I’d spent years deciding what that look meant. Standing on her deck at twenty-eight, I finally had it: it hadn’t meant anything.
Meaning would have required her attention, and her attention had a guest list, and I had never been on it. Anything I said now would go unheard, because I had never mattered anyway.
“You have always been happiest with small, beautiful things,” she said, and her voice was gentle, which was the cruelest way she knew how to say it. “There is nothing wrong with that. You are so like your father.”
My father, who built beautiful boats and loved his family and had never once left this town or had magic, and whom she looked at sometimes with that same patient, waiting expression, as if she were still expecting him to become someone larger. Someone like her.
She meant it as a comfort.
That was the worst part.
In her accounting there was her, and there were the small, beautiful things that orbited her, and she’d just told me which one I was.
“It was a towndecision,” she went on, “and I am the town’s consultant on these things. And frankly, mija, the town needed someone with my relationships to land it. Be happy for me. For us. People will finally come here for something.”
I didn’t say anything, all my focus on keeping my hands steady in hers, and the tears out of my eyes.
The screen door opened. My dad came out with a tray—two real coffees in real cups, with condensed milk.
“You two okay?”
“We’re great, Papi,” my mother answered.
I stood up
“I’m leaving.”
I felt her roll her eyes more than saw it.
“Mi corazón. The drama. You get this from his side.”
I walked through the house. I heard them both call my name, but I did not stop.
I kept an even pace until I’d slammed the door of my Jeep closed, setting off the Pomeranians again.
I sat in the driveway with both hands on the wheel and breathed for a count of ten.
It didn’t help.
Tears streamed down my cheeks, the saltwater a bitter traitor that likely would have listened to her, to her magic, her power.
Unlike me, the daughter who fought too much, who was too dramatic, who had worked for years to carve herself a small place in this town, and even that was too much to ask for in the life of Marina Torres.
My hands were warm. The Jeep’s center console was vibrating lightly. I made myself stop.
I started the engine.
I drove down the bluff road at an unsafe speed, the sharp curves pulling dangerously close to my Jeep’s tires.
It caught me at the third curve. A truth I had always known.
She had signed the contract before she told me. She had done it because she didn’t think of me as someone who needed to be consulted.
She didn’t think of me at all.
What magic?
Like it was nothing.
