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By Root 657 0

knew nothing about the Aranas. They were a mystery to me. In many ways they still are. A foreign land. You know, I’ve always suspected there is good reason why your abuelito is the way he is. Something that explains why he’s so taciturn, so unwilling to deal with people, so removed from the rest of the world. But in the end, his little peculiarities don’t really matter. My life isn’t particularly easy, but I gave my life over to one man, and the strength of our family is my reward. When men are left to their own devices, Marisi—I don’t care whether they’re from Piccadilly or the Ucayali—when women are not at men’s sides, things fall apart. Other women worm in. Other opportunities unfold. It’s only natural. I wonder sometimes if your mother understands this. If she cares about it at all. Why does she insist on living in one place, if her husband is someplace else? Does she want an end to this marriage? Is that what she wants?”

I was staggered by what she was saying to me. This was a real-life conversation, and she was talking about taboos freely, in a way I’d heard only Erika’s mother do. She was looking at me expectantly, as if I were a full-grown woman with important opinions to share. I struggled to find the words to respond to her. “She’s happy here, Abuelita. This is her country. She likes that we go to school here, that we’re learning to be like her.” Two pallid eggs stared up from my plate.

She sighed and leaned back in her chair. Her shoulders were limp in her dress. “I want you to do something for me, Marisita. I want you to tell your mother that if she loves your father, she will make an effort to be with him. Tell her this: Living apart will not solve their differences. It will only make them grow. Love cannot possibly survive with a hemisphere in between.

“I want you to do something more, one more thing. When you tell her that, don’t say that I asked you to say it. That will add confusion, muddle my meaning. I want this message to reach her in its simplest possible form.”

That evening, Mother came to the Biltmore Hotel to call on Abuelita. She was exhausted from spending days on her feet—I could see that in her swollen ankles—but she did not tell Abuelita about the dress shop. They conversed stiffly in Spanish: how much we’d grown, how well we were doing in school. It was an awkward truce of sorts. The next morning, my grandmother visited Summit. She toured my mother’s garden, circled the flower beds, insisted she couldn’t stay. “Your home is pleasant, Marie,” she said, reaching for her daughter-in-law’s hands and squeezing them into her own. Muy acogedor. “I can see why you love your country.” Then she left me to say the rest.

FOR DAYS I wondered how to relay my grandmother’s message to Mother. I was not good at diplomacy. In those days of my prodigality, the mouth outran the head, blurting substituted for frankness, too often I went too far. I worried that I would reveal my source or—at the very least—provoke renewed hostilities between the women I most admired. How to counsel a grown-up about love?

Love seemed to have so little to do with it. Although my father said he cared for this country, he seemed to be an utter misfit in it, just as Mother had been a misfit in his. The question, as far as I could tell, was one of logistics. But of love? It seemed a wheel-work so remote, so abstract, that I could not even imagine the contours of the machine.

If she loves your father, she will make an effort to be with him. That meant one thing only: If there was love between my mother and father, we would all be living in Peru. Could love be so dictatorial, so unilateral as all that?

I decided to wait and watch until the right moment for my delivery of the secret dispatch. But days passed, then weeks and months, and the hugger-mugger never got done. It wasn’t because I was avoiding the mission; it was because a ray of deductive reasoning had lit my brain.

The evidence appeared—as I have since learned important things do—in a small way. My father came home that fall, lavishing us with gifts, beaming on our accomplishments,