What the Moon Saw (16 page)

He rolled a few beans around in his hand. “Clara, I have only seen your grandmother cry one time. And that was the day Enrique told us he might leave. The only time,
m’hija.
She sat there by the fire and a single tear slipped out. Months later, on the morning after he did leave, I had breakfast alone with your grandmother. And do you know what she told me? ‘He will be gone for a long time, years and years.’ ‘But no,’ I told her, ‘he’ll be back as soon as he saves up money.’ She put her hand over mine and shook her head. And then I cried enough tears for the both of us.”

Abuelo began collecting the beans and dropping them by handfuls into a tin bucket. I started to plunk them in too.

I thought about how Pedro’s face grew red and angry when he talked about men in the village leaving. “Were you angry at Dad?”

“Mostly sad. That is where the wind has taken him. Like the coffee skins. Why struggle against it?”

“But he could’ve visited you, at least!”
I
would’ve been mad.

“He hasn’t forgotten us. From time to time a postcard comes. Always blank. Empty of writing but full of shame. And every once in a while an envelope comes with some money and photos in it. Never a message, just the return address.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps he hoped that one day we would ask him to come home. Or perhaps that one day we would ask his daughter.”

The bucket of beans was full to the brim now. Abuelo heaved it up and carried it to the shed. He walked into the shadows at the back corner and dug out a small wooden box from a pile of tools and crates.

I opened it and pulled out a thick pile of postcards. One from Arizona—sunset over cacti. Then one from California—the beach and palm trees—postmarked a few months later. Then one from Washington State—giant pines.

“This must have been when Dad was traveling around,” I said. “Picking fruit and vegetables for money.”

Abuelo took out a thin stack of photos from the bottom of the box. “Look at this,
m’hija.
When you were born he sent us this.” He pointed to a baby picture of me, swaddled up, a fat little ball, in the middle of Mom and Dad’s green bedspread.

The photo was familiar—it hung on the family room wall at home. On the back were my name and birthday, written in Dad’s precise handwriting. The next picture was me, two years old, picking a purple crocus. And four years old, digging in a sandbox in a red sweater. And then baby Hector, plopped down in the surf at Ocean City. And on and on until the most recent, fourteen-year-old me, drawing in my sketchbook on the couch, so intent on what I was doing that I was caught off guard by Dad taking the picture. My mouth was slightly open in surprise and my eyes looked wide and confused—I was hovering between my inside world and the outside one.

“I didn’t know he sent you these, Abuelo!”

I flipped through the rest of the postcards now, all the places Dad had worked.

“And how lucky that he sent them. That is how we knew your address. This spring, your grandmother told me that she felt your restless spirit. Searching, she said. She would get out of bed at night and wander outside. Night after night, like a jaguar. She said she could feel you better then. One morning she said, ‘Come to town with me to mail a letter.’ You see, she had asked Pedro to write it the night before.”

“Pedro wrote that letter?” I felt myself smile, even though I was trying not to. I liked the idea that there was a connection between Pedro and me before we ever saw each other. It sent a shivery thrill through me to think of my hands holding the same piece of paper that his had held.

Abuelo nodded. “Your grandmother said you would come in June on the full moon. And Clara, when I heard that, my heart soared like a bird. I went into Enrique’s old room and aired out his mattress and blankets and scrubbed the walls and floor. And on the way to the airport, I kept pestering your grandmother, ‘What if she’s not there? What if she decided not to come?’ Oh, I was just like a child!”

I laughed. He
had
reminded me of an excited little kid when we first met at the airport.

“And as you were coming off that plane, Clara, my heart was so flooded with joy, I thought I would burst!”

After each day of hard work, I’d lie on my mattress and listen to rain beat overhead on the tin roof. I’d feel my tired legs and exhausted shoulders. And all the while, bits of Pedro’s music ran through my head, flitting around like butterflies—they entered my dreams and stayed with me until morning, when I found myself humming his songs as I got dressed. I started taking short afternoon walks in the mountains and scanned the trees for a glimpse of his red pants. I listened hopefully for the scuttle of goat hooves. I sat by the stream at the spot where we used to meet, wishing he’d show up. He was avoiding me, that was obvious.

At the market on Saturday, Abuelita and I were picking out avocados when I spotted Pedro in his orange T-shirt. He was over by the clock tower, where a bunch of women in long braids and checked aprons sat behind low tables. The tables were spread with half-gourds full of wet cheese. The women were swatting away flies with palm fans and stirring the cheese with wooden spoons. Next to them, Pedro was cutting chunks of solid cheese into squares and wrapping them in banana leaves.

Something inside me jumped. Tingles spread over my skin. He must have felt my gaze because he looked up at me, straight into my eyes, right through the crowd of people and the piles of chiles and the bundles of flowers. He handed his knife to the woman next to him. She was small and fragile-looking, with thin wrists and pointy shoulders. He said something to her and pointed in my direction. Then he wiped his hands on his pants and began to weave his way toward me. I tried to look interested in the avocados, but my heart was beating fast.

When he reached us, he greeted Abuelita in Mixteco and touched her hand. Then he said to me in Spanish, “Hello, Clara.”

“Hello,” I said coolly.

“My mother wants to meet you.” It was hard to tell if he was still angry at me or not. His face was empty of expression. Even so, the way he said my name sounded nice. It rolled off his tongue like tiny crystals.

“Here I will wait for you, by the tomatoes,” Abuelita said.

I followed Pedro as he wound back through smells of frying meat, simmering corn soup, hot cinnamon coffee. A warmth moved through me like bathwater, and it amazed me that just being near a certain person could make me feel this way. We reached the cheese section.

“Have a spoonful of cheese,” Pedro offered. “It’s from our goats’ milk.”

The cheese looked disgusting—snotty and goopy, with a damp, moldy smell. And even with the women fanning, a few flies were managing to land in it here and there.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Please, go ahead,” urged the fragile woman, who I guessed must be his mother. She would have had a nice smile if two of her teeth hadn’t been rotted.

After a deep breath I took a nibble off the spoonful she handed me. It was rich and creamy. “Not bad,” I said, licking the spoon clean.

His mother touched my hand lightly, the way people here shake hands, like they’re afraid you might break. “My son thinks very highly of you,” she said.

So he must have said good things about me. He must have been thinking about me.

Pedro pretended not to be listening. He acted completely absorbed in fanning the flies. But I noticed his cheeks growing pinker. His mother gave me a square of cheese wrapped in a banana leaf to share with my grandparents. “Come visit us soon,” she said. “Our house is your house.” After I thanked her, Pedro and I made our way back to the vegetables. But Abuelita wasn’t by the avocados and tomatoes anymore. We walked all the way to the end of the row, scanning the crowds. The nasal sounds of Mixteco surrounded us—people bargaining, chatting, calling to wandering children, soothing babies, joking and laughing. Salsa music blared from a giant speaker at a CD stand nearby, where a group of boys had gathered.

“Eh, Pedro!” a boy in a baseball cap called out. “Introduce us to your woman!”

“I’ll just go back to Abuelita,” I mumbled. I tried to spot her in the crowd of dozens of other women, who all had long braids woven with ribbons.

By this time three of the guys had walked over to us.
“Hola, guapa,”
the biggest one said. The one in the baseball cap whistled and looked me up and down.

This was only the second time in my life when any boy had looked at me that way—the first time had been the year before at the Ocean City boardwalk. And the boys might have been whistling at Samantha rather than me. We’d felt giggly and flattered then, but now I just crossed my arms awkwardly, then uncrossed them, then held them stiffly by my sides.

“How does she like it here?” asked the big guy. He wore baggy jeans and a black T-shirt and two gold chains. Even though he was right in front of us, he had to yell to be heard over the music.

“Ask her yourself, Felipe. She speaks Spanish,” Pedro said. He kept looking over his shoulder, like he wanted to get away as soon as he could.

Felipe said to me, “Marry me and take me back to your country.”

I wanted to shrink or hide or become invisible.

“Let’s go,” Pedro said. He walked away and I turned to follow him.

“Ah, Pedro’s the one she’ll take with her,” said the boy in the baseball cap.

“Pedro’s going to disappear from here, just like his dad,” the youngest one added, smirking.

As soon as the words were out, Felipe gave him a shove. “Shut up, Diego!”

Pedro stopped in his tracks. He turned around and slowly walked up to the younger kid.

“Pedro, calm down,” Felipe said. He backed up, pulling the younger one with him. “Diego didn’t know any better.”

“If he
ever
says anything like that again…” Pedro’s fists clenched and unclenched. Was he going to hit someone? But no, he turned and ran away, disappearing into the crowd, leaving me alone with the group of boys.

I straightened up and lifted my head high like a heron’s. I hoped I looked graceful. That was how I felt, at least, and it surprised me. I looked each one of them straight in the eyes. My stare wasn’t as strong as Abuelita’s, but it seemed to work. They glanced at each other sheepishly and hung their heads.

On the way to the sink that night with my toothbrush and toothpaste, I noticed the moon, perfectly full. I could see the shape of the entire rabbit inside the circle. A song that Dad used to sing came back to me, the song that told the story of how the rabbit got stuck in the moon. A farmer was angry that a rabbit kept nibbling at his crops, so he rolled a big ball of candle wax toward it. The rabbit got caught in the wax ball, which rolled faster and faster until it left the earth and flew into the sky.

A full moon. It must be July then, exactly one month after I’d gotten here. Now I understood why Abuelita hadn’t given a calendar date in her letter, but moon time instead. Here, times and dates didn’t matter. There were rhythms—of the moon, the sun, the afternoon rains, hot chocolate at night, patting tortillas in the mornings.

One month left. Suddenly I missed the strumming of Pedro’s guitar so much, I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. I stood in the cool air with toothpaste foam dripping down my chin, halfheartedly brushing. I looked past the cornfield to where Pedro’s house was just a little point of light.

Should I walk over there, barefoot, like Abuelita did more than two full moons ago? The only thing stopping me was some kind of pride mixed with shame. Maybe it was the same thing that kept Dad from visiting his parents, or at least writing them a real letter. Maybe what people really wanted was to touch souls with other people, but the problem was that other things kept getting in the way. I thought of doña Carmen and her husband, and Silvia, and Uncle José—who would be my great-great-uncle. What each of them really wanted were threads of love like a spiderweb connecting them with other people, but they couldn’t quite get it right.

But I was going to get it right, I decided. I could go to Pedro’s house with an offering of roasted coffee beans. Yes, I would do it. I would go tomorrow night, when he’d be at home with his mother, having hot cinnamon-chocolate milk. After all, she had invited me.