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It was past midnight when I realized that I had missed Mama’s call. I was surprised. She usually never called me after ten at night, and in the loud Houston downtown bar I hadn’t heard my cell ring. The Thirsty Monkey wasn’t the type of place I wanted to find myself drinking in late at night. In the sordid yellow light of cheap low hanging ceiling lights, everything had an impermanent quality to it. We were all just hollowed out people, dimming lamps and drawing shades in small apartments.
I hadn’t checked my phone until I awoke from my drunken slumber in the middle of the night. There was no voicemail, just a cryptic text message: call me.
She picked up on the third ring. “Where are you?”
I looked over at the mysterious young man lying in my bed. “I’m home.”
Her voice sounded thin and strained as if she was trying to talk through thick velvet. A seamstress with words, she’d learned how to bind her own words into smaller stitches until they vanished into the fabric. “Your Uela’s in the hospital. They’re telling us we should come by.”
By this point death didn’t shock me. It was routine for my family; Uela and Tito both grew up on farms, watched their mothers wring the necks of chickens till blood spattered; seen rabid dogs and possums shot; and assisted their mothers with last-minute abortions. I too had been raised around death, and was accustomed to the evanescence of existence. My first lesson was watching the annual death of Uela’s zinnia flowers. In the extreme Texas heat they’d wrinkle and shrink until the last petal fell. Then, Uela would plant the next batch.
My second lesson was with my Tito. He was out in the backyard mowing the grass. Like the flowers he too began to wither in the summer heat. He suddenly stood up straight, gripped his arm, and silently fell to the ground. After the heart attack, we were all hyper vigilant for any further signs of deterioration. The doctor prescribed him a mountain of pills. When I was younger I use to sit by Uela’s feet and watch her meticulously count Tito’s vitamins for him. One red. Two yellow. One white. Her hard and wrinkled fingers would gingerly trace over the shape before shoveling them in to his weekly pillbox. With each plop into the plastic box I prayed that Tito’s heart would grow stronger. Uela did this every day until Tito passed away.
“Will you drive down?” Her question hung like a noose around my neck. Physically we were hundreds of miles apart, but it felt as if she was standing in the room, leaning her weight into me.
“Of course. You never can Ofelia.” As her voice rang in my ear, I felt the searing sting of her words stab me in the stomach. There was a string of worry attached to her entreaty, and I imagined Mama standing alone in a dark room shivering to herself as she waited for my reply.
After Tito’s funeral, I’d left Pharr and my family behind for a waitressing job in Houston. We never got many customers to come down to Phil’s Diner, but sometimes amongst the slow lunch hour I found myself disappearing behind stacks of orders and unclean white plates. Yet, everyone could still sense my small town roots. They use to see it in my way, in the silk web-like bits of threads stuck to all my clothes.
“I’ll be down tomorrow night.”
I put my cell down on the nightstand and crawled back into bed with a stranger.
That night I dreamt of the garden in front of Uela and Tito’s home. The fuchsia flower petals of the crepe myrtle weighed the branches down till they bowed down to the floor. When I looked down, I realized I was a child, running through the crepe myrtle as if they were stage curtains, swerving in and out. At the end of the infinite row of trees, I came upon a large seed the size of my thumb. Over my shoulder I heard Tito’s voice.
“Your Uela would know how to plant that.” But when I tried to see his face, there was no one there, just a black void.
Then the whole dream burst into smaller bubbles and floated away into the recess of my mind.
The early morning sunlight filtering in from the window shades shocked me out of my sleep. Dancing in the ray of light were tiny specks of dust. My skin prickled from the heat. Though in contrast to last night my apartment was calm and quiet, Mama’s voice silently sat heavy in the air. I turned to my side. The man from last night was still lying in my bed, face down buried in the dirty pillowcase. After a while, his breathing became noticeable, a loud hiss of air coming in and out of his large nostrils. With my thumb and forefinger I pinched his nose, trying to stop the sound. He struggled for a second, his body was looking for some other way to breathe, and then he opened his mouth. I kept playing with his face until I heard my stomach growl.
I left the man in my bed, who I was now referring to as Tim, and got up to make myself breakfast. The egg yolk hit the pan and began to fry in the bubbling oil. Putting my head down on the granite counter top, I tried listening to the crackling sound. When I had a hangover the feel of the cold granite and the comforting sound of cooking use to calm me down. It was a now a habit for any time I was stressed.
After breakfast, I was halfway through packing when Tim woke up.
“Morning.” He watched me as I packed a black dress into my suitcase. “Going somewhere?”
“Sorry Tim. I’ve got to drive home tonight.” I shoved random toiletries inside.
“I’m Tom.” He paused for a second.
I looked at him once more. His messy strawberry blonde hair was parted in a pretentious way. He was definitely a Tim.
“Sorry Tom. I’ve got to be on the road soon.” I quickly dressed in some discarded jeans and a wrinkled t-shirt as an incentive for him to leave. “There’s coffee in the kitchen.”
Tom stood confused in nothing but his underwear. He kept turning his head from the kitchen to me, trying to find an answer.
Finally I said, “My grandmother’s dying Tom. You have to go.” He looked like he wanted to hug me for a second, but I pushed him out my apartment door with the rest of his clothes.
It was a routine I had picked up from Mama. She’d never been able to settle down either. There were numerous suitors—all nice well-educated white men—and three engagements, but as the wedding date came near things always seemed to pop-up. Then she’d met my father, and decided to skip the whole marriage and forever after crap. So she wasn’t all that surprised when he returned back to his wife.
Mama never had a dream. She’d only been taught to take care of her family. She knew nothing else. Even when the opportunity to leave Uela and Tito behind arrived at her feet, she simply stepped over and let the chance pass by. After all, someone had to take care of them in their old age.
After I was born, Mama got a job as receptionist for a law firm in town. While my mother worked my grandparents raised me. During the day I spent time with Tito and Uela, and at night I saw Mama.
The first image I had of Uela was of her back. No matter what time of the day, she seemed to always be hunched over the kitchen counter making something. I used to watch her as she made tortillas from scratch. Her tan hands would beat the flour dough into submission. Whack. Whack. Whack. The staccato sound of her wooden rolling pin filled the off-pink 50’s style small kitchen. A sweet smell of butter and flour filled the room, brushing against my nostrils. I would lean into the aroma and imagine the taste of the fluffy treats lying on my tongue.
Uela loved to cook, but she didn’t like having me in the kitchen. A wooden chair in the corner of the room was my space. I was not allowed to get up from it. Sitting in that small chair my back standing up straight, a strange desire to hug her back would come over me. The hungry need to love her scared me.
As a child, I wanted to be like Uela. Her and Tito’s bedroom was a frilly pink with white wooden furniture. Against one wall was an ornate vanity bursting with sparkling jewelry. When Uela was busy at work, I would sneak into her room and try on her things. My favorite was a beautiful white sun hat with pink trim she wore for gardening. The wide rim made my eight-year-old head look tiny and ridiculous, but in the inside lining of the hat I could feel where her damp head had touched the light fabric. Her sweat was still drying. That was the closest I ever got to her.
After the fifth time, she caught me sneaking into her stuff. I stumbled over my words trying to explain, but the words were caught in my throat. She stood over me, her shadow engulfing my tiny body. I began to sob to myself uncontrollably. She reached for one of Tito’s belts lying on the bed and pulled me onto her knee. I winced when the fist strike landed on me. Mama had never hit me once. I was unaccustomed to the feel of leather against my naked skin, but I soon memorized the sound. That day she only dealt me five blows. In the light, the welts that rose up from where the notch holes had hit me shined like the spider webs on the crepe myrtle.
Tito was much easier to get along with. During his lunch break Tito would leave the office and take me to an old cowboy shop across the way from where he worked. When we walked in all the female store clerks stopped what they were doing and said hello to us. Caught in the spotlight, Tito smiled and told them all to treat his granddaughter like a princess, “mi princesa.” All the attention made my cheeks burn. With all the female clerks eyes fixed on me, I couldn’t find my voice. Tito turned, looked over at me and winked. My whole body relaxed as if I was wrapped in the softest blanket.
The women pulled out a chair for me to sit in. From there, I watched Tito as he tried on his white Stetson hat and shiny belt buckles. Seeing him in the mirror, reminded me of all those old cowboy movies he use to watch. Afterwards, he’d take me out for vanilla ice cream. We’d sit outside on wooden benches, eating our cones. That was our routine.
Even as I got older, things with Uela never got easier. Sometimes I wish my childhood were compacted into those memories of us sitting outside in the summer heat eating ice cream in silence. I’d open them up relive my childhood as only a series of happy memories with my Tito.
Before Tito passed away Uela asked me to write the Epitaph for his gravestone. Alone in her barely lit Pepto-Bismol pink kitchen we sat across from each other, a full tortilla warmer between us. Suddenly, Uela got up from her wooden chair, making a squeaky creak as the leg moved across the floor. She told me she needed to get something. She hobbled over to the stove, and began cooking something new.
“What are you making?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders in response. It’s nothing really she reassured me, but I watched as she began to pull out avocados, tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and cumin. With the avocado in the palm of her hand she drove a knife into the hard black skin, cutting it open. She stabbed at the pit, and laid it aside. She reached for her grey rock mortar and began to mash the avocado inside. The smell of guacamole filled the room. I wanted to know what it was for. Perhaps she was going to make us a little snack. After all, I had driven all the way over here just to sit and chat with her.
She remained silent as she continued to mix the avocado with the tomatoes and onions. After a great pause she finally answered me. The guacamole was for my cousin, Oralia. She was down from college for the weekend and Uela wanted to make her favorite food. The tortillas in front of me were also for her.
I asked if I could have a tortilla, but Uela said I had to wait. Those were for Oralia, not for me.
“You never liked my cooking much anyway,” she said.
Sensing I was getting ready to leave, Uela stopped me. She explained about the VA, how they needed a copy of every gravestone in advance, in case something sudden were to happen.
“I thought you should be the one to write something.” She spoke fast, stumbling across the words as they poured from her mouth.
We could only afford the basic package, twenty letters, that’s all we could give to Tito. You can’t say much in twenty letters, at least not a real goodbye. I tried to keep the message clear: Father, and Husband.
With her wrinkled hands, Uela turned over the written form with my epitaph on it. She let the idea sink into her thoughts. Her mouth was pulled back into a thin-lipped grimace. For a second, I thought she was going to ask me to write something different.
Instead, she turned to me and said, “ok.”
We didn’t speak of the epitaph again till Tito’s funeral. It was a small Catholic Church service with family and friends. A father who hardly knew my Tito, lead us all in prayers of forgiveness and blessings. There’s a part after the mass where everyone gets a chance to walk by the open casket. When it was my turn I took a long look at my Tito lying inside his red velvet lined pine wood casket. They had slicked his hair back, and put him in a black suit with a red tie. None of it made any sense. Where was his cowboy hat and belt buckle?
My uncle Jose and my uncle Roel loaded the closed casket into the black hearse. A trail of cars followed behind the hearse as it headed to the VA cemetery.
After the service, and after burying the casket, Uela stood by my side.
“They won’t be able to put the grave stone up until a month after he’s buried.” She said.
“It doesn’t matter. The whole process just makes it all feel too real.” Tears started to form in the corners of my eyes.
Without looking at me she said, “You’ve never loved me like you’ve loved your grandfather.” It came out almost like a whisper, a whisper that had been building strength in a dark corner of Uela’s mind for years. Her words echoed inside my body like the rush of a waterfall. I was caught up in them, drowning in the immense weight of my family. They strangled me and held me down. I felt Uela’s two hands reaching out from the darkness inside me. Scared I left. The day after Tito’s funeral, I packed everything I could inside a small suitcase and drove for seven hours straight till I ran out of gas in Houston.
Years later, arriving once again in my hometown, Pharr, the same fear suddenly came over me. The blue sky dissolved to darkness, and the town looked forgotten in the lonely light of the bright stars. From all the years of cotton picking and crop cleaning, there was a dust that permeated over everyone and everything here. Sewn from the shattered dreams and smashed remains of possibilities, the stale dust of impotence blanketed the town. You could see it even in the nighttime.
Nothing had changed in the last five years, except for the amount of for sale and going out of business signs in the town square. Passing through downtown, everything looked dead, except for the hospital, the largest complex in the whole town. The flashing lights and hundreds of parked cars out front alit the hospital in a beige glow like dead skin.
In the crowded waiting room my family stood out. The room was awash in off-white wallpaper with faded seashells. People were sitting in bright purple cushioned chairs. While everyone else cried and prayed for their loved ones, my family stood strong, unwavering in their resolute decision not to be emotional at times like these.
Mama was leaning back in her chair, looking up at the ceiling when she finally turned and saw me.
“Ofelia’s here,” she announced.
They swarmed around me, crowding me as they all gave me obligatory hugs and how-are-yous. In five years no one besides my mother had reached out to me in Houston, but I smiled out of politeness and continued the charade.
Mama pulled me aside. She kept her voice quiet and low but slowly explained everything to me. Yesterday night Uela had a heart attack. It was sudden and unprecedented. According to her doctor she was in perfect health. It happened while she was gardening they said. Earlier in the week she’d realized her crepe myrtle was dying.
“It doesn’t make any sense though,” mom continued “it’s a perennial, she’d only planted it last year.”
While she was digging the bed for the new seed, her heart’s pulse quickened, and she’d felt a tight squeeze before falling.
“No one was with her though. Thank god the dog started barking. That alerted the neighbors.” She looked back up at me. “But the damage to her heart looks severe.” She walked over to a chair and sat down. I took the one next to her.
“No. They’ll let us see her in the morning.”
It was only ten at night.
It’s never really quiet inside a hospital waiting room. The stray sounds from machines and instruments sifter through the walls and permeate empty spaces. Even if no one is sitting behind you, on your exposed neck you feel a warm breath cowering over you.
Even for people familiar with death, like my family, the weight of uncertainty plagued us in the sterile waiting room. The woman sitting in the chair next to me was hunched over, sobbing to herself. In her hands she clenched a wadded up pink tissue paper, so used it was falling to pieces. I looked over at my mother. She was asleep in her chair.
I felt my eyelids getting heavy, and my head naturally began to fall back against the chair headrest.
My eyes closed and everything went dark inside my head. In the distance I saw a fuchsia colored petal falling to the ground. As I got closer more petals began to fall. Petal after petal rained down from an invisible sky. Soon my mind was overflowing with flowers. Then I appeared, as a child once again. I ran through bunches of petals and played with the falling flowers, trying to catch them with my tongue.
“You’re missing it.” From behind me I could hear Tito’s voice. The child me turned to face him. In cowboy boots and a white Stetson hat, Tito began striding over to where I was playing. He took me into his arms and carried me like a princess.
A sudden gust of wind blew the petals aside. Underneath where there was darkness there was now grass. Suddenly the invisible sky dissipated into a baby blue. As we walked on I could see Uela and Tito’s house in the distance. When we arrived, Tito set me back down on to the ground. He stuck his hand into his pant pocket and pulled from it a seed.
“You forgot this.” He bent down and placed the seed into my hand. With his other arm he pointed to the crepe myrtle tree growing in the front garden. The ground underneath me seemed to shift under my feet. It was moving me closer to the crepe myrtle. The tree began to stir and shake. Its buried roots popped up from the ground, and became legs, taking the crepe myrtle away. Left in its wake, was a cavernous hole, waiting to be filled.
When I awoke the crepe myrtle was gone. Tito and Uela’s house had dissolved into the reality of the waiting room. Even though the dream was over, I sensed traces of it still in the room. Light poured into the dreary room from a window, and in the brightness a fine filigree of dust twinkled. I traced the web of dust with my eyes. It landed on my two sleeping uncles, Jose and Roel, my cousin, Oralia, and Mama.
Aware of my gaze, Mama turned to me and said, “Do you want to see your Uela.”
I hesitated for a second. I was afraid to leave my chair. “What will happen if I get up?” I wondered.
On the way to Uela’s hospital room, we passed by nurses pushing sick patients in wheelchairs, and families crying amongst themselves. There was the familiar hospital faint hum of machinery that canceled out the sound of any particular heart monitor. The hospital was just one surreptitious heartbeat, concealed by concrete and tile. My head hurt and I felt light headed by the time we got to Uela’s room.
Inside her room, all outside sound grew dull. All I could hear was her single heart monitor beeping softly then loudly at times. My own heart matched the pace. Uela’s eyes kept opening and shutting uncontrollably. She seemed to be wincing in pain each time they did. Under the white sheets her body seemed so small and fragile. I walked over to her and took her hand in mine. Her bony hand clasped onto my wrist. I felt her fingers digging into my skin.
It was a familiar feeling. Her long and outstretched fingers, the same ones I’d seen gripping a leather belt, pulled me into a protective embrace. I was eight when I tried to teach my Oralia how to swim. I thought I could hold her body up above the water by standing on my tippy-toes, but my cousin began to panic in the water. With her in my arms flailing, I quickly lost balance and found my whole head submerged into the cerulean pool water. My cousin kept pushing my head further down in order to keep herself afloat. I opened my eyes underwater and saw legs splashing rushing to get out, to get help. I tried to push myself up, for one small breath of air, but things started to get dark; the light from the summer sun was slowly disappearing along with the oxygen in my lungs. Then I felt Uela’s hands pulling me out of the water, taking me into her arms, and patting my back until I calmed down.
When I was younger Uela seemed so big. I imagined that she stood at least two feet taller than me when she held Tito’s belt in her hands. But now, lying on sweat stained sheets in a sanitized hospital room she looked beaten down and weathered. Her bony fingers felt like they could break. Her round face had shrunk down into nothing but bones. I could make out the hollows of her cheeks underneath the wrinkles; I could see the layers of Uela.
Uela opened her eyes fully. She looked over at me and tried to open her mouth. She looked like a child gasping for air. Her hand gripped my wrist further. I tried not to wince.
“Uela, do you want anything?” I ask.
She blinks once then twice. Her mouth kept shutting. Open. Close. Open. She was searching for the right words.
I wanted to look away in disgust. She was moving like an animal does right before it dies. The image of Uela watching her mama strangle a chicken appeared in my mind. Mama was nodding at me, encouraging me to talk more.
“I’m sorry about the crepe myrtle.”
At first her voice was faint. I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
“What?” I leaned in, putting my ear close to her mouth. As she whispered in my ear, I felt the warmth from her breath on my skin.
“The seed,” She susurrated.
Her fingers released my wrist, and Uela closed her eyes shut this time. I was left with just the sound of the heart monitor. Beep…beep.
With Uela’s words still ringing in my ear, I drove out to her home. The front garden still looked the same, beautiful and maintained. That’s when I saw it, out of the corner of my eye: the crepe myrtle tree’s naked branches. The long brown limbs reached up to the sky, but their purple pink petal flowers were gone. Even the dried-up bulbs of the flower had fallen off. The tree was rotting. Against the blue sky the branches looked like lonely hands reaching up from the earth’s soil.
The tools Uela had been using were still lying on the ground by the new seedbed where she had left them. A large hole of dirt looked up at me. There was nothing inside of it; there was no seed for the new crepe myrtle. I’d have to chop down the old tree and find some seeds in order for the new tree to take. That was the trouble with perennials; if they weren’t planted just right rot could easily take over again.
Tito kept his tools in the backyard shed. I hopped the steel fence and broke into the small wooden shed. I pilfered a single axe from his collection. With the axe I began to chop the thin tree trunk down. As I was cutting into it, I saw how rotted the tree looked on the inside. A black fungus stained the revealed wood. Even as the sun began to set, I continue to hack up the dead crepe myrtle. Beads of sweat formed around my head. They rolled down my face into my eyes, stinging me, but I continued. The axe began to feel heavy in my hands. Each swing started to take a part of me with it.
By nighttime, I managed to clear most of the area. The new bed was ready, but I still hadn’t found the seed Uela and Tito were talking about. Desperately I scoured the ground with my hand, looking for the seeds. I dug deep into the dirt, until there was nothing but bits of leaves and soil trapped under my finger beds. But in the darkness the cut grass all looks the same, a blot of dark green upon the earth.
I looked up at the night sky. Houston is over run with shopping malls and tall buildings. All the commercial lights ruin the night sky; you can never see the stars. But out here, away from the city the stars are a swarm of firefly squids in the ocean, their bright bioluminescence decorating the blue sea.
The starlight shined down on me, and in that instant I saw a flash of light illuminating from the ground. Rifling through the grass, I felt the smooth warm touch of a single seed. In the deep hole Uela dug, I planted the last seed, and with the remaining dirt I covered the hole and gently patted it down.
With my hand, I leveled the dirt. It’s hard and smooth. Like a child I crumbled up into a ball on the freshly planted soil. It felt cold against my skin. Scattered around my body are the fallen branches of the dead crepe myrtle. As my eyes began to open and shut, I imagined the cold hard ground was my grandmother’s lap, and that the branches were her fingertips.
It's been so long since I updated this website. Hopefully, with more time coming in, I'll continue to write. For fun! It was past midnight when I realized that I had missed Mama’s call. I was surprised. She usually never called me after ten at night, and in the loud Houston downtown bar I hadn’t heard my cell ring.
