Sara B. Fraser

The Visitor

It is two o’clock and Merche knows that her husband and son are at home, waiting for lunch.

She puts the remaining fish—two slippery eels; three flounder; and half a salmon, its flesh plump like a toddler’s—into the refrigerator. As she shuts the door and unties her apron, a woman approaches and asks if she has any sardines. She’d put them aside for the stray cats because they were two days old already, but she says yes, there are seven left.

The woman speaks with a languid South American accent, dropping S’s from the ends of words as if they were too much to ask of her. She wears a coat made of canvas and several silver rings with colored stones. Merche puts the sardines onto a hanging scale. Almost a kilo. She pushes the scale with her finger as she turns the dial to face her and gets them to weigh just over. She tells the woman the price as though she were giving a discount.

“Four euros is fine,” she says. “Está bien.”

As she starts to remove the fish from the scale, the woman says, “Could you clean them?”

Merche blows a stream of air through tense lips but tries to keep her annoyance at bay. Jose and Xan are waiting for her. They’re hungry, she knows, and so is she.

As she moves the sardines onto the thick white cutting board, she imagines what she’ll do in order to make lunch as efficiently as possible. No potatoes today; they’ll have rice. It cooks faster. Jose will say, “Rice again?” but he’ll shovel it in. She has already covered slabs of hake in a garlic and parsley adobo, and they are marinating in a plastic bag. When she gets a minute, right before leaving, she’ll call home and ask one of them to turn on the oven. If it is hot already, everything will go smoothly and she’ll have the comida on the table before two forty-five.

She sticks her finger into the soft belly of each sardine, sweeps out the organs, makes a macabre pile on the side of the cutting board: stringy guts the color of blackberries and translucent scales like bits of mica.

Her finger has just breached the belly of the last sardine when the woman says, “How are your mother and grandmother?”

At first she thinks the woman must be talking to someone else. But there is no one here. She finishes rinsing the fish and slides them onto a Styrofoam tray before turning.

“You know them? My mother and grandmother?” Merche looks dubious. When the woman passes her hand over her hair, Merche can see that she wears rings on every one of her fingers, including her forefinger and thumb, and that a faded tattoo, the color of dried peppermint, snakes around her wrist and into the sleeve of her jacket.

Merche feels unsteady and looks down at her tall boots. They are splattered with fish confetti. Her grandmother used to wear traditional Galician wooden clogs that lifted her out of the quagmire of the fish stall, but her grandmother also wore dresses. Merche likes to keep the bottoms of her pants clean.

Finally, the woman says, in Gallego, “I grew up here. With your mother. We were friends.”

Merche shakes her head as if to dispel a dream. “I thought you were from the Americas,” she says.

“I’ve been gone a long time.” Her eyes draw an arc around the plaza de abastos; her thin smile tells Merche that she is reminiscing; the place probably seems smaller than it used to. “How are they? Your mother? And your grandmother. Is she well?”

Merche’s phone jangles from her purse, which is hanging on a hook. She tries to look apologetic but feels some relief. “Grandmother is in the old age home on the carretera,” she says. “She can’t walk on her own anymore, but she’s doing well. She likes the food.” She moves toward the phone but reaches it too late.

“My name is Laura,” the woman says, shaking four euros from her change purse. “She’ll remember me. Her memory is good?” Merche nods and slides the sardines into a plastic bag, hands them across, unties her apron. “And Estela? Your mother?”

Merche doesn’t think about her mother very often. She only comes to visit once a year, and Merche hasn’t been to Madrid since she finished high school. Her childhood there has faded to a cluttered memory of anxiety, smog, and cardboard boxes.

Merche would come home from school, and there would be the stacks of boxes, a small city in the kitchen. “I found an apartment in a better neighborhood,” her mother would say. Or, “They’re going to renovate.” Or, “The landlord is a son of a bitch, honey.”

As a single mother, Estela was an object of scrutiny. What was she doing alone? Where was the girl’s father? It didn’t seem to bother her. She’d get her hair cut short and dyed platinum; she’d smoke cigarettes defiantly as she waited for Merche at the elementary school gate, always separate from the other mothers. But Merche hated it and wished for a mother who would stay home making lunch in a mandilón. A mother who didn’t spend her free time making art projects out of rusty nuts and bolts that she found in a vacant lot and then throw her hands up when she’d forgotten to make dinner, open a can of tuna, and hand it to Merche with a fork.

“Fine,” she says. “Still in Madrid.” Merche slides off her boots and slips her feet into zapatillas.

“She was my friend,” Laura says. “I’m sorry, you have to go.”

Merche looks at the small plastic clock on the wall. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

Laura has the bag of sardines looped over her wrist, and her arms are crossed; she is looking at Merche with an expression that reminds Merche of her mother: a combination of pity, amusement, and disdain. Or is she imagining it? Perhaps it’s just curiosity.

“Where in the Americas did you migrate to?” Merche turns off the light and the two women start toward the exit, an enormous wrought iron door with plastic panels to keep out the wind.

“Argentina,” Laura says. “But I’ve been in New York for the last ten years.” She puts her hand on Merche’s forearm, and they stop on the sidewalk. “I’m so glad to see you. Me alegro mucho. I remember your grandmother with the fish. And you a little girl.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t…” Merche trails off.

“Of course you don’t remember me. I was in Madrid too, though, you know. With you and Estela, for a bit. We left Galicia together. You didn’t know that, did you?”

Merche isn’t sure if Laura’s eyes were glassy before—the plaza de abastos is dimly lit—or if there are tears in them. She realizes that Laura hadn’t been looking at her with pity, as her mother sometimes does. It was something else, something kinder: Loss. Envy. Regret.

“You were just a baby. Your mother and your father. Well, you know about that.”

Merche didn’t know much about it, actually, not because no one would tell her, but because she didn’t want to know. Her mother had tried to talk to her, to explain things, but Merche had always walked away, left the room, satisfied with the life she knew awaited her in Galicia, with her grandmother. She nods, not wanting to give fuel to Laura’s talking. She is irritated at this woman for interrupting her life, making her clean sardines, and now telling her all of this, and at lunchtime. She must have been gone a long time to have forgotten the sacred quiet of the siesta. Merche has been at work since eight in the fish market and will have to do all of the housework in the afternoon, as well as visit with her grandmother in the home.

Laura goes on, “Your mother and I couldn’t stay here. It would have been impossible. But your mother.” She laughs. “She was such a free spirit.”

Merche’s grandmother had instilled ironclad rules about being polite, honest, and generous, but she can feel her face harden, her spirit shrink with the hunger that, if she feels, Jose and Xan must also be feeling. Jose will have washed up after plucking leaves all day in the vineyard, ready to eat. Impossible to fully clean his hands, the nails short and tipped permanently with brown dirt from labor. And Xan, probably on the couch with that sinister Nintendo thing held two inches from his face.

“You were such a sweetie. Your mom and you had a real bond when you were a baby. To tell you the truth, it made me jealous. I never had kids. We had a falling out, Estela and I. Madrid was far enough for her, but not for me; I had to go halfway around the world.” She pauses, looks up at the sky. It is stark and blue. “Sometimes I wish I’d stayed. You would’ve been like a daughter to me. But, well, you know, some people, it seems, they have to keep moving.” Laura indicates a small rua that winds into the old town center. “I’m down here,” she says. “My family’s place. My brother uses it on weekends, but he’s in Vigo during the week. I’m there now, too, in Vigo. It’s changed a lot. I like it.”

Merche leans down to give Laura two kisses when they part.

When she gets home, Merche sees that the marinating hake has leaked into her shoulder bag. She hadn’t gotten a chance to call home and ask someone to light the oven, so she does that now, then gets a sponge and soap to scrub the fish juice out of her bag. Jose emerges from the bedroom, his hair damp and combed.

“What in the devil were you doing?” He takes a beer from the refrigerator but doesn’t sit down.

“I got caught up, a friend of my mother’s.”

“Xan needs to eat,” he says. “If I’m going to have to learn to cook, you should let me know.” She pulls a flat tray from the oven, arranges the fish on it. Pours rice into a pot. Jose leaves the small kitchen and sits beside their son on the couch. Merche can see the backs of their two heads: the same black hair, Xan’s thick and oily and Jose’s thinning on top. The skin of his scalp is tanned the color of the earth. The television is on: highlights from last night’s soccer game.

Before she went into the old-age home, Merche’s grandmother used to make lunch on Sundays.  The apartment would be full of the smell of boiling potatoes, sizzling meat, stewed cabbage. Merche misses it. Being the one cared for, returning to that place where children live, if they’re lucky, in the midst of a guardian’s hive, protected and fed. It was what had been missing in Madrid, with her mother, and it was what had brought her back to Galicia. But now she is the one doing all the feeding and protecting. It’s the way of the world, but still, she misses it.

When the rice is simmering and the fish is in the oven, Merche sits heavily on one of the anemic kitchen chairs.

Jose calls to her, “I can smell your fishy clothes. Get changed.”

Merche goes into the bedroom, pulls a clean pair of pants from the drawer, hangs the others on a hook in the enclosed balcony. She turns down the rice and goes to sit next to Jose.

“What? What is it?”

“I met a friend of my mother’s today,” she says.

“Yes. You said.”

“She seems sad.”

“Why?”

“I think they were, you know, together.”

Jose pretends a coughing fit and indicates Xan, who has let his Nintendo drop onto his lap, his attention won over by the Choco Puff commercial on TV.

“Let’s not talk about that kind of thing,” Jose says quietly.

But Merche is gripped by a desire to gossip. “You want to come in the kitchen?” she says. Maybe the fact that she wants to talk about it—rather than avoid it—means she has finally distanced herself sufficiently.

“Is the lunch ready?”

“Not yet. But we can talk in there.”

“Aw, no, Merche. I’m exhausted. I need to rest.”

“So am I.” Her voice is quietly exasperated.

“Fine.” He stands and follows her into the kitchen. They sit at the table, and Jose says, “Your mother has a sickness. It was good you got out of there.” He says it with finality, not as opinion, and focuses the beer can on his waiting lips.

Merche is grateful that he followed her into the kitchen. She is grateful that he didn’t completely forsake her for the highlights of the game he already watched last night. But she doesn’t want the judgment she’s heard him make so many times before. She wants him to sit with her, and to listen.

And if she were completely honest, to goddamn make some food every once in a while. But she doesn’t say any of that.

“She dresses so young. Her face looks older than mamá’s, but she dresses younger.”

“They’re both sick,” Jose says. He drinks the last of his beer and tosses the can into the sink.

On Estela’s once-or-twice-a-year visits, she sleeps on the mattress that pulls out from under the bed in Xan’s room. In the mornings, she sits in a chair in the corner of the fish stall, helps Merche cook, shows her recipes she learned in Madrid. In the afternoons, she is duty-bound to sit with her mother in the old age home. She always insists on walking there, unless it is raining, rather than go with Merche in the car, and she leaves half an hour before Merche so she can walk home again.

The last time she came, she stayed for three days. For the little time she was there, she was pleasant and seemed to get along with Merche’s grandmother, but Merche did most of the talking, her mother and grandmother smiling and nodding. Merche left the two of them alone once, and when she returned, her mother was outside the door, waiting for her.

“What are you doing?” Merche said. “Is she okay?” She peered past Estela’s shoulder to look into the room.

“Fine,” Estela said, shaking a cigarette from a pack. “The same as ever.” She paused. “I’m going to smoke. Be back soon.”

In the room, her grandmother was picking lint nubs from the sleeve of her black sweater.

“Hola, abuela. Todo bien?” Her grandmother looked up and nodded. Some emotion that Merche couldn’t decipher flickered across her face.

Merche leaned on the windowsill. “Mamá is smoking.” Her grandmother nodded and went back to her sweater.

Merche never asked either of them why they were like this. She more or less already knew, and she knew too that she wasn’t going to be able to change things. She knew she was disappointing to her mother and that her mother was likewise a disappointment to her grandmother—though for very different reasons—and that when her mother came to visit it, was a chore; she’d much prefer to stay in Madrid, where nobody would judge her.

*

Merche opens the oven and prods the hake with a fork, then drains the rice. She can hear Jose peeing loudly in the bathroom. She calls Xan, and they sit at the table. Merche gets plates, knives, and forks, douses a platter of lettuce with olive oil and vinegar. When she finally sits down, Jose and Xan are already eating.

After lunch, Merche takes their tiny Seat to visit her grandmother. There are several ancient people bent into wheelchairs on the front lawn as she approaches. The afternoon sun is behind the building so they are in the shade, and a nurse sits nearby, reading a magazine.

She looks up as Merche passes and says, “Muy buenas.”

Inside the building, everything is painted yellow. Merche understands that it is an attempt to make the place cheery, but it feels like they’re in the middle of a giant egg tortilla. Her grandmother is sitting in an armchair. Merche kisses her cheek and crouches down to look at her face. “Muy buenas, Abuelita,” she says. Her grandmother’s hair is wispy; her eyes are rheumy. She has somewhere between seven and twelve teeth sticking out of her pink gums. She has worn no other color than black since Merche’s grandfather died thirty years ago. Her hands are still strong as they grip Merche and pull her close. Merche finds herself wanting to put her head into her grandmother’s lap, to sit on the floor and stay that way all afternoon. But she is a grown-up now. She moves back and sits on the bed. Being a grown-up means feeling alone a lot of the time. Even when you’re with people.

“I met a woman named Laura today, at the fish stall,” she says, looking at the floor. “A friend of my mother’s.”

When Merche looks up, her grandmother’s eyes are closed. When she opens them, she shakes her head a little to say she doesn’t remember. Merche goes on, “The woman bought sardines, but I don’t know who she was going to be eating them with. Maybe she’ll be having some for breakfast.” Her grandmother shakes her head again.

Merche says, “We had hake and rice today.”

“The food here is good,” her grandmother says.

Merche recounts the details of her day. Her grandmother interjects with things like, “Well, sardines are good for breakfast, though more so in the wintertime,” and, “Those games the kids are playing, they must be ruining their eyes.”

Then it is time for Merche to leave. Jose will need the Seat to get back to work. She kisses her grandmother’s cheek, lingers, crouching.

“Thank you for coming,” her grandmother says.

“Nonsense,” Merche says. “I always come.”

*

The next day, Laura shows up again. It is warmer, and she wears green cargo shorts and a white T-shirt with a smear of gold paint in the shape of a heart.

“How were the sardines?” Merche asks.

“Not the freshest, but they were fine.” She winks to show Merche that she isn’t mad.

“You never asked,” Merche reminds her. 

“No. I never did. I guess you can’t expect a person to tell you something if you don’t ask.”

“Yes,” Merche agrees. “If you ask, you need to be prepared for the answer.”

There is silence as Laura looks over the fish laid out on blood-streaked ice.    

“Eres feliz?” she says.

Merche, who hadn’t been expecting such a question, blanches. She’d been enjoying their banter and is annoyed to be exposed like this. Like Laura has blown air on an ember inside her that she’d prefer to let die.

“Of course,” she manages.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to….” Laura looks remorseful. “Listen, just give me one of those flounder there. I’ll fry it in the pan; you don’t need to do anything with it. I’ll clean it at home.”

Merche feels her strength returning and says, “Bueno, Laura, are you happy?”

They both laugh when Laura replies. “More than that flounder.”

“Stop by,” Merche says. “When you’re in town. Podemos tomar algo.”

Estela comes to visit a couple of months later, after the grapes have been harvested. Merche meets her at the bus station. Her mother seems to have only started to age in the last couple of years. Now Merche notices the hammock of skin that hangs from her jaw bones, the wrinkle like a pock mark to the left of her mouth, enhancing her frown. Merche wonders as they walk, the sun’s slanted rays lighting up the soft loose skin of her neck, whether her mother is lonely and is surprised at herself that she’s never wondered that before. She’d always assumed that her mother was content living alone, with her strange friends and her various jobs that brought more strange friends into her life.

Estela is talking but Merche isn’t listening. When she turns to her daughter, waiting for a response, Merche isn’t sure what she’s said.

“Lo siento.”

“What’s wrong with you, daughter?” Merche is thrown off because she’d been wondering the same thing about Estela. Now she wonders if her mother only seems strange to her because Merche is the one who is sad-seeming, maybe even old-seeming.

“I met your friend Laura,” she says. 

Estela pulls a pack of cigarettes from her purse.

“What was she doing here?”

“She’s from here. She was visiting. It’s a normal thing to do.”

“Of course, it’s normal,” Estela snaps. “I do it too. I visit. Even though it’s terrible. It’s a terrible place to come visit.”

“It’s my home,” Merche shoots back. “It used to be yours.”

“Well, you know very well why it can’t be my home.”

Merche agrees, meekly, that, yes, she does know why. Even though she doesn’t really. But she won’t ask. Her mother assumes she knows things that she’s not sure she does know. It’s a lie by omission, and it’s too late to ask for clarification.

She imagines stopping, turning, putting her hand on her mother’s arm, looking her straight in the face and saying, Is it because you’re a lesbian? Or is there something else? Is it because abuela doesn’t accept that? We’re not that backwards here. You could still live here.

But she can’t, and she doesn’t.

*

The elevator is oxidizing metal and mirrors and dim yellow light, and it shudders with the weight of the two women as they ascend. The hallway smells like pork and/or cinnamon; it’s hard to tell if it’s lunch or dessert until they pass by the door of Merche’s neighbor and the smell becomes more distinct. There is cabbage and chorizo involved, probably a caldo.

“Did she tell you anything?” Estela asks, as though fifteen minutes hadn’t just passed since they left off this conversation. Merche knows what she’s talking about and feels at peace with her mother, and close, as though there is some telepathy going on.

“No. But that she’d been with us when we went to Madrid. I didn’t know that.”

Estela nods. Merche has her key out but hasn’t put it into the lock, because she knows once they enter the apartment, with Xan and Jose there, they won’t be able to talk about Laura anymore. And Merche wants to tell her mother how much she liked Laura. She wants to say that Laura lives close now, and that they’ll go for coffee soon, maybe. The next time she’s in town.

“So, she’s back.” Estela nods as if answering her own question.

“In Vigo.”

“Has Xan started talking again?”

Merche laughs as she turns the key. “No. Not yet!”

“Kids at that age. They should all be sent away somewhere, stripped of all electronic devices, and given nothing but a book of matches and a sleeping bag.”

Merche appreciates that her mother says this about “kids at that age,” and not specifically Xan, but still, she feels the barb, and it makes her defensive. She is ready to snap back with a reminder that she’d escaped her mother’s parenting at fifteen, and not a minute too soon.

Already Merche feels exhausted, like every word that passes between them is weighted with something else, some parry or jab or blame or plea; she is on high alert, trying to keep up with it all.

Xan is, of course, on the couch with his Nintendo. He stands up when he hears them come in and gives his grandmother two kisses. He is lanky, and Merche sees him through her mother’s eyes. He has grown so much over the last year. It hurts Merche to think of his body, the way it used to be (chubby, smooth, pliable), and what the riot of muscles and bones must be going through as he stretches and solidifies, the hormones doing their part to grease him up and darken him. His eyes hooded under dark brows. Plots of acne worming this way and that under the skin, erupting at the worst times.

Estela seems to light up though, as she takes him in. The two of them sit on the couch while Merche rolls her mother’s suitcase into Xan’s bedroom; the extra mattress that Estela will sleep on is made up, and it takes up almost all of the floor space. She brings three cans of coke and rejoins her mother and son in the living room.

Soon Jose emerges, a beer in his hand and his hair wet from the shower. With the two men, conversation has become easier, if shallower.

Women. Merche decides that she is happy to have had a boy, even though he doesn’t give her very much in the way of conversation. At least there will be none of this: something that feels like competition, for what, she’s not sure. Something like victimhood.

Meantime, Estela has become a much bigger fútbol fan, a concession to normalcy she would’ve shunned when Merche was a kid. They are talking excitedly about El Clásico, which will be on while Estela is visiting. They are Barça fans, all three of them. Merche supposes that she is too, though she forgets to care who wins or loses and is usually cooking, cleaning, or doing laundry when the games are on. She always comes when she hears Xan and Jose yell out—a score, a penalty, whatever it is, she comes for the re-play, a dish rag over her shoulder, long pink plastic gloves on her hands.

*

When they go to visit Merche’s abuela in the home, Estela says that she’ll ride with Merche in the car. Merche is surprised but doesn’t show it. She dusts off the passenger seat with her hand before her mother sits. The roots of Estela’s hair are almost all grey where the dye is growing out, and she is dressed in a beige polyester top and leggings. Merche recognizes the clothing from the Chinese bazaars that have sprung up around Galicia like mushrooms after the rain. They all carry more or less the same cheaply-made styles.

Estela keeps her head down as they cross the front yard. Merche recognizes several of the ancianos sitting on chairs in the shade of the building and basks for a moment in the fruits of having devoted her life to this one place, to her grandmother, to her family, and feels a mixture of pity and disdain for her mother—who should know these people as well but doesn’t. She recognizes this mixture of emotions: it is the same as what she has always thought she’d felt from her mother. Competition: Who is living true? Is living true when you take the burden of responsibility? Or is it when you follow your own star, leaving loved ones behind if necessary?

Merche feels one-up today, and rooted. “Muy buenas,” she says to a woman named Amadora. “Your daughter gave me the best membrillo. You must have taught her to make it?” “Well Tomás, you didn’t miss much this year. The harvest was over in a heartbeat. The grapes were small and the wild pigs ate their share as usual.” Amadora and Tomás are laughing and nodding, happy for the bit of chat.

Merche leads the way down the hall to her grandmother’s room.

“Hola abuela. Vino mamá.” Estela approaches slowly, as if she were afraid of startling her mother. Merche watches her grandmother reach her hands toward her only daughter. Estela takes hold of them and kisses her mother’s cheek. Then she sits in a chair and puts her purse on the floor.

“How are you, mamá?” she says. “You look good. You look healthy.”

Merche’s mother nods and smiles, and Merche sees affection in her eyes. Sadness. Estela turns to Merche: “Daughter, would you get us something to drink?” Merche goes down the hall to the kitchen. In the refrigerator, there are bottles of gaseosa and a couple of open boxes of milk. She gets three glasses and fills them with water from the tap. As she nudges the door open with her shoulder, her mother is moving away from her grandmother, whose eyes are closed, and for a split second it looks to Merche like her mother has just murdered her grandmother. She puts the three glasses on the small table. Her grandmother’s hand shakes as she opens her eyes and reaches for one of the glasses. Estela sits back and takes a long sip of water.

When it is time to go home, Estela says she will walk. Merche watches her in the rearview mirror as she drives away. Her beige top looks sad and washed-out against a backdrop of vineyards whose leaves have turned blood-red, stripped of grapes, waiting to die.

*

It isn’t until they are in the fish stall the next morning, Estela reading El País, her legs crossed, the top one swinging up and down in time to some invisible music, that she tells Merche her news.

Merche has finished gutting an eel and cutting it into steaks. She sits on the other fold-out chair, her apron stretched tight across her knees. She wipes the hair from her eyes with her wrist. Her wrist stays there, at her hairline, when Estela says to her, “Merche, I have to tell you something.”

Merche’s brain doesn’t process what her mother is telling her, but she understands the meaning because her body is reacting in strange and uncomfortable ways. Like millions of winged insects under her skin.

“Could the doctors be wrong?” she finally manages to say.

“They’re not wrong. I can feel it. I’ve felt it for a long while.”

Merche’s eyes form tears. Before they fall, her mother stands up, saying, “I need to go for a walk.”

Estela stays away for over an hour. Merche’s eyes have dried. Juana, in the fruit stall, is picking up plums, squeezing them lightly, testing to see if they are good enough to sell to a tourist who doesn’t know any better. Merche is looking at the newspaper, not taking in the words, waiting for customers. Waiting for her mother.

Estela walks in as if she’s only been gone for a minute or two, takes her seat in the corner. Merche is weighing shrimp; they slip between her fingers as she grabs handfuls of them and puts them on the scale in a plastic bag. A man pays for them, takes the bag from Merche, puts them in a rolling trolley, and wanders off to the frutería, checking a piece of paper—a shopping list, Merche knows, written by his wife, who took a fall recently and can’t do the shopping herself. Merche is surprised at how well the man is handling his new role. It’s like he’s been doing it all along. Juana greets him warmly, but Merche doubts her sincerity. Juana is rotund and in her late sixties, but her hair is the color and style of Marilyn Monroe’s.

“Where did you go?” Merche says, turning to her mother.

Her mother raises an eyebrow at her, like a man, Merche thinks, like that punk rocker from her childhood. Like Billy Idol.

“You’ll need taking care of.”

“I will not.”

“Mamá. You should come back.”

“And live in the bedroom with your son?” Estela snaps. “Don’t be ridiculous. My life is no longer here.”

Merche is surprised at how disappointed she feels. If she’d said it to Jose—my mother needs to be taken care of; she should live with us—she knows how he’d respond. He’d say they didn’t have room. He’d say she’d hate it here. But he’d concede it was their responsibility, and they’d make do. They would both know that it was Merche’s job to care for her. And she’s surprised to realize how much she really wants to care for her mother. She wants her to come home.

She puts the other chair next to Estela’s and sits down.

“Did you tell my abuela?”

Estela nods.

“What did she say?”

“My daughter, I don’t really think she understood.”

“No,” Merche agrees. “How would she? How could she? It’s too difficult.”

“Well, I’m not sure that’s what the problem is.” Estela is pushing the corners of the newspaper under her fingernails.

Merche sighs, recognizes what she hasn’t said to anyone: that her grandmother’s mind is starting to go. Having her mother insinuate this fact feels like a weight lifted. Merche has been keeping the fear to herself, steeping it unacknowledged in her head.

“Yes. She’s not nearly as talkative. Or responsive.”

“She won’t be around too much longer, daughter. You’ll have to get used to it.”

Merche is stunned by her mother’s callousness. “What do you know?” she says. “You know nothing of our family anymore. She’s more my mother than she is yours.”

“That’s a ridiculous thing to say,” Estela laughs. “You can’t rearrange the generations according to your conservative notions of what people are supposed to be, to do.”

“I can and I will,” Merche says. Merche is surprised, and not, by her outburst. Surprised because she’s so used to keeping everything in. Not surprised because she’s harbored these feelings for such a long time. This would feel better if she could yell, but she whisper-scolds her mother, aware of Juana, the fruit-seller, who is arranging a box of oranges. “Why couldn’t you ever do normal mother things?”

“I did the best I could, daughter.” Estela seems weary now, and Merche is suddenly guilty. Estela stands up and leans over to give Merche two kisses. “Just as you are doing. I’ll see you later on.” Merche notices for the first time a small dip in her step, not quite a limp. She wonders if it’s a symptom.

There are no customers. Juana comes over, pulling a small plastic rectangle of tissues from the pocket of her trousers.

Merche thanks her and blows her nose. “My mother is sick,” she says.

“It will happen to all of us,” Juana says.

Jose and Xan are on the sofa in front of the TV. Merche pushes the door closed and goes to the kitchen, where she takes four thick slices of eel and a head of lettuce from her bag.

“You smell,” Jose calls to her from the couch. She goes to the enclosed balcony to change her clothes.

“Where is mamá?” she says, looking into Xan’s room and seeing that her mother isn’t there.

“She left,” Jose says.

Xan gets up and comes to the kitchen. “She said she was going to see a friend. She said she wouldn’t be here for lunch.”

“What? What friend?”

“She said to tell you it’s Laura?”

“Where? Was she here? She could’ve told me. I have a cell phone.” But he has moved to his room, toting his Nintendo, and closes the door.

She thinks of her grandmother: another person she can’t talk to, or rely on. Merche goes to the sofa.

“What is wrong with you, woman?” Jose asks as she slides in closer to him, her shoulder nudging into his armpit.            

She considers following Xan into his room; she wants to lay her head on him and cry for her mother. But she stays put. Jose stretches his arm across her shoulders and gives her a squeeze. His other hand forms a fist as he yells something at the news on TV.

Sara B. Fraser has written two novels: Long Division and Just River, both published by Black Rose Writing. Her short fiction has been included in such journals as Salamander, The Forge, and the Jabberwock Review. She is a high-school Spanish teacher in Massachusetts and is grateful to be able to spend most summers in Galicia.