Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [41]
If Ellie’s parents had still been alive, she might have discussed her worries with her mother. No doubt Anthony and Guadalupe Francisco would have been thrilled to look after their grandchildren while Ellie went off to school. Unfortunately, Ellie’s parents were dead. They had died six years earlier in a Saturday-night car wreck as they returned home after buying groceries in Tucson. When it came to taking care of her children, Ellie Chavez was definitely on her own.
“Come on, Manny,” Ellie said reasonably, hoping to cajole her way around him as she had countless times before. “We’ve been over all this. You said I could go and let me sign up.”
“I changed my mind,” Manny said. “Now you’re staying here.”
“Too bad,” Ellie returned. “I’m going anyway, and that’s final. Sister Justine pulled all kinds of strings to make this work. She’s even arranged a place for us to stay.”
“A place for you to stay,” Manny Chavez said pointedly. “I don’t remember being invited.” He paused and took another long swig from the bottle. “I don’t care what Sister Justine did. She’s a troublemaker,” he added. “She’s trying to break us up.”
“Manny!” Ellie exclaimed. “Don’t say that in front of Delia. Sister Justine’s doing no such thing. She thinks I’ll be a good teacher, that’s all. She thinks so, and so do I.”
Manuel Chavez stepped farther into the room. “We were doing just fine with you as an aide and with me driving a bus. Why isn’t that good enough?”
“Because being an aide isn’t the same as being a real teacher,” Ellie insisted. “I want to be one of the first Tohono O’odham teachers here at Sells. It’ll set a good example for our kids and for other kids, too. It’s not right that all the teachers on the reservation are Mil-gahn.”
“You’ll set an example, all right,” Manny Chavez muttered, taking another step forward. “If you leave here, you’ll never come back, and you won’t get the kids, either. I won’t let you.”
“Yes, you will.”
To most of the world, Ellie Chavez included, those three small words, spoken quietly but resolutely, might have been considered a minor act of disobedience. With Manny they provoked outright war. He attacked her with the bottle and with his one free fist while Delia cowered in one corner and Eddie screamed from his crib. Ellie Chavez fought back. Although her husband outweighed her, he was also very drunk. In the end, that cost him.
He landed several telling blows. Delia watched in horror as her mother went down, blood spouting from her nose and lips. She landed on the floor and lay still. Manny staggered over to her. “I told you,” he muttered. “Nobody’s going to Tempe.”
With that, Manny raised his foot and aimed a vicious kick at his stricken wife. Seeing her father raise his foot, Delia knew what he was going to do. It was more than she could stand. With a screech of outrage, Delia rushed from her hiding place. She tackled her father from behind, hitting him just at knee level. Since he was already off balance, Delia’s unexpected blow was enough to send Manny crashing face-first into a corner of the coffee table. As he fell, the bottle was still gripped in his hand. When it smashed into the concrete floor it exploded, sending a spray of tequila and broken glass across the room.
Delia watched him fall and lie still. For several awful moments she expected he would rise and come after her mother again, but he didn’t. Slowly, covering her bleeding mouth with one hand, Ellie struggled to her feet. Bright red blood spewed from her nose and from cuts on her upper and lower lips. A long bloody scrape stretched from the tip of her nose to the top of her forehead, where she had fallen on the side of one of three matching suitcases the nuns at Topawa had given her as a going-away present.
For a moment, Ellie, too, stood over her