The kitchen hadn’t changed much through the decades. It was perpetually permeated by a warm, moist atmosphere and a heavy air thick with the smell of something recently baked or cooked, fried or refried. He pulled the screen door open and let himself in unceremoniously. Of all the unassuming houses on the block, Ninfa del Rosario’s was the neatest, the cleanest, and the prettiest. For though she had not hailed from money or high society, she was raised proud and strong on the ranchlands of northern Mexico. Steel ran through her veins, and fire still burned in the coal of her eyes. Outside of her household, she had never expected or demanded much of life or the world she lived in, but within her diminutive domain, she reigned as undisputed master since the death of her husband, Nicolas Ramirez Sr. So to appease her unbroken pride and untamed temperament, Fulgencio kept the house painted and the yard mowed. He had offered to move her into a newer house in a more respectable part of town, but she had refused time and again.
“Coming from El Otro Lado was enough of a move to last me a lifetime,” she’d say, referring to the other side of the river. “And I’m still not sure that it was worth it but that’s what your father wanted, que Dios lo guarde.”
The widow Ramirez stood at her spot by the stove as Fulgencio entered. Spoon in hand. Chorizo con huevo on the skillet. Fresh tortillas de harina on the comal. Little David, whose disabilities prevented him from living on his own, sat at the table dutifully consuming breakfast tacos.
Fulgencio often thought in passing, if his brothers could still be physically attached to her appendages, they would be. He wondered if she ever moved from that spot, the place from where she had struck him that evening long ago when he forgot her back medicine. Maybe she just stood there, waiting for her children and grandchildren to come and go. Like a piece of furniture, maybe she felt this was the place where she belonged, beneath this humble roof.
“What are you doing here?” she asked casually. “Did you read the obituaries? Did you see who died?” She pointed at the newspaper spread open on the table he’d flown under as a teenager, propelled by the force of her rage.
His throat tugged on his heart again as he glanced at the page and his eyes landed on the twenty-two letters. But she spoke of someone else.
“La Señora Villarreal passed yesterday,” she chattered, stirring the eggs and chorizo. “Do you remember her, m’ijo? She was the one that first told you about that ridiculous maldición. You were in high school. Scared you half to death. Our families were related, distantly of course, from the days when our people were out on the ranches toward the beach. That’s how she knew about it. Como pasan los años. Eighty-three years old! I’ll be going to the velorio tonight. Who would have thought? She looked so good last week when I saw her at Lopez Supermarket with her daughter, you know, the one that buys her medicines from you.”
He nodded, maneuvering around her on his way toward the back of the house.
“Pobrecita,” she carried on, oblivious to his machinations. “They say she died of pneumonia. Ni modo . . . así es la vida,” she exhaled, sighing and making the sign of the cross over her chest, raising the dainty silver crucifix dangling from her neck to her lips.
He passed through her simply furnished bedroom into one of the two back rooms, where his older brother Nicolas Jr. snored on a couch in his wife-beater and boxers, a half-empty bottle of cheap Scotch sitting next to a coffee mug on the hardwood floor.
“It seems these days I spend all of my time either at one of the nursing homes visiting a dying friend from church or at one of the funeral homes paying my last respects,” she rattled on from the kitchen in a slightly louder tone so he could hear her musings. “I don’t know what’s wrong with this town. Babies born without brains. Cancer as common as colds. It’s all because of the pollution being dumped by those maquiladoras into the river. And those doctors are nothing but thieves. Una bola de sinvergüenzas. They just take your money, prescribe antibiotics, and collect your Medicaid till you die. I hear some of them keep collecting it even after you die. That’s how they afford those big mansions on Palm Boulevard.”
He reached up high in a closet for an old wooden box that hadn’t seen the light of day in decades. Blowing a cloud of dust off its treasure chest lid, he opened it, revealing its red velvet interior. He rifled deliberately through the contents: a red, white, and blue Junior Citizen pin, three miniature plastic footballs dipped in gold, the years 1956, 1957, and 1958 etched on them, a
mother-of-pearl teething ring with a silver amulet hanging black, the initials F. R. C. (Fulgencio Ramirez Cisneros) engraved on it, a tarnished Lady Liberty silver dollar collecting grime since 1925, a gold twenty-peso coin minted in 1918 still shiny as the sun, and the object of his search hidden at the bottom in a miniature onionskin sack. Delicately, he extricated it, closed the coffer, and slid it back into the shadows. His brother snored. His mother rambled. A fragile chain spun of yellow gold slipped like silk into his giant, callused hand. A tiny, circular medallion still hung from the fragile braid. His thumb traced its surface. Madonna and Child. He flipped it over, reading the inscription on the smooth, reflective back: “With Love. For Carolina. 1958.”
“Poor Maria de la Luz Villarreal,” his mother continued as he brushed by her on the way back to the kitchen door. “I remember, a long time ago, she actually did get pneumonia. Was it 1958? You had just graduated from high school. The whole town was in a panic that she’d die and leave all those poor children huérfanos. Ay pobre mujer . . .”
The door closed behind him as his determined face met the cold morning air again. It was always too warm in that house. The floor fans had to run full blast for him to breathe, no matter the season. Always steaming, even when it was freezing outside and rock solid oranges plummeted from trees, shattering into bittersweet shards on the brick patio backyard.
“Mira, how rude! You don’t even say ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ anymore! Is that how a son treats his mother? This isn’t a revolving door hotel, you know. It’s still somebody’s home!” He could hear his mother’s cries from the echo chamber of his frigid little truck.
He smiled. It felt good. Been a long time since he had worked those neglected muscles around his mouth. The truck sputtered to life with a big clap from the muffler and a cloud of smoke. As he shot down the pothole-ridden street, he could hear her parting salvo, “Good thing you don’t live here anymore, Fulgencio Ramirez!”
No, no señor. He hadn’t lived under his mother’s roof since he’d left home at sixteen, following one of Papá’s drunken outbursts of gratuitous violence. Instead, he spent his nights across the border.
Pushing the accelerator against the cold metal floor, he traversed the bridge and sped down the two-lane highway to the ranch on the outskirts of Nueva Frontera, Mexico. The wind ripped through the pickup’s skeletal cab as he hurtled toward El Dos de Copas. The Two of Cups. No one else from the family had been out there in eons. They considered it a waste of space. After all, the Two of Cups was the lowest playing card in the Spanish deck.