Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by jacob packaged goods LLC

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/grandcentralpub

  First eBook Edition: August 2009

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a

  trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55082-6

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  GUÍA PARA GRUPOS DE LECTURA

  A PREVIEW OF SISTERS, STRANGERS, AND STARTING OVER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “Belinda Acosta’s DAMAS, DRAMAS, AND ANA RUIZ delivers all its title promises and more: It’s a book about damas of all ages, from teenage girls to the struggling mothers of those teenage girls; it’s packed with drama so you don’t want to stop reading; it’s a novel that deeply and honestly tells the story of Ana Ruiz, her own coming of age as a woman and as a mother. Belinda Acosta is up to all of the challenges of such a rich panorama of characters and events. She’s sassy, she’s smart, she makes it look easy! But it takes a lot of hard work and a pile of talent to write such an engaging, touching book. A wonderful quinceañera of a novel!”

  —Julia Alvarez, author of Once Upon a Quinceañera:

  Coming of Age in the USA and Return to Sender

  To my mother,

  Geneva Acosta,

  who deserves more credit

  than she’s ever received;

  and to my father,

  Eugene S. Acosta,

  who continues to wait

  for a miracle.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Mil gracias to my sistah scribes for keeping me upright when I felt most like crashing: Maribel Sosa, Pat Alderete, Liliana Valenzuela, and Amelia Montes. My deep appreciation to Rosalind Bell, who graciously lent me a few days of respite at Casa Azul in San Antonio, Texas, and to Sandra Cisneros and the staff of the Macondo Foundation who greeted me warmly, then left me the hell alone to work. A bit of kitty crack to Max and Marie for providing amusement.

  For sharing their San Antonio with me, un abrazo and mil gracias to: Elaine Ayala, JoAnn Carreon Reyes, George Ozuna, and every person throughout San Anto heard and overheard.

  My heartfelt thanks to Isabel Guerrero for inviting me to her daughter’s quinceañera mass. Thanks to Silvia Reveles, who sees and hears young people every day, and shared her observations. I thank my lucky stars Stuart Bernstein agreed to be my agent, and that Grand Central Publishing Editor Selina McLemore read the manuscript closely and offered her thorough, thoughtful notes. Props to Ellen Jacob for bringing everyone to the table. And finally, to my brother in all things writing related, Vicente Lozano, who struggles with words, understands what the work requires, and does it anyway.

  —Belinda Acosta

  October 3, 2008

  PROLOGUE

  Don’t let anyone tell you that being a woman is like—cómo se dice?—a piece of the cake. Mira, take a look around. All these niñitas dressed up like Barbie dolls outside of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, their toes scrunched into pointy high heels, hair pulled into tidy buns, bangs springing over their foreheads or hanging in gaunt strands alongside their girlish faces. The smell of hairspray and designer perfume, starched shirts and polished shoes mingle in the air. The matching boys are tucked into tuxedos looking like they want to be someplace else. They do! The Spurs game starts in thirty minutes. The limo driver, allá, is looking at his watch for the same reason. And then there’s pobrecita Ana Ruiz. That poor woman! All she wanted was to have a small quinceañera, a nice way to celebrate her niña Carmen con cariño. She wanted Carmen’s fifteenth birthday to be special and lovely. Instead, there she is, the one in the lilac dress, her wavy hair going flat and her feet screaming from running around in heels, taking care of one disaster after the next. Today, she looks older than her thirty-eight years, weary from months of worry. The few streaks of gray she has, she got this month alone! Still, everything about Ana is soft—her hands, her laugh, the color of her amber skin. She has a small patch of dark skin below her ear that some women get when they have babies. But because Ana is what you would call pretty, you don’t even notice. She’s a good-looking woman; thin, but with meat in all the right places, as the men might say. For the women who need to be the center of attention when they walk into a room, Ana is the last one they worry about. They think, She’s like a sugar cube—easy to melt with the heat they make with the sway of their nalgas or the heave of their chichis. But oh no! Ana is the one that surprises them. With those bésame mucho lips, the whispery hollows of her cheeks, the way her neck curves like poured water, and finally, that look from her smoky black eyes—that alone will make some men walk into walls while the women, who thought they were the main dish at the party, will cluck to themselves and think, Her? Quién es esa?

  You can tell right away that Ana Ruiz is respectable. She’s no spring kitten, but she’s way too young to cover it up in housedresses. But right now, Ana doesn’t care what she looks like. She’s wondering how this wonderful day turned to this. All she wanted was a little tradition, a nice way to mark this time in Carmen’s life and maybe get back to the way things were before Esteban left.

  Carmen is officially becoming a woman today, in a time when becoming a woman happens in a flurry like a million cascarones broken over your head. Just this week, she was figuring out the best way to brush her hair to make the tiara sit just so. Pero, no one knows where the tiara is now and Carmen doesn’t even care. Today means nothing and everything to Carmen who, right now, only really wants to know, When will this pinche day be over?

  Ana is standing near the door of the church. No one would be surprised if she snapped in two from all this drama! But no, like always, there she is: like a blade of grass in a hurricane. You can smash her down but she will never break. She’s the one they call a strong woman, though she never understood why. She would say she only did what she had to do and that if patience and hard work are what it takes to be a strong woman, then okay, call her what you want. But right now, she feels spent. She feels like she might lose it. Her son, Diego, didn’t come home last night, and Carmen has been barfing since midnight. The band that showed up is not the nice mariachi Ana thought was coming but three boys, one with tattoos on his arms and silver rings poked aquí y allá on his face and ears. And did I tell you about the cake? The cake is late. There was talk that there might not even b
e a cake, and well, you can’t have a quinceañera without a cake, can you? Well, the cake finally comes, right after Ana made some calls and that girl they call Bianca tore her dress (accidentally on purpose, if you ask me). One of the boys in the court showed up with a black eye. And just when it seemed like the ground should open up and swallow this whole mess, then, then there comes la señora with the cake. Four stories tall, all pink and sparkly. Bien pretty, but late. And because she’s late she shows up in shorts and chanclas. No “discúlpeme.” No “perdóname.” Instead, she laughs como la loca, saying she’s on Mexican time. “Mexican time”? Ay, por favor! La señora toda sin vergüenza in those chanclas and that thing stuck in her ear like she works in the secret service.

  One of the boys in the band goes to help la señora with the cake, and then so does the boy in the tuxedo with the black eye. They’re all talking, no one is listening, and everyone wants to be in charge. So of course you know what’s going to happen, right? La señora with the chanclas and the boy with the black eye he can hardly see out of, they look like they’re going to crash. I see the whole thing before everyone else. I see the whole picture. I can tell you why Ana is wrung out. I can tell you why Carmen is sick. I can tell you why Ana and Carmen have been fighting. I can tell you where Diego is. I can tell you why the cake is late and why that boy has a black eye. And I can tell you if, and when, that cake is going to fall.

  Pero, let me go back to the beginning. The very beginning, because híjole! I love a good quinceañera story. And I got to tell you this one.

  ONE

  Ana was finishing her coffee when she saw the full-page ad in the morning paper:

  Everything you need for the ultimate

  teen birthday party!

  “Take a look at this, mi’ja.” Ana slid the paper toward Carmen, who was stuffing her backpack for school. Carmen glanced at the paper, then up at her mother, then back to her backpack. It didn’t matter if Ana asked Carmen for the time or if she wanted a new car; the look was always the same: a sour mix of annoyance with y qué? It was a look Ana had come to expect but would not ever get used to. It was a look Carmen had since her beloved ’apá moved out of their house a month earlier. They called it a separation, something temporary to work things out. Carmen didn’t care what they called it. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all, and it was all on Ana where she put the blame. To say Carmen was angry was to put it softly. That girl was as furious as a blister, as mean as a sunburn, as popping mad as water sprinkled on hot oil. Carmen Ruiz was as angry as a fourteen-year-old daddy’s girl can be without her hair catching fire. And even though the girl with the sweet round face and her mother’s eyes could be so, so—órale, let’s just say it, cabrona!—Ana wanted her daughter back. She wanted things to go back to the way things were between them, and she had a plan.

  “Let’s go to this,” Ana said.

  “Why?”

  “To check it out. I’ve been thinking—it would be nice to have a quinceañera for you.”

  “Why would you think that?” Carmen snapped. But Ana goes on like she didn’t hear the sting in her daughter’s voice.

  “It’s a nice tradition. I’ve been hearing a lot of girls are having them these days.”

  “Did you have one?” Carmen asked.

  “Well, no,” Ana said, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t have one.”

  Carmen was wishing her mother would have said, “Yes,” so she could have said, Well, then what makes you think I’d be interested in that old-fashioned thing? or what she was really dying to say, What makes you think I want to be like you?

  “It says the expo is this Sunday,” Ana said. “Maybe we could have a nice breakfast somewhere and then go. You know, just you and me.” Carmen kept digging in her backpack. She wasn’t looking for anything; she just didn’t want her mother to have all her attention.

  It’s been a month already, Ana thought. Longer if you counted all the hushed talk behind their bedroom door, and the long nights when pobrecita Ana would cry into her pillow after Esteban left in the middle of the night. Maybe it wasn’t the best way, but they waited till the latest possible time to announce the separation to their kids. So, when Carmen and Diego finally learned what had happened, they felt as if the house they grew up in had fallen on top of them. With Esteban gone, Ana was left to poke through the remains and put things right again. Diego, the oldest, was sad and brave. He did his best to help around the house and look after his mother and sister, but Carmen—ay, Carmen!—that one wasn’t making it easy. She was so sure that the reason her father left was all her mother’s fault. Carmen clung to her anger and held it so tight it left a mark on everything she said or did.

  Ana noticed the time and gulped down the last of her coffee. She pulled on her navy linen blazer and inspected herself in the mirror as she tied a rose-colored scarf around her neck, which looked good against her amber skin. It was going to be a busy day at work, and she liked this outfit because it was comfortable but professional, and if she were to take the time to notice, Ana would have to agree that she looked bien pretty, too.

  “Dieguito! Vámonos, mi’jo!” she called.

  “He’s gone,” Carmen said. Ana felt panicked.

  “What do you mean, ‘he’s gone’?”

  “He’s gone. You know, to school? That place you send us to during the day?”

  “I didn’t hear him leave.”

  “Yeah, well, se fue,” Carmen said. “Bianca is coming for me, so you can go.” (Hear how she talks to her mother? Híjole!)

  Ana hated it when Diego wasn’t around. Her son had a way of sweetening Carmen’s bitterness. It wasn’t what he said or did; it was something about his quiet way. He wasn’t angry like Carmen. Ana was thankful for that, only she wasn’t sure what he was feeling these days. Because of this, Ana said he took after his father, but really Diego took after Ana—serene on the outside but twisted with worry on the inside. Oh, Diego was suffering like Carmen, all right; he just didn’t make a show of it. Diego was the cool water to calm the pot that was always on the edge of boiling over when Carmen and Ana were together. Mornings in the Ruiz house used to be so nice. They were always hectic, the way they are when everyone is scrambling to get out the door to school and work. But Ana loved it. It used to be a calming start to her day, being with her babies—her corazones—before sending them out into the world. Ay, Ana would take a bullet for those kids, even that ungrateful girl who decided that Ana was to blame for everything gone wrong in her world.

  “Okay, mi’ja.” Ana stood up and gave Carmen un abrazo, but Carmen did not hug her back. Ana swallowed the lump in her throat and tried to ignore the stab in her heart. She wanted to take her daughter by the shoulders and wail, “Do you think this is fun for me!” But no. Instead, she calmly pulled the car keys from her purse and left for work. By the time she reached her car, the tears had swollen in her eyes and had spilled down her cheeks. When she got into her car she looked into her rearview mirror and patted dry her mascara with a smashed tissue from the bottom of her purse.

  To call Bianca de la Torre Ana’s niece was not enough. That girl was a cotton-candy tornado. Just as Ana was pulling out of her driveway, Bianca screeched up in her bubblegum-pink VW Bug (the girl was all about the pink). Although she was what most would call a girly-girl, Bianca could handle a car like los NASCAR drivers. She barely missed the bumper of Ana’s car, a clunker they called La ’Onda, because the silver H in the grill had been knocked out, so it smiled at the other cars like a jack-the-lantern. Bianca brought her Bug to rest partly on the curb, the street, on the drive, and over the trash can left on the curb from the night before. Ana angrily pushed open her car door and pounded down the driveway toward her niece. Bianca was sixteen, two years older than Carmen. She was lean and curvy like most of the girls in the family, but unlike the rest of them, she was blond with sea-green eyes, something that used to bother her when she was a little girl. As a teenager, she came to accept her “güera” label. So, whe
n some tonto said, “Hey, how come you don’t look Mexican?” Bianca replied, “We come in all flavors, menso!” turning on her heel to leave the baboso, her ponytail snapping like a whip.

  Bianca smiled as she popped up through her car’s sunroof, her honey-blond locks pulled tightly from her long face into a high ponytail. Ana groaned when she saw her trash can wedged under Bianca’s Bug.

  “Hola, Tía!” Bianca called out over the blare of her car stereo. She pushed her white-framed sunglasses to the top of her head. Ana thought Bianca’s eyeliner was a little too thick, ending in dramatic wisps at the edges.

  “Bianca!”

  “Mande?”

  “Look at my trash can!”

  “Cómo?”

  “Bianca! Turn down the da—”

  As soon as Ana got to the part that would make the neighbors gasp, Bianca had turned off the music and popped up through the sunroof again.

  “Ay, Tía!” Bianca said playfully, shaking her head side to side, her chongo bobbing like a spring. Ana went to pull her trash can out from under Bianca’s bumper.

  “It’s okay, Tía. I’m sure it didn’t hurt my car.” Ana threw Bianca a look that could have frozen the sun. “Can’t you just buy another one?”

  Bianca wasn’t trying to be smart. She honestly thought that that was the way to solve this and any other problem.

  “That’s not the point, Bianca!”

  After two hard tugs, Ana freed the trash can. She thought about hauling it back to the house, but now she was really late for work. She pushed the trash can to the curb where it fell with a thud and turned back to her niece.

  When Bianca saw Ana’s eyes, she knew her aunt was not in the mood for tonterías.

  “I’m sorry, Tía. If there’s something wrong with the trash can, I’ll buy you a new one, okay?”