My mother invites me to Versailles for the Sunday tamal en cazuela special. It’s our third weekend seeing each other in a row, it’s hard to believe. She knows tamal en cazuela is my favorite. I don’t like Versailles, its combination of “yellow rice with beans, please” tourist crowd and old guard prim-and-proper Cuban Americans. But the tamal en cazuela. I live for the salty mush—corn, lard, pork—burning my tongue. We end the meal with cortaditos, and my mother places a hand on mine. She is so uncomfortable showing emotion but then she cracks, and the crack then breaks me and I rush to put up the façade again. We do this dance over and over and over again, and it feels worse than not talking at all.

I know I have failed you in some way, she says. And I just wish I knew how. I just wish I knew how to fix whatever is broken between us.

I can’t look up. I can’t look up from my coffee, from the foam dissolving into the tiny cup. Tell her, I think, tell her.

But what would it do other than widen the gulf? We are already two continents; impossible to imagine a bridge could even exist. I wish to dissolve into my cup, I wish to dissolve on the tongue, to be sugar and not this bitter, watery substance in the shape of Girl.

It is easier to go further back, to deflect past with past. I ask about Cuba again.

My mother sighs.

There is nothing to say, she says. But I’ll tell you this: I was not rich like the other Cubans who came at that time.

It is more than she has ever said.

So how did you survive? I say, and what I really mean is how will I walk out of these gaudy gold-etched doors into the wet open mouth of a hot Miami afternoon and survive, and then the day after that, how will I survive, and then the day after that, how will I survive, and when will I stop feeling exhausted from all the surviving?

My mother laughs. Your father, she says. That’s how. Do you understand now why it’s been so hard for me to say no to that man all our life together?

See me, see me, I think. Just for this one moment, see me. I am sinking, I am screaming, Tell me how to live, Mommy.

I dip a finger into my cup, and she watches, perplexed, as I place it in my mouth.

I want to go, I say. To Cuba.

My mother laughs sarcastically. She rolls her eyes. It’s so good, my mother says. It’s so good to see you doing well. I mean, I think you are well. Are you well?