath her toes is a miracle. She squeezes Mom’s arm, and floats the idea that perhaps Grandma’s forgetfulness doesn’t matter. What happened decades ago, what will happen decades hence. What does it matter, if they are together?
Grandma and Candido planned a simple wedding, first—a Friday morning trip to the courthouse. But then she decided on a Friday evening beach wedding instead, just close family, a few friends. Priti is ninety-two now, and keeps insisting she deserves a reason to come to San Juan for one last party.
“I can’t disagree, Ma,” Candido says.
So they pushed the wedding to a Saturday, and the guest list currently stands at 134. It includes Peter and Trisha. Try as they may, no one can picture Rafaela getting married barefoot. They wait for her to announce that they’re moving the celebration to the Vanderbilt instead. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Carlos pesters her to create a wedding registry, which Rafaela deems the height of foolishness, but he won’t let it drop, so finally, she relents. The registry contains a single item: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo Switch.
“The point is, she’s happy,” Daisy says. “She’s right where she’s supposed to be.”
“About time,” Mom says.
She kisses Daisy on the side of the head and wraps one arm around her shoulders. They stop together at the edge of the hot, bright Atlantic, and watch as the ocean folds itself up onto the land in turns. It kisses their toes, their ankles. It glistens in the sinking light as it recedes. Above them, a gull swoops silently through the yellowing sky, and Daisy leans her head on her mother’s shoulder. She squeezes Mom’s arm to remind them both that, no matter where they are, together, they are home.
Candido and his son stand beneath a banyan tree in a manicured courtyard beside the Vanderbilt hotel. It is evening, and there is nothing reasonable about the colors at his back, where the sky meets the sea on the untidy horizon. Beneath Candido’s feet, the roots of that tree grip into the soil; they spread and hold, and Daisy can almost see it, in time lapse or memory: the roots become the branches become the leaves become the roots become the branches. The tree is its own unquestioning lover, its own family, its own history. It provides everything it needs for itself.
Beneath this paragon of splendor, Candido is waiting for his bride. Daisy sits between her brothers in the front row of folding white chairs, and experiences the gauzy, indistinct memory of a staircase she almost couldn’t climb. And then a feeling of being ferried, lofted, borne. She is here now. She taps three fingers against her sternum to ground herself. She is here. Carlos squeezes her hand, and they turn to look.
Here is Mom in a navy tuxedo-gown, her arm tendered to her own mama, the beauty of love all over her face.
And here is Rafaela, all in white.