Читать книгу River of Love - Aimée Medina Carr - Страница 10

My name is Rose Ramirez—this story is my glory. Summer of 1965, our family moved from Colorado City to the rural town of Red Cañon. My father, Blaze cut hair in Colorado City. We relocated so he could open a barbershop in Red Cañon. The really real reason: Dad got busted having an affair—and she’d given birth to a baby boy. He didn’t know if the baby was his, and wasn’t sticking around to find out.

When my mother found his girlfriend’s prescription bottle in the car, he had to end it. Mom was to never know about the prostitute he met at a beer joint next door to where he worked. When confronted by my mother, Dad fiercely denied it.

We saw the result of the Lover’s argument; she used a church key to slice open the right side of his face, from the sideburn to the bottom of his chin. It left a nasty scar and a permanent mark of the indiscretion. I was too young to understand, but as an adult, my older sister explained during a discussion of our parent’s hot mess of a marriage.

My mother was eager to take her children out of Colorado City which included me, Rae my sister, and brother Essé. My siblings ran with the neighborhood riffraff. A next-door neighbor and best friend Eddie busied me with playdates and escorted me to school every day.

Eddie’s mother bellowed over the fence for him to come home in the evenings for dinner: “Eddiiieee!” He yelled back: “WHATTEEE?” Heartbroken to move away from my first, best friend and ethnically diverse school which was not the case in Red Cañon with its few minorities. My mother’s sister Lucy, brother Julian, and my father’s parents, Grandma Grace, and Grandpa Frank lived in Red Cañon. It took two, overflowing pickup loads to move our belongings. She was relieved to see Colorado City in the rearview mirror of Dad’s silver, 1957, Chevy. Looking forward through the big windshield to what’s ahead, was vastly more important than what’s left behind.

Shortly, after we moved to Red Cañon, my mother got pregnant. It could’ve been an honest slip, being Catholic, but it appeared to be an attempt to hold onto the marriage. I was mommy’s little helper with baby Mangas, (Coloradas after the Apache leader) who we called Gus. She went to work as a teacher’s aide at Head Start when Gus turned three years old. She took him to work, returned home exhausted and delegated the night duties to me. I can’t imagine life without my first cousin, Chavela a.k.a. Cha Cha—Uncle Julian’s daughter. I was introduced to my cousins during the summer, the only saving grace of that painful first year at an unaccepting, all-white elementary school in Red Cañon.

Mom adored her oldest brother Julian; he was a carbon copy of her father, Juan. I delighted in Uncle Julian’s modest white house; it even had a flagpole! I ran up and wrapped my body around it like a tetherball and chanted a lively rendition of Ring Around the Rosie. Cha Cha (named after the legendary Mexican singer Chavela Vargas) was a standoffish tomboy that lived in cutoffs, and T-shirts with a wild Indian mane of jet black hair. Adept at running and playing sports with her five siblings, I kept close to Mom, coloring, reading, and playacting alone indoors. Years later, Chavela teased me—all the cousins thought I was mentally challenged.

Uncle Julian was a gifted gardener and good provider with quiet gravitas. Unlike my father, he worked a regular job and came home every night. My Aunt Lily’s tamales were the highlight of the holidays, the vittles top-notch. I never left her house without eating.

I fought back fears of the unknown living in this new place. The house wasn’t cockroach infested like other rentals we’d lived in. Dad had an exciting new business and was on his best behavior and Cha Cha was becoming my best friend.