FIFTEEN

Mauro’s sobriety was still a fragile thing. He sometimes squandered months of it for a few blurry days that would leave him feeling sick down to his liver. He didn’t yet feel ready to return to live with Talia and Perla but visited often, and saw that in his daughter’s eyes he was becoming more familiar, someone she looked at with delight. He no longer resembled those she called “outside people,” who wiped windshields at intersections, or the unsheltered day-sleepers on sidewalks and patches of dead grass. Sometimes he brought Talia flowers, which she’d pull apart petal by petal, or a peluche when he could afford it. Her favorite was a small yellow bear that she took everywhere until she dropped it during an outing with her grandmother. At least that’s what Perla told him. He brought her a pink bear as a replacement, but she didn’t love it in the same way.

In one of his meetings Mauro met a man who asked if he did handiwork. He said he managed an apartment building near El Retiro. They were looking for someone to do maintenance and repairs around the property.

Mauro appeared at Perla’s door in a new uniform, said he had a good job and was ready to live in the house again, that he could pay more than his share and help with the lavandería before and after his shifts. He saw how Perla was struggling. Fewer customers and other supposedly loyal ones who never paid their long-running tabs. Perla was becoming sick too. Her breathing laborious, coughing fits that produced dots of blood. But she refused to see a doctor. Mauro, not wanting to disrespect her, didn’t insist.

Mauro and Elena spoke every few weeks, mostly because she was calling for Perla and he happened to answer. Conversations that were largely transactional. He reported on the lavandería, told her what Perla wouldn’t, like that they’d moved her bed to the room on the ground floor behind the kitchen because the stairs overwhelmed her. Her memory fragmenting, words and names for things slipping from her grasp; how she referred to Karina and Nando as the girl and the boy and one day, when Mauro asked Perla to say their names, she could not.

Mauro told Elena that Perla’s memory was restored in Talia’s presence. She knew every detail of her granddaughter’s life. The way she liked each meal prepared down to the stirring of a spice, waking to dress her for school, watching as she left the house with Mauro, who dropped her at class on his way to work. For Talia, her grandmother was not a fading sunset but a woman burning bright. And so, Elena agreed to postpone sending for her daughter to join her in the United States knowing, as Mauro did, that Perla would not survive long without her.

In the years that Mauro drifted further from the life he had with Elena, Karina, and Nando, he rooted deeper into his life with Talia. He heard his other children’s resistance when Elena forced them to the phone with him. Monosyllabic. They no longer called him Papi or Papá but Dad or nothing at all. He could not deny Talia was special to him because she was the one he watched grow.