Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75737 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75737 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
My mother taught me how to French braid hair. I taught Celenia. My mother showed me how to make empanadas. I was the one to stand over that hot plate and help Celenia learn. Makeup talks, boy talks, changing body talks, sex talks. Celenia and I had all of those on our long walks when we dreamed of a future where we might be able to go into one of those stores and treat ourselves to something pretty.
Those were our secret wishes, ones that guilt kept us from ever uttering to our overworked mother.
Much to our mother's—and maybe even mine at times—worries and fears, Celenia not only followed in our mother's shoes in terms of beauty, but somehow managed to well surpass her. It didn't seem possible. Until she was fourteen and wearing out mother's old sundresses like they'd been stitched just for her.
It was also that summer, the one where she turned fourteen, when we'd finally managed to move out of that basement, partially because I had been working for years, was legal, could qualify to sign for a lease.
I had been taking classes at the local college after having found the balls to track down my father and demand he pay seeing as he hadn't paid a cent in child support since then. He, being with a new woman who had no idea he'd had any children, had thrown me just enough to get me started.
Things had finally, finally started to get better for the three of us.
And then one of the women my mother had been working for, handling a brat of an eight-year-old who told ugly lies about how he was treated to gain attention from his never-present parents, had accused her of stealing her diamond necklace.
And then reported her.
Sometimes, I could still hear her cries as she was pulled away from us, as Celenia was dragged into foster care until they could go through the process of allowing her to be in my custody.
But it wasn't the same.
Just the two of us.
The absence of our mother was a gaping wound in our hearts, in our psyches, it became bigger than anything else we had going on.
Until, eventually, we made the decision to get our passports, to gather what was left of our savings, to break our lease, and to go to our mother's homeland for the first time.
We hadn't known what to expect. Aside from stories about our family we'd never met and the food they all used to make together, we didn't know much about our mother's hometown.
We had been accustomed to apartment buildings and single-family homes separated by little yards.
That wasn't what we were met with as we made our way down the street toward the address our mother had put on the last letter she'd sent to us.
There was a high hill with little rectangular, brightly-colored homes seemingly stacked on top of each other all the way up to the top, occasionally broken up by a single green tree.
"How do they get from home to home?" Celenia asked under her breath.
I wanted to keep being the mom to her, imparting the wisdom that came from being eight years her senior.
But just this once, I had no idea. Because I had been contemplating that myself.
As it turned out, though you couldn't see it from the direction we'd come in, there were little streets of the barrio and staircases between all the homes as well as a town behind them.
It wasn't long as we made our way down those little streets before we were discovered by someone claiming we looked just like our mother, though, clearly, these days, Celenia was the holder of most of the beauty in our family.
This group of women had saved us from walking around cluelessly for hours, since we had no idea which house we were looking for, or even how they were situated so we could figure out the numbers. They led us toward the top of the hill to a bright red home, making Celenia and I shared a worried look, wondering how more than our mother and her mother could fit in that home. Would there be space for us? Had we made a major mistake?
But then the door flew open.
And our mother's arms closed around us.
And then our grandmother's.
Our aunts'.
Our uncles'.
It was there in our new home that I started to lose Celenia.
She had our mother who no longer needed to work so hard. She had our grandmother. She had our aunts. All of these women with more wisdom to impart on her than I thought I could ever have.
She clung to them, moved away from me.
And, finally, in my early twenties, I was free to pursue my own interests.
I got friends and occasionally dated.
It was the following year we lost our grandmother. The one after that, our mother to a freak blood clot.