Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [61]
Delia loved school. At first she was far behind other kids in her class. She was lumped in with the slower ones and pretty much ignored, but with her own natural capabilities and with Ruth’s nightly tutoring sessions at home, Delia soon bubbled to the top.
Neither Delia nor her brother saw their father again until four years later, the summer Eddie turned six and Delia twelve. Delia Chavez was within days of promotion to the eighth grade when, on a warm spring afternoon, she came home from the library with an armload of books and with her little brother in tow. As they approached the house, an unfamiliar pickup truck was parked in the front driveway. Manuel Chavez stood on the front porch, shouting at Ruth Waldron and at Ellie. Delia knew at once her father was just as drunk and angry as she remembered him.
“I want my son!” he yelled for all the neighborhood to hear. “You’d better give Eddie back to me before you turn him into an Anglo and a queer, too.”
Eddie had been so young when they left Sells that he had no recollection of this man who claimed to be his father, but if this loud stranger wanted to take Eddie somewhere in a shiny pickup truck, the boy was eager to go.
While the children looked on, the argument raged back and forth. In the end Ellie agreed that Eddie would return to the reservation with his father.
To Delia, the whole thing was incomprehensible. It had taken the next several years for her to come to terms with what had happened that day on Ruth’s front porch. How could her mother bear to send Eddie off with a horrible drunk who was a virtual stranger? How could she let him go without putting up a fight? It wasn’t a matter of legal custody. As far as Delia knew, there had never been a divorce or a court order or any exchange of legal documents. Ellie simply handed Eddie over even though she must have known what the consequences would be. She must have guessed that once Manny drove away with her son, she would never get him back. He would disappear into the world of the reservation and into his father’s family and be lost to her forever.
That was exactly what happened. Ellie and Ruth may have spoiled Eddie, but his Grandmother Chavez in Big Fields was far better—or worse—at spoiling. Eddie had grown up fat and lazy and every bit as much of a drunk as his father. When he graduated from eighth grade, he quit going to school, and Manny made no attempt to change his mind. Eddie contacted Delia only when he needed money—when he had wrecked his latest pickup or when he had been let out of jail and needed something to get by on until he could find a job for day wages.
As a twelve-year-old, Delia hadn’t understood all the implications of what was being said on the porch, nor did she realize how much went unspoken beneath that flurry of angry words.
Delia’s seventh-grade assessment of the situation was that her brother was a stupid, spoiled brat. That being the case, why had Manuel come to Tempe for Eddie and not for Delia? Why had he collected his crybaby son—someone who’d had to repeat kindergarten—and not his straight-A daughter? Why was Eddie worthy of being returned to the reservation when Delia was not?
Eventually, in high school, Delia understood more about the dynamics of the relationships involved. It took that long for her to grasp what was really going on between her mother and Ruth Waldron—a former Benedictine nun with strong connections to an old Boston family. Both women were exiles—Ellie from the reservation and Ruth from her convent and her disapproving family. Ellie and Ruth had been lovers almost from the beginning, from the night Ruth took the reservation refugees in off the street and welcomed them into her home.
Years after that, when Delia was in law school, she finally grasped the kinds of pressures her father could have brought to bear if Ellie hadn’t given in to Manny’s demands for Eddie. Lesbian mothers had no rights in those days. If Ellie had defied her husband, she’d have risked losing both children rather than just one. A legal fracas might