Chapter 5 Luisa
The moment I step foot into Mami’s house, all the glitter, streamers, and balloons I’ve managed to avoid in the office find their way into my day.
It’s my twenty-ninth birthday, a fact that I—fortuitously—kept from everyone in the newsroom.
The last thing I wanted was some well-meaning co-worker littering my cube with garish decorations, singing “Happy Birthday” in garbled Spanish, and forcing everyone to eat that too-sweet supermarket buttercream-frosting cake.
Mercifully, I didn’t have to contend with said decorations as I emptied out my desk.
On the stove sits Mami’s mouthwatering paella, and beside it a bowl of sliced green plantains ready to be recast into fried tostones.
The Spanish sounds of chisme and laughter glide through the patio door like the soothing notes of a favorite song.
I take a deep breath and amble through the screen door and down the daffodil-lined path that connects the house with the converted barn where our family-owned beauty salon is.
This salon is the only piece of home we managed to rebuild after our first one was ripped out from under us.
Like the daffodils, which come back every year, Abuela says our salon is a reminder that “la vida continúa,” and even after a tragedy, good things can happen.
For Mami, this salon was a way back to her confident self.
After my dad died, the other woman—or La Otra Mujer, as we still call her—and my mom almost came to blows at the velorio over the swift claim she made on Papi’s estate.
La Otra Mujer and her daughter wanted half of everything.
Following the funeral, Mami decided the Island was too small for Federico Aurelio Martín’s two families, so she sold her hair salon and relinquished two decades of loyal clients.
Then, she was forced to sell my childhood home, a stunning colonial in the hills of San Germán—ironically called Casa Consuelo, as in, there was no consolation to be had.
Three months after Papi’s death, we collected half of his life insurance benefits and followed one of Mami’s friends to Atlanta.
It took us a long minute to find our place in this sprawling city, with its dozens of distinct neighborhoods and noodle-like highways.
Eventually, we came to appreciate its rich civil rights history and progressive art scene.
We ate our way up the Buford Highway corridor, bursting with international flavors from every corner of the world, and in the process discovered a little suburban enclave called Norcross.
On that fateful day, we were bound for an antique store in the town’s historic center—treasure hunting being our family’s team sport.
Instead, we ended up following the train tracks past a road lined with magnolia trees and white cottages.
At the end of the street, we found a dilapidated Victorian home for sale, like something out of a Southern Gothic novel, sitting on a one-acre lot with its own massive red barn in the back.
Mami remodeled the barn and reopened her salon, christening it The Barn Salón de Belleza.
Abuela and our Spanish-speaking clients took to calling it La Barna.
This house was an unexpected gift—the ultimate antiquing project, and a much-needed distraction from our collective grief.
This house brought us back from the dead.
I’m just hoping the miracle will repeat.
And since it looks like I’ll be forced to move back in, I’m hoping that, once again, inhabiting this house will bring me back from the bardo state I’ve landed myself in.
“La bendición,” I call out, the door to La Barna slamming shut behind me. The acrid smell of hair chemicals replaces the delicious food aroma from only a moment ago.
“Mija,” Abuela exclaims from her perch in a La-Z-Boy chair, “you’re gonna break the hinge one of these days.” She’s reading one of those trashy novels she likes. This one is called Pirata del Deseo, and it features a risqué, half-naked pirate on the cover.
I lean down and plant a kiss on her cheek.
“Que la Virgencita y San Antonio te bendigan,” she says, peering at the upside-down statue of Saint Anthony behind the register.
I roll my eyes. Abuela offers him a candle daily in the hopes that he’ll find me a husband, as if saints have nothing better to do these days than play matchmakers.
I wonder which saint finds new jobs for the recently unemployed. I’ll light that candle myself.
“Happy birthday, hermanita,” Carola sings from behind her styling chair.
With one practiced move, she unfastens the salon cape from her last client of the day, then turns to sweep me into a hug.
I hug her back, inhaling the familiar scent of hair dye and essential oils lingering on the fabric of her dress.
Carola followed in Mami’s footsteps: wife, mother, purveyor of all things beautifying.
Which means I’m usually the third wheel in our relationship.
“There’s the birthday girl!” As if on cue, Mami steps out of the laundry room, looking ever like the Puerto Rican version of Sophia Loren in a waist-hugging dress and bright red lipstick.
She kisses me on both cheeks, then drops an armful of freshly laundered towels in my hands.
“Fold these, nena. Neatly, please—into squares, not rectangles. I don’t want to find them all bunched up every time I open the drawer. ”
I swallow a protest and start folding, aware that my squares are nowhere near as neat as she wants them to be. The moment I step out, my loving but controlling mother will refold them herself. Today, I have no patience for her neurotic demands. “Can we talk for a minute?” I ask. “In the back room?”
“Augusto and the kids will be here in a minute,” Carola calls out from the register, where she is checking out a client. “Augusto is doing an overnight shift, so we’re eating early.”
“I’ll go get the tostones started,” Abuela says, leaving her perch on the La-Z-Boy and heading toward the house.
Mami’s fastidious gaze falls on my face, and before I can pull away, her hands are on my skin, assessing. “You need a facial.” Her fingers crawl over my cheeks. “You have to moisturize if you want any chance of getting a husband, Luisa.”
“Maybe I should go help Abuela in the kitchen,” I say, but then Carola shoves a broom in my hands, expecting me to use it. “It’s my birthday,” I cry out in mock indignation, which only makes her laugh.
“Vidalina was here this morning,” Mami prattles on as I sweep the floors.
“Says her son, Juan Pablo, just broke up with his floozy of a girlfriend.” I ignore her, because who refers to women as floozies anymore, and the thought of getting set up with my very embarrassing teenage crush—who incidentally doesn’t know I exist—feels like entering the seventh circle of hell.
“Maybe I should have them over for dinner.”
“Please don’t—” I bark.
Mercifully, we’re joined by my brother-in-law, Augusto, who decided from day one that his role in the family was “human buffer”—and we all love him for it.
Augusto won over the family with his breezy Afro-Cuban manner, sharp wit, and shrewd intellect.
His job as an Atlanta police detective earned him a special place in my heart as a fellow fact-finding geek.
“Happy birthday, hermanita,” he coos, balancing my baby niece, Sarita, in one arm.
He plants a kiss on my temple and in turn I shower my niece with little pecks. She giggles into her daddy’s chest.
“What about a makeover for your birthday weekend?” my sister squeals, eyes going wide with excitement. “Facial, blowout, nails.”
“Keratin treatment,” Mami offers. “Make that frizzy pelo malo smooth and shiny.”
“You shouldn’t say ‘pelo malo,’ Mami,” I snap, collecting hair clippings from the floor with a dustpan, then dropping them in the garbage. “It’s racist.”
“Bah.” Mami waves one hand in the air dismissively. “Everything is racist these days.”
I know I should let this go. I am too stressed and too tired for this conversation. Plus, my mother, like most people on the Island, still identifies as white every time she ticks a race checkbox on an official form. She’s brown, not permanently tanned as she likes to believe.
We finish closing the salon, then head back to the house, where Abuela busies herself beside the stove, smashing plantains on a tostonera and tossing them in hot oil.
My nieces Rosita and Daniela storm past me, chasing after (i.e.
, terrorizing) Abuela’s cat, Chapulín. I love these girls more than life itself, but at three and five years old, they are truly little demons.
Augusto, still holding Sarita, pours me a glass of chardonnay, filling it almost to the brim. I mouth a silent thanks, and we exchange a knowing smile. We do this a lot, talk without words. Augusto is the brother I never had and never thought I needed, until he stepped into our lives.
“Augusto is Black,” Mami says abruptly, returning to our conversation in La Barna. Her eyebrows shoot up and her tone goes defensive toward me, and yet she lovingly offers a spoonful of paella to Augusto, which he eagerly accepts.
“I am?” Augusto responds with cartoonish surprise. “Oh. My. God,” he exclaims, chewing. “Another kitchen miracle.”
“See?” Mami turns to me. “How can I be racist when this man is one of the great loves of my life?” She pinches his cheek, then drops a piece of chorizo into his mouth.
“One does not beget the other, Mami. You only call it pelo malo because it’s Black hair,” I try to explain, exhaustion clawing back into my body. “Do you tell your blond, straight-haired clients that they have pelo malo? No. You don’t.”
“You think too much about these things, Luisa.” She grabs a serrated knife, then slices into a crusty baguette. “Give it a rest. That mind of yours is always thinking. Always working. Can’t you just unwind?”