Excerpt: The Understated Unraveling of Mercedes Moreno

Angela can’t resist abandoning the piano for a formal place setting and a sampling of Mercedes and Victoria’s Not-So-Famous Chicken Thingie. She seems to like it, though she doesn’t make a move for the garlic bread waiting shamefully in a napkin-covered basket in the middle of the table. Vic and I left it in the oven too long, so the bottom of each hot dog bun is charred black. The tops are edible, though. Vic tries to be dainty in using her spoon to salvage the cheesy-buttery goodness of the top part. It works, sort of.

When Angela finishes the last bite of her portion of Chicken Thingie, she puts her fork down and stares at me. Ceci never really schooled us in the art of dinner table conversation, and now that Ceci is really, officially In Puerto Rico (Angela got an e-mail from her this afternoon) there’s a note of depressing finality to this meal, like we’re finally able to start using the stuff that Ceci has taught us over the years – whether explicitly or not – and it all comes down to finishing this semi-shitty meal at a table we didn’t even set for ourselves and then discover we have nothing to say to each other.

Too bad Tall Jon didn’t have a bottle of champagne for me the other night.

Angela finally says, “When do you leave for New York?”

Vic looks up from her plate, where she’s been adding to the pile of charred bread bits. “Our flight leaves at nine-fifteen tomorrow morning.”

“I mean, when do you move away to dance school?”

“The middle of August.”

“How do you do that? I mean, how do you move somewhere that you have to fly to?”

“Big suitcases.” Vic arranges her napkin on top of the bread mess. “And maybe boxes shipped from home. But my life is pretty mobile, I think.” She smiles sweetly at Angela. Maybe I should let Vic borrow Angela for a weekend so she knows what it’s like to have a sibling.

“Hmm, that’s neat. Don’t you think so, Mercedes?”

“Absolutely,” I say. “It is absolutely neat. Does anyone else want more Chicken Thingie?”

Angela doesn’t return to the piano after dinner. Instead, she grabs a book on tennis instruction from the dining room’s neglected bookshelf and heads into her bedroom to study it. The Halfway House is silent. More silent than it has been in a long time. Ceci is probably trying to sleep beside poor Abuela Delores’s hospital bed right now, and here I am watching Victoria brush out her hair in the bathroom mirror. She pulls the brush all the way to the end, slow and deliberate, like she’s pulling taffy or something. One, two, three, four strokes. She knows I’m watching.

“You should get your own place in the fall, you know?” She lays the brush on the counter beside my brush, which is thorny with a bunch of my curly hairs. “You always talk about that. And it’ll feel more like college that way.”

“Yeah, great. It’ll feel more like college ‘cause I’ll be broke. Completemente. Shit-ass broke and crawling to Tall Jon’s doorstep for a bowl of soup. And then I won’t be able to visit you in New York.”

She considers this. “True. I’d put up with Ceci’s house – or pretty much anything – if my reward was a New York trip.”

But it’s not a reward for her, is it? At least, it doesn’t feel like it right now. In my head I know she’s gone through a zillion hours of practice and tons of auditions and her feet are all calloused and she walks funny sometimes and she might wind up teaching ballet to five-year-olds in twenty years. I know this. But also: she’s going away for spring break, for college, for life and I’m not. And if I look at her in the mirror a slightly different way, I can narrate the whole thing as though it’s been completely easy for her. Handed to her. Pleasantly diffused to her through a lifetime of only-childness and supportive parenting and sitting in New York City theaters at least once a year.

She shuts the door to change out of her purple dress. She always shuts the door. I duck around the corner of the bedroom and change out of my jeans into a pair of yoga pants that I have never actually used for yoga.

***
We switch off the lights right around ten o’clock since Victoria has to be up early in the morning.

“I don’t want to sleep.”

“Why are you whispering, Vic?”

“’Cause that’s what people do in the dark.” She flops over onto her stomach. “But I just feel so impatient now, you know? School is going to feel like an unnecessary body part for the next two months.”

“There’s a lot of shit left to do, though.” For me, at least. The county art show. The AP English exam. Making sure my father actually meant what he said about helping me out with college. “People are already yapping about the prom.”

“Oh God. I had enough of that last year.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Aw, but Sweetie, you know what I think would be hot?”

“What?”

“If you could find some cute girl to go to the prom with you, and you both went in, like, tux pants on the bottom and pink frilly dresses on top.”

“I’m not sure if I’d put that in the hot category, but it’d make for some interesting photos, at least.” I shift around so I’m facing her, sort of. She’s got half of her face in the pillow. “And anyway, I don’t know any girls who wouldn’t totally laugh in my face at that idea.”

“Aw, you could find someone if you really wanted. You’d have no problem.”

“Thanks.” I punch at the pillow, trying to fluff it up in the right areas. Vic’s being here always throws me off in about a hundred different ways, only one of which is that I don’t get to sleep on two pillows. And the light is strange in the room tonight – too much moonlight or streetlight slanting in through the blinds. Even the bottom slat, which has a crack, seems to be betraying me tonight.

Vic takes a deep breath, seemingly straight from the pillow, and says good night.