THE HURT

When Mom announced that she’d given herself to God, none of us believed it. In mid-July, the windows and back door were thrown open, the dining room humid yet cool. Cicadas, katydids, and frogs echoed from the woods that lined our raised ranch in Burrillville. Fireflies pirouetted just outside of the house. My brothers sat opposite me, our grandmother and mother on either head of the table. It was pan-seared scallops night. Moths congregated at the light above the sink, some danced around the chandelier that emitted warm, yellow light around us.

News of Mom’s ex boyfriend’s death reached us a week prior to pan-seared scallops night, on canja night.

“When? How?” Her voice was deep, low, when she turned her face to the wall. The landline cord was wrapped around her fingers. “I have to go.” When she hung up the phone and booked it straight to her room without so much as a courteous glance, we couldn’t determine if she had said that to us or whoever was on the other line.

Vavo was never conservative with the garlic and rosemary. Submerged in a relentless pool of butter, it’s impossible to taste the scallops themselves.

The sand from the scallops crunched in my mouth, the way it did when I was a toddler, sitting under the beating sun at Sand Hill Cove while Mom and Vavo applied oil liberally to themselves, making faces when my father asked about sunscreen. I’d lift a handful of the soft, hot sand, let it slip through my fingers like a waterfall.

“The sand is the best part,” my brother Jose said, mouth full. I rolled my eyes, carefully dipping a scallop into the communal bowl of ocean water, then into the butter on my plate. You’d rarely see a fork, spoon, or knife in this household from May to September. Summer turned us into ourselves. “What?” Jose barked at me, his hands covered in an abominable layer of sand, butter, rosemary, and garlic.

I was always especially clean when it came to eating. I used only one hand, three fingers tops: thumb, first, middle. I glanced at Mom for any sign that she might stop it before it got out of hand. Eyes on her plate, she pushed around the scallops with her index finger. I scoffed, “I mean, Vavo went through all of this to make us a nice dinner, and you said that the sand is the best part.” I nod to Vavo. “How does that make you feel, Vav? All of your hard work, overshadowed by sand. Sand that was already there, no less,” I let out a single, staccato laugh.

“Ah, corisco,” Vavo shook her head slowly, taking another serving of scallops.

“Can you lay off?” my other brother Estevão gestured to me, his fingers pressed to his thumb like the stereotypical Italian American that he wasn’t. “Who cares? It’s just an opinion. You’re always on our asses.”

I swatted a moth away from me. “Well, someone has to be.” Since Mom left our father, Vavo got too busy with keeping the house and seeing her other grandkids while Mom did who knows what. As the oldest, I took the inevitable responsibility of Mother to my younger brothers. That was the curse; Vavo, Mom, myself, we were all firstborns, all women, all responsibilities shoved onto us for lack of a second parent.

Jose and Estevão exchanged looks of solidarity. They adjusted themselves in their seats. Jose delivered on flimsy confidence, “I don’t need you to be. I’ll get my discipline in the Marines.”

That was rich. I gestured to him, “You think you can handle the Marines when you can’t even handle me? Sure. Your knees start shaking when Principal Torres looks in your direction.”

“Shut up!” Jose slammed his palm flat against the table, a jarring thwack, butter flying upwards and landing every which way, Vavo flinching from the surprise.

In one sudden movement, Mom stood up, the sheer force pushing the chair back. With her head high, our undivided attention on her, she announced, “I have found God.”

It was so silent that even the typical summer rhythms paused. “What?” Vavo was the first to break that silence. The summer rhythms continued. I shared puzzled looks with my brothers.

Mom stood tall with authority, with absoluteness. “It’s true. Everything that happens is His way. Father Veloso has been helping me through my grief.”

I wanted to say, about tearing your family apart, or about your boyfriend from high school? In a rare moment of cooperation, Jose and I rolled our eyes, thinking the same thing.

“I don’t get it,” Estevão admitted. None of us were baptized, despite our hardcore Catholic heritage on both sides.

Vavo asked, “Now you believe in this, after the effort you went through to turn me into an atheist?” she couldn’t help but laugh. Of course she wasn’t taking Mom seriously. Vavo grew up severely religious with her mom and vavo. She baptized Mom, feeling the pressures to pass down a religion that really did her no good. When Mom was a teenager, she insisted that Catholicism and God were a bunch of bullshit. So Vavo left the church and began describing herself as a “Recovering Catholic.”

“I have to go pray now,” she declared. She was staring at nothing, I even attempted to trace her line of vision. It only led me to the darkness of the living room. A chill went down my spine; I imagined someone standing in there, watching us. Mom glided into her room down the hall as if she was floating.

Vavo rolled her eyes, chuckling. She leaned over to me, pointing at the scallops. “They’re from New Bedford.”

***

I lounged on the translucent green pool raft, squinting my eyes to read the public library’s copy of Little Women. The sky was cloudless, the cicadas deafeningly let everyone know just how hot it was. Dad’s copy of Gilberto Gil’s LP Refavela he brought from Brazil streamed out of the back door. I had dragged the record player into the kitchen, turned the volume all the way up. I had no idea what he was singing, but it was my Vavo’s language, my whole family’s on both sides, and that meant something to me. It was the only thing he forgot when he left. Maybe he hadn’t forgotten it at all.

Before I reached the halfway mark of Little Women, I found myself emerging from the water, gasping for air. Jose and Estevão laughed and hi-fived each other as my eyes darted around for the book. There it lay, open, its cover facing the sun. As Jose reached for it, I snatched it and punched him.

“Owwwww!” he whined, holding his arm.

I shoved the soaked book in his face. “Now I have to pay for this!” I took a fistful of my unbraided hair, already losing its moisture from the chlorine, “And it’s gonna be impossible to untangle this! So thanks for that!”

Estevão attempted to float on his back. “Is this Dad’s LP? You don’t even know what he’s singing about.”

“I don’t care,” I crossed my arms, “it’s our language.”

“Our language is En-glish,” Jose over pronounced. He never passed up an opportunity to be a total ass.

“And you look like an idiot squinting like this,” Estevão added, giving up the back float and instead mimicking how I looked on the raft. “Total idiot.”

I ripped the sunglasses off of his face and pointed to his insane tan line, “Less idiotic than you!” The distinct lines looked like he had permanent sunglasses on.

As he lunged toward me, the LP scratched obnoxiously, and the music stopped. I dodged Estevão by a hair. He flew past me face down into the water. I squinted up at the back door to see Mom and her waist-length braid hurry away. Jose jumped towards me in a Superman fashion to avenge our brother. I dodged him too, and he landed on Estevão just as he was coming up from underwater. I left them to wrestle it out.

The short walk from the pool, up the stairs and into the kitchen was enough to mostly dry me off. I tried but quickly gave up on running my fingers through my thick hair that felt like straw. The blinds were closed in the lightless house, slivers of sunlight spilling on select parts of the carpet. Soft hums of fans, both oscillating and idle, filled the vacant rooms. Water dripped from my bikini and the ends of my tangled curls, leaving a hazard on the kitchen tile for Vavo, my brothers, and for myself when I inevitably forget about it. I trailed down the hallway to the very end, to Mom’s room. Before I grasped the doorknob, I turned back. I felt someone behind me. The distance from there to the back door felt like years.

Incense poured from the room when I entered. There Mom was, knelt in front of some makeshift shrine, rosary intertwined with her fingers. She was whispering something, not Hail Mary or Our Father, nothing remotely memorable from our past church visits. Her maroon curtains lazily waved from the light breeze.

“I was listening to that,” I picked up the carelessly thrown LP. It lay on the floor behind her.

“It was disturbing me.” She didn’t even look at me when she said it. Since canja night, she never looked me or my brothers or Vavo in the eyes. I marched over to her, standing in front of her stupid new shrine. I waved my hands in front of her, but she kept her head down. From the corner of my eye, I spotted an unfamiliar photo on the shrine. A young man, definitely a senior portrait. A greaser-looking boy. It definitely was not my father. Placing the LP carefully on the bed, I gripped the photo frame and lifted it closer.

“Where did this come from?” I asked in the nicest way possible.

Mom’s eyes shot open. Horrified, she yanked the photo from me, scratching me with her sharp, red nails. For the first time in what felt like ages, her eyes met mine. “Don’t touch anything!” Her eyes were sharp, needlepoint pupils. In an instant, upon seeing my arm bleeding, her demeanor softened, as if the energy had been sucked out of her. She reverted her gaze from me and gently placed the photo back on the shrine, relit a candle. “Father Veloso says he’s still with me.” Her voice was soft, small.

I retrieved Refavela, which stung to the touch with the memory of Dad leaving. He sat on the edge of my bed at some ungodly hour, unwilling to look at me directly.

“Your mother… She’s a good person,” he said, “just remember that.”

No I love you, I’m proud of you, we will definitely see each other again. Nothing. I watched his silhouette under the full moon and single solitary streetlight. The shadow of him became more distorted, more ghoulish as he reached his ‘78 Chevy Malibu. When he turned to wave goodbye, I could not recognize him.

My mother sighed. “You can’t come in here if you won’t let me process this the way I need to.”

“Mom,” I scoffed, “he was married. I go to school with his kids. I’m not sure if this is your thing to grieve.”

She hunched forward, heaving. “You can’t tell me what and what not to do. Santiago was the love of my life. You would never understand.” An intense gust of wind passed through the house, through her window, blowing out the candle in front of the photo, down the hall, out of the back door. “You don’t know the hurt I’ve carried with me.”

I failed to recognize my mother at that moment. Turning on my heel, I left the room in an instant, the door slamming behind me; I don’t recall even touching it.

***

I trudged down the road after the humiliating experience at the library, paying for a lost book in front of everyone. I didn’t have the peito as Dad used to say – “teu não tem peito” – to tell the sweet Donas that I actually was reading in the pool. The chances of them dying of heart attacks from that information were too high.

In the parking lot of the sole liquor store in town, I found Jose and Estevão kicking rocks outside. My face scrunched up from the sun’s force, stinging my nose from the sunburn I discovered that morning. Burrillville reminded me of a town in the Wild West during the peak of summer.

A strange, tall, mustached man with his button-up shirt open so his stupid gold chains were visible failed to discreetly hand my brothers a 6-pack of beer. When the man skidded off in his Cadillac, I stormed over to them. I shoved Jose, taking them by surprise.

“Are you the stupidest people in the world?” I hissed, reaching for the beers. Estevão backed away, holding them close to him.

“I’m guessing that we’re not supposed to actually answer that question,” Jose mused.

“Obviously not!” I shouted, stomping my sandaled foot, a cloud of dirt puffing upwards. The dust stuck to my sweaty legs. My brain was baking inside of my skull. “What will Mom say?”

“Hmm,” Estevão aggressively tapped his chin, “what will Mom say? Oh, probably jack shit!” In a moment of kindness, he tossed me a freezing cold beer that I somehow managed to catch, placing it on the back of my neck. “Remember? She doesn’t care about anything except her dumbass dead ex-boyfriend.”

I couldn’t argue with that. “And what about Vavo?”

“Grandma?” Jose spat. “She’s always in goddamn New Bedford or Fall River or EP. You think anyone cares about us?”

My free fist clenched. “It’s Vavo.”

“It’s grandma!” Jose shouted. “We’re Americans! If we weren’t, we wouldn’t know only three words, curses, and idioms! Foda!”

Some poor Dona strolling down the sidewalk clutched her nonexistent pearls.

My shoulders dropped. I shaded my eyes with my free hand and tried to see my brothers for how they really were: lost, fatherless, essentially motherless, young men. “Is that why you want to go into the Marines? Because nobody cares about you?”

He groaned, shaking his fists at nothing. “Why else, Ilha?” The defeat shook his voice.

Estevão gave me a look that a lost dog would give anyone who might give it a direction home. I carefully scanned my surroundings, held out my hands. Estevão reluctantly handed me the beers, now sweating through the cardboard.

“We can store these in the basement fridge. Nobody goes down there.”

That night, my brothers and I sat around the neglected fire pit by the basement door. They sat in their chairs, sipping their beer at a slow pace, reveling in underage drinking. Meanwhile, every time I moved my chair, the wind decided to blow in my face, bringing the smoke with it. My eyes burned, and I couldn’t decide if I would rather have suffocated from smoke or be covered in ginormous welts because mosquitoes loved only my blood for some reason.

Estevão handed me his third beer. Despite how I felt that beer tasted worse than anything, I kept it to myself that night, basking in the rare sentimental moment. I looked up to the sky in all its glory. Living in rural Rhode Island meant millions of stars. I pointed vaguely. “I think that’s the Big Dipper.”

My brothers grimaced at me. Jose pointed above him, “And that’s the Massive Reagan. Like you’d know.” He rolled his eyes. So much for the sentimental moment.

Estevão stared into the fire. The flames danced in his deep brown eyes. “What’s happening to Mom? Did she lose her job? I haven’t seen her since pan-seared scallops night.” We hadn’t had a proper dinner since that night, what with Vavo in Fall River, New Bedford, East Providence. She had other grandkids, no matter how much we didn’t want it to be true.

“I think that priest is feeding into her delusions.” I told them about what she said to me, how she freaked out when I held the photo. How I couldn’t recognize the words she was chanting when I walked in. “She might’ve told him that her ex was Dad or something. Like, as if she’d been with Santiago the whole time.”

Jose leaned forward, twirling the bottle between his fingers. “I don’t get it. Why does she care? She had Dad, she had us. Who cares about some asshole that dumped her when they were fifteen?”

I had nothing to say. It all seemed so stupid to me, too. Some guy who probably forgot about her before he proposed to his future widow.

Through the window above us, a loud shatter broke us out of our wistfulness. I volunteered to check; God forbid Mom suddenly decided to care and realized they had been drinking, the lightweights they were. Stealthily I went through the basement, almost floating up the carpeted stairs. The curtains waltzed. The house was hot compared to the cool, dewy grass my feet were planted in, a crisp breeze weaving through my hair with the fire smoke. The front door was wide open, revealing the pitch darkness before me. It made me shudder. I knew something was out there, watching. I made out the outline of the figure. It could’ve been as close as the doorway or as far as the road. With a deep feeling of dread in my stomach, I sprinted to the door and yanked it shut, locking it.

Mom’s door was ajar. Cautiously I approached. The room was empty, a candle about to burn out, her bedside lamp illuminating the maroon curtains and cherry oak furniture. There was a new photo on the shrine: her and Santiago. While it was only a photo, she glowed. It lit up the room. I’d never seen her so happy, his arm around her, cigarettes in hands, they looked so cool and carefree. Her skin was deep brown, nothing like her pale complexion that developed as she became older. No tired, sunken eyes. She had no idea what was coming next in life.

Shit, what do I know about love and loss? The only boy I’d ever liked by that point danced with me once at homecoming when I was a sophomore and he was a junior, then he dropped out and screwed off to the Air Force. I could never relate what Mom felt. I could never know the hurt.

A distant shuffling startled me. For fear of Mom’s new wrath, I gently placed the photo back down on the shrine. Beginning to tiptoe out of the room, I felt a sharp pinch in the center of my foot. I looked down to see myself standing on broken glass. Investigating, I scanned the walls. There was a single nail sticking out. My gaze fell upon a frame, face down a few feet away. Wincing through the pain, I flipped over the photo, extra shards of glass falling through the frame, threatening to further injure me.

Mom and Dad together. How had I never noticed? They were sat on the hood of Dad’s old car, his smile like a sunbeam. Mom was holding her left hand up, flashing a beautiful engagement ring, a toothy grin. Behind her eyes, I could see a woman looking out. A woman who felt the hurt too soon. A woman who once tasted true happiness and failed to ever find it again.

Raisa Norberg is a writer who lived in Rhode Island for too long. Her short fiction has appeared in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, JAKE, Johnny America, and others. She writes about girls who want to escape their small New England towns. Ironically, she now lives in Northern California. It’s just okay.