Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz Read online

Ana knew it wouldn’t be her but Bianca’s father who would buy the new trash can. The last thing Ana wanted was to give her older brother, Marcos, a chance to lecture her on how Esteban moving out was a bad idea, on how a good man is hard to find (“especially the way you are”), and on how she could save herself a world of struggle by forgiving her husband and letting bygones be bygones already.

  “It’s fine, mi’ja. Just move your car. I’m late for work.”

  Ana pulled out of the driveway and drove her car alongside her niece’s so the driver-side windows were next to each other. Bianca pulled her sunglasses down over her eyes. She hated to see how tired and sad her tía looked at the beginning of the day.

  “Have a good day at school—and be careful!” Ana said.

  When Ana pulled away, Bianca zipped her Bug back and forth and charged into the driveway, honking the horn in time with the music she’d turned back on full blast. Carmen would have heard the whole thing except she was reading the ad for the quinceañera fair.

  Everything you need for the ultimate

  teen birthday party!

  The curly letters were as bright and bouncy as Bianca. Carmen tore the ad from the paper, stuffed it into her backpack, and ran out to meet her cousin.

  TWO

  What’s that?” Bianca asked, as she backed out of the driveway. Carmen looked at her jeans, checked the top button on her fitted white blouse, felt for the chandelier earrings she’d decided to wear, and ran her hand through her hair, pulling a long wisp of espresso-brown hair behind her ear. She’d just gotten what she called a “posh bob”—short in the back with a long wedge of bangs that swung to the front. The cut was qué cute with her round face, but she was still self-conscious about how it looked; she hadn’t got the hang of how to use the hot iron to get her wavy hair to behave like she wanted.

  “Do I have a moco or something?” Carmen asked, pulling down the visor to inspect herself in the mirror beneath. Two pink lights blinked on when the visor was opened.

  “No.” Bianca waved a white-tipped nail toward Carmen’s feet. “That.”

  “My backpack? What about it?”

  “It’s not made by me, for one thing. Pick one.” Bianca motioned toward the backseat, and when Carmen turned to look, she saw it was covered in layers of bags, round ones and square ones, some with big geometric patterns in sharp colors, others in Mexican oilcloth, bursting with tropical flowers set against bloodshot reds and neon blues. The only black to be found was in the trim around the seams and zippers.

  “Dang, Bianca! What’s all this?”

  “I made them, like I told you I was going to. Take one.”

  “For real? Dang, girl, don’t you ever sleep—oooh!” Carmen grabbed a bag patterned with pumpkin and raspberry checks, a large white calavera with a garland of bright roses around its forehead. Bianca smiled. This was the bag she’d made especial for Carmen.

  “You’re my model. Once everyone sees them, the orders will come in. So don’t leave it in your locker.”

  “This calavera looks painted.”

  “It’s silk-screened.”

  Bianca bit her bottom lip all nervous as Carmen carefully inspected the bag.

  “So?”

  “Dang, B. This is sweet!”

  Bianca was relieved. Carmen happily moved the stuff from her old backpack to her new bag, stopping when she pulled out the ad for the quinceañera fair.

  “You won’t believe what my mom asked me this morning. She wants me to go to this quinceañera fair.”

  “Shut. Up!”

  “Can you believe it?”

  “Where? When is it?”

  Carmen rolled her eyes. Of course Bianca would be excited about a quinceañera fair. She was sorry she brought it up.

  “Sunday,” Carmen said. “Hey, does this thing have a place for your cell?”

  “Pos, yeah. What time Sunday?”

  Carmen shrugged, putting all her attention on the little zippers and pockets on her bag. Bianca peeked over her sunglasses at Carmen.

  “You’re going, right?”

  “Oh, hell no!”

  (Ay, por fa’! You would think Bianca had told Carmen to shave off her eyebrows or something.)

  Bianca screeched to a stop.

  “You should go.”

  To be all dramatic, Carmen crumpled the ad in her fist.

  “You should totally go!” Bianca said. A car behind them honked, and Bianca surged forward as Carmen looked at the ad again.

  “She just wants us to go so she can act like everything is normal.”

  Bianca remembered the look on Ana’s face. She knew everything was far from normal in the Ruiz house. Her tía Ana’s house was where she’d gone to birthday parties and Easter egg hunts, where she had helped set up a family altar for Día de los Muertos and then dressed up as a princess for Halloween. It was the place she had gone to slumber parties as a little girl and woke to the warm, sweet aroma of her tía’s famous buñuelos the next morning. Ana had always warned Bianca and Carmen about making a mess, but the girls always managed to get cinnamon and sugar all over their faces and hands, and one time in their hair. But Ana always seemed to forget the next time around. Bianca remembered the long, matching pink T-shirts the two of them wore as nightgowns (Carmen wasn’t anti-pink back then), the two of them giggling like changuitos till they fell asleep. The next morning, they were the first ones up (after Ana), ready for the first, sweet crunch of a warm buñuelo. Bianca remembered how it flaked onto their plates, sugar sparkling on their cheeks as they licked their fingers and drank ice-cold glasses of milk. Bianca decided Ana was the closest thing she had to a real mother. She would never say that out loud because it would cause drama between Bianca and her father, between Bianca and Ana, and probably between Bianca and Carmen (even though Carmen was anti-Ana lately). Bianca didn’t like to think about the woman who used to be her mother. She pushed her sunglasses firmly over her eyes. She wanted to be excited about her new bolsas and how popular they would be. She wanted to think about having a quinceañera, even if it wasn’t her own.

  “Quinceañeras are nice, or they should be,” Bianca said, remembering her quinceañera that wasn’t, as Bianca said to Carmen and to Carmen only, “the year my mother lost it.”

  “Come on, Carma. It will be fun! We could dress up and have a party with cool music …”

  “You would have fun dressing up and having a party. I would have to bring the music since you don’t know what’s good unless I tell you,” Carmen teased.

  “Shut up—”

  On the stereo, Piñata Protest took off into their punk version of “La Cucaracha.” She turned it up to drown out Bianca, like that was going to stop her.

  “Come on, Carmen! I bet Mari and Amelia would be on your court. And what’s her name, Alicia was a quince last month. She’d be on your court. For the rest, you can get the Valley girls …” The Valley girls were a string of cousins from Laredo to Harlingen, and every South Texas town that had a Dairy Queen in between.

  “They’ll do it. They always want a reason to come up here.”

  “The Valley girls hate us!” Carmen reminded her cousin.

  “Only the twins from Laredo, and they hate you—you think that’s going to stop them from being damas?” The ideas were flooding in, and Bianca gasped.

  “Oh! You know what you should do? Get Sonia on the court—” Bianca screeched to another stop. “Ay! Diego! Was I supposed to give him a ride, too?”

  “No, he walked over to get a ride with Rafa so he could see Sonia.”

  “When’s he going to make a move or something? See? That’s why you should have a quinceañera. So you can get Dieguito with Sonia already.”

  Bianca pulled into the school parking lot, her pink Bug prowling like Pac-Man, up and down the rows. Bianca was leaning forward, concentrating on finding a parking space—or so Carmen thought, until Bianca blurted, “Tomás could be your escort!”

  “Tomás? You mean Louis?”

  “Louis
? Who’s Louis?”

  “Tomás, Louis—it doesn’t matter. I’m so over high school boys, B.”

  “What about your mom, then?”

  “She can’t be my escort.”

  “Very funny. I mean if your mom is bringing it up, she must want you to have a quinceañera.”

  “Bianca.” Carmen ejected the CD from the stereo, all serious-like. She wanted to make sure her cousin heard every word she had to say. “I don’t want a quinceañera. It’s not right with things the way they are.”

  “Well, just go to the fair with your mom, then. I think she would like it.”

  “I don’t care what she likes!” Carmen yelled, as Bianca pulled into a spot under a pecan tree. “Did she think about what me or Diego would like when she kicked my dad out? She wants to act like everything is normal, and it’s not.” Her eyes frosted with anger.

  “Your mom isn’t like that.”

  “You don’t know what my mom is like! When your mom …” Carmen could not finish. She didn’t know what to say—or if she should say anything—about Bianca’s mother. Things were already crazy-upside-down at home. She didn’t need to make it that way with Bianca. “You just don’t know.”

  “I know you have a mom who’s trying,” Bianca said flatly.

  The CD stuck out from the player like a bratty kid’s tongue and Carmen yanked it out.

  “Isn’t this mine?”

  Carmen felt bad yelling at Bianca, but lately it was getting harder and harder for Bianca to hear her, or for Carmen to be heard by her cousin. She couldn’t decide which. A heavy silence filled the car. Carmen opened her car door to let it out and to breathe in the clean October morning. Bianca began to gloss her lips and check her eye makeup while Carmen dug inside the glove compartment.

  “It’s not there.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s not in there,” Bianca said a little louder than she needed to. She wanted to be heard, too. “The case. You’re looking for the case, aren’t you? There isn’t one. I got it on my iPod now. Take it, if you want.” Carmen wrapped the naked CD in the quinceañera ad and stuffed it in her bag. She climbed out of the car and pulled her new bag over her head so it slung over her shoulder and across her chest. The cut and shape of it followed the line of her body, with the fullest part of it cupping her hip.

  “So?” Carmen asked.

  “It looks good,” Bianca was happy to say.

  “What about me?”

  “You always look good. How does it feel?”

  “’Stá bien. It feels good, B.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.”

  “Ándale!” Bianca said. “Go on. My first class isn’t for an hour.”

  Bianca watched Carmen walk into the crowd of kids. She had barely reached the front steps when she saw a couple of girls admiring her bag. Bianca sighed a small, sad sigh, not because she wasn’t happy but because she knew before “the year her mother lost it,” she would have been pleased, too.

  THREE

  Ana was making good time on the i-10, almost at the i-35, where she would take it straight into downtown San Antonio and right onto the university. An old Stevie Wonder tape played on her cassette deck (Ana was—how did her Diego say it?—todo “old school”). The bad feelings from the morning were fading and Ana was almost smiling, listening to Stevie sing “Isn’t She Lovely?” happy as a jingle bell. (How could she not feel better, listening to Stevie sing con cariño y felicidad?) Ana loved this song for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it reminded her of Carmen (sí, her Carmen). Ana taught her the song when she was muy chiquita. Back then, Carmen would sometimes burst out singing it, her arms thrown out así, twinkling like the brightest star in the sky. And to Ana and Esteban, she was. Esteban learned the song because he knew how much Ana liked it, and Ana loved hearing him sing it to put their girl to sleep.

  “Ella muy bella … Ella es won’erful …”

  His English wasn’t so good back then. But that was many, many years ago, before Esteban did what he did and Ana was forced to see her marriage in a new way; forced to see she was not the same woman she was when she married Esteban at eighteen and, the worst of all, was forced to be the mother of the angriest teenage girl to walk the state of Texas.

  Ana ran her hands to the top of the steering wheel and saw the mark her wedding ring left behind. She had taken it to a jeweler Esteban knew for repair the week before. It was a humble two-ring set—the very best Esteban could afford when they were young, handmade by a silversmith in Mexico, with one tiny diamond. Esteban always promised to buy her a better ring “en este lado,” pero Ana said no. This ring was the most precious thing she had, outside of her children. Years of wear had tarnished its shine, but it was only after she accidentally dropped it into the garbage disposal that she finally took it off. It was a mean coincidence that her wedding ring got mangled around the time she and Esteban split up. Or maybe it was an omen. Ana didn’t want to think that, even though the truth was right there, plain to see.

  When Ana’s cell phone rang she came back to the present. It was her new assistant, Cynthia, speaking in that high-pitched voice she used when she was nervous.

  “Mrs. Ruiz? The dean wants to know …”

  Before she could finish the sentence, Ana remembered that she was supposed to get to work early to prepare for the dean’s faculty meeting.

  “I got the meeting room set up, like you told me, but all the other stuff—I told the dean I would find out, but I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Cynthia said.

  “Is Mocte there?”

  “What’s a ‘Mocte’?”

  “Mocte is me!” Ana heard him say on the other end of the phone. Mocte was the work-study student who had worked for Ana the last two semesters.

  “He’ll help you find what you need,” she told Cynthia. “I’ll be there in ten.”

  She stepped on the gas and prayed that the traffic cops had already gone for their breakfast tacos.

  When Ana got to her building, her heart was pounding in her ears. Cynthia jumped up as Ana walked into the office, rattling off a list of things she did, the things she didn’t do, the things she thought she should do, and the things she wished she had done. Ana listened, patient like always, relieved that Cynthia had everything under control. She’d done everything the dean wanted and more. To be sure, Ana went to the meeting room, and when she entered, the dean said todo showy, “Ah, my fantastic executive associate, Ana Ruiz.”

  “Is everything set in here?”

  “Everything is great, Ana.”

  When she got back to her office, she plopped into a chair near the door. Cynthia brought her a glass of water.

  “Oh, thank you, Cynthia.” Ana drank the water and fished in her pocket for the aspirin she’d forgotten to take at home. “Thank you for everything. What else did I miss?”

  “Just a few messages. They’re on your desk. Beatriz Sánchez-Milligan from the president’s office just called to say she was walking Carlos Montalvo over.”

  Ana pressed the glass to her forehead. The thrumming of her heartbeat was now in her eye, making everything she saw tremble with each beat.

  “Who?”

  “The new artist in residence, miss,” Mocte said from the workroom, where he was sorting files.

  “Is that today?” Ana asked

  “Yes, miss. That’s why I’m working today, ’member?”

  Carlos Montalvo was a Mexican artist doing his first residency at a U.S. university at Texas State University in San Antonio. Ana’s dean was proud of this and wanted everything about his visit to be perfect. He had plans for this Montalvo.

  “Do you think it would be okay to show him my sketches, miss?” Mocte was standing in the door of the workroom, dressed in his best work shirt, which was buttoned at the neck. A “¡Vivan Los Zapatistas!” T-shirt peeked from the gap where his shirt splayed open from his neck. The shirt matched his taupe pants, both spotless and planchado bien sharp.

  “Wel
l, he just got here, and his class is supposed to be for upperclassmen,” Ana reminded him. Mocte nodded and silently returned to his work. When Ana rose to go to her office, she stopped at the workroom.

  “But I’ll see what I can do,” she whispered to Mocte.

  “Thanks, miss. You rawk.”

  Ana smiled, as she walked down the short hall to her office, wondering what her Carmen would think if she heard this young man talking to her with appreciation. Mocte was an art student. Before that, he’d been a crack baby, a ward of the state, a foster child, a huffer, a onetime street hustler, a born-again Christian, a Chicano activist, and a telemarketer. Somehow, he’d survived all of that—or maybe because of all that—to become, how she called him, a talented visual artist. He had lived on the Southside with his tía since he was seventeen. Ana could see Mocte was a good boy and a good artist. She didn’t want him to fall in the cracks again.

  Ana was reading her calendar when she heard Beatriz’s voice in the outer office.

  “Buenas, I’m Beatriz Sánchez-Milligan here with Mr. Montalvo for the dean.”

  Before Ana could return, she heard Mocte speaking longer than she’d ever heard him speak in the year she’d known him.

  “Oh, sir, it’s such an honor, sir. I know your work, sir. Since I was a boy …” And then, because he was nervous, excited, or both, Mocte began speaking in a language no one understood. Cynthia was silent, and when Ana reached the outer office she saw why. Carlos Montalvo was tall and lean and solid like a pillar of buffed mahogany. His skin was—how do you say?—ebullient (yes, ebullient) against the snowy, short-sleeved guayabera he wore with gunmetal black, straight-legged jeans, which were pulled over polished boots. His close-cropped black hair was flecked with gray, making his skull look like it was carved from a block of stone. To say it plain, the man was fine! As if to drive the obvious to home base, a corona appeared around him. Ana rubbed her eyes. She wondered if a migraine was coming on. When she opened her eyes again, she saw that the wreath of light around him was caused by the glare of the sun bouncing off a window facing her building, behind him. Well, that explained that—but not how this incredible angel of a man came to be.