Big Chicas Don't Cry(2)

Gracie spun her head around to look at me, arching her bushy eyebrows to the sky. “We will?”

“Yep. It’s Monday. That means Abuelo is going to take Abuela to the market in a little while. We’ll just ask to stay with Welita and sneak out while she’s watching her telenovela.”

Welita was our abuela’s mother. She was seventy-six years old and had lived with our grandparents for as long as I could remember. We called her Welita because it was short for Abuelita. I had no idea what her real name was.

That meant she would be the one to tell our parents that we were gone. She might even cry. Shame and sadness washed over me.

Welita was always saying how family was the most important thing in this world. And we were doing this to stay together.

She’ll understand. Eventually.

So there, under the lemon tree, we hatched our plan to run away to the beach. I was in charge of picking our favorite CDs while Mari filled up her backpack with lemons and whatever else she could find in our abuela’s pantry. Gracie took the bus schedule from Welita’s dresser and said she would figure out the best route to the beach. Selena pulled down all the sheets and towels that had been drying on the backyard clothesline and stuffed them into a trash bag. Between the four of us, we had almost twenty-five dollars.

We were about three blocks away when Gracie stopped in her tracks. “Selena, who’s going to feed Gidget?”

Selena didn’t even look at her sister and kept on walking. “Mom, I guess? They’re not going to let the cat die just because you’re not there to take care of her.”

“And what about Joanna’s pool party on Saturday?” Gracie continued. “She’s your best friend. Don’t you think you should call her and let her know you’re not going to be there?”

That made Selena stop. She told us we needed to go back so she could call Joanna.

We stood there arguing for a good ten minutes about it before Mari finally threw up her hands. “Forget it! Just forget it! You three go back, and I’ll go by myself.”

Mari spun on her heel and marched away. I had to stop her before it was too late.

“Wait, Mari. I’ll still go with you!” I yelled. Mari turned and ran back and practically tackled me with a big hug.

“Mari, if you still want to go to the beach, then we’ll all go with you,” Selena interrupted. “But I think maybe you should wait a few days, or even a few weeks, and see what happens. Like Gracie said, you never know—they could still work things out.”

It took a little more convincing, but Mari eventually agreed to stay. We turned around and walked hand in hand back toward our grandparents’ house. But once we turned the corner onto their street, we froze.

There, standing on the sidewalk, was Welita. She wore a gray sweatshirt over her flowered housecoat and brown chanclas. And ay caray, did she look pinche mad.

By the time she’d corralled us into the kitchen, I thought she looked less mad and more relieved. But she was mumbling in Spanish, and I couldn’t make out if she was saying that she was going to spank us or feed us. Turned out it was neither. Instead, she asked us in Spanish where we had gone, and—“?Madre de Dios!”—why had we taken all her sheets and towels?

Since I was the only one who knew enough Spanish to answer her, I explained it all. Then I translated what Welita said back to everyone else. She knew about the divorce, but running away wasn’t the answer.

“Pero, we’ll never see her again,” I cried in my usual Spanglish.

“No llores. Big girls no cry,” she told me. When she had to, Welita used the small vocabulary of English she’d learned thanks to ’60s American music and ’80s sitcoms.

Welita continued.

“She says it’s time we learned that family is forever and that won’t change,” I told my cousins. “But it’s going to be up to us to stay close.”

Later, when our parents came to take us home, she never said a word about our failed beach adventure. Instead, as we each headed out the door, she kissed us on the forehead and whispered, “Que Dios te bendiga.”

It was the blessing she always gave us whenever we would leave her. She once told me it was better than goodbye because she knew that she would see us again soon.

So a few weeks later, when we gathered together underneath the lemon tree, we told Mari, “Que Dios te bendiga.” We swore to each other that we would always be close and be a part of each other’s lives . . . no matter what. One by one, we took turns etching our initials into the trunk of the tree. And underneath, I carved the letters BCF.

“What does that mean?” Gracie asked.

“It stands for Best Cousins Forever,” I explained.

“But that’s silly,” Selena said. “Of course we’re going to be cousins forever. We’re related. Duh.”

I traced the rough lines with my thumb. “I know we’ll always be cousins. But this way we’ll always remember that we promised to be Best Cousins, okay?”

The other girls nodded, and we crashed into each other for a hug.

How could I know at that moment that the lemon tree and the promise we’d just made would only survive a few more summers?





Chapter Two


ERICA


Present Day

“Who the hell breaks up with his girlfriend two days before Christmas?”