“You explained.”
“Yes.”
“To a man who had already called you a liar.”
She wrote something down.
“That’s not a criticism.
Every single woman who sits in that chair explains.
I want you to notice you did it, because in about four months a very good attorney is going to ask you on the record why you didn’t leave that night, and the answer is that you were busy explaining, and that is a completely human thing that will be used against you if you don’t see it coming.”
The pressure came the following week.
From my own mother.
“Yesenia.
Ofelia called me.”
“Of course she did.”
“She says Nestor is devastated.
She says he’s had a shock, that he made a mistake, that he’s willing to come home.”
“Mamá, he told the whole neighborhood I ch*ated.
He posted a photograph.”
“He’ll delete it.”
“He signed a lease with her in February.”
Silence on the line.
“That’s — Yesenia, you’re going to have two babies.
Two.
Alone, in that house, with what money?
Can’t you just… let it go?
Let him come back.
Let the children have a father in the house.
People survive worse.”
And I asked my mother the question that has, I think, been sitting in our family for three generations.
“Mamá.
When Papá did what he did in 1998 — did somebody tell you to let it go?”
A very long silence.
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“My mother,” she said.
“At this table.
In this chair.”
“And?”
“And I let it go, and he did it twice more, and I stayed until he d*ed, and I have never once in twenty-eight years said that out loud.”
She was crying.
“Don’t come here for advice, mija,” my mother said.
“Come here for food.
I’m very good at food and I’m terrible at this.”
So that’s what we did.
She cooked for me for the rest of the pregnancy.
And she came to every single appointment after that one, and she sat in the chair by the door with her purse in her lap, and the first time Dr. Beltrán turned on the speaker my mother put both hands over her mouth and said, “Dos.
Dios mío.
Dos.”
PART 4
Ofelia Delgado held a family dinner in October.
Nestor’s mother.
The woman with the garbage bags.
It was, she told everyone, “a chance to clear the air before the babies come,” and forty-one people were invited, which is how you know it was never about air.
Ines advised me not to go.
“Yesenia, nothing good happens at those.”
“Ines, my children are going to have that family for the rest of their lives.
I’d like to decide, once, in front of all of them, what the terms are.
If I don’t do it now, I’ll be doing it at every birthday for eighteen years.”
She thought about that.
