“All is not lost, m’ija. Follow your senses,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “The senses don’t lie, and they’ll lead you through all of . . . this.” She made a circular motion around Lumi’s head.
Lumi sighed and leaned her elbow on the table, supporting her head with it. “These past few weeks have been so full of chaos. First, everything with him . . . and now my mother. I come here to get away and get a little distance, and this is the time Mami chooses to tell me, ‘Oh, guess what? The story with your father? Everything I taught you? Lies.’”
Doña Elia frowned and studied Lumi’s exasperated features. “Your mother is a hard woman,” she said simply, “and she has lived most of her life focusing on what she doesn’t want. So . . . there’s your example,” she concluded cryptically.
She patted Lumi lightly on the hand.
“It’s time for me to close the shop,” she said, as she looked pointedly at the now-darkened windows. Lumi stood up slowly. Doña Elia drew her in for a hug again, but this time she held her there and said, “May all the love and light you need accompany you. Go with power, m’ija.”
Lumi felt a lightening in her chest and squeezed her in return. Doña Elia smelled of incense and agua de florida, and Lumi found the fragrance comforting.
“Thank you, Doña Elia,” she whispered back. “I’ll see you soon.”
Doña Elia nodded graciously. “Give my regards to your mother and Anahilda.”
Lumi nodded and paced toward the door, bowing her head slightly to Doña Elia on the way out.
Across the street, there was a bus in the waiting station. Its sign read MIAMI BEACH. Lumi dashed across the street and hopped on, tossing some coins in the fare box, and grabbed a seat on the bus before the vehicle lurched into action. She watched the blur of stores and people of Calle Ocho whiz by, letting the aftertaste of Doña Elia’s lemonade linger on her palate.
When the bus pulled up at Collins Avenue and Forty-First Street, she stepped off and took a narrow side path that led past an elegant hotel right up to the boardwalk. She could see there were still people on the sand and she decided to walk down to the water. She slipped off her sandals and carried them with her, dangling them from one of her fingers.
She inhaled the sea air deeply and let it wash over her, tossing her curls every which way. She let the breeze caress her and allowed all thoughts to rush out from her and into the waves, past the breakers. In that moment, there was no need to find answers, she just wanted to be.
When the cool breeze turned cold and the last families and couples with dogs packed up and left the beach bare, she knew what she would do. She had a call to make. She fished her phone out of her pocket as she walked back to the bus stop and pulled up her contacts.
“Corazón! I thought you forgot about me.”
As soon as she heard Richard’s melodious voice, she could not help but smile. “Mi amor.” She blew a kiss into the phone. “Listen, I’m going to need your help with something.”
By the time Lumi got back to Inés’s, the cicadas in the front yard were chirping at full pitch. She appraised the exterior of the ranch-style home she had grown up in. There was a shutter coming loose that she hadn’t noticed before, and in the upper left-hand corner, the paint was beginning to peel. The facade had become dingier in the stretch of several hours.
The lights were dimmed, so she supposed her mother and Anahilda had already retired to bed. She stepped into the compact kitchen for a glass of water and found Inés sitting at the dinette table, folding cotton dinner napkins into minute squares. When she got them down to matchbox size, she shook the napkins loose and started again.
Lumi took a seat at the table, and Inés kept folding, unfolding, and refolding, her gaze focused on the cotton squares. As the silence stretched on, Lumi remembered her glass of water. As she retrieved the water pitcher, a low voice came from behind her back.
“I told you why I did what I did.”
Lumi whirled around, and Inés was still staring at her napkins. She approached the table with caution. She studied the lines on her mother’s face, the way her eyes bore into the table, and her arms tingled with the urge to hug her. Instead, she asked in a near whisper, “Mami, why did you assume I would judge you?”
Inés shook her head. “I don’t know, m’ija. I guess because almost everyone else did.”
“Did you love him, Mami?”
Inés let out a long sigh that sounded like she had been holding it in for the past thirty years. “Yes,” she said, “yes, I did.” The last words came out like she was fighting not to swallow them. “I loved him, but our decisions made us face life before we were ready.”
She drew another long breath.
“I was sure I had done right by you, but now . . . I’m not so sure anymore. I’m sorry.”
Lumi reached out to squeeze her mother’s hand, and to her surprise, Inés looked up at her and squeezed back, her brown eyes shining in the dim light.
“Mami,” Lumi said, “I’m going back.”
Inés gave her a small nod. “You do what you have to do, m’ija. As if you were ever going to do anything else,” she said, smiling.
This was the closest she would get to her mother’s blessing, and she knew it, and that was huge.
“I’ll start packing,” Lumi said softly. She laid a light kiss on her mother’s forehead and went to her room to grab her suitcase.
47
Lumi
The subway crawled toward 116th Street early on a July morning. The Fulton Fish Market was Lumi’s favorite, but it was eight o’clock and Fulton closed at seven. She had planned to take a bus at 155th Street until she realized she was too late. She opted to just stay on the subway, remembering Ocean Wave Seafood on 116th. It wasn’t Fulton, but it would have to do.
Lumi wore a white T-shirt, distressed jeans that barely hung on by a stitch, and a beige linen scarf with gilded threads that billowed under her chin as she walked toward the market.
The frigid air hit her full blast as she stepped in. She spotted a few spiny crustaceans on ice and was relieved to see their claws were tightly bound with thick rubber bands. A single lobster would do the trick. She stepped into line behind the woman waiting at the counter. As she stared at the back of the woman’s head, her heart thudded in her chest as she recognized the honey-blond hair with black roots.
“Esme?”
Esme whipped her head around. “Lumi?” Her face blanched.
What was Esme doing at the fish market at eight o’clock in the morning? Would it be too obvious if Lumi turned on her heel and hightailed it back to the subway station?
Instead, she took a deep breath and settled herself. “Wow. I wasn’t sure I would ever see you again,” Lumi said. “What brings you here?”
Esme fidgeted with her jacket cuffs and shifted her weight from side to side. “This is my neighborhood. My mother’s church is having a model biblical meal today at noon,” she said.
Lumi wrinkled her brow in curiosity. “What’s that?”
Esme smiled a small grin. “They prepare and share a meal made of the same foods Jesus and his disciples ate in the Bible.”