The Genealogies: Chapter Six, "Daughter, Mother, Father"

What Carlos hated most about his new home was that it was down half a block from Tia Evelina and Tio Roberto. He didn’t want anyone to misunderstand: he loved his aunt and uncle, perhaps not with a Pentecostal love, but definitely with a warm, affectionate, Episcopalian love, if he had to categorize it in sectarian terms. No, it was more the fact that Evelina and Roberto lived in Inglewood, and thus, so did he. He had, quite assiduously, schemed and maneuvered to leave Inglewood at the earliest opportunity that presented itself. He went significantly into debt during college so that, after at first living with Lina and Berto after moving out from New York to start as a freshman at UCLA, he could afford to live in the dorms, then in an off-campus apartment, but still in Westwood. His whole adult life had been built and aimed towards putting as much distance between Inglewood—and anything like Inglewood—and himself after the short time he had lived there with his aunt and uncle, before the rest of his family followed him soon after. His choice of school, his choice of career, his choice of friends, all choices made with an eye towards becoming something other than he felt he was. Inglewood was a nice enough place, he supposed, but it was beneath the flight-path towards LAX, and the housing lots were cramped. (But what housing lots weren’t cramped in Los Angeles? That’s the great illusion of L.A.: street after street of detached, neat little single family homes, but barely enough land to breathe in, yet enough land allotted to each neat little single family home in order to create the almost cancerous sprawl that one could only truly appreciate by flying in over the city.) And the people, the people. Fine enough, he supposed, but he just couldn’t connect with them. He had never had anything to bind him to his neighbors. He hadn’t gone to any local schools. He lived with Mamá and Papá for a year after graduating college so that he could save money, but then at the first opportunity set off for better climes. He didn’t shop in Inglewood, didn’t socialize in Inglewood, didn’t drink in Inglewood. He barely even bought gas in Inglewood, even though it was often cheaper than in surrounding, better neighborhoods. With a smirk, he often referred to the city as “California’s garden spot.” Nothing would have brought him back to live anywhere within Inglewood’s city limits. But there he was, past forty, living alone in a two-bedroom, one-bath ranch style on a leafy Inglewood street, and almost nothing made it bearable.



He met Brigit Keegan while working as a network administrator at an accounting firm downtown. He had been with the firm for a couple of years, not his first job out of college, but the first one that paid anything commensurate with his talents. Brigit was an analyst, past up-and-coming, veritably arrived, burning with the sort of ambition that Carlos felt himself. They had been hired at around the same time, but seldom talked, Carlos ensconced deep in the technical services cul-de-sac, Brigit crunching numbers, making reports, flying out to see clients, living a life that seemed so glamorous to a kid from Washington Heights, and before that Havana. But Carlos wasn’t complaining—he had a new car, a roomy, lightfilled apartment, a couple of women he saw off and on. Everything was good, everything was going along just as he envisioned, going on a clear path towards a goal; it didn’t matter that the goal was ill-defined, only amorphously grasped at. He had a vague idea of where he was going, but the trajectory was at an upward incline. All was well.

One day his phone buzzed. Brigit was on the other end of it, frantic, so apoplectic that he imagined her almost foaming. He could only gather that she had lost or deleted or somehow misplaced a very important spreadsheet, and she needed it back, immediately, before anyone found out, before her sojourn at the firm came to an ignominious end. He rushed over, having honed a soothing manner to settle frazzled computer users still learning how to employ all this new, wondrous gadgetry. He quickly had her at ease, sat at her desk, and retrieved the putatively destroyed file. And then she did something he would never forget: she squealed. It was such a girlish gesture, so unguarded and unexpected. There was a light in it, and her face was bright, glowing with relief and what looked like appreciation. That innocent eruption struck him, glued him to his seat, knocking him back with its unmediated glee. He looked up at her as she kept thanking him, and for once was at a loss for words with a woman.

“You saved my life.”

“Well, I don’t think you would’ve actually died. No-one’s died from a lost file yet.”

“Oh, no, I would’ve. I’ve been working on it for a week.” She gave him a smile he would come to know. “Do you have any plans for lunch?”

“Oh, I brown-bagged it, you know, we never have time for lunch.”

“Well make time. I’m taking you out.”

And so it began, Carlos rescuing Brigit, Brigit thanking him, and thanking him, and thanking him again. It began with lunch that day—one of those blast-furnace type days in August when monsoonal clouds float over Southern California, bringing no rain, save for a thundershower or two in the desert, but bestowing all the attendant humidity upon the area, making everything hot, sticky, wretched. Once a week or so they’d lunch together. Soon it became every other day, then it graduated to almost every day when they weren’t otherwise occupied with work. Lunches evolved into after-work drinks, which morphed into weekday dinners. After two months Carlos asked her out on their first official date, taking her to a little bistro in Hollywood that served a decent hanger streak and pommes frites. Much to his delight they fucked that night, after dinner and after drinks and after dancing and, as clichéd as it sounded to him, it was a type of sex he had never had. She had him. Oh, she had him by his cock, and he knew it, but didn’t care. He fully lost himself in her, became immersed in her contrail, the metaphorical fire consuming him, burning her face and her mouth and her cunt into his mind until she was all he could think of. She was around his age, and had traveled more than he had, and her experiences merely added to the aphrodisiac of her body. At work it was all he could do to refrain from wandering by her desk every few minutes, knowing how all-business, nose-to-the-grindstone she was at the office, no time for fooling, gotta get up gotta get ahead. He struggled to keep his head in his work, but her example spurred him on. She wasn’t distant at work, but neither was she overly affectionate. There were no exchanged kisses in the hallway, furtive gropes in the supply closet, quick fucks in the car. She kept him on a tight leash for most of the day, something for which she made up amply once they were in one or the other’s homes.

Soon coworkers began to talk. Carlos’ colleagues congratulated him, seeing Brigit as some kind of type-A trophy. Brigit’s associates in Analysis clucked their tongues and wondered what she saw in someone who was clearly not on the same track as she, regardless of his personal talents. One senior analyst who’d had his eye on her ribbed her mercilessly, asking if his apartment was filled with fantasy novels, or if he recovered from sex with a healthy bout of Dungeons and Dragons. “You know, Gerald,” she said one day, when things were going not quite her way at work, and she needed to inflict pain on someone, “you shouldn’t take out your small penis issues on Charlie.” After that he spoke to her only as business dictated, always looking for small, petty ways to retaliate, but stymied effortlessly by her.

“It’s such a high school. It’s like no-one kept growing after they turned 18.”

Carlos nibbled on her ear. “Yeah, well, luckily you’re one of the popular kids.”

“Not that popular. You’re never popular enough.”

Within months, Carlos gave up his apartment, moving his books and computer and albums into Brigit’s house in El Segundo, a house she had bought with an inheritance left her by her father. The street was quiet, treelined, populated by young families and retirees, all nice, all neighborly, all almost uniformly white and Midwestern. El Segundo was the last, desperate bastion of a vanishing Los Angeles, filled with the descendants of pioneers from Iowa and Indiana and Idaho, rock-ribbed and solid. It was a tiny little place, nestled in between the beach and the airport, hidden from the main avenues and freeways. One had to make a conscious choice to go there.

One Saturday Brigit was making breakfast, nothing fancy, some bacon, a few eggs, coffee brewing in the Krupps, Tropicana juice extra pulpy on the table. Carlos wandered into the kitchen, sitting down, opening the Times to the sports section, reading about the latest travails of the Lakers. He wished Brigit a good morning in a practiced, reflexive way, pouring himself a glass of juice. Brigit didn’t respond, and, while the eggs began to burn and stick to the pan, she started to cry. Slowly, Carlos roused from his torpor, her quiet, repressed sobs insidiously breaking through to his consciousness. He cocked his head, unsure of what to make of this. In all the time he had known Brigit, he had never seen her cry. Neither of them had ever cried in front of the other. He merely attributed that to the fact that their love affair had produced nothing to cry over. They had never fought, had cross words, bickered. Their love had floated along tranquilly, undisturbed by eddies or vortices. And it was love. Carlos had thought, at first, that it was only her power over his libido that kept him in the relationship. She was smart and she could fuck: he had never encountered such a perfect convergence. But, no, it was more than that, he knew. He ached for her in a way he hadn’t for anyone in years. It was an almost adolescent ache in its intensity, in the combination of negation in her absence and delight in her presence. When she broached the subject of moving in together, she couldn’t even finish her proposal before he said “Yes.” After moving in, Carlos did everything he could think of for her, molding himself to her moods, her whims, the sinuous paths of her psyche. He had always looked for someone to complete him, and had finally found her. He was unbearably happy, and, until he saw her standing over a quickly-ruining breakfast, thought she was as well.

“Wh-what’s wrong?” He put the paper down, a fear seizing him, as in flashing moments he imagined what could be wrong—a death in her family, a sudden illness in her, a call from his mother that he hadn’t heard in the deepness of his sleep. She began to cry more loudly now, her shoulders heaving up and down in gentle waves, sweeping over her body. Carlos moved his chair back, away from the table, moving to go to her, but stopped, still unsure of what to do. He hadn’t known quite what to do when Papá died; he hadn’t cried at the funeral, or in the run-up to it, nor even afterwards; months had now passed, his death coming just before he began dating Brigit, and hey, maybe that had something to do with it, perhaps the rush he had felt at joining with her was some sort of displacement, securing someone as a bulwark against grief. He didn’t know. He did know that it had been remarked upon, his lack of visible sorrow. Even Marcelo cried, and he was the stoic of the family, imperturbable and steady, the one Mamá and Lexie relied upon. Carlos fled from responsibility, as much as he could, or at least responsibility to anyone save himself. But now there she was, wasn’t she, crying, a jag cutting through the kitchen, growing louder and more insistent, breakfast completely ruined, and he sat there, frozen, the paper still clutched in one hand. Finally he roused himself, unglued himself from the chair, and padded over to her, towering over her, squeezing her shoulder with one hand, the other hand rubbing up and down her arm. She didn’t turn around, but merely leaned back into him, her relatively tiny frame molding into his. He reached down and turned off the gas flame, the smoke from the burned food whirling around them. Brigit’s weeping subsided, slowly, until shaking no more than the rose petals outside in a light breeze.

“Oh, Charlie. I’m pregnant.”

Of all the things he was expecting, boy-o, that wasn’t it. Weren’t they careful? She on the pill, he using rubbers most of the time, except for when the mood was on them, so insistent that there was no time for prophylactics, with messing around with tearing open and sliding on. It could have only been a handful of times—a handful of a handful, really, statistically not even worth tracking. Maybe she forgot to take it once or twice. When he broached that possibility she began crying again, “I don’t know, I don’t know” jutting in between sobs. He wrapped his arms around her, squeezing her as tightly as he could, and she let him, sinking into his body, her cries again subsiding, calming down, standing thus together in the morning light of the kitchen, the smells of charred flesh and burned eggs slipping into the spaces left empty by the coffee’s aroma, creating a constant, jarring olfactory sensation, the dead and the sweet.

Holding her, he asked in a low voice, “So what are we gonna do, then?”

“Have her or not have her. Those are pretty much our only options.”

“Her?”

“Yeah. I don’t know that it’s a ‘her.’ I just feel it.”

“I’ve always wanted a little girl.”

She looked up at him.

“Charlie. I don’t think I could not have her. You know? I don’t want to think of you asking me not to have her.”

He leaned down and kissed her forehead.

“I wasn’t thinking about it. Really.”

She sighed. “Good. But God, this is at such the worst time. Everything’s going the way I want it to now.”

“Marcelo would say something like you just have to accept it, it happened because it was meant to happen. I think he’d be right.”

She chuckled. “It must be hard to have a little brother who’s wiser and more mature than you.”

“Well, I think I have one up on him now.”

Carlos let go of Brigit, picking up the pans with the eggs and bacon, emptying the contents into the wastebasket, putting the pans and spatulas into the sink, running some water over them, soaking the burned-in grease. He offered to take her out to breakfast. They had a quiet meal at a quiet little restaurant on Main Street. Carlos couldn’t quite yet get over living in a town that had a “Main Street,” and one that looked like a Main Street, right out of Andy Griffith or Our Town, lined with oaks and elms, tidy one- and two-story buildings, hardware stores, barbershops, ice cream parlors, WASP-y clothing stores, stationers, cleaners, a video rental store where the clerks all knew your name and your movie preferences. It was a village plopped down on the edge of the impersonal, ever-expansive sprawl, the anti-L.A., a stubborn reminder of when L.A. was a much smaller, whiter, more innocent place, if any place in America could truly be called innocent. They didn’t talk about the baby; they didn’t talk much, merely planning out their day, not so much pushing thoughts of imminent parenthood aside, as letting them settle in, swirling around in their consciousnesses, but unspoken. There was time for one more day before they acknowledged that everything had changed forever.

In short order they married, both having a Catholic antipathy towards out-of-wedlock births. The ceremony was small, at a local church in town, just family and close friends, with a reception at a hotel in Santa Monica on the beach. At midsummer, Brigit was delivered of an eight pound baby girl, all screaming lungs and black hair and red flesh, squirming and mewling. Both she and Carlos fell in love with her. They named her Allison Flor, after their maternal grandmothers, and settled quickly into something approximating familial bliss. Carlos had painted the baby’s room a soothing powder blue with white trim, nothing to upset her, surrounded at all times in her crib by a placid color. He hung a merry-go-round of zebras and horses and elephants over her crib, and they selected sheets of softest cotton for her, expensive and fine-gauge, not taking into consideration, of course, the spittle and vomit and mucus, the urine and feces and general stink that baby Allison would emit on a continual basis, soon wearing and fraying the fine, downy fabrics. But at that time, before the birth, everything was new and untested, everything was entered into with zeal and boundless hope. Brigit had become softer as her belly expanded, as if the hormones that triggered her maternal instincts for caring transmitted that caring to the rest of the world. The terror—or annoyance—she instilled in her colleagues abated, and she took pains to make them feel considered and thought of. The company had a liberal maternity leave policy, and she took advantage of it; the last month of her pregnancy she spent at home, feet propped up on an ottoman, watching all the wretchedly amusing daytime television she hadn’t had time to watch in years, consuming the soaps, the talkshows, the breaking news freeway chases. She thought she could get used to this, this easeful rest. Maybe she would even quit work once the baby was born, just stay home and raise her child the way her mother had raised her. Ideas of alternate futures gestated in her as the birth drew near.

Carlos had grown more frayed as the delivery date closed in. Maybe it was the hormones, or maybe it was Brigit’s preternatural ability to roll over obstacles and difficulties, but she was handling things much better than he. He painted the bedroom because he was able to lose himself in the act of painting, running the brush up and down, stroke after stroke, dumb, repetitive motion. He didn’t have to think then. When he did think, he tried to stop. He felt too young, too unready, too untrained for this. For every task he had ever undertaken, he had received some sort of training. Mamá was little help, only offering what seemed like bromides. At night, while Brigit lay beside him slumbering deeply, he would awaken, seized with a clutching fear, scenarios of inadequacy spinning out in the darkness. He tried to rationalize, to soothe himself with assurances that his father, and his father’s father, and all the fathers of his line unbroken back into the past had felt the same unease, the same welter of insecurity. Of course, he didn’t really believe it, didn’t believe that Papá and Abuelo had ever felt anything save assured confidence in themselves. Abuelo had been a stevedore at the harbor, Papá an exile; parenting was as easy as sipping a cafecito in the afternoon. He hadn’t been tested; he hadn’t been prepared; he was unsteady.

No-one, except for Mamá, forewarned him of the efflorescence that took place within him after Allison Flor was born. “You watch, mijo, you’ll see her, so tiny and alone, and something will just flower in your heart, and it’ll take you and never let you go again, if I raised you properly. There’s no love like it, not even the love you feel for Brigit.” That and a knowing look, and she kept her peace. Of course, she was right. It happened as she had predicted. He held his daughter after she had been cleaned up, a nametag affixed to her impossibly fragile right wrist, and a blowth, a bud broke out in him, seizing him unawares, traveling up and down his body as he stood in Brigit’s room, Allison Flor asleep in his arms, adrift seemingly in her own ether, not quite of the real world yet, still a fantasy figure, an elf-child left on the doorstep. He couldn’t stop looking at her, barely paying attention to Brigit in her hospital bed, still showing the effects of labor.

“She’s so—”

“Wrinkly.”

“Beautiful.”

Brigit reached out a hand to cup the top of her head, covered by a cotton cap. “I hope so. I want her to have the whole world laid out before her.”

Both sides of the family made pilgrimage to the hospital, cooing over the baby, Marcelo and Lexie arguing over who got to hold her more. Allison Flor had an auspicious beginning, blanketed almost immediately by love.



Allison Flor had fallen asleep on the couch, watching something on Cartoon Network. Carlos never had to nag her to go to bed; an hour or so of television and she usually drifted off to sleep on her own. He picked her up, her body hanging limply in his arms, and carried her off to her room. Gingerly he undressed her, folding her clothes up on the chair by her dresser, then pulling on the oversized Power Puff Girls t-shirt that served as her pajama. He picked up her legs, then scooted her beneath the comforter, drawing it up to her chin, her mouth slightly agape, her pink tongue peeking out as she breathed heavily and steadily, her father’s motions disturbing her no more than the planes which rattled the house every few minutes. He leaned down and kissed her forehead, stroking her long brown hair, her face and her hair showing more influence from his side of the family than from Brigit’s. Carlos left the table lamp turned on its lowest setting, not wanting to be woken up by Allison Flor’s screaming fear of the dark, if she stirred at all during the night. He quietly exited the room, leaving the door just slightly ajar, again guarding against a 3 a.m. screeching child’s wail. He walked through the house, turning off lights, putting away DVDs and crayons, doing a few dishes, straightening up as much as he had energy for. He grabbed a book and flopped down on the couch, leaving the TV on, muted, staring at it, the living room floor lamp on low, just enough to keep him awake, barely.

He got Allison Flor every weekend; her mother had her during the week. He was glad that they had been able to work out the custody arrangements amicably. Sometimes he felt that Brigit was relieved that he took her weekends, leaving her free to spend them with Todd. But that was an uncharitable view, and he tried to suppress it as much as he could. At any rate, he didn’t mind having her every weekend. Doing so had kept him grounded since the divorce. Allison Flor certainly preferred spending weekends with Carlos than weeks with Todd and Brigit. She loved her mother, certainly, but Todd was a whole other matter. It’s not so much that she felt scared or creepy around him. He wasn’t one of those stepfathers she was warned against in school and public service announcements. No, nothing so obvious. He was just—well, he just wasn’t Carlos. He tried too hard to win her over, buying her clothes, toys, taking her to Disneyland on her days off from school. He expended huge amounts of money to woo her, and she let him, because why not? She may as well get something out of this deal. But when he tried to get her to give up a weekend with Carlos so that he and she and Brigit could go out and do something as a new family, she would steadfastly refuse, never even thinking about breaking her weekly time with her father. The week, while not quite a purgatory to be suffered, still seemed like a chore, although an amenable one, one through which she went to get to the weekend.

Carlos and Brigit had been happy for quite a while. Brigit returned to work shortly after the birth, both having decided that Mamá was the best candidate for caring after Allison Flor. Mamá, of course, loved it. It wasn’t only that she, like every grandmother, had fallen instantly in love with her first grandchild; Carlos had always been the most independent of her children, or at least the one who declared his independence most assertively, and this sudden admission of need gratified her, not with self-important glee, but with the knowledge that her son needed her, and that she was able to provide him with that help. Either Brigit or Carlos would drop Allison Flor off at Mamá’s house every weekday at around 7 or 7:30. The routine never changed: Carlos or Brigit would walk up to the front door, baby and baby bag in hand; Mamá would open the door before a knock or ringing of the doorbell; Carlos or Brigit would kiss Allison Flor all over her face then hand her off to Mamá, which was the signal for Allison Flor to let out with an unholy screaming wail, a jag that continued until, still standing on the front step, they saw the car containing Carlos or Brigit pull out and drive away, around a corner and out of sight. Once the car was gone, Allison Flor would almost instantly quiet down, and turn her gaze from the street to Mamá, and begin to giggle. She would clasp Mamá’s face in her tiny, fat hands, holding it for several moments, then, through grunts and wriggling, indicate that it was time to go in and start the day. It was almost as if the keening was for her parents’ benefit, to assure them that they were needed and loved and longed for as they inexplicably left her, every day, with this very pleasant and agreeable woman, leaving her to go off and do things she would never understand, but that left them noticeably tired and out of sorts. They were the first faint stirrings of guilt at having a favored life.

A year after Allison Flor’s birth, Brigit was offered a job at a brokerage house for quite a bit more money. She hesitated; a new job would entail new responsibilities, new demands on her time that would perforce impinge on Allison Flor. She talked it over with Carlos, weighing options, sorting out variables like the good analytical sorts they were.

“Well, I think you should go for it.”

“But I’ll have almost no free time—not for you, not for Allie.”

“We’ll sort it out. Families do this all the time. And this job would be good for the family.”

“Family.” She smiled at that. She rolled the word in her mouth, testing the heft of it, its taste and texture, letting it dangle in the air, enfolding her and Carlos and Allison Flor asleep on his lap, a line of drool draining down his jeans. She had to keep reminding herself that that’s what they were. The concept had rushed after her silently, tackling her unawares. It wasn’t just about her anymore; that she was even discussing it was proof of that.

“Do it. We’ll figure it out, you know. My hours are regular, and you know my mom can’t get enough of Allie. Do it.”

That Monday she accepted the offer.

Everything floated along calmly. Allison Flor grew into a long and lithe little girl, her nut-brown hair falling down to her waist, always clad in dresses that she invariably shredded by her running-around. Carlos floated along from job to job, always doing the same basic thing for a bit more money, a few more perks, living the sort of life he had always wanted to live, thinking this was good, a good job, a pleasant house, a healthy family. Brigit, meanwhile, became chief financial analyst at yet another firm, rising and hiking up, not quite clawing her way up, no, that wasn’t her style, she much preferred to seduce, to win over, to flirt and bat eyes and use that girlishness that motherhood hadn’t diminished. She saw nothing wrong in it, and there was probably nothing wrong with it, because she saw life as one huge flirtation, a long cocktail party where the goal was to get and keep the host’s attention, to position yourself into the center of the gathering and, by sheer force of your personality, dominate the place. She was quite good at that. Carlos was less adept, and slowly that began to wear on her. Carlos was hardly shy; he could hold his own in any gathering. But, see, he just didn’t have the stories that people expected. He was a kid from the barrio who had made it, an immigrant family’s success story, another model Cuban, as far as that went, and that was great for a Hallmark, melting-pot moment. But having him on her arm for a work function was a bit of a drag, somewhat of a letdown. Other spouses were lawyers, doctors, upper management, entrepreneurs. “Network administrator,” though a very honorable job, certainly better than “janitor,” didn’t quite hold the cachet it could have. It was a world of money she moved in, and Carlos increasingly lived for Allison Flor. She did too, but wanted her to have everything she could have, the same as Brigit was acquiring. Brigit would stare at Carlos’ unlined face as he slept and wish—and wish—that he was just more. She loved him; her eyes welled up during these nocturnal observations. She felt that she was slipping away from him, and she didn’t know if she had the desire to moor herself to him. Bit by bit it was coming unglued, and bit by bit she began to think it might be a good thing. She was changing, and Carlos wasn’t, or at least wasn’t changing in the same way she was.

In hindsight, there alone on the couch, he had seen it coming. It was so obvious to anyone with a modicum of perspicacity. Words became curt, touches cold, lovemaking more and more infrequent. At the time he felt an unnamable pang, something he couldn’t quite define. He had friends, but none so close as to talk to about things like that. He was afraid to tell Mamá, afraid that her instant condemnation would lower down upon Brigit. He didn’t think it was her; he felt a lacking in himself; he became more solicitous, wending himself more tightly around her, inimitably complaisant. But nothing he did seemed to make a difference, seemed rather to dig the chill deeper, into bone and flesh and cell. But he didn’t know what else to do. He was who he was. He occupied himself with work, and lost himself in Allison Flor, listening to her stories, reading to her, painting with her, taking her to swimming lessons, ballet class, junior soccer, being there on her first day of first grade when Brigit couldn’t make it due to a large presentation she was making. His existence as Carlos—which he had spent years cultivating—slowly faded, replaced by his existence as Allison Flor’s father. Everything was for her, and if he could make her life easier, or happier, he did it. That too frustrated Brigit, who thought he gave Allison Flor too much latitude, him and Mamá both, spoiling her in the way Cuban daughters were spoiled. He didn’t see it, of course, and truthfully Allison Flor was nothing but delightful around him, always minding her manners, almost never whining or pouting, knowing when he was being serious and had to be heeded. Brigit was fearful of what she could become if given too much free rein; Carlos merely enjoyed her for who she was. But through it all he attributed all the troubles to stress, to the pressure under which Brigit operated, and to some vague failing on his part. Her occupation was as abstruse to him as his to her, both operating in parallel worlds that never quite tended together. Financial projections and stock futures meant as much to him as network structure and client-server relationship meant to her. Up until then, though, they had always found other things to talk about. However, he convinced himself it would get better. These things always did.

One day he returned home from work and found Brigit already there, having left the office early and picked up Allison Flor from school, not even taking her to his mother’s. Allison Flor was at the kitchen table, coloring in a book, careful in the way she was to stay within the lines, making sure not to mix colors. Brigit sat with her, holding a crayon in her hand as well, filling in another figure on the opposite page. Carlos stood at the kitchen doorway, watching his two women, both intent on what they were doing. They both stopped and looked up, Allison Flor beaming at him.

“Mommy came to pick me up. We went for ice cream and to the park.”

“You did? It was a good thing Mommy could leave work early today.” He looked quizzically at Brigit. “What’s up with that, babe?”

Brigit made a moue. “I’m due some time off. And I couldn’t think of a better way to spend it than with my girl.”

Before Brigit would’ve called him to let him know she was picking up Allison Flor. Now she was more cavalier in her notifications. Carlos walked over to his daughter, bending down and kissing the top of her head. He stretched out a hand to caress Brigit’s face, and she flinched involuntarily. He grimaced inwardly, and left them to their coloring.

As it would come out later, that was the first afternoon she had spent with Todd. Yes, it would all come out later: the long lunches, the weekends spent at “work”, the plans and plots and assignations. It would turn out to be as illicit as any affair, and as devastating. Brigit wrote it all down in a long letter delivered months after the divorce was finalized, a belated attempt at honesty. Fortunately Carlos received it and read it on a Friday, and didn’t leave the house all weekend, leaving Allison Flor with Mamá, rousing himself enough to drop her off at Brigit’s new house with Todd that Sunday night, having to look at him in the face as he opened the door and Allison Flor reluctantly pulled away from his hand on her shoulder and into what he only half-sardonically called “the mansion.” It had all started out innocently enough, of course, just a friendship, conversations over coffee breaks, a lunch here and there, late hours at the office fostering a certain camaraderie, that sort of thing. Nothing to suggest that that their friendship would mutate into something else, it’s DNA recombining into something new and slouching. Todd, Todd was a vice-president at the house, a high muckety-muck as Marcelo would call him, Brigit’s immediate boss. And he was loaded. Wealth dripped off of him, pooling around him in an iconic halo. He wasn’t ostentatious about it; he came from a line of men who had bedded with money, and he was accustomed to the comportment it demanded. He was no nouveau-riche stockbroker from Visalia getting his first taste of success after a youth shoveling shit on the family farm. It was all very practiced for him, very sedate, very natural. He wore his wealth quietly, and that wove a devastating spell around Brigit. Here, finally, was a man who understood that wealth wasn’t about brute strength, that power didn’t have to be acquired by main force. Subtlety and flirtation were much more amicable modes of attaining desired effects. She was still a novitiate, though, while he was a senior adept, a master of sorts. She didn’t stand a chance.

On nights like this—and most nights were like this, either spent alone in the house, or spent alone in the living room with Allison Flor slumbering away in bed—on nights like this Carlos wondered what steps they took, how they proceeded bit by bit into an affair, and thence into love, because he had to tell himself, had to believe, see, that they loved each other, that Brigit’s motives weren’t merely mercenary. And, again, on nights like these, he knew they loved each other, that she had fallen out of love with him and into love with Todd. Surely, Todd could have any woman he wanted, what with his house in Bel Air, the Lexus sedan and SUV, the vacation house in Sun Valley. Oh yes, Todd was on another plane, one whose geometries Carlos was never taught in university. So, certainly, for Todd it was love. He could have easily found a much younger, less baggage-laden trophy. Which made it hard to completely hate him. He knew what it was like to be in love with Brigit, to some extent still knew. So, as much as he would love to stick an ice pick in Todd’s eye socket in his darker moments, he couldn’t totally blame him. But Brigit was a tougher nut to crack. It was a dark puzzle, cloudswirled and fuzzyedged. At some point she stopped loving him, or loving him in the way she once did. On their frequent meetings—the divorce, they agreed, would be cordial, for Allison Flor’s sake—he thought he could detect a faint ember of the old love. There was the smile, yes, and the arm squeeze, the unguarded giggle. Of course, all those things were there for Todd as well, weren’t they? Yes, hard to trust signals, when signals had been proven to be so wrenched from meaning.

“So, this is it?” he remembered on the couch.

“Oh, Charlie, you make it sound like I’m disappearing from your life.”

“How would you prefer I sound? Hmm? Like you’re off for a weekend in San Diego?”

“It’s not like that. It’s not as easy as you’re making it seem.”

“Easy? Oh, ‘easy’ is not the word I’d use to describe this—” waving his hand at first furiously, then slowly, absently. “So, explain to me what it is like. Hmm? Because I know you have before, or tried to, but it’s not quite sinking into my thick skull.”

“Don’t talk like that about yourself. I know this sounds trite, and soap-operaish, but really, it has nothing to do with you, it’s all me.”

“I think it has something to do with me, in some small way. I think so.”

She sighed, and slumped back in her chair. “I’ve—I’ve just changed. And you haven’t. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I’m not saying you’re somehow lacking because you’ve not changed. It’s just that I have, and I’m not where you are anymore.”

Carlos fell silent. “I think I’ve changed. I mean, I’m not the same as I was before I met you, or before Allie. I think I’ve changed, but maybe not in a way that helps you.”

She looked downward, averting her gaze from Carlos. “You’re a great dad.”

“But you don’t need a great dad. Hey, you’ll still get that with me, whether we’re together or not, right? So, I’m on retainer.”

Things were still raw then. But, slowly, bit by bit, it got easier. It hurt, but the hurt became tolerable, or maybe just wore a comfortable enough groove in its circumambulation. He winced less when seeing her. At first, during school functions like plays or recitals, she would meet him alone, without Todd. Slowly, though, she began introducing Todd into Allison Flor’s activities, because he was her stepfather now, regardless of her distaste for him, and she couldn’t very well keep him away forever, and gradually Carlos didn’t mind, especially since Todd, perhaps showing more sensitivity than Carlos had given him credit for, would often in fact stay away, letting them maintain the fiction of family. It was an arrangement that Carlos, having been raised by Mamá and Papá, had never been prepared for. He grew accustomed to it, though.

Carlos was dozing off when he felt a small form crawl onto the couch with him. Allison Flor had brought her blanket with her, and as she curved into his body she pulled it over them, covering as much of her father as she could.

“Daddy?”

Sleepily, “Yes pumpkin?”

“Why do I always have to go back?”

“Because your Mommy would miss you a lot if you didn’t and she’d be sad. We can’t make Mommy sad, can we?”

“No. But I know you’re sad when you leave me. I don’t want you to be sad either.”

He passed a hand over her head. “I’m only sad for a little bit. Then I get happy because I know I’ll see you again in a few days. Don’t worry about me.”

“I do worry about you, Daddy.”

He wrapped an arm around her over the covers, making sure she was guarded against the cool summer-scented night.

“It’s not your job to worry about me.”

“But if I don’t worry about you no-one else will. And I love you, Daddy.”

Carlos squeezed his daughter.

“I love you too, pumpkin. Now go to sleep. It’s late.”

Outside, he listened to the low hum of electricity along power lines, and the wind blowing through the leafy trees. Soon Allison Flor fell into the steady breathing of a sleeping child. Carlos remained awake the rest of the night, watching her sleep, guarding her.