London comes and goes. Two days? Three? Ynez isn’t really paying that much attention. London tires her out and confuses her. Dead people can be overwhelming. She tells John she’s going back to Rome, she intends to go back to Rome, but she changes her mind in the airport and buys a ticket to Madrid instead.

( Her things are still in storage there. That’s why. )

Somewhere in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Ynez sorts through her clothes. She told Darius she’d make more room for his belongings, and even though he doesn’t seem to need it, once the urge to clean out closets hits, it cannot be denied. Some things for charity, some things for the trash can, some things to keep. It should be simple ( Read more... )

Ynez is happier this Christmas than she has been for years. Darius is such good company, so loving and so quietly funny, she still can’t believe her luck. To think she’d walked away and left him behind. It just goes to show that she’s not half as smart as she likes to think she is, or at least that’s what she tells herself when she thinks about how ( Read more... )

It’s part of what they do now. There’s a new routine, a shared one. Breakfast in the morning, reading quietly late at night. In the afternoon, they curl up together on her big old bed for a nap. He wraps his arms around her and she sleeps.

Alta noite is still her time, the hours after midnight. She has the shows she tivoed earlier in the evening ( Read more... )

Ynez left her camera in Madrid. The memory card is full of Darius, everything she wanted to erase but couldn’t bring herself to. Easier to leave the whole thing behind, every record of smiles and monuments, of bright days spent wasting time together in the Campo dei Fiori. Flowers stalls and vegetables in the sun, captured in bits, pixels of ( Read more... )

Strange to be back in Manhattan. Ynez intends to steal in and out as quickly as possible, staying only as long as Greg needs her support. This city isn’t her home. It’s possible that it never was ( Read more... )

Ynez isn’t a picky eater. Far from it. In her family, if you didn’t eat what Lupe put on the table, you didn’t eat. It was that simple. Her family still had the habits of the poor. One generation removed means that nothing is forgotten and nothing gets wasted. All parts of the pig get eaten whether it’s boudin (her maternal grandfather’s recipe) or ( Read more... )

Ynez loves being a woman. It’s her fundamental identity, something that she grows into over the years, but something she somehow always was. The daily changes are imperceptible, but the years pass by, working their inevitable magic. She had been in such a hurry to grow up, flopping around in a pair of Tia Nance’s shoes, the pretty ones with the ( Read more... )

Ynez is seven the first time she climbs out her bedroom window. It’s early summer, and the grown-ups are playing cards downstairs, making lots of noise as usual. She sneaks out to watch from the top of the stairs, which she isn’t supposed to do. Lupe puts her back to bed twice. The last time, her father comes up. He isn’t at all fooled by her ( Read more... )

"The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place." Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon. Smell of incense, heavy in the still, close air. The scented smoke makes her eyes water. Many voices unite, echo ( Read more... )