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  “We don’t need a house. We need Papi,” Mago said.

  “We need you,” Carlos said.

  Mami ran her fingers through Mago’s hair. “Your father says a man must have his own house, his own land to pass down to his children,” she said. “I’ll be gone a year. I promise that by the end of the year, I will bring your father back with me whether we have enough money for a house or not. Do you promise to take care of your hermanos for me, be their little mother?”

  Mago looked at Carlos, then at me. I don’t know what my sister saw in my eyes that made her face soften. Had she realized then how much I would need her? Had she known that without her strength and unwavering love, I would not have survived what was to come? Her face was full of determination when she looked at Mami and said, “Sí, Mami. I promise. But you’ll keep your promise, right? You will come back.”

  “Of course,” Mami said. She opened her arms to us, and we fell into them.

  “Don’t go, Mami. Stay with us. Stay with me,” I said as I held on to her.

  She kissed the top of my head and pushed me toward the closed gate. “You need to get out of the sun before it gives you a headache,” she said.

  Abuela Evila finally opened the gate, and we were allowed inside, but we didn’t move. We stood there holding our bags, and I suddenly wanted to throw Papi’s photo against the ground so that it shattered into pieces because I hated him for taking my mother from me just because he wanted a house and a piece of land to call his own.

  “Don’t leave me, Mami. Please!” I begged.

  Mami gave us each a hug and kissed us goodbye. When she kissed me, I pressed my cheek against her lips painted red with Avon lipstick.

  Mago held me tightly while we watched Mami walk away, pebbles dancing in and out of her sandals, her hair burning black under the sun. When I saw her blurry figure disappear where the road curved, I escaped Mago’s grip on my hand and took off running, yelling for my mother.

  Through my tears, I watched a taxicab take her away, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Mago standing behind me. “Come on, Nena,” she said. There were no tears in her eyes, and as we walked back to my grandmother’s house, I wondered if, when Mami asked Mago to be our little mother, it had also meant she was not allowed to cry.

  Carlos was still standing by the gate, waiting for us so that we could go in together. I looked at the empty dirt road once more, realizing that there was nothing left of my mother. As we walked into my grandmother’s house, I touched my cheek and told myself there was something I still had left. The feel of her red lips.

  2

  Abuelo Augurio

  MAGO, CARLOS, AND I were given a corner of my grandfather’s bedroom. Abuelo Augurio and Abuela Evila didn’t sleep in the same room because when my cousin Élida came to live at their house my grandmother kicked him out of her bed to make space for her favorite grandchild. My grandfather’s room smelled of sweat, beer, and cigarette smoke. His bed was in the farthest corner, next to some boxes, an old wardrobe, and his gardening tools. The light that streamed through the only window was too weak to make the room less somber.

  Close to the door was a twin-size box spring raised on bricks and covered with a straw mat. The “bed” was pushed up against the wall, underneath the tiny window that looked out onto an alley.

  This is where Mago, Carlos, and I slept. I was in the middle, so I wouldn’t fall off. Mago slept against the wall because if a scorpion crawled down and stung her, she would be okay. Scorpions couldn’t do anything to my hot-blooded Scorpio sister. Carlos slept on the edge because a week after Mami left he began to wet the bed. We hoped that sleeping on the edge would make it easier for him to get up in the middle of the night to use the bucket by the door.

  My grandfather’s room was next to the alley. Since the window above our heads didn’t have any glass to muffle the outside noises, we could hear everything that went on in that alley. Sometimes, we heard grunting noises coming from there. Mago and Carlos got up to look, and they giggled about what they saw, but they never picked me up so that I could see for myself. Other times we heard drunken men coming from the cantina down the road. They yelled obscenities that echoed against the brick walls of the nearby houses. Sometimes we could hear them urinating on the rock fence that surrounded Abuela Evila’s property while singing borracho songs. ¡No vale nada la vida, la vida no vale nadaaaa! I hated that song those drunks liked to sing. Life isn’t worth anything?

  One night, the noises we heard were a horse’s hooves hitting the rocks on the ground. My skin prickled with goose bumps. I wondered who could be in the alley so late.

  “What is that?” Carlos asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mago said. “Get up and look.” Just then, dogs started to bark.

  “Nah,” Carlos said.

  “You’re such a sissy,” Mago said. She got up from the bed and stood over us as she looked out the window. With all the noise we were making, you would think Abuelo Augurio would wake up, but he didn’t. I wished he would wake up. I wished he would be the one to look out the window and reassure us that everything was all right. I looked at the opposite side of the room and knew he was asleep. When he was awake, he would lie in bed for hours smoking cigarettes in the darkness, the red tip of the cigarette winking at me like an evil eye. His silence always made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like my grandmother constantly yelling at us, but my grandfather acted as if we weren’t even there. Somehow, I felt that was worse. He made me feel invisible.

  Mago gasped and quickly fell on top of us, crossing herself over and over again.

  “What did you see?” I asked her. “Who was that in the alley?”

  “It was a man, a man on a horse,” Mago whispered. The clopclopping of the hooves grew fainter and fainter.

  “So?” Carlos said.

  “But he was dragging something behind him in a sack!”

  “You’re lying,” Carlos said.

  “I’m not, I swear I’m not,” Mago insisted. “I swear I saw him drag a person away.”

  “We don’t believe you,” Carlos said again. “Right, Reyna?”

  I nodded, but none of us could fall back to sleep.

  “That’s the devil making his rounds,” Abuela Evila said the next morning when we told her what Mago had seen. “He’s looking for all the naughty children to take back to Hell with him. So you three better behave, or the devil is going to take you away.”

  Mago told us not to believe anything Abuela Evila said. But at night, we huddled together even closer when we heard a horse pass by our window, the sound of its hooves sending chills up our spines. Who would protect us if the devil came to steal us and take us far away where we would never see our parents again? I wondered. Every night, I would bury my face in my pillow and hold on tight to my sister.

  My mother had asked Mago to be our little mother, and she and my father would have been proud to see how bravely their older daughter had taken on that role. Sometimes she took it a little too far for my taste, but Mago was there when my father and my mother were not.

  One day, about a month after Mami left, Mago and I were passing by the baker’s house on our way to the tortilla mill when he came out wearing a big basket that looked like a giant straw hat filled with sweet bread. My mouth watered at the thought of sinking my teeth into a sweet, fluffy concha de chocolate.

  The baker’s wife looked at us and said to her husband, “Mirálas, pobrecitas huerfanitas.”

  “We aren’t orphans!” I yelled at her, forgetting all about the sweet bread. I grabbed a rock to throw at her, but I knew Mami would be disappointed in me if I threw it. So I let it fall to the ground.

  Still, the baker’s wife had seen the look in my eyes. She knew what I was about to do. “Shame on you, girl!” she scolded.

  “Oh, don’t be too harsh on her,” the baker said. “It’s a sad thing not to have any parents.” He got on his bicycle to deliver his bread. I watched him until he turne
d the corner, amazed at how he weaved his bike through the rocks scattered throughout the dirt road without losing his balance and spilling all the bread he carried on that giant hat basket.

  “If your mother ever comes back, I will be sure to tell her of your behavior,” the baker’s wife said, pointing a finger at me. Then she went into her house and slammed the door shut.

  “I can’t believe you,” Mago said angrily. She hit me hard with the straw tortilla basket.

  “But we aren’t orphans!” I said to Mago. She was too angry to speak to me, so she held me tightly by the wrist and hurried me along to the mill to buy tortillas for the midday meal. I stumbled on a rock, and I would have fallen if Mago hadn’t been holding me. She slowed her pace and loosened her hold on my wrist.

  “I don’t want people feeling sorry for me,” I told her.

  She stopped walking then. She touched her cheek and ran her finger over the scar she had there. When she was three, she had almost lost her eye while playing hide-and-seek. She’d hidden underneath an old bed that had metal springs sticking from it like spiky fingers. One of them dug into Mago’s eyelid, another into her cheek, another on the bridge of her nose. The scars the stitches left on her eyelid looked like miniature train tracks. Ever since then, whenever anyone noticed her scars, they would look at her with pity.

  After a brief silence she said, “I’m sorry I hit you, Nena.” Then she took my hand, and we continued our walk.

  When we got back from the tortilla mill, Élida was waiting by the gate asking why we took so long with the tortillas, and couldn’t we see she was hungry? Élida had a round chubby face and big puffy eyes that Mago teased her about, calling them frog eyes. At first, we had tried to be friends with Élida. We thought that since we were in the same situation—having been left behind by our parents—we would be friends. Élida wasn’t interested in being our friend, and, like the neighbors, called us the little orphans. Technically, she was a little orphan, too. But the fashionable clothes Abuela Evila made for her on her sewing machine and the many gifts her mother sent her from El Otro Lado helped Élida transform herself from the little orphan to a privileged granddaughter. She was everything we were not.

  Seeing her, I was angry again at being called an orphan, at being hit by Mago, at my mother leaving, at my father for taking her away. I wanted to yank Élida’s braid, but at the sight of Abuela Evila hovering nearby, I knew it wise not to. Instead I said, “Your hair looks like a horse’s tail.”

  “¡Pinche huérfana!” she said, and yanked my pigtail. Abuelita Evila took the tortillas from Mago but didn’t say anything to Élida for pulling my hair.

  Mago, before the scars

  My grandfather and my aunt, Tía Emperatriz, were sitting at the table in the kitchen. My grandfather worked in the fields nearby and was only there for lunch. My aunt worked at a photo studio. She was twenty-five years old and was still single. The youngest of my grandmother’s five living children, she had yet to find someone who my grandmother felt was good enough to marry her prettiest daughter. Any man that came knocking would be scared off by my grandmother.

  Carlos, Mago, and I sat on the two concrete steps leading from the kitchen to my grandmother’s room since the table was only big enough for four people, and those seats were already taken. Abuela Evila gave a pork chop to Abuelo Augurio, another to Élida, the third went to Tía Emperatriz, and the last pork chop she took for herself. By the time the frying pan came our way, there was nothing left. Abuela Evila scooped up spoonfuls of oil in which she had fried the meat and mixed it in with our beans. “For flavor,” she said.

  If Papi were here, if Mami were here, we wouldn’t be eating oil, I thought.

  “Isn’t there any meat left?” Tía Emperatriz asked.

  Abuela Evila shook her head. “The money you left me this morning didn’t go very far at el mercado,” she said. “And the money their parents sent is gone.”

  Tía Emperatriz looked at our oily beans and then got up and grabbed her purse. She gave Mago a coin and sent her to buy a soda for us. Mago came back with a Fanta. We thanked our aunt for the soda and took turns sipping from the bottle, but the sweet, orangey taste didn’t wash away the oil in our mouths.

  “What’s the point of our parents being in El Otro Lado, if we’re going to be eating like beggars?” Mago said after our meal, once we were out of earshot. I had no answer to give my sister, so I said nothing. Tía Emperatriz and Abuelo Augurio went back to work. Élida went to watch TV. Carlos took the trash can out to the backyard to burn the pile of garbage, and I helped Mago take all the dirty dishes out to the stone lavadero. Then we cleaned the table and swept the dirt floor.

  “¡Regina!” Abuela Evila called out from her bedroom, where she was mending her dresses. “¡Regina, ven acá!” It took me a moment to realize she was calling me, since Regina isn’t my name. My grandmother thought it should have been because I was born on September 7, the day of Santa Regina. When my mother went to city hall to obtain my birth certificate, she had been angry at my grandmother for constantly criticizing her cooking or the way she cleaned, so in an act of small defiance, my mother registered me as Reyna. My grandmother never called me by my given name.

  “¡Regina!” Abuela Evila called again.

  “¿Sí, Abuelita?” I said as I stood at the threshold of her room.

  “Go buy me a needle,” she said, handing me the money she took out of the coin bag she kept in her brassiere. “And hurry back,” she said. I glanced at the living room where Élida was watching El Chavo del Ocho while eating a bag of chicharrones sprinkled with red sauce.

  Don Bartolo’s two daughters were playing hopscotch outside his store. When they saw me walking past them, they pointed at me and said, “Look, there goes the little orphan.” This time, I didn’t think twice about it. This time, I didn’t care if the whole colonia thought I was wild and a disgrace to my family. I threw the coin as hard as I could. It hit one of the girls above her right eye. She screamed and called to her father. I ran home, forgetting to pick up the coin on the ground. When Abuela Evila asked me for her needle, I had no choice but to tell her the truth.

  She called Mago over and said, “Take your sister to apologize to Don Bartolo, and don’t come back without my needle.”

  Mago grabbed my hand and pulled me along. “Now you’ve done it,” she said.

  “She shouldn’t have called me an orphan!” I yanked my hand from Mago’s and stopped walking. Mago looked at me for a long time. I thought she was going to hit me. Instead she took my hand again but pulled me in the opposite direction of Don Bartolo’s store.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. She didn’t tell me where she was taking me, but as soon as we turned the corner, our little house came into view. We stopped in front of it. The window was open, and I could smell beans cooking. I heard a woman singing along to the radio. Mago said she didn’t know who Don Rubén’s new tenants were, but that this house would always be where we had lived with our parents. “No one can take that away,” she said. “I know you don’t remember Papi at all, but whatever you remember about Mami and this house is yours to keep forever.”

  I followed her down to the canal on the opposite side of the hill from Abuela Evila’s house. Mami would come to do the washing here when we lived in Don Rubén’s house. Mago said, “This is where Mami saved your life, Nena. Remember?”

  When I was three, I had almost drowned in that canal. The rainy season had turned it into a gushing river, and the current was swift and strong. Mami told me to sit on the washing stones and stay by her side, but she let Mago and Carlos get in the water and play with the other kids. I wanted to get in, and when Mami was busy rinsing our clothes and looking the other way, I jumped in. The current pulled me down the canal. My feet couldn’t touch the bottom, and I got pulled under. Mami got to me just in time.

  We went back to Abuela Evila’s house, not knowing what we were going to tell her. But before we went into the house itself, Mago took me into the shac
k made of bamboo sticks and cardboard near the patio. Inside were large clay pots, a griddle, and other things my grandmother didn’t have space for in her kitchen. This is where Mami and Papi had first lived when they were married.

  Mago and I sat on the dirt floor, and she told me about the day I was born exactly the way Mami used to tell it. She pointed to the circle of rocks and a pile of ash and told me that during my birth, a fire had been on while Mami had squatted on the ground, over a straw mat, grabbing the rope hanging from the ceiling. When I was born, the midwife put me into my mother’s arms. She turned to face the fire so that the heat would keep me warm. As I listened to Mago, I closed my eyes and felt the heat of the flames, and I heard Mami’s heart beating against my ear.

  Mago pointed to a spot on the dirt floor and reminded me that my umbilical cord was buried there. That way, Mami told the midwife, no matter where life takes her, she won’t ever forget where she came from.

  But then Mago touched my belly button and added something to the story my mother had never told me. She said that my umbilical cord was like a ribbon that connected me to Mami. She said, “It doesn’t matter that there’s a distance between us now. That cord is there forever.” I touched my belly button and thought about what my sister had said. I had Papi’s photo to keep me connected to him. I had no photo of my mother, but now my sister had given me something to remember her by.

  “We still have a mother and a father,” Mago said. “We aren’t orphans, Nena. Just because they aren’t with us doesn’t mean we don’t have parents anymore. Now come on, let’s go tell our grandmother we have no needle for her.”

  I took Mago’s hand and together we left the shack. “She’s going to beat me,” I told her as we headed to the house. “And she’s going to beat you, too, even though you didn’t do anything.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Wait,” I said. I ran out of the gate before I lost my nerve. I ran down the street as fast as I could. Outside the store, Don Bartolo’s daughters were playing again. They glared at me the moment they saw me. Suddenly, my feet didn’t want to keep walking. I put a finger on my belly button, and I thought about Mami, and about everything my sister had just said. It gave me courage.