In the Name of Salome Read Free Page B

I die without reply!”
    I nod. I will do anything he asks me, this man who speaks in rhymes.
    The face softens with a look that I have seen before on my mother’s face. “Write me, little dove. Give it to any mule driver to deliver to the house on Mercy Street with the gardenia bush by the door and the laurel tree in the backyard.” He hands me a mexicano, which is a heavy, silver coin that I don’t often get to hold in my hand.
    The man catches sight of something over my shoulder. All playfulness vanishes from his face. “Remember, it’s our secret,” he mouths. “Now put it away.” And before I can remember that I have never kept anything hidden from anyone in my family, I slip the letter and coin into the pocket of my pinafore.
    A moment later, Tía Ana is at my back. I feel an antipathy I have never felt inside my own house before. It’s as if the hatred that has been causing all the fighting on the streets has been put in a small bottle, and stoppered—so that for days now there have been parades and sunshine and happiness—and now someone has come and opened that little bottle right here between my aunt and this strange man.
    But my aunt Ana is a schoolteacher. She has to set a good example. Right this moment, her fifteen charges sit behind her, peering at the stranger and wondering what is about to happen. She reaches out a hand through the top opening of the Dutch door in a half abrazo. “¿Qué hay, Nicolás?” she says, and then over her shoulder she calls, “Gregoria, you are wanted.”
    The fifteen little girls bow their heads to their tablets as Tía Ana turns back to them. Mamá hurries in from the backyard. There is an excitement in her face that I don’t often see there, and then also its opposite, a rein to the excitement as if Mamá were trying to make her face stop showing it.
    â€œWhat is it?” Mamá asks Tía Ana, who glances toward thedoor, and then looks surprised herself. “Why Nicolás was just standing there.”
    I look in the direction my aunt is pointing, and sure enough the man has disappeared.
    â€œWhat did you say to him, Ana?” my mother asks in her quiet voice that is like something coming to a slow boil on a low fire.
    Before my aunt can answer, I’ve lifted the bottom latch and run out the door to the corner. The stranger is already halfway down the next street. I call out the one word I know will make him stop. “¡Papá!”
    Sure enough, my father turns around and waves back.
    I DON’T THINK ANYONE ever told us why my parents separated in 1852, two years after I was born. In fact, until the day Ramona and I buried our father and met our counterparts in my father’s other family at the gravesite, we did not know why our mother had left our father. Of course, once people knew that we knew, they filled us in on all the particulars.
    Supposedly, for several years, my mother did not suspect that her husband was finding pleasure outside their marriage bed. She was very much in love with her fun-loving Nicolás, who wrote poetry and studied law and came from a fine, old family in the capital.
    The marriage between my mother and my father had been acceptable enough to his family, particularly because, if you count back from the birth of my older sister Ramona, there was very little room for argument as to what should be done. But had there been time to discuss the matter, the Ureñas might have had a long talk with their son Nicolás in which they might have pointed out that though Gregoria herself was pale enough, and though she spoke of her grandpapá from the Canary Islands, all you had to do was look over her shoulder at her grandmother and draw your own conclusions.
    The way my mother finally found out about her husband’s transgressions was through her sharp-eyed, straight-talking older sister, Ana. Every time Nicolás did a little stepping out,