“Gracias,” Dustin winked.
“And wow, you picked a very handsome husband, Catarina.”
“I picked her, actually,” Dustin said, wrapping his arm around me.“Ella es muy bonita.”
Now I was blushing as red as a rose.
“Ooooo,” my mother said. “Hablas español muy bien.”
I cleared my throat. “Anyway. What are you guys up to?” I asked.
“Well,” my mother said, “Zelda just got back from a church fundraiser, I’ve been working on knitting a new sweater, and your sister Norma is going to switch jobs soon to work in technology.”
“And we’ve been looking forward to this call all week!” Aunt Sabrina chimed in. “So, Dustin, tell us. How did you and Catarina meet? We want to hear your version of the events.”
Dustin cleared his throat and told them the story about our meeting in college, that we had down pretty well by now.
“And you play the hockey?” Zelda asked, making a movement with her arms that looked more like she was waving a flag in the air than flinging a hockey stick. But hockey wasn’t exactly the number one sport in Spain, so I applauded her effort.
“Sí,” Dustin said. “Yo juego el hockey.”
They giggled like schoolgirls whenever he said even the littlest sentence in Spanish. Dustin seemed to thoroughly enjoy hamming it up for them, too.
We chatted for a while, and I filled them in on the details of our dual life in Chicago and D.C. (we still couldn’t compromise, so for right now we were one of those half here and half there couples), the status of my immigration papers (we had a meeting coming up next week with Winterborne), and what we were doing for St. Patrick’s day, a day that made the Irish side of my family infinitely curious. The day was a much bigger deal, ironically, in the United States than even in Ireland.
My family was also relieved to find out that Dustin—however loosely he practiced—came from a Catholic family.
I sighed, thinking about tradition, and—if they only knew what Dustin and I had done to the big tradition that starts with an M.
Dustin excused himself to go to the bathroom, and the three women leaned in like gossipy middle schoolers.
“He’s fantastic, Cata. You did so well,” Aunt Zelda said. I wasn’t expecting the next words that popped out of her mouth, which hit me like tear gas. “Your father would be very proud of you for marrying such a fine young man.”
Emotion rushed under my skin, and luckily Dustin got back and distracted them—and me. He wrapped his arm around me.
“What’d I miss, mi amor?” he asked nonchalantly.
“So cute, you taught him how to say ‘my love’ in Spanish.”
“I didn’t teach him that,” I said, then turned to him. “Where’d you learn that?”
He just shrugged. “Isn’t that what couples say?”
“Your father would be so very proud. I know he’s watching you from up in the sky,” my mother chimed in.
I swallowed a lump of guilt.
As we ended the conversation, Dustin smiled. “That was fun. Great family you have,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“You okay?”
“Fine. You?”
“They’re good people it feels a little ... deceptive ... what we’re doing.”
“Tell me about it,” I repeated.
