Cry Me A Rio

Chapter One

Road Worrier

My mother hurries through the trailer in a dress the color of troubled sky. I stand by the front door on a welcome mat of scattered newspaper. Obituaries of the recent dead are smeared with winter mud.

I’m ready to go, but my mother is still packing last-minute things for our trip to Mexico. Toilet paper. Herbal teas for her insomnia. That thick leather bible she reads like a travel guide for her life. As she goes from one flimsy room to the next, she stops to roll her shoulders and work out the kinks in her arms. She gripes about not getting enough rest the previous night.

“Slept like a tortilla,” she says. “Just turned and turned.”

The left arm pains her most. It’s the unfortunate prize from field labor as a girl and, years later, as a working mother who wanted to give her kids all that she didn’t have growing up. Now, at fifty-five, her arm hangs loose, greasy from the ointments she rubbed into it during the night. She grits her teeth and takes a sharp breath each time she touches the arm. I don’t know why she won’t just leave it alone.

My father, Ismael, sits at the kitchen dinette and waits for his coffee to brew. As the percolator hisses, he tells my mother, “They shoulda named you Dolores.” Thirty years of marriage, and he thrills at his mean little jokes, including this one poking my mother about her chronic, dolorous pains. This is a man whose knuckles are tattooed with the letters L-O-V-E.

Jessie, my little sister, having heard all this countless times, rolls her eyes and says she’ll wait outside in the Jeep.

Neither is coming. Jessie doesn't have any money. My father insists he has to watch the house. I’d planned to go alone but my mother refused to let me go unless she came along.

“She's afraid for you,” my father says, sinking into his chair with his coffee mug and a smirk.

“It's gotten bien ugly down there,” my mother says, whispering a string of No’s that sounds like she’s reciting the rosary. “N'hombre, they kill you the same as any dog.”

With her troubled arm, she’ll be able to look after me as well as a glittery dashboard saint. Even in her grave I don’t think my mother will tire of trying to protect us.

She hadn’t always been afraid. As a kid, in the ‘80s, I used to watch her hobble around the house in her high heels, legs in sheer stockings with little black bows at the ankle. She put on her makeup and false eyelashes for a Saturday night of seafood dinners and dancing in the supper clubs across the river. Now, at the turn of the millennium, she only slips across to the other side for generic refills of the cholesterol drug Lipitor. Though Mexico isn’t as dangerous as it will be in years to come, my mother says she doesn’t go unless she’s got business. Which, in this case, means the business of my personal safety. Never mind that I’m a capable young man about to turn thirty, who has been living the past seven years in New York City.

But even I don't want to go anymore as I wait for my mother to finish packing. I stare at the walls hung with portraits of my older sister Elizabeth. Her beauty pageant smile burns with determination to get out into the world. I’d left at eighteen, right after high school graduation, a year after the car accident that claimed Elizabeth’s life. Like everyone I knew, I boomeranged back and forth, trying to go farther with each throw and hoping to stay away longer. Seven years in the city was a record.

Each time I return home it’s as if I never really went away. Never grew up. At least in my parent’s eyes. I’m still the hundred-pound weakling I was in junior high. Why do I bother coming back? Now I’m saddled with my mother, who insists on going across the border to see family in San Pedro. Not that we sent word that we’re coming. In San Pedro there are few phones. There is no regular mail service. We’re just setting out with the hope that Aunt Lucha will be home and pleased to see us.