“Do you think we’ll find her?” Carolina’s eyes flashed as her hair whipped around her face.
“I know we will,” he yelled over the rushing wind, his eyes on the road.
“And where do you think finding her will take us?” she asked.
“Back to where we took a wrong turn. Back to the beginning so we can pick the right path this time. The path to what should have been.”
“To what should have been,” she murmured, examining herself in the side mirror. “I wonder if she’ll want to meet us or if she will resent us for meddling with her life yet again?”
“Don’t worry, Carolina,” he called out over the wind, “she’ll see us for who we are.”
“And then what?” she said fearfully.
“And then . . . We’ll see.”
Thirty
Pausing at a roadside dive, they crammed into a cozy booth and hunched over tortillas de harina stuffed with chorizo con huevo.
“How’d you know about this little place?” she marveled, savoring the rich, authentic food.
“My drivers used to come here back when I had the trucking company,” he mouthed.
“Trucking company?” She shook her head in disbelief. “I thought you had been a pharmacist all these years. You never mentioned trucking.”
“Well, Carolina, it turns out you were right. Pharmacy wasn’t enough for me. I always needed more. I felt like something was missing. I tried to find that something in different businesses and entrepreneurial endeavors, but I was looking in the wrong place. What I was really missing was you.”
She blushed. “You’re still the old romantic, Fully.”
“How could a girl resist me?” He grinned.
“Woman,” she corrected him.
“Yes, of course, woman!” Ah yes, her brazen, independent spirit had drawn him—like a suicidal moth—from the very beginning. It had even made possible their unlikely liaison.
“Don’t make fun of my ideas, Fulgencio Ramirez,” she cautioned, waving her fork in the air like a scepter. “Your machismo cursed you way back when and it can still bring you down if you’re not careful. Maldición or no maldición, you know it’s still in you to some extent.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” he responded. He didn’t mind her modern ways. In fact, in the wake of the broken curse, they inspired him. He discerned a depth in her that he’d been too foolish to fathom the first time around.
Finishing breakfast, they took the scenic route up the Gulf Coast, stopping on a bluff overlooking the sea in the Aransas Pass Wildlife Refuge. They didn’t even notice the cold Gulf breeze biting into their skin as they sat up on the backs of their seats, gazing out over the waves crashing below.
“I’d forgotten how beautiful the world could be,” she sighed.
“This is just the beginning,” he said, gently brushing her hair back with his hand.
By the time they rolled into Houston, the sun was setting, and downtown’s imposing skyline loomed against the auburn sky, lights twinkling in the windows.
Fulgencio pointed at a roadside motel on the outskirts of downtown. “Sometimes we used to stay there, the truckers and I, when we brought a big convoy to town. El Chotay thought it was heaven.”
She raised a disapproving eyebrow at the dilapidated collection of forgotten shacks. “Is that where we’re staying?”
“No. I think we’ve suffered enough,” he chuckled. “This trip is about ending the pain, not rubbing it in.”
Arriving at the Four Seasons hotel, she stepped down onto the red carpet as Fulgencio took her by the hand. “I feel like the homecoming queen all over again,” Carolina whispered to Fulgencio as the bellman opened the door and bowed. “But I also feel guilty,” she confessed as they checked in. “Here we are searching for our daughter and, well, are we having too much fun?”
“No more punishing, Carolina. Whatever happens tomorrow, whatever we find, no more guilt. Just our life.”
No one would have guessed it, but Fulgencio Ramirez was a man of money. He had lived a very simple and humble life. In the first months after he opened his drugstore, he had generated sufficient funds to walk proudly into the bank in downtown La Frontera and repay the loan Old Man Maldonado’s son had approved. The Spanish-speaking customers loved him, for he was the first and only pharmacist in town who spoke to them in their language. The only one who did not look down on them with disdain from high up behind the counter. The only one that did not hide behind a white lab coat. No, no señor, he used to say, sporting his guayaberas proudly and stroking his mustache. He was just like them, but he knew how to heal their ailments. And when the prescriptions didn’t work, the herbs and incantations he learned from his mother did. After that, the bank had always supported his entrepreneurial schemes. And since he lived in an adobe hut on his grandfather’s ranch, he had managed to amass a vast fortune over the decades, including the reunited lands of Caja Pinta. So much so, that when the Walmarts and the HEBs and the Walgreens swooped into town like buzzards from another world, it was of little concern to him. He didn’t depend on the drugstore’s income anymore. The many businesses he’d built and sold off over the years could have kept him—and generations to come—living the high life. But still he tended to his dwindling parade of decrepit and senile viejitos. He chewed the fat with his assortment of hangers-on. Slowly, these elements filled the yawning vacuum of time as he had waited for another chance to reunite with Carolina.
And now, Fulgencio and Carolina cuddled over candlelight in the hotel’s elegantly appointed dining room. While she had bathed and gotten dressed in her suite, he had wandered over to one of the glitzy boutiques connected to the skyscraper via a glass skywalk spanning the busy street below. He walked in a daze, his eyes wide with amazement. He had never seen all this before, this glorious world built by modern man. He had been content retracing his daily steps in the lowly shadows of La Frontera’s crumbling downtown buildings. He had even managed to avoid ever setting foot in those windowless hulks of concrete that interloping developers had erected on the outskirts of town in the ’70s, the ones they called malls. He had also avoided the flashy chain restaurants and stores that had crowded out the mom-and-pop shops on the town’s main drags. No Blockbuster Video for him. No Church’s Fried Chicken. Rarely, if ever, did he allow himself to cruise along those sign-cluttered neon streets. No, no señor, he had found what little comfort he could in the familiar surroundings of the faded downtown. Doing his part to keep Mr. Capistran’s Men’s Shop in business.
But now, for the first time ever, he felt differently about the new world. As he removed his tortoiseshell frames and allowed the glamour of the shops before him to dazzle and impress, he realized that he liked what he saw. Shortly thereafter, he emerged in a dark olive Armani suit from one of the boutiques with a funny French name he couldn’t pronounce. Carolina’s jaw dropped before he could catch it with a kiss on the lips as they stood in the doorway to her suite.