Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia (best ereader for pdf and epub .TXT) 📗

dog. The footsteps rang heavy, the breathing not a pant but an audible purring. Like Linda’s purrs but through a stethoscope, magnified, huge. For a moment, she had the irrational idea that a house might have a living, breathing soul, a heart trapped among shine-polished appliances and old inherited furniture, bursting to be known. Perhaps bleeding into the street. She stumbled back from the door. Then crept forward again, put her ear to it again. Yes, purring.

A part of her liked the idea of a monster waiting to burst into Coral Gables, waiting to devour Carmen’s cousins and old aunts, their adult children, her fifteen guests. She couldn’t shake her fear at the strange confluence of blood and loud breathing, but she was too nervous about Thanksgiving dinner to give her imaginative leaps much real estate, to spend time or energy on anything but dinner. She forced herself to think of harmless explanations—Who hasn’t cut themselves on some sharp object or another and unknowingly left a trail of blood? Who is to say a cat can’t sound like a lion under the right conditions? Jeanette was fresh out of treatment, only two months living out of the facility. It had been her third stay. Carmen wanted everything perfect, though she had little hope for Jeanette’s continuing sobriety.

At home, Carmen chilled a second bottle of seltzer. She set out more chips, two appetizer stations at opposite sides of the living room. In an hour, her first guests would arrive. She had decided to invite Jeanette for their first Thanksgiving together in years, so many years.

Before this, she had banned Jeanette. Carmen had told her point-blank: she would no longer support her, she would no longer invite her to any family functions, she would no longer be her mother until Jeanette could prove that she was really, truly sober. Such a decision would likely have seemed, to any mother on the outside, cruel. But no mother on the outside could possibly know what it was to face a truth like the one she’d been presented with: that it was her own love killing her daughter, that she needed to become stone, marble, not a mother at all, to save her daughter. Now Carmen would see her daughter for the first time since driving her to detox and then rehab, again.

Jeanette arrived last, long after the steady stream of relatives, one after the other, carrying aluminum trays covered in foil and bottles of fruit juice, as if no one knew what to bring in place of wine. She had told her guests not to bring alcohol but she hadn’t said why. She hadn’t said recovery or drugs or even my daughter. She knew they knew why. That was her family, unwilling to name the truth as it danced like dander in the periphery.

Jeanette greeted Carmen as if the two had just seen each other: airy kiss on the cheek and airy chitchat—how hot is it out there?—between handfuls of chips. The noise in the house had grown to a level that would drown out any wild growls.

“By the way, Mom,” Jeanette said, smoothing an errant curl behind her ear and leaving a trail of crumbs beneath her, “Mario is coming but he couldn’t get ready in time. I gave him the address.”

“Are you kidding me?” Each syllable strained against the others unnaturally.

Jeanette waved a hand in front of her face as if to say It’s nothing, don’t worry. “He’s sober now too, Mom. It’s completely different. And we’re not, like, together. He’s being a really good friend.”

Jeanette looked away. Her eyes darted, seemed to take in the whole room, all the clusters of conversation.

“Anyways, it’s not like you can judge.”

That familiar sharp, stabbing pain. Carmen wanted to say something back. But she couldn’t.

Jeanette looked sober, though, Carmen thought. Her curls were neatly moussed and bouncy; she wore fresh, precise makeup. Carmen would’ve preferred she wear something a little more celebratory than jeans and a tight-fitting tank top but she couldn’t deny that, in her late twenties, Jeanette could pull off looking good in almost anything. Still, she seemed distracted, jumping from conversation to conversation, ducking each time talk turned toward her. Carmen stood on the margin, gripping a glass of fruit juice, afraid to approach her daughter as if she’d catch a whiff of some hidden sorrow if she got too close. Could this be all there was to it—Jeanette would get sober? Mario too? Life would continue as if the past five years had happened to someone else?

And there was the other fact keeping Carmen hyper-perceptive—she couldn’t shake the noise, the guttural growl; she couldn’t shake the blood. She found herself losing the thread of conversations and turning toward her living room window, her guests trailing off. And then she’d turn back to that person, an aunt or a cousin or their spouse: You were saying?

But then Rosalinda’s husband, Pepe, had pulled a flask out of his back pocket and poured its contents into a water glass. Carmen saw him do it. She had set the table without wine stems or highballs. She’d set the table with only water glasses. Carmen sidled up to Pepe, made a show of staring at the glass in his hand.

“You’re looking younger, Carmen,” he said. Pepe leaned a hand on her mahogany side table. “You’re looking more like Jeanette.” He took a sip. “Me, I just get older. I was never one to coddle my Vanessa, you know. That’s probably what keeps you young. When you don’t coddle them, it’s stressful. But it’s better not to coddle, it’s definitely better.”

Pepe’s slender wiry daughter appeared as if on cue, whisking the glass out of his hand and taking a sip herself. “I heard that,” she said.

“Now, Papi.” Vanessa smiled at Carmen. She’d left a dark-red lipstick ring on the glass. “Everyone knows you’re the world’s biggest coddler. Tía, come.” She took Carmen by the arm as if leading a child.

In the kitchen, Vanessa poured Pepe’s liquor into