How Tía Lola Came to (Visit) Stay (9 page)

“Who is it?” Juanita is standing beside him, holding on to her brother’s arm. All her smart-alecky confidence is gone.

“I think it’s him—Colonel Charlebois,”
Miguel whispers. Now that the car is so close, he can make out the old man behind the wheeL The hood has a striking ornament: a little silver batter, crouched, ready to swing-“I’m going to pretend no one is home,” Miguel adds.

But Colonel Charlebois doesn’t come up to the door. He sits in his car, gazing up at the purple-and-white house for a few minutes, and then he drives away. Later that day, a letter appears in the mailbox. “Unless the house is back to its original white by the end of the month, you are welcome to move out.”

“Welcome
to move out?” Miguel repeats. He wrote !BIENVENIDA! to his Tía Lola when she moved in. It doesn’t sound right to
welcome
someone to move out.

“We’ve got three weeks to paint the house back or move,” their mother says in a teary voice at dinner. “I’m disappointed, too,” she admits to Tía Lola. After all, she really loves the new color. That flaking white paint made the place look so blah and run-down. “But still, I don’t want to have to move again,” Mami sighs.

Tía Lola pats her niece’s hand. There is something else they can try first.

“What’s that?” her niece asks.

They can invite
el coronel
over on Saturday.

“But that’s the day of our big game,” Miguel reminds his aunt. They’ll be playing against another local team from the next county over.

Tía Lola winks. She knows.
“Pero tengo un plan.”
She has a plan. Miguel should tell his friends to come a little early so they can change.

“Change what?” Miguel’s mother asks. “Change the color of the house?”

Tía Lola shakes her head. Change a hard heart. She’ll need more grape juice from the store.

The day dawns sunny and warm. The cloudless sky stretches on and on and on, endlessly blue with the glint of an airplane, like a needle sewing a tiny tear in it. Every tree seems filled to capacity with dark green rustling leaves. On the neighboring farms, the corn is as tall as the boys who play baseball in the fallow field nearby. Tía Lola’s garden looks like one of Papi’s palettes. But now, after living in the country for seven months, Miguel has his own new names for colors: zucchini green, squash yellow, chili-pepper red, raspberry crimson. The eggplants are as
purple as the newly painted house. It is the full of summer. In a few weeks, up in the mountains, the maples will begin to turn.

Miguel’s friends and their parents arrive early. The boys head upstairs behind Tía Lola and Rudy. Their parents stay downstairs, drinking grape smoothies and talking about how their gardens are doing. At last, the silver car rolls into the driveway.

Slowly, Colonel Charlebois climbs out. He stands, a cane in one hand, looking up at the house. One quarter of the house is purple. The other three-quarters is still white. Which color will the whole house end up being?

Miguel looks down at the old man from an upstairs window. Suddenly, he feels a sense of panic. What if Tía Lola’s plan doesn’t work? He doesn’t want to move from the house that has finally become a home to him.

He feels his aunt’s hand on his shoulder.
“No hay problema, Miguelito,”
she reassures him as if she can read his thoughts even without looking into his eyes.

*   *   *

Colonel Charlebois is still staring up at the house when the front door opens. Out file nine boys in purple-and-white-striped uniforms and purple baseball caps. They look as if the house itself has sprouted them! Miguel leads the way, a baseball in his hand-Behind them, Tía Lola and Rudy each hold the corner of a pennant that reads: CHARLIE’S BOYS.

Colonel Charlebois gazes at each boy. It is difficult to tell what is going through his mind. Suddenly, he drops his cane on the front lawn and calls out, “Let’s play ball!” He stands, wobbly and waiting and smiling. Miguel looks into the old man’s eyes and sees a boy, legs apart, body bent forward, a gloved hand held out in front of him.

He lifts his arm and throws the ball at that young boy—and the old man catches it.

Mami’s Birthday Party

Mami’s birthday party is planned as a small surprise party with a few friends—not unlike Migue's birthday back in March.

But soon it turns into a block party that will be like the ones they used to have in New York. Except that here in Vermont, there’s no such thing as a simple block. You have neighbors who have neighbors who have neighbors, and before you know it, you have a whole county coming over to your house for your “small surprise party.”

There is one other reason why the party keeps growing that cannot be blamed on Vermont-Tía Lola-She is the friendliest person Miguel and Juanita have ever known-Tía Lola speaks with everyone-“To practice my English,” she explains, though really she just loves people.

After a chat with Reggie, the UPS man
whom months ago she turned away from her door, Tía Lola goes running down the drive after the brown van-“What are you doing on August thirtieth?” she gasps when Reggie finally sees her in his rearview mirror and stops the van.

“Coming over to your house for your niece’s party,” Reggie replies. “What else?”

Melrose, the town clerk, says the same thing when Tía Lola asks him. And Ernestine, who runs the seamstress shop, and Johnny, who has the car garage, and Petey, who owns the pet shop, and the three waitresses at Rudy’s Restaurant, Sandy, Shauna, and Dawn, and Shauna’s husband and Dawn’s sister and Sandy’s partner, who has a best friend—

In less than two weeks, over seventy people will be descending on the house.

“We’ve got to plan Mami’s party, Tía Lola,” Miguel keeps reminding his aunt.

But Tía Lola seems unfazed. She stands in front of the house, her head cocked, looking at her masterpiece. The painting is finally finished. The house is completely purple with a salmon-pink trim. “Maybe…just maybe,” Tía Lola wonders
out loud, “turquoise with hot pink would work better?”

“About the party,” Miguel tries again, “We’ve got to plan, Tía Lola.”

“
¿Tú sabes lo que dicen de los planes?”
Tía Lola says, winking. Does he know what they say about plans? Make them, but be prepared to break them!

“Yeah, I know,” Miguel agrees, “Like when we invited ten people and now weVe got over seventy,”

“!Exactamente!”
Tía Lola smiles as if she has had nothing to do with it.

On Saturday morning, while Mami putters downstairs, Tía Lola finally calls a secret planning session in her bedroom. She is wearing her purple Charlie’s Boys baseball cap atop her high
moño
and carrying a clipboard in her hand as if she were assigning positions to the team.

“Diez y siete…treinta y ocho.
…
setenta y cinco,”
she counts. Seventeen… thirty-eight… seventy-five. Suddenly, her head jerks up. They have seventy-five guests coming to Mami’s party! They can’t fit that many people in the living room!

“I was trying to tell you,” Miguel sighs, folding
his arms and giving his aunt a pointed look.

“I know! I know!” Juanita is waving her hand in the air as if she were still in school and had to ask for permission to talk. “Why don’t we have the party in the back field?”

“!Muy buena idea!”
Tía Lola says, checking that item off the list on her clipboard.

Miguel brings up another problem. “How are we going to cook for so many people? Mami will notice if we start making all this food in the house.”

“Déjame pensar un momentico”
Tía Lola says. She needs to think a moment.

When Tía Lola thinks, you can see her thinking. Her painted-on eyebrows move slowly toward the center of her face in a thinker’s scowl. And just when you think they’ll run into each other and become one brow, she jumps up and says, “Aha!” and some Great Idea pops out of her mouth.

This time, nothing pops out of her mouth but a heavy sigh. Nothing pops out of Juanita’s mouth or Miguel’s mouth, either. They can’t figure this problem out.

The phone rings downstairs. Their mother answers. “Oh, hello, Rudy. Let me get her—Tía Lola!” Mami calls up the stairs.

Miguel, Juanita, and Tía Lola look at each other and cry out, “Aha!”

“I think maybe your aunt and Rudy are becoming very fond of each other,” their mother notes to Miguel and Juanita a few days later.

“Is that so?” Miguel says, trying to look surprised.

“She’s over there all the time. Maybe Tía Lola will get married after all,” Their mother smiles as if she has planned this all along, “Why not? Poor Rudy’s been widowed for five years. And Tía Lola,
bueno
, she could do with some good company,”

Miguel remembers that his mother once told him that Tía Lola is very sensitive about the subject of marriage, “Mami, why didn’t Tía Lola ever get married?”

A sad, wistful look comes over her face, “Remember how I told you my mother died when I was only three? Well, my mami had a younger sister, Tía Lola, When Mami died, Tía Lola took care of me. Maybe Tía Lola was too busy being my mother to find a husband,”

This is a surprise to Miguel and Juanita, You
can be a mother without really being
the
mother-You can be a family even if your parents are no longer married.

At last count, seventy-seven people are coming tomorrow. Miguel and Juanita sorely wish they could add one more person to the list of guests.

“You have to remember,” the wished-for number seventy-eight reminds them that evening on the phone, “it’s your
mother’s
birthday, not yours-”

“But it won’t be the same without you, Papi,” Miguel says, lowering his voice-

His mother is having a pre-birthday massage in the living room from her friend Stargazer-Stargazer looks like a hippie to Miguel and Juanita with her long, flowered skirts and natural-fiber tunics, her curly hair and dangly earrings-But Stargazer says she is no longer a hippie but an Irish-Armenian-Native-American with her moon in Cancer-You can’t get Stargazer started or you’ll ruin Mami’s massages with too much conversation.

“I don’t see why you can’t come,” Juanita tells her father-She is on the upstairs extension-

“I’ll be there,” Papi says-“Really-Just look up,
and you’ll see a brush stroke of white in the sky, and that’s me, nearby!’

“Titanium white?” Juanita guesses in a little voice from her end.

“Sí, mi amor”
Papi says. His voice is as small as hers.

But to Miguel, Papi’s promise sounds silly. Kid stuff. Like wishing on stars. He is now the captain of a baseball team. He has helped plan a whole surprise party that his mother doesn’t know about. He is too grown-up to believe wishes have their own way of coming true.

That night, they tell Tía Lola how sad it makes them feel every time there’s a family occasion and their papi—or mami—isn’t there.

“You don’t ever have to lose anyone you really love,” she tells them, “They stay with you in your heart,”

That might be so, but it still hurts not to have Papi around.

To brighten things up, Tía Lola brings up the party tomorrow, “I just invited number seventy-eight today,”

“Tía Lola!” both Miguel and Juanita cry out.

“But this could not be avoided,” Tía Lola explains. “El Rudy’s son—”

“No, Tía Lola!” Miguel and Juanita insist.

“This son has a business,” Tía Lola continues. “He puts up tents for weddings and parties.”

Miguel and Juanita are still shaking their heads when they hear the first raindrops falling on the leaves of the locust trees outside the window.

Early the next morning, Miguel sits up in bed and looks out. The rain is coming down hard as if the leaves all need a good scrubbing before they take on their fall colors. After so much planning, Mami’s party will be ruined! Perhaps Papi’s hand slipped when he tried to paint only one brush stroke in the sky?

When Miguel goes down to the kitchen, Tía Lola is busy preparing Mami’s birthday breakfast. Juanita stands just inside the door, gazing out at the curtain of rain. Two teardrops join the trillion raindrops falling on the ground.

“Don’t worry,” Tía Lola reassures them. “Everything will be fine.”

Just then, their mother enters the room.

“What is going to be fine?” she asks, looking from one to the other.

“Your birthday breakfast,” Tía Lola says quickly in Spanish. She sets down a plate of Mami’s favorite, fried onions over mashed plantains, which Rudy speciaLordeied from his distributor in Boston.
“Feliz cumpleaños,”
she sings. Miguel and Juanita join in.

“What a wonderful surprise!” their mother cries. Miguel and Juanita look at each other, thinking of the much bigger
sorpresa
that awaits her.

“Our special present comes later,” Tía Lola explains, nodding at Miguel and Juanita. They have decided that after the surprise party, they will drive up to their mother’s favorite spot in the Green Mountains.

“I don’t need another present,” their mother says, blinking back happy tears. “This is already so special!”

“The only thing is the rain,” Miguel notes. “We ordered a nice day for your birthday.” He tries to sound lighthearted, but he can’t hide his disappointment.