Raquel's Abel
Raquel’s Abel
By
Leigh Barbour
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Raquel’s Abel by Leigh Barbour
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Copyright© 2009
Leigh Barbour
ISBN: 978-1-60435-355-6
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Raquel’s Abel
By
Leigh Barbour
Chapter One
I looked up to see Grandmother wheeling herself down to the pool area. Maria Elena, the woman I employed to take care of my grandmother, was probably taking a nap.
Being a glutton for punishment and anything edible, I had to ask, “Grandma, why isn’t Maria Elena with you?”
She arched her neck, being sure to jut her nose out. “If you are referring to my sister, Tatiana, I don’t know.”
“I don’t like you coming down the hill by yourself.” The sidewalk leading from the mansion to the pool was crumbling and entire concrete chunks were ready to break loose.
“I’m hardly alone, my dear.” Her eyes moved to the side quickly as if pointing to someone.
“Who is with you?” I hoped she wasn’t starting to imagine people now.
“As if you haven’t noticed.” She winked at me.
“Grandmother, no one is with you.”
“Don’t be that way.” She leaned toward me holding on tight to the armrests of the wheelchair. “He’s very sweet on you. And he’s so charming—as we used to say in my day—debonair.”
Sometimes she was as sharp as the edge of a guillotine. She’d gotten a clean bill of health from the doctor, so it wasn’t Alzheimers or dementia.
“Maria Elena should have brought you down here.”
“If you are referring to my sister, Tatiana, perhaps she’s taking a nap. She needs her beauty sleep, you know.”
“Her name is Maria Elena Caceres, not Tatiana. She’s from Ecuador. And she is the maid, not your sister.”
She made a raspy sound in her throat. “Raquel, you’ve always been my favorite, but you are very mistaken about who your grandmother is.”
I hoped one day she’d see the light, although it had been at least five years since she’d started insisting on this nonsense. “Grandmother, I know exactly who you are. You were born Mary Margaret Minor in Richmond, Virginia, in 1926.”
“That’s what people say who don’t want to accept the truth.” She stuck her nose up again, her eyes glaring at me. “I was born Anastasia Nicolaevna Romanov in Russia.”
“That’s funny,” I said with a lilt. “You don’t sound very Russian.” Sometimes I liked making her mad. A little anger might get her to stop this insanity.
“I have forgotten my native tongue. It was so long since I was there,” she said wistfully, as if remembering the Alexander Palace.
“Another thing, Grandmother, you were born in 1926 and Anastasia was born around 1901.” I looked over at her, but she wasn’t fazed by my remark. “You are much too young to be Anastasia.”
Her lips pressed together, pushing some of her wrinkles out. “How do you know I wasn’t born in 1901?”
“Your drivers license, your passport, and the fact you had my father in 1950.”
“I believe someone else bore that child, although I did so adore your father.”
“What a terrible thing to say.”
I looked around at our backyard and our old pool. The cement was so chipped that grass grew between the pieces of stone.
She eyed my freckles that always appeared when I sat out in the sun. “You should be careful. You’ll burn out here.”
“I wouldn’t mind getting a little tan.” What Grandmother really meant was that she was afraid
she’d
burn.
“I’m sure your gentleman suitor prefers you to be fair. It’s a sign of noble birth.”
“Gentleman suitor?”
“He’s standing right behind me and hasn’t taken his eyes off you since we came down here.”
“I can’t take any more of this.” I stood up, no easy feat considering I weighed close to four hundred pounds. “I’m going to get Maria Elena.”
“If you mean Tatiana, please have her join me here by the pool.” She fanned herself with a piece of tissue. “And be a doll and have one of the servants bring me my sun hat.”
One of the servants. Right.
I stormed up the crumbling steps that led to the back of the house. Above me, on the back side of the house, verandas overlooked the pool. They looked intact from here, but if someone ventured onto one, no doubt it would come tumbling down. Great-granddaddy built the house in the 1890s, and in spite of a rather good salary I made as a writer, I was unable to maintain the thirty-bedroom, two-wing mansion. In fact, there were times I wondered if the roof would come tumbling down on our heads.
As I neared the rear porch, I stopped to get my breath. I was going to be thirty-six soon and needed to get this weight off. The doctor reminded me just the other day that I was a borderline diabetic, and that very soon I might have to start taking heart medication.
After a few minutes, I regained my strength and charged into the house, determined to find Maria Elena. Grandmother could have fallen going down to the pool.
The television was on. I rounded the corner to see her watching those Spanish soap operas again. Even today, I rarely entered the room with dark wood paneling and worn sculptured carpet. When I was young, this had been known as the men’s room. Sometimes I still got whiffs of Granddaddy’s cigars.
“Maria Elena, my grandmother is down by the pool by herself.”
She glanced up at me, then back to the tube. “Look. Marcio get another woman.” She pointed to a swarthy man on the screen. “And poor Diana is almost finding out.”
I marched in front of her and shut the television off. “I don’t pay you to watch soap operas. I pay you to take care of my grandmother.”
She shrugged. “She is all right?”
I didn’t respond.
Maria Elena had large black eyes that looked out of dark skin. Her golden hair had black roots and split ends grazed her shoulders.
“My grandmother rolled her wheelchair all the way down there by herself.”
Maria Elena jumped up and made her body as stiff as a board like a soldier at attention. “Yes, ma’am, I go down there now!” She made her words sound like robot-speak.
I walked through the foyer that was bigger than some people’s entire houses. Above me hung an enormous chandelier that hadn’t been dusted in so long cobwebs ran from crystal to crystal. I proceeded to the kitchen that was big enough to serve an entire cruise ship. When I was small, having such an enormous cooking area had seemed normal. Back then we had three maids that worked hard to feed my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and my sister and me. Now there were just my grandmother and me, and occasionally Regina, my younger sister. That is, when she needed a place to crash between disastrous marriages.
I patted my pillowy midriff and grabbed the brochure sitting on the stainless steel island. Should I do this? I wondered as I looked once again at the diagram of the medical procedure I was contemplating. I headed back out to the swimming pool.
Maria Elena was already sitting beside my grandmother, sunning herself.
“Raquel, I’m glad you persuaded my sister to join me out here by the pool.”
At least Maria Elena had brought Grandmother the sun hat.
“Tatiana, it’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”
Grandmother pulled the brim down to shade her eyes.
“It certainly is, Anastasia. In fact, I getting my swimsuit and going swimming.”
I glared at Maria Elena. “No you won’t. You need to get back up there to the kitchen and fix my grandmother something to eat.”
Grandmother turned and glared at me. “Tatiana, please forgive my granddaughter.”
Maria Elena smirked in my direction. “It all right, Anastasia.” She had the nerve to pat my grandmother on the hand as if she really were kin.
Maria Elena was a mystery to me. When I hired her, I told her she could make weekly phone calls to Ecuador at my expense, but so far I hadn’t seen any charges on the phone bill. And on her days off, instead of leaving the house, she stayed with my grandmother.
Grandmother looked back at the pool. “Raquel, there must be staff to prepare us something to eat.”
I gave Maria Elena a glare, letting her know I expected her to cook Grandmother something fairly soon. There were times I wanted to smack that maid back to Ecuador, and other times I realized she really did make my grandmother happy.
I opened up the brochure and began to read about the operation. The model on the front page was wearing a pink cat suit, but inside there was a picture of her when she’d weighed enough to sink a yacht. On the next page it showed what the surgery would entail—where they’d cut and exactly what they’d be doing inside.
“What are you looking at?” Grandmother asked.
“Something I’m considering.”
“I know what it is,” Maria Elena said in the annoying Spanish accent she exaggerated when she wanted to. “It called the bypassa gasatrica.”
“Gastric bypass,” I corrected.
My grandmother lowered her lip stretching out her cheeks. “I don’t know what it is, but that gentleman who’s always admiring you certainly doesn’t like it.”
“What’s his name again, Grandmother?”
“Sir, be so good as to tell me what your name is?” My grandmother spoke to someone supposedly standing next to me. “Oh, a nice name, young man. I’ll have you know I’m Anastasia Romanov.” She nodded at thin air. “Yes, I am the daughter of the Czarina Alexandra and the Czar Nicholas Romanov.” She gestured to her sister. “This is my older sister, Tatiana.”
Maria Elena wrinkled her nose up at hearing she was supposed to be older than my grandmother. I didn’t know exactly how old Maria Elena was, but she wasn’t much older than me.