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

the police. Would that have saved Jeanette? Even she knew that was a lie.

Jeanette had told her on the day of her husband’s funeral. She’d shown up slurring, moving from corner of the room to corner of the room like each one held an opposing magnetic force and she just could not find her place, falling asleep each time she sat down. Other mourners eyed her, cast sidelong glances at one another. And Carmen, furious, had thought, How could you do this? How could you do this to your father? She had kicked Jeanette out and continued to greet guests as if nothing had happened. She’d said Jeanette didn’t feel well.

But Jeanette had returned. Carmen sat in an armchair, just outside the viewing room that contained Julio’s body. She’d tired of guests munching on crackers and standing around as if a dead body were nothing more than a prop, nothing more than a print on the wall or background music or a vase.

“I’m not leaving,” Jeanette said.

Carmen stood. She told Jeanette she’d disrespected her father’s memory.

“My father’s memory?” Jeanette laughed harshly.

“Do you know how lucky you are to even have had a father?”

At that, Jeanette had grabbed Carmen’s arm and stared at her, wild eyed. “That father is the reason for All. Of. This.” Jeanette motioned at herself.

“How dare you blame a man who—!”

“A man who—” Her face changed, turned serious. “A man who molested me?”

And Carmen felt the whole room shift, close in on them.

Her words should have been How? or When? or I believe you. Or nothing. Just her body, holding Jeanette’s close. Jeanette began to sob.

She remembered the feeling of hovering over the scene. Her daughter shuddering. The guests who walked past assuming Jeanette mourned her father. The flower vendors with the wreaths. That flower smell. Stale. The light bulb. The door. The heat, the heat, even in the overly air-conditioned room.

Her words should have been—any other words. But the real Carmen floated somewhere in the distance. And the body said, “It can’t be. It can’t be. Are you sure you—?”

But she absolutely knew it could be. How many nights had she woken to drunken Julio over her body? How many times had she fought him off and then given in, thinking, I’m married to him, isn’t this just duty? How the violation had strangled her, how she’d willed herself another life. She had thought herself a bad wife.

Carmen collapsed in the stale-flower-scented bathroom of the Rodríguez Funeral Home. She’d contemplated crawling into a casket herself. When she left the bathroom, Jeanette was gone.

The dishwasher began its cycle with a lurch of swishing water, the stop-and-start of the jets. Carmen could hear the inappropriate child, Lila, loudly answering questions in the dining room as the adults laughed.

“Maybe we should serve dessert,” she said.

Ha ha ha went the whole dining room. Someone smacked the table.

“Mom,” Jeanette said. “Asking me a few basic questions about what happened, one time, does not equal meaningful conversation. Do you know what it took for me to tell you?”

Carmen could smell the funeral home again—ugh, the flowers, she hated the flowers. Why? Why dwell, why talk, what good would it do? She had mastered a life without unearthing her own horror stories. She wished Jeanette could do the same. Her daughter needed strength, she needed Carmen’s strength for the both of them, she needed to learn the past haunted only if you let it.

“I have to go check on something,” she said, already walking out.

She could feel Jeanette watch her, could imagine her exasperated face. Carmen walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway, walked past her guests with their faces turned to her, walked out the door. She could hear the conversation die down to a trickle and then silence as the latch of the front door clicked shut. She imagined Mercy turning to Pepe—Where did she go? She imagined Jeanette struggling to serve a flan, imagined her staring at her stacks of serving utensils in confusion.

The pervert, the sick sick man, the poor excuse for a human being, he who should have met a fate worse than liver failure. Her heels clacked loud on the pavement. My beautiful daughter. My beautiful, beautiful, lost daughter. Her daughter needed her. No, she wouldn’t abandon her this time. She couldn’t. She would be a part of Jeanette’s life, sober or not, she would, she must.

The other house. Again nobody answered at the other house. Carmen knocked and knocked. She walked across the driveway past the garage and turned. A fence separated the house from the next one, like her own. A small stone path cut to a low gate at the backyard. There was a trash bin and a recycling one. There was a small window perched inches over her head. Carmen stood on tiptoe and peered in. She could scarcely make out a bathroom curtain. She had never understood windows in bathrooms. Why not just a vent of some sort if humidity was the problem? Windows, so many windows. Florida was obsessed with windows.

It was dark now. But the heat hadn’t let up. Carmen could feel the moisture bunching on her lower back, into the folds of her suit. She could imagine her carefully sculpted curls frizzing into clown hair. She felt like a clown, creeping around someone else’s house, pushing back the words that surfaced despite a refusal to accept them as her thoughts: It was minor abuse. He’d touched Jeanette twice only, over her clothes. Just her breasts, Jeanette had said. That minor and abuse could even fit in the same sentence seemed preposterous. There was no minor in abuse, there was no Thank God, it could have been worse. Sexual abuse was no car accident. Sexual abuse was no spectrum. Was it?

The backyard gate wasn’t locked. Carmen left her kitten heels at the threshold and stepped onto the soft mowed lawn in her stockings. The backyard had a pool and a smaller Jacuzzi lit up from beneath like a