one hot summer (20 page)

As I stepped out, I had a brief thought. What kind of psychic was Violeta, anyhow? She hadn’t seen Luther coming back into my life, and she hadn’t foreseen my partners going behind my back.

Going behind my back. Like a married spouse scouting the options before sleeping around. I had to smile ruefully at the irony.

Making sure my presence was felt at the firm took longer than I had anticipated, so I didn’t have time to return home to Miami Beach before I went to my parents’ house for dinner. I wished I could have had time to visit with Marti and change my clothes, but schmoozing with my partners had been more critical. When I realized how late I was running, I called Ariel. His first response was a stony silence that spoke volumes—I knew he was having a flashback to a time when a call like that was an everyday occurrence.

None of the partners I spoke with even hinted that they had discussed my status at the firm behind my back. They might have been avoiding a confrontation until it was absolutely necessary, or they might have actually believed the office grapevine wouldn’t divulge their secret to me. Whatever the reason, they couldn’t have been more cordial and welcoming, asking about my family and gossiping about what was going on at the other major Miami firms. If I didn’t trust Maria so much, I would have thought she was delusional and had imagined the whole thing in her paranoia about being banished back down to the secretarial pool.

I had certainly taken full advantage of my visit to the office, and made sure the partners knew I was alive and still wanted to be a player. I hadn’t ceased to be a lawyer with a taste for the jugular just because I’d become a mother. My hips might be wider, but giving birth hadn’t caused a complete personality change in me.

I hadn’t really asked myself why I was fighting so hard to make certain my position at the firm was secure, given the fact that I really hadn’t made up my mind what I was going to do when my leave was over. I guess it was a knee-jerk reaction to Maria’s news of my possible replacement. I had jumped into full battle mode without really thinking about the long-term consequences. From my partners’ reactions that afternoon, I knew I had put out the fire for the time being. But I didn’t buy much time, and the fact that none of them mentioned the big new case wasn’t lost on me.

My cell phone rang just as I was turning out the lights in my office. The number on the display was Luther’s. My heart thumped in my chest, both from relief that he had called and apprehension about what he might say. For the second time that day I felt like a silly high school girl; this time, it was as though my eyes were glued to the pink princess phone in my room, waiting for the captain of the football team to ask me to the prom.

“Daisy, how are you?” Luther spoke quickly and softly. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you before now. I’ve been stuck all afternoon in a deposition. I kind of manufactured a break so I’d have a minute to call you.”

“I wasn’t calling about anything important,” I said.

“Everything you have to say is important,” Luther replied.

I smiled in the dark of my office.

“You know, I was just calling to see how you’re doing,” I said.

I tried to sound casual, not demanding. I knew how much men hated that in women. Although I might have sounded relaxed, I was anything but. Suddenly I wasn’t in high school anymore. This was a lot more serious. It was vital that I found out how he felt about yesterday. I was loathe to admit it, but I needed for Luther to assure me that making love meant as much to him as it did to me. All his declarations of love were touching to remember, but our relationship had moved to a deeper level and I needed to know how he felt. I didn’t consider myself insecure, but I needed reassurance from Luther that this was real, important, meaningful. Because I had betrayed Ariel, and nothing was going to change that.

“Listen, Daisy, they’re heading back into the conference room,” Luther said, hurried. “I can’t talk anymore. Are you free on Monday? I really need to see you. Can we get together?”

Maybe that was all the reassurance I needed, right there in the longing in his voice. Visions of Ariel, and Marti, came into my mind. But that wasn’t enough to stop me.

“Yes, Monday would be great.”

We made plans to meet at noon at his apartment, then hung up. I stood there for a second, listening to silence.

When I looked at my watch, I was alarmed to see that it was almost seven o’clock. I was expected at my parents’ in thirty minutes. Unlike most Cubans, the Santoses were punctual to a fault when it came to family gatherings—if someone wasn’t early, they would become the object of unspoken condemnation, usually from my mother. My brothers and I used to joke that one of our ancestors must have had an affair with an Anglo, leaving us with a punctuality gene in a vestige of WASP blood in our veins.

I had hoped to have a chance to check in with Vivian, to see how she was doing with Margarita Anabel, but I didn’t have time for th
e long conversation that would inevitably ensue, so the call would have to wait. Between fighting for my life at the firm and trysts with my lover, I didn’t have much time left over for family and friends. It looked as though I was going to have to become a better schedule keeper.

Even though it was seven, the office was humming along with as much activity as regular office hours. Several of the attorneys would probably not even go home that night. They would shower and change clothes in the twenty-four hour gym in the building’s basement. It wasn’t unusual to see an attorney down there at four in the morning, working out to relieve stress from the intensity of the office. Then they would go back upstairs, hair wet from the shower, face shiny from just having shaved, and wearing a fresh shirt to begin another workday.

I missed the adrenaline-laced atmosphere in the office during the days before a big trial, but I could do without the stomach-churning stress of fearing I might somehow drop the ball and lose the case for the firm. I’d had Maalox for breakfast plenty of times, washing the taste away with Cuban coffee. It was a miracle I didn’t have a hole in my stomach the size of the Florida Straits.

Sometimes the stress at the office, though, was positively enjoyable compared to the stress of a Santos family dinner. We got along well enough otherwise, but at some point—usually after consuming a prodigious amount of alcohol, the only way to get through the evening—the shit would hit the fan. During our periodic family gatherings, Mamá could have made Mother Teresa snarl with anger.

I punched the button to summon the elevator. All I had to do was get through it. Then I could see Luther again.

I made myself as presentable as I could, using the resources available to me from my purse. Most of the traffic lights were red on the way over, so I could apply my makeup without steering with my knees at the same time—the custom in Miami. I did a pretty credible job, I thought, looking in the rearview mirror to check out the results.

I wondered how Ariel was going to act toward me. He hadn’t sounded happy at all when I told him I was working late at the office. Normally I wouldn’t have been apprehensive about his reaction, knowing that I could humor him without too much trouble, but that was before Luther. Now I had to be careful. I didn’t want Ariel to notice any changes in my behavior that might make him suspicious.

A Santos family dinner was not the ideal environment in which to ease Ariel’s unhappiness about my working late. It would have been better to see him at home, where I could control the situation. Ariel might have even worked later than me, and never known how much time I had spent at the office. Instead, we were going to see each other in the Santos family pressure cooker.

I probably wasn’t in the best frame of mind. I was preoccupied as hell, both about the politics at the firm and about Luther. Mamá’s invitation couldn’t have come at a worse time. I knew what lay ahead that night for me, and none of it was good. I reminded myself not to take Mamá’s bait and argue with her, although I knew I would.

We were a close-knit family, like most Latinos. We all lived in Miami, save for my cousin Magdalena—Tia Norma and Tio Roman’s daughter, an actress who waited tables in New York while auditioning in parts for plays that were so Off-Broadway they were actually staged in New Jersey. Papa was every bit the Cuban patriarch, and Mamá loved to show off, so our regular get-togethers were almost always held at my parents’ house.

All together, there were sixteen of us in attendance. There were my parents and my two older brothers Mickey and Sergio. Mickey was still unmarried but Sergio was newly married to Victoria. There was Ariel and Marti and me—although my son was spared enduring the family dinners. Mamá was the only one on her side of the family still alive; her parents and older sister had passed away many years before, so long ago that my brothers and I never knew them. Apart from a few distant relatives we didn’t hear from very often, our family consisted of Papa’s siblings, along with their spouses and offspring.

Papa had three brothers. Roman was married to Norma, and they were the parents of Magdalena and Francisco, whom we called Frank. Felix was married to Veronica, with no children. Ricardo was married to Maureen but recently separated—the rumor was that he got caught having an affair. Their three daughters were my cousins Bridgette, Moira, and Shannon.

When we were younger, it was funny to watch the grown-ups making fools of themselves as the alcohol kicked in, but when we got older we realized that the drinks were acting as truth serum, and that long-hidden sentiments were coming out at the dinner table.
In vino veritas
was never truer than at a Santos family gathering.

I turned onto North Greenway Drive, hoping that this night would be different, and that I wouldn’t get embroiled in some conflict. I couldn’t deal with it. Maybe, just maybe, we could coexist for an evening without arguing about politics, religion, and who had disappointed whom.

I hadn’t spoken with Mamá yet, and I didn’t know which of my relatives would be in attendance that night, but judging from the number of cars parked on the street, it seemed dinner was going to be well attended. Cars filled the driveway and spilled out onto both sides of the street—my family doesn’t carpool. I saw there was no place to park the Escalade, so I swung around the driveway back out onto the street, where I eased into a spot between my cousin Bridgette’s black VW Beetle and Moira’s dark-green Cabriolet. Parked between those two small vehicles, my car looked like a huge, shiny, gas-guzzling set of wheels straight out of the ’hood. As I maneuvered into the tight spot, I tried and failed to conjure up some guilt about how much gas it consumed and how much air it polluted. I was simply too pleased with it.

I was relieved not to have seen Ariel’s Lexus when I pulled up, assuming that he hadn’t arrived yet, but then I saw it partially hidden from view under the giant oak tree by the driveway. I had hoped to get there before Ariel, knowing it was the best way to fend off gratuitous remarks from my family about how I worked harder than my husband.

Just outside the giant mahogany front door, I adjusted my clothes, pinched my cheeks to give them color so I wouldn’t be told I looked pale from working too hard, and knocked on the door. Mamá had gone overboard on the Spanish theme for the house’s exterior as well—the door knocker was made of solid iron, and must have weighed close to twenty pounds. My wrist always gave a little twinge of discomfort after I used it.

The house’s front door was about six inches thick—Mamá must have feared an assault from the Moors when she bought it—but I swore I could still hear the rustle of Yolanda’s crisp, overstarched uniform as she approached to open it for me. It took both her arms and a great deal of effort to open the slablike door. When I stepped in, one look at the poor maid’s face spoke volumes about her misery. It didn’t take a psychic to see that Yolanda hated these family gatherings. Mamá, difficult under the best of circumstances, would invariably become ballistic with the stress of trying to impress all of Papa’s relatives.

“Señora Margarita,” Yolanda greeted me. “Señora Mercedes was asking Señor Ariel about you, because you’re the last to arrive. Señor Ariel told her that you were working late at the office.”

My stomach sank as I absorbed this unwanted bit of information. It wouldn’t be the first time that Mamá and Ariel ganged up against me. I knew that Yolanda telling me this was her way of putting me on notice that my mother was on the warpath and that I’d better be careful if I didn’t want to get chewed up. Yolanda and I got along pretty well, and we found solidarity in the fact that we both had to deal with Mamá’s moods. We tried to help each other out when the shit hit the fan, but so far I hadn’t been able to do anything about Mamá’s insistence that Yolanda wear stockings year-round. I was working on it, though.

It wasn’t unprecedented for Yolanda to phone me at home and report an instance of Mamá’s impossible behavior, so that I could put out the fires she had lit as a consequence. We both knew that Mamá didn’t behave the way she did from any innate meanness of character, but rather because she was unhappy with her life. She may have had all the material things that she ever needed or desired, but I suspected that emotionally her life was empty.

I had to apologize to the pool-cleaning service almost on a monthly basis because Mamá insulted one of their employees. She continually berated them about not knowing how to clean a swimming pool, and once tried to make them agree with her that an entire colony of frogs was living in the drain system. Mamá would point to some minuscule bits of dirt in the water and claim they were tadpoles. It was no use when the owner of the pool service came out in person to politely inform her that tadpoles couldn’t survive in chlorinated water.

“
Gracias,
Yolanda,” I said. In a lower voice, I added, “Thanks for the warning.”

With a sigh, I left the safety of the foyer and headed for the living room, where the family had broken off and clustered into small groups. In the gothic, dimly lit pseudo-Spanish decor, they looked as though they were plotting and planning conspiracies against each other. Order reigned for the moment, but I knew how quickly that could change. One look around told me all I needed to know about how the evening would go. Nino, the octagenarian butler whom Mamá hired when she was entertaining, held a silver tray and worked the crowd with brimming glasses of mojitos, a Cuban specialty. A mojito was a delicious but deadly combination of rum, lime juice, sugar, and crushed mint leaves. The consequences of drinking several were comparable to having injected pure alcohol into one’s bloodstream.

I said hello to my brothers and two of my uncles, Roman and Felix, who were seated opposite each other, hunched over a square table. They were so engrossed in their game of dominoes that they barely acknowledged my greeting. Dominoes is a passion for Caribbean men, and my family was no exception. Because the game was all-consuming and provided the men with an excuse not to socialize, Mamá had forbidden anyone to play during family dinner nights. This was one decree of hers that no one had ever paid much attention to.

Seeing as how I wasn’t going to get much interaction from my uncles or my brothers—who were concentrating on watching Roman and Felix, and offering heckling and advice in equal measure—I kept going. The next person I saw was my Tia Norma, the plastic surgery addict. She was talking in an excited tone of voice to my other aunt, Veronica, the liposuction queen. They both stopped to greet me, and I almost reeled from shock when I leaned over to kiss Tia Norma.

I thought Mamá was exaggerating when she told me about Tia Norma’s latest face-lift, but for once Mamá’s observations hadn’t been malicious gossip. My poor aunt’s face was stretched so tight that it was reflecting beams from the overhead lights, like a skin-colored mirror. I was almost tempted to get closer, just to check how my hair looked, but I was frightened by the fact that I might actually be able to. I turned away so I wouldn’t have to get a better view of my aunt’s latest foray into plastic-surgery hell.

Instead I turned my attention to Aunt Veronica who, according to Mamá, had just undergone yet another round of liposuction. I had no idea where the plastic surgeon had found any fat on her; my aunt was already so thin that her veins were visible through her skin. Surely all of her procedures were putting her surgeon’s children through private school. I was very fond of both my aunts, although I knew for a fact that they were both confused and basically unhappy women. It would probably take years of therapy to begin to straighten them out.

I moved on to my cousins. Bridgette, Moira, and Shannon were all dressed in total hootchie-mama outfits, and I could see that they were doing their best to establish a world record for mojito consumption in the shortest possible period of time. I caught a glance of Nino’s long-suffering expression, and could tell that he didn’t appreciate slaving in the kitchen squeezing all those limes just so these teenage girls could get buzzed. Their Irish-American mother, Maureen, would never have allowed them to dress or act that way, but Maureen wasn’t there.

“Margarita!” Bridgette, the oldest, said with transparent mojito cheerfulness. “Come sit with us! Have a drink.”

“In a little while,” I said. “I have to find Ariel.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Moira gushed. “They’re still in love even though they’re…they’re…”

“Old and married?” I laughed.

“No!” Moira said, mortified. She nearly spilled her drink on Mamá’s sofa cushions. “I meant—”

“I know, Moira,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder. “I’ll come back and have that drink with you, I promise.”

Papa and Tio Ricardo—and my good-for-nothing cousin Francisco—were standing together over by the French doors. There were several empty mojito glasses on the table beside them, and they were smoking cigars and telling jokes. From their loud laughs and exaggerated joviality, I could see they were competing with my young cousins for the mojito-drinking record. It felt as though the general volume level in the room had risen in the short time I’d been there, with the deep voices of the men competing with the women’s laughter. I put all the men’s glasses on a small empty tray on the table, knowing that Nino and Yolanda would probably receive a dressing down from Mamá for failing to clear away the empty glasses fast enough. I broke through the thick cloud of cigar smoke, kissed all three of the men briefly, and moved on. I could sense their relief when my unwelcome female presence was lifted, and they could return to their innuendos and stories.

Then I saw them: Mamá and Ariel, huddled together just inside the dining room, so engrossed in conversation that I was apprehensive about going over there. From their guilty looks when I approached, I could tell that they had been talking about me.

“Margarita!” Ariel came to me with such enthusiasm, anyone would have thought he hadn’t seen me in months. “How are you,
querida
?”

He kissed me and escorted me and Mamá to an open set of armchairs. I leaned down to kiss Mamá, who was impeccably turned out in her favorite Valentino. I could see that she’d spent the day at the hairdresser and stylist, and her coiffure framed her professionally made-up face. Mamá had gone all-out for this dinner—she had opened up the safe, and was wearing the set of diamond earrings, necklace, and bracelet that had belonged to my maternal grandmother and which had been smuggled out of Cuba.

“Margarita, dear, you look lovely,” Mamá said, taking me in. “I really like that suit. Armani. Last season, right?”

I smiled in agreement, but inwardly I was gripped by anxiety. I knew from experience that Mamá was never so gracious about my clothes and appearance unless she felt guilty about something she had done to me or said about me.

Ariel let his hand rest on the back of Mamá’s chair, as though they were the best of friends. I couldn’t help but remember the first time they met, when Ariel came to the house to pick me up for our first date. Mamá had totally disapproved of this penniless young liberal Cuban lawyer—from the wrong side of the tracks, no less. As time went on and our relationship got more serious, Mamá softened and got to know Ariel better. The Matos settlement, of course, had cemented my parents’ approval of Ariel, and from that day on Mamá became one of his most enthusiastic backers.

Mamá knew she always had an ally in Ariel as far as I was concerned—they may have been on opposing ends of the spectrum politically, but they thought alike in regard to me. Mamá could even tolerate the fact that Ariel had voted for Bill Clinton because he agreed with her that I had proved the point that I could succeed in the cutthroat Miami legal world. Having made partner in a major firm in my early thirties, they both felt it was now time to dedicate myself wholeheartedly to my family.