Another announcement and Daniel’s mother reached out her hand. Daniel got to his feet. The man stepped aside and watched them leave. They walked down a long corridor. Before turning into a separate room, Daniel took one last look behind him. The man was still staring. Daniel almost raised a hand to say goodbye.
The room was already packed. Daniel’s mother got up on her toes and looked around. “There she is,” his mother said. She led him though another maze of people. Daniel had never seen his grandmother in person. In her pictures she had looked nice enough, normal. Still, after all he’d heard, he’d expected to see an ugly, gnarled brute of woman. He was surprised when he finally saw her.
More than anything, she was short. She had her head away from him but Daniel recognized her, her glasses, how the stems connected high up on her frames then dipped to become the earpieces. Of all the things Daniel had heard, nothing really prepared him for how tiny she was. She was barely taller than him, like it could’ve been her shoes giving her a boost. His mother said fifteen children had come from this woman. Daniel wondered how that was possible.
Her arms were long. She looked strong, compact, wide. The closer Daniel got, the more he figured she could knock down a tree if she wanted. She looked nothing like his mother. His mother had soft features — her eyebrows, her nose all seemed to mold into each other, but his grandmother was chiseled, sharp and defined. The lines in her face were deep and more like scars than wrinkles.
“Hola, mamá,” his mother said. “Comó estas?”
His grandmother jumped. “Ay, mija, me asustastes. Comó estas mi vida?”
His mother leaned in and gave his grandmother a kiss. His grandmother returned the kiss, then said something Daniel couldn’t understand. He saw an angry look on his mother’s face.
“Y tú?” his grandmother said to him. “Éres Daniel, verdad?”
“Sí,” Daniel said. And she gave him a kiss and hugged him. He still couldn’t believe how short she was. Daniel tried to hug her back but he felt like he couldn’t get a grip. He felt like he was hugging a building. When his grandmother backed away, he wasn’t satisfied.
She rubbed the back of his head. “Tan flaquillo, te pareces a tú abuelito.”
“Mípapá no era flaco, mamá,” his mother said.
“Enflacó antes de morir. Pero tú ya no estavas.”
Daniel had no idea what his mother and grandmother were saying to each other, but he could tell there was an edge to it. His mother shook her head and without a word picked up his grandmother’s suitcase and began walking away. His grandmother looked to Daniel as if she had something to say, but all she did was pull him close. Together they walked in his mother’s wake.
This had all happened one week ago. Since that time they had visited his great-uncle exactly once. There had been more tension in the air than ever before. Hardly anything had been said during the visit. Voices were hushed. Daniel was the main topic of conversation. “Is he doing good in school?” “Summer break, huh?” “Make sure he drinks a lot, dehydration, you know?”
During the visit his great-uncle said a total of two words to his sister, Daniel’s grandmother: “Hi” and “Bye.”
Daniel, his grandmother, and his mother left after only an hour. When they got back to the car his grandmother and mother went back and forth like schoolgirls. Daniel couldn’t understand everything they were saying, but he knew they were talking about his great-uncle and cousins, and not in a positive way. His grandmother and mother laughed and waved their hands. Then they said things and laughed and waved their hands again. It was the only time all week that they seemed at all alike. It was the only time all week that they seemed the least bit happy with each other.
Between Daniel and his grandmother, though, things were different. There had been cold nights, damp nights, like the night of his grandmother’s arrival. Daniel had experienced his rumas often, and while his mother had taken to leaving him to his own remedies, his grandmother went out of her way to make him more comfortable. She drew baths for him, something his mother hadn’t done for him in years. His grandmother had also cut tube socks for him, taking the toes off of an old pair so that he could use them as warmers once he put his Ben-gay on. When he went to bed now, with his rumas, tube socks around his elbows and knees, he was in a world of warmth, heaven.
Daniel had also improved his Spanish. In the last week he had learned the right way to roll his r’s. His grandmother spoke to him in Spanish, so he had to understand, and more than that, he had to respond. If he was unsure of a word, he used those he knew and got as close as possible. Then his grandmother would say, “Ahh, caca-huete,” or whatever she guessed the word was. Somehow, Daniel knew instantly if the word his grandmother quoted was the word he meant. If it was, Daniel would nod, say it over to himself, and commit it to memory.
Between his mother and grandmother, things were more tense. Aside from that brief moment after visiting his great-uncle, the two of them argued constantly. Sometimes his grandmother tired of arguing and dealt quietly with whatever his mother said. Sometimes it was the other way around, and his mother put up with whatever his grandmother said. But most often neither could stand the other, and they would walk around the kitchen cooking or cleaning and at the same time arguing, his grandmother’s voice screeching, his mother’s voice sounding amazingly similar. When they got to fighting like that, even sitting in his room with the door closed didn’t help, and Daniel would leave the apartment to walk the neighborhood, where it was quieter, where at least he was able to think.
Daniel wondered if he’d eventually get to be the same way. If he’d get to the point where being in the same room with his mother was almost physically painful. Already he felt himself wanting to say things—“Mom, can’t you just shut up for a minute? What the hell is your problem?” It wasn’t so much that he suddenly loved his grandmother and would take her side over anyone else’s, it was just that he wanted things to go more smoothly, more smoothly than it seemed they ever could.
At the sprinkler pool Daniel could’ve made things easier by wearing clean socks. His mother would’ve said something if she’d seen the ones Daniel had on. Especially considering that there were probably clean ones in his dresser drawer. As it was, he knew that as soon as he and his grandmother returned home from the park, she would take the socks she had pulled off his feet and scrub them the way she did all the white clothes, in the kitchen sink, on the washboard she’d insisted on buying the first day she was in Chicago. She would use gallons of bleach, Daniel knew. She had used so much already that the apartment had begun to smell sour. A smell Daniel was convinced had fumigated all the cockroaches in their apartment building.
As he got up and walked through the wading pool to the sprinkler, Daniel thought about what it must be like in Mexico: if his grandmother had separated herself from her whole family the way his mother had separated herself from everyone here. He wondered about his uncles, his aunts. Fourteen of them. He wondered at the cousins he had running around. He wanted to meet them, visit them, stay with them. He wondered if his grandmother even talked to them, or if all her children, like his mother, had cut her off.