Kirstin Valdez Quade - Night at the Fiestas - Stories

When we’ve found all the things we need, we continue to push the cart down aisles under fluorescent lights. We are both a little dazed by the colors of this place, the bustle, both unwilling, it seems, to leave and be alone together. We push the cart, turning our heads left and right.

The woman at the checkout is stout and middle-aged and wears braces on her teeth. She asks what we think should happen to the horses. When we look at her blankly, she asks if we’re from here.

“Cuipas,” my grandfather says.

The horses, the cashier explains, are wild. They came down from the mountains because they were starving from the drought. They gather along the highway to eat chamisa and grass and the corn tossed to them by concerned citizens.

“I can’t believe you don’t know,” the cashier says. “It’s all over the TV. They say the horses are the same ones brought by the Spanish hundreds of years ago.”

The cashier scans each item as she talks. She moves too quickly. I’m afraid she will be done before she has told us everything about the horses.

“What will happen to them?” I ask.

“Who knows? People have to fight about it, like everything else. I saw on the news where some people are saying they’ll have to be slaughtered because there just isn’t enough grass, what with the drought.”

My grandfather fingers the bills in his hand, ready to count them out when she gives us the total.

“Some people say the state should feed them until the rains come, some say they should be driven to Colorado or Wyoming.” The cashier pauses, tongues her braces. “The one sure thing is no one’s going to leave them alone. People will interfere.”

When I look toward the doors, I know it’s for a reason. It takes a few moments for me to see her. My mother. She pushes a cart, the corner of a box of sugared cereal poking out of a bag. She is as young as I remember, her hair as straight and heavy. She squints up, her gaze brushing over my face.

When I turn to him, I know from the way he holds the bills in his trembling hands that my grandfather has seen her, too.

If it really were her, I would run across the crowded store, throw myself against her. If it were her, I would beat at her chest and belly with my fists. The cashier sighs and says that everything is expensive nowadays. I want so much for this woman to be my mother, and suddenly I fear it, too. If she returns, my grandfather will get better, but he will also remember everything she put him through. If she returns she might leave again, and then he might get worse. But it isn’t her, of course, and the woman passes through the automatic doors.

My grandfather is still looking toward the doors. His face is open and longing.

“Grandpa,” I say, to draw his attention. “I’m hungry. I want my lunch.”

Slowly he turns to me. He blinks, and then his face is shuttered.

IN THE CAR my grandfather asks where I want to eat.

“I want to go home. Let’s eat at home. We’ll have cheese and mustard sandwiches.”

He nods, and we drive in silence until he begins to speak.

“Your mother never forgave me for the way I treated your grandma,” he says, looking hard at the road.

“It wasn’t her,” I tell him. “It was just someone who looked like her.”

My grandfather sits upright, close to the steering wheel, his gaze fixed on the horizon. “Once I shook your grandma so hard the skin around her eyes bruised,” he says. “Your mother stood against the wall and watched.”

“Grandpa, that lady didn’t even look like her, not really.”

He says, “Your grandma’s head went back and forth.”

I won’t look at him. I won’t.

“It took a week for the black to fade, and during those days I stayed away from the house. One night I even slept at a job site. On the weekend I worked on the cars. I changed the fluids in every single one, checked the pressure on every tire, recorded the mileage. I couldn’t go into the house where they were.”

The ojo begins to flare. I want his story to stop. My skin burns.

“ It wasn’t her ,” I say.

He clears his throat. “I never touched your grandma again. I wouldn’t have, even if she hadn’t left. And I never touched your mother. But that didn’t matter, because your mother never forgave me.”

I can’t stand it, but he keeps going. I hear him even over the hot throbbing in my ears. I think of his voice earlier, that hard, hoarse severity, and think of Ofelia Alma Zamora, my grandmother, being shaken so hard the fragile skin around her eyes bruised. I’ve never heard this story, but now I understand that I knew it all along. I need him to stop.

“She blamed me for her mother leaving her, and maybe she was right.”

USUALLY AS WE LEAVE the rush and concrete of Albuquerque, the vast beige housing developments, my grandfather and I begin to relax and breathe. Today, though, his terrible story remains packed around us, as thick and suffocating as cotton. I feel it would take great effort for me to move.

As we wind up and over the Manzanos, I thank him for the trip, say I’ll be glad to get home. My voice is stiff. He pats my hand, and behind his glasses his eyes are rimmed red with age.

AND BECAUSE OF WHAT he has said, I remember the thing I nearly always succeed in forgetting, the thing my grandfather believes I can’t remember because I was four: the day I last saw my mother.

She had been gone for three weeks, left without telling us. One day she returned in a truck I’d never seen, driven by a man I’d never seen. She jumped from the passenger seat, and what I remember is being furious, but I ran to her because I couldn’t stop myself. When she opened her arms, I backed against the house and yelled at her to go away. She looked at me, lips parted in hurt surprise, and I thought she’d come to me, but instead she walked into the house.

The man in the truck — Anglo, cowboy hat tilted forward — looked straight ahead, tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel.

My grandfather sat silently at the kitchen table, while in the tiny back room she packed. I stood in the doorway, where by turning my head left or right I could see them both, my grandfather sitting still, one palm pressed against the table, and my mother working fast, shoving skirts and blouses into my grandfather’s canvas army duffel. Outside in the truck, the man waited.

My mother’s back was to me and she cried as she packed. I looked at her with hate that burned her edges, until she browned and curled like a photograph cast into the stove. I looked at her and sliced through her with cuts so fine she hardly knew they were there until pieces of her began to drop away. I looked at her and she began to dry up and shrink from my gaze, until she was as cold and brittle as a marigold in November.

I wish now I had cried and flung myself at her and gripped the hem of her shirt. If I had, she might have stayed. Instead, I trailed her stiffly. Out on the porch she kneeled to hug me, and I remained rigid with hate, and over her shoulder I could see the man watching us. My mother was crying and murmuring in my ear, love or promises, but I couldn’t listen. The man’s eye caught mine, and that’s when the ojo began to spread through me. My mother pulled away, jogged to the street, where she swung her bag into the back. She didn’t call to me when they drove away.

For a long time I watched the road that led to the Manzanos, and beyond, to Albuquerque. I watched until the sun dropped so low in the sky that it burned my eyes and I had to turn my head.

I don’t remember what I did when I lost sight of the truck, but I imagine I went inside to where my grandfather was sitting in the kitchen. I imagine when he heard my step he looked up and saw me.