11. Abuelitas Kitchen
Chapter eleven
Abuelita's Kitchen
Nova
We pulled up in front of a small house on a street I didn't know. White stucco with a porch. Three potted succulents. A wind chime made from old spoons.
"She knows we're coming?" I asked.
"She always knows," Diego said, and got out.
Carmen Moreno was in her eighties and answered the door before Diego could knock. She wore a house dress in yellow and green, her white hair pinned back, and she looked at me the way people look when they've been expecting you for ten years and are not going to mention how long the wait was.
"Mija," she said. Not a greeting. A declaration.
She hugged me with the full-bodied certainty of a woman who had not lost the habit of contact. I was taller than her by six inches and she still somehow made me feel small in the way that meant contained, held, managed. I had not been held like that in longer than I could account for.
She brought us inside.
The house smelled like masa and Comet cleaner and something else — old wood, candle wax, the particular accumulation of decades in a small space.
The kitchen was the whole house, in the way kitchens are when the person who lives there considers the kitchen the only room that counts.
A long table. A heavy pot already going on the stove. Photographs on every available surface.
"Sit," Carmen said, in the way Mama Joy had said it. The word in this community was a command.
I sat. Diego sat beside me and did not touch me, which was its own kind of presence.
Carmen worked at the stove and spoke without turning around, first in Spanish and then correcting herself to English, then sometimes in both at once, the way the very old do when the languages have long since merged.
She told me about the street. Who had lived where.
Who had moved, who had stayed, who had died.
She told me about Diego's mother — briefly, without performance, the way people mention the dead when they're done grieving them: she was beautiful and she died too young and Diego got her eyes.
Then she told me about my father.
"Eduardo grew up two blocks from here," she said. "Did you know that?"
"My mother mentioned—"
"Your mother didn't know the half of it.
" She said it without meanness. "She met him when he was already becoming what he became.
I knew him when he was a boy. When he was twelve and stealing my mango from the tree I kept in the yard before I had to take it down.
When he was seventeen and talking about justice and fairness like those were things a person just decided to have. "
She turned and put a plate of tamales in front of me.
"He talked about you," she said. "For the last twelve years he was alive, you were in every other sentence."
I didn't answer.
"He talked about the quincea?era he was going to give you.
He had plans." She said it with the fond resignation of a woman who had listened to those plans many times and had never told him they might not come to pass.
"The hall. The decorations. The dress he described to me from a picture he'd cut out of a magazine — he was not ashamed of knowing about dresses when it was your dress. "
A small sound escaped me. Not quite a laugh.
"He had a list," I said.
"He had many lists." She shook her head. "For you, especially. Eduardo Santos with a list was Eduardo Santos who had decided something mattered enough to write down. You were on more lists than anyone."
"He called me when you were born," she continued, settling into the chair across from me with her own coffee and a tamale she ate in three bites.
"He called at four in the morning from the hospital and he said, Carmen, she has her mother's mouth and my grandmother's eyes and I don't know what to do with the feeling. "
My throat closed.
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him, Eduardo, you hold her. That's what you do with a feeling like that." She looked at me without apology. "He held you for six hours straight. Rosa couldn't get him to put you down."
I felt the tears coming before I could catalog them. They arrived the way they had all week — without permission, without the formal announcement of grief, just water from somewhere deeper than I could locate. I put my hand over my mouth.
Carmen did not say don't cry. She did not say it's okay. She did not say anything.
She got up and made me a second plate of tamales.
I sat there in a dead woman's kitchen and ate and cried and did not speak, and Carmen fed me and let me be fed, which is perhaps the only honest response to that kind of grief.
Diego's hand found my back. Not rubbing. Just placed there. Present.
After a while, Carmen sat down again and pointed at the wall behind me. I turned.
Photographs. A row of them on a shelf I'd missed when we came in, printed on regular paper and framed in cheap store frames like they cost nothing because the content was already priceless.
Eduardo, young. Twenty-something, in jeans, laughing at something off-camera. A woman beside him who might have been Diego's mother by the shape of her eyes.
Eduardo at the bar of The Rusty Cage, younger than I remembered, talking to a man who might have been Hawthorne with less gray in his hair.
Eduardo at someone's birthday. Birthday cake. Candles.
And then the last one.
I got up and took it off the shelf.
Three people. Eduardo in the center, his hand resting on the shoulder of the boy to his right.
That boy was fourteen — dark-haired, heavyset already at the jaw, a bruise forming under his left eye and fresh tape on his right hand.
Diego, at fourteen. On Eduardo's other side stood a boy of seventeen, sun-burned and straight-spined, already carrying himself like something in him had been squared and set. Colt, at seventeen.
My father's hand on Diego's shoulder.
The look on his face.
He already knew. The expression of a man who has found the people he will love the longest, who has not yet had to lose any of them, who is still operating under the grace of not knowing.
"He found us in the street," Diego said from behind me. His voice was quiet. "Different streets. Different ways. But that's what he did. He found the kids nobody else wanted and he made them something."
"He made you into MC," I said.
"He made us into his." Diego paused. "Same thing to us."
I looked at the photograph for a long time.
My father had his hand on Diego's shoulder in the particular way of a man who means I've got you. Not I claim you. Not you belong to me. Just I've got you.
Ten years ago he stopped being able to keep that promise.
Three men had spent ten years trying to keep it for him.
I didn't know how to factor that into anything yet.
The photograph was from before I was born. Before I existed in this story. And yet my father was already holding the people he was going to call his — seventeen and fourteen, two boys who would become the men, the men who would become this.
He'd had a plan, even then. You could see it in the way he stood.
Seven years a president already. But in this photograph, he was still becoming — still gathering the people who would carry it.
But already the man who built in anticipation.
Who planted trees he might not sit under.
Who arranged things so that what came after would find what he'd left.
The photograph. The desk drawer with its trick opening. The files in labeled boxes in the storage room. The trust fund that Bishop had quietly revealed, the $487,000 in a structure Bishop had built in the months after my father died.
Carmen had known my father for forty years.
This was the number she had mentioned in passing — the year they had met, when they were both in their early twenties and Eduardo Santos had not yet built anything and was, by Carmen's account, a man who knew what he wanted but not yet what to do with it.
Forty years of knowing someone was a different order of knowledge than anything I had access to. I had twelve years. Carmen had forty.
The things in her face when she talked about him were the things of someone who had watched a person become what they were, had watched the daily increments of character development that produced the man who wrote the founding document and built the boxing program and raised three boys who were not his sons and kept records that his daughter would eventually find.
Carmen had watched all of it. She had watched it from the kitchen, which was where she had always been, and the kitchen was the room where Eduardo had done his actual thinking, not the office, not the chapter meetings, not the porch. The kitchen.
The trust fund had been built from this compound. Carmen had mentioned that Bishop had worked late in the back office the week after Eduardo died, and that she had brought him tortillas.
I thought about that. A trust fund built over grief and tortillas.
He had been building for after.
He had known there might be an after.
Carmen refilled my coffee.
"Eat," she said.
I ate.