Esme threw the mixture into a deep plastic bowl, then peeled shrimp tails, deveined them, and tossed those in while sharing the latest chisme—which Valley women were cheating and in whose bed and why. But Bianca and Esme still never spoke of what had happened at the Clínicas de Salud Bianca’s freshman year in high school.
A ceramic rooster cookie jar glinted against the faux marble counter. Esme’s kitchen was decorated in red roosters that anywhere else would’ve been chintzy, but here they were comforting.
Outside, the lawn roasted in patches. Wilted yellow flowers spilt from cane cholla and barrel cactus. White flies, iridescent and smaller than grains of rice, orbited the streetlamps. The Rio Vista street sign was pocked with bullet holes where drunk teenagers had ricocheted through the alley with shotguns. Aluminum-foiled windows shimmered from the ranch-style stuccos squatting beneath palo verdes and mulberries, barricades against the 110-degree broil that relented only after midnight.
“If Gabe were my husband, I’d have left him,” said Esme, “but since he’s my son . . . Ay, hija. We’ve made a full-blooded Mexican of you. La Bee.”
Bianca pursed her lips, poured a chilled bottle of Clamato over the mixture while Esme squeezed lemon halves, shook Tapatío out in spurts. Once, while delivering tamales that Nana, Esme, and Bee had made, Esme told her comadre that Bianca was her nuera, daughter-in-law. But she never said it in front of Gabe. He was a mama’s boy, which, in the Valley, wasn’t necessarily bad. A man who treated his mama with respect would treat his own wife with respect, that’s what Esme said.
Selena blasted from the stereo in the backyard. Gabe’s rusted ’66 Mustang hulked on a frayed patch of grass against the fence, covered with a tarp. Hector had promised to help his son restore it years before. But between them, most things remained unsaid or unfinished.
On the patio, carne asada sizzled on the grill with whole green onions—bulbs and all—habanero chiles, thick flour tortillas. Hector, a skewer in one hand, cerveza in the other, was a John Deere of a man, over six feet and three hundred pounds. When Hector found Gabe and Bianca in Gabe’s bed when they were fifteen and seventeen, sheets pulled over her naked body up to her neck, he shouted in a growl deeper than her own dad’s yelling, drunk and raging, “Never let me see her in this fucking bed again!” He slammed the door and drove away. Gabe had rubbed her thighs as she sobbed. “He’s like that. He’ll warm to you when we have our first baby.” He said it like he didn’t regret what they’d done. Regret: a metal scraping her mouth. She imagined what their baby would’ve looked like. Imagined herself growing beneath the tent of bedsheet into a carnival. Running away with her own damn self.
Two years later, when she was seventeen, beneath a star-pitted sky during winter break, she and Gabe lay in the back of his pea-green truck. Gabe was crying. Across the dirt road, red and green chaser lights blinked Merry Christmas from a farmhouse in the distance. “You don’t understand,” he’d said. And she didn’t. It should have been simple: They loved each other. Wasn’t that enough? She was a senior in high school, he a freshman in college. He’d gone away to Cal State San Bernardino, three hours north toward the Inland Empire. The week after he’d left, Lily’s mom had driven a drunk and babbling Bee home from a house party, and Bee’s mama had rushed her to the ER where they’d pumped her stomach. Mama had grounded Bee for months; she would’ve allowed Gabe to come over, but he never did, not once did he come and see her like he’d promised, and Bee didn’t know why until mid-November. Bee had gone to the Cattle Call parade on Main Street with Lily, and when she saw Gabe there, his arms around another girl, she’d fallen off the curb where she’d been buying watermelon with chile from a street vendor and sprained her ankle, but that pain didn’t compare with the sight of Gabe’s arm draped across another girl’s shoulders, watching the floats of school children and rodeo queens passing by with another girl in Bee’s place in the lawn chairs and blankets on the sidewalk beside his familia. Bee hadn’t even planned on going; Gabe must have thought she wouldn’t be there. She hadn’t confronted him then. She’d been too ashamed. She’d left her fruit cup and limped back to her dad’s car. They broke up over the phone, and she ignored his calls for the next month. She’d found out through the small-town chisme that the other girl’s name was Katrina, and she went to San Bernardino with Gabe, though she was from the Valley, también.
Still, when Gabe had returned for winter break, he’d stopped by her house first to wish her a Merry Christmas, but they’d ended up driving out to the country between ditch banks and haystacks, where she gave in, gave herself to him, and afterward, he told her that he still loved her and never should’ve let her go. She hadn’t gone anywhere, she’d said. They could still get back together. That other girl didn’t matter. It was over. What didn’t she understand?
“Katrina’s pregnant.”
The air had splintered, crackling like shards of ice. She’d sucked it in until her lungs ached.
She should’ve walked away then. She’d tried. She’d thrown herself into the novels and poetry books she loved, signed up for an online, dual-credit college literature class and read Beloved for the first time, filled every page of every journal she could get her hands on, transcribing the prickling songs of the cacti in her mama’s garden, the troubled arrows of the penned horses’ eyes down at the stables beyond the empty lots beside the river, the texture and taste of the pomegranate seeds growing wild in the orchards behind her house, the Saturday-morning before-sunrise chatter of the sleepy migrant workers gathering in the doughnut shop, their yawning Spanish, their gnarled, calloused hands, as she ordered her bear claw and sweet tea, last meal before she finally dragged herself to sleep. Her dreams; she wrote those too.
She’d earned scholarships to several California universities before she’d settled on Holy Cross. It was their music that had called to her. Their choir had put on a performance in the auditorium at school, and their haunted voices had spoken to the hole inside her. Of course, Mama had been thrilled.
But there’s a hole in the belly of the earth. It swallows.
And it flapped open its meaty jaws. Made a meal of her father.
When Bianca had returned for the funeral, there was Gabe.
Now, Esme took the bowl of shrimp cocktail and a tray of saltines out to the patio. Bianca followed with a bowl of homemade salsa, made the way Gabe’s nana had taught her. Blacken fat, green poblano chiles on the comal, “Pick them up fast or you’ll burn the tips of your fingers,” Nana had said, pinching her fingers together, snatching back her clasped hand and wincing, “¡Ay! How that stings.”
“Bee,” Hector called playfully from the barbecue. Grinning, he nodded toward the bowl in her hands. “You didn’t make the salsa all soupy like the lasagna, did you? Remember, Esme? La sopa?” He meant the time she’d tried making lasagna for Gabe’s whole family, and Hector had barked, “¿Qué es estó? ¿Sopa?” They’d all laughed at her runny casserole, her tomato-red face.