Chapter 5

I booked a restaurant and gave Caleb his makeup birthday.

At the table, George didn't ask anything. He just quietly kept putting food on my plate.

Caleb was a little let down, but he was good about it, no tears, no fuss.

When we got home that night, the place was dead quiet.

Aunt Leona's door was shut tight, and my mother sat on the living room couch with her back to me, her whole frame looking small and worn out.

I didn't say a word to her. I went straight to my room.

The next two days, the house fell into a strange cold war.

Aunt Leona didn't move out, and the hotel booking I'd made was canceled by the next morning. I didn't have to guess who'd done it.

My mother didn't scream and fight with me again. She switched tactics.

She stopped eating, said she had no appetite.

Whatever I cooked, she wouldn't touch.

Aunt Leona followed her lead, and the two of them lived on plain oatmeal and pickles.

George couldn't stand it. He tried to talk me down. "Why don't you just give a little? Your mom's getting old. Don't actually make her sick over this."

I shook my head.

This time, I couldn't back down.

I knew my mother. Give her an inch and she'd take ten, and we'd never have a moment's peace again.

By the third night of the standoff, my mother must have figured the hunger strike wasn't working on me, because she finally changed her approach.

She sent George downstairs to buy liquor, specifically asking for two bottles of strong whiskey.

"Tonight your Aunt Leona and I are going to have a real drink. We're not stopping till we're drunk."

My mother said it to me with red eyes. "Call it a... a send-off for her."

Something shifted in me. I thought she'd come around.

The dinner table that night was heavier than any of the days before.

I made four dishes, but neither my mother nor Aunt Leona picked up their chopsticks. They just sat over a plate of salted peanuts, drinking one glass after another in silence.

George and I ate quietly. Neither of us dared to speak.

A few rounds in, Aunt Leona started to talk more.

She held my mother's hand and poured out all her misfortunes, sobbing and wiping her nose.

Abandoned by a man in her youth, laid off in middle age, and now old age with no children, no one, nothing but loneliness.

My mother cried right along with her, patting her back over and over to comfort her.

"Leona, it's okay, you have me. As long as I have food on my table, I'll never let you go hungry."

It ran cold through me to hear it. I quietly gathered the dishes and hid myself in the kitchen.

I didn't want to hear the same old sob story, and I didn't want to watch the two of them put on their devoted-sisters act.

I stood at the sink and washed the dishes slowly, the running water covering the broken sobbing from the living room.

I don't know how long it was before I finished the last plate and was about to dry my hands and go back out.

The crying in the living room had stopped. In its place was Aunt Leona's slurred, drink-thick muttering.

Something made me stop, and I turned my ear toward it.

I heard my mother sigh, coaxing her. "Enough, you've had too much. Don't talk anymore."

The living room went silent for a few seconds. Then, clear as anything, I heard Aunt Leona laugh, low and strange and full of spite, her words thick and slurred.

"Don't talk? I've held it in for thirty years... Priscilla... I hate it... why should she... why did she get to keep all the good things..."

The rest was cut off by a panicked snap.

"Leona Chavez! Shut your mouth!"

It was my mother's voice, shrill, fast, full of a fear and panic I had never heard from her.

It hit me like lightning, and I froze where I stood. The dishcloth dropped from my hand and slapped against the floor, kicking up a tiny splash of water.

My mind went blank.

I've held it in for thirty years?

Why should she get to have it?

Who was this "she"? What had happened thirty years ago? Why was my mother's reaction so violent, like she was desperately covering up some enormous secret?

In that instant I felt like a fool who'd wandered into forbidden ground and overheard a curse strong enough to overturn my entire world. I'd always thought Aunt Leona was just an ordinary woman who chased small advantages and had no sense of boundaries, but that terrified "Shut your mouth" from my mother turned the blood in my body cold.

I turned sharply, looking through the little pane of glass in the kitchen door at the two women weeping in each other's arms in the living room.

I'd always thought I was watching some absurd family scene play out, and only now did it hit me that I might have been living inside a massive lie all along.

My hands and feet went cold, my heart pounding. Something suddenly made sense, and at the same time everything blurred worse than before.

The answer to that question felt close enough to touch, and yet it was wrapped in a thick black fog.

I stared at my mother in disbelief, the person I was closest to, the one I trusted most.

Mom, what on earth... are you afraid of?