I had no idea she was behind me, standing in the bathroom door in the robe I got her at Nordstrom Rack on a trip last year. (I have a homing device for outlets and discounts.) It’s so much softer than the ratty old thing she used to wear, which she got before I was born. She has a serious hold-on-too-long thing going on. Her hairbrush is three times my age. She has shoes that went in and out, back in, and back out of style. Even her job: In high school, she lived off campus too, and had a candy striper job at the same nursing home she works at now; when she became an RN, she didn’t apply anywhere else. Abuelo had already abandoned the farm and moved to Florida (where there were actual other Cubans around), but she has lived in Antic Springs ever since. Like decades. My job is to sneak The New into her life whenever possible.

“Why are you home?”

She is rubbing the moisturizer I got her onto her cheeks, but her green eyes are focused on me. She worries all the time. “Born for a widow’s walk” is what her best friend CeCe says. This makes her loving, diligent, serious, loyal … and exhausting. The gazillion ways she has fearfully pictured my sudden death—I could write a book.

The problem is, I try not to lie to her. She deserves someone to be true, which my dad, in the end, couldn’t be. They were high school sweethearts who broke up just before graduation over something she vaguely describes as “trust issues.” That should have been the end of it, except that one of Gordo’s buddies became the gym teacher, Coach Vincent, fifteen years later and invited Gordo to visit their old stomping grounds. When he ran into Mom—well, Maria Elena, I guess, because they hadn’t yet made me—they bonded over both being single (she worked too much, and he had moved too often) and agreeing that life seemed simpler back in their First Secondary days. He visited Antic Springs a lot after that weekend and didn’t pretend it was to see Coach Vincent. When they got married, she thought he’d stay here forever.