So mymamádid not ask for any special explanation for everything that had happened. I kept the ring on my finger, even though I hadn’t been in touch with Dustin. I couldn’t stand to take it off. And my mom did not ask prodding questions about the melancholy she saw on my face some days. Although I did overhear her a few times sayingqué lástima todo que pasóto her sister when she thought I was out of earshot. She knew the minimum she needed to know: that my visa had fallen through in spite of my marriage. She especially didn’t ask if I was planning to get adivorcio, a word that seemed to carry a type of taboo in my house.
So I cooked and ate with my mother, sister, and aunt, helped around the house, and went job hunting during the day. I applied for a job at a pharmacy. It was ironic that the hospital I wanted to apply to in Barcelona to practice medicine wanted me to have aSpanishcertification when I had one of the best certifications in the world.
They needed to have some or other meeting about how to place me, and after a week or two of not hearing back from them, I took the job at the pharmacy.
One night, my family decided to have a ‘welcome Cat home’ dinner.
A lot of my old friends and family came, including my aunt on my dad’s side, who had been working on a project in France and flew in for the occasion.
I had been gone so long with no intention of coming back, and the entire family knew and respected my decision. After I took the job at the pharmacy, though, it seemed to register with them that I was going to stay here for the indefinite future.
It was a gorgeous night, one of the first in May. The weather was warm but not hot with a gentle breeze, and the sun was just setting over the mountains. I breathed in the fresh air on our patio as my mom’s mother, my only living grandparent said grace inCatalanas she sat next to me.
We ate paella (much better than what I made for Dustin, I must confess), cheap but delicious red wine flowed into our glasses, and I felt grateful to have a family to be able to fall back on in spite of how poorly everything had gone this year.
“So, Cata,” my grandmother said inCatalan. “Tell us about your adventures this year.”
The other voices at the table hushed, and I felt multiple eyes flit to the ring I realized I was unconsciously fiddling with.
“Well, aside from the problems I had with immigration, I had a good year. The patients I was with?—”
“No,” my grandmother interrupted. “Tell us about yourhombre.”
I swallowed down some food with wine and thought for a moment how to encapsulate Dustin LeBlanc in one sentence.
“Well,” I said. “His specialty was playing on ice, but in person, he seemed more like fire.”
Why did everything sound so much more poetic in Catalan than English?
My grandmother chuckled, her voice sounding hoarse. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Why not?”
“Well, he married you. You’re lareina de hielo. The queen of ice. Ever since your dad died. I knew it would take fire to burn through to your heart.”
I swallowed and felt my body turning hot. My grandmother barely commented on any of our lives, ever. So it was surprising to hear her being so direct with me.
But I couldn’t shake those words. Was I really the queen of ice? The thought that Dustin, if he were here, would back up my grandmother’s words and probably never let me hear the end of my new nickname, the queen of ice.
And then he would take me into bed and burn through me until he arrived at my core. A smile tugged at the corner of my lips before it turned upside down with the wave of sadness that was hitting me.
I didn’t want to really be in love with Dustin LeBlanc. But I was. And now, I was kicked out of the USA and had to live in Spain, I would have lost another. It was better to push him away before that love could root more deeply than it already had.
Maybe my grandmother was right about me.
I looked off into the distance of the Spanish sky. A few stars dotted the sky as the sun fell farther beyond the horizon. My family continued to speak at the table, but their voices blurred into one big inaudible soup and I was no longer at the table.
As I looked at the sky, I was eight years old again and my father had just died and I was devastated and in shock.
When my father passed, my mom’s mother, myabuelaMarti had been the strongest one in our family. In the weeks after my father’s death, she stayed in our house. When I would hear my mom crying in bed at night, and I was feeling scared and small, she would come into my room and tell me not to worry, and thatthese were things of life that we don’t understand now, but we will somedaymi amorcita, someday.
She would sometimes read me a story until I fell asleep.
After a year or so—I don’t remember exactly—my mother recovered emotionally. But I remember how much she needed Grandmother Marti.
My hands became clammy, and emotions I hadn’t felt in years—maybe even decades—came washing over me.
I snapped back to reality when Grandmother took a sip of wine and it launched her into a coughing fit.
