When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [38]
When everyone had come back, I realized the man with the wrinkled brown suit was two pews up, and I looked up at Jesus on his cross and prayed, “Please, Jesus, don’t let her find out I moved during the service.” Which I knew was a bad thought.
I packed my clothes and put the doily I had made for Mami into a corner of my small bag. Abuela made fish head soup with plantain dumplings, and we ate some for lunch.
“Don’t take your dress off,” she said. “When he comes to pick you up, Pablito might be in a hurry to get back.”
But Papi didn’t come. Sunday stretched long and hot, through siesta time. Abuela made coffee in the late afternoon, and we sat at the table with a stack of soda crackers.
“He’ll probably come for dinner,” she said. But the blue haze of evening shrouded the street, stifled sounds, and sent everyone indoors to their secrets, and Papi didn’t come. Abuela went in to say her prayers. “He must have been held up. Why don’t you change into something comfortable.”
I took off my white pique dress, which was no longer clean and starched. I thought, The minute I change clothes he’s going to show up. But he didn’t, and when Abuela came out from her prayers, we sat by the door, working our needles in, around, up, and out, silently making patterns with thread that might have told a story had either one of us known how to transform our feelings into shape.
Instead, she worked an altar cloth she’d promised Father David, and I added red flowers to the doily I’d made for Mami. And neither one of us said what we both knew. That Papi wasn’t coming. That perhaps the person he had to see the Sunday before needed him again, and he went there, and maybe that person needed him so much that he had forgotten about us, just like he sometimes forgot about Mami chasing after babies in Macún. We worked our crochet until it was too dark to see, until after Abuelo had brought his cart into the yard and tied it up against the fence, until he’d peeled an orange in one long ribbon, until we’d closed up the house and gone into our separate rooms and had wrapped ourselves in the white cotton sheets edged with crocheted scallops.
And I thought about how many nights Mami had left food warming on the ashes of the fogón, how often she’d sat on her rocking chair, nursing a baby, telling us to be still, that Papi would be coming any minute, but in the morning he wasn’t there and hadn’t been. I thought about how she washed and pressed his clothes until they were new-looking and fresh, how he didn’t have to ask where anything was because nothing he ever wore stayed dirty longer than it took Mami to scrub it against the metal ripples of the washboard, to let it dry in the sun so that it smelled like air. I wondered if Mami felt the way I was feeling at this moment on those nights when she slept on their bed alone, the springs creaking as she wrestled with some nightmare, or whether the soft moans I heard coming from their side of the room were stifled sobs, like the ones that now pressed against my throat, so that I had to bury my face in the pillow and cry until my head hurt.
Every night, right after dinner, Abuela slipped into her room, put on a faded green nightgown embroidered with small yellow flowers, and undid her hair. Two twisted ropes of hair fell past her knees, one over each shoulder. She combed first one side, then the other, loosening the ropes into strands of white, gray, and a few black hairs, her fingers weaving